RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-9-7-add-rent-control-to-the-list-of-progressive-policies-that-increase-income-inequality

The list of progressive policy proposals supposedly designed to increase fairness and justice in the world just keeps getting longer and longer. Medicare for all. Free college. Higher minimum wages. Every kind of “climate justice” prescription. Reparations for slavery. And here’s one that seemed to have faded away in disgrace decades ago, but now is making a revival: rent control. Rent control is currently getting expanded and strengthened in numerous progressive jurisdictions, from New York to California, with new proposals now on the table in places like Minnesota and Illinois.

A recurring topic in this blog has been the extent to which progressive policies reduce — or instead, actually increase — income inequality. You will not be surprised to hear that there is a very close relationship between jurisdictions with more progressive and redistributive policies and higher income inequality. In an article I wrote in the City Journal in 2015 I pointed out the close relationship:

[In 2014] Bloomberg Rankings published a national study on income inequality, using U.S. Census Bureau income data to rank each of the 435 congressional districts by economists’ standard measure of inequality, the Gini coefficient. The study found high levels of income inequality in areas of the country known for their political progressivism. Topping the inequality list was New York’s tenth congressional district, which covers the West Side of Manhattan and Wall Street—including City Hall. Of the top 25 spots, 23 went to Democratic districts—and not just any Democratic districts. The five congressional districts covering some part of Manhattan earned the first, sixth, ninth, 13th, and 20th positions. Congressional districts in solidly liberal Chicago, Cambridge, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and Berkeley placed in the Top 25. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district ranked 14th on the list . . . .

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/09/06/the-dystopian-democrats-authoritarian-town-hall/

Who would imagine that the Democrats’ hurtling to the far left would actually lead to an attack on one of their sacred precepts: “a woman’s right to choose.”

The right to choose not to have a baby is fine, reducing as it does your carbon footprint, and thus saving the earth. But choosing to have too many babies (on top of being so bourgeois and unseemly) is like selfishly choosing to burn oil instead of harnessing your energy from the sun or wind.

Get it straight: carbon is immoral, whether the polluting carbon you’re expelling into the atmosphere is fossil fuels or children.

At CNN’s “Climate Crisis Town Hall” on Wednesday, working class champion Sen. Bernie Sanders was asked a population control question by a longtime elementary teacher at a Montessori school where the tuition ranges from $11,000 to $27,000, in 96% white, $66,500 median family income Litchfield County in rural western Connecticut, the state’s most sparsely populated county.

“The planet cannot sustain this growth” in population, she contended. “Empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth seems a reasonable campaign to enact. Would you be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature of a plan to address climate catastrophe?” she asked. Sanders responded in the positive and expressed a willingness to give U.S. “aid to those organizations around the world that allow women to have abortions” and provide contraception.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/06/americans-wanted-freedom-much-hong-kongers/

As I watch the fearless Hong Kong protesters risk life and limb, standing up to the Chinese juggernaut to protect freedom, I can’t help but wistfully wish we’re witnessing the beginning of a spreading popular movement. In my heart of hearts, it’s my fondest hope that these courageous, freedom-loving protesters succeed and that their message of hope catches fire in other countries in desperate need of the Hong Kong formula.

I’m not referring to a spread into mainland China, which would also be wonderful. No, here I’m hoping their thirst for freedom also spreads to the United States.

I’m not saying the United States isn’t free. But it’s a whole lot less free than the special experiment of Hong Kong. For one thing, the Heritage Foundation rates Hong Kong’s as the freest economy in the world, and the United States as the world’s 12th-freest. That’s embarrassing.

Hong Kong is a miracle economy. Its unemployment rate rarely rises above 4 percent. It recovered quickly from the financial crisis in contrast to the very lethargic U.S. recovery between 2008 and 2017. Hong Kong has avoided the curse of a large entitlement system due to its free market policies. It maintains a “simple and efficient” tax rate of 15 percent, from which it drives an astonishing budget surplus, averaging 3.4 percent. Its debt is equivalent to 0.1 percent of GDP.

Leftist orthodoxy would hold that the absence of a robust social safety net would result in widespread human suffering. But the opposite is true. Hong Kong, a city of comparable size to New York City, has a tiny homeless population of approximately 1,000, as opposed to New York, where nearly one of every 121 New Yorkers is currently homeless. Hong Kong’s poverty rate of 14.7 percent is among the lowest in the world.

In spite of a comparatively hands-off regulatory environment, market efficiencies make Hong Kong’s carbon footprint per citizen less than green-obsessed Great Britain, Belgium, Germany, and Luxembourg, to name a few examples. Indeed, its carbon footprint per citizen is only two-thirds of Norway’s (6.4 metric tons per capita versus 9.3) and less than half of Canada’s (15.2 metric tons). If the left really cared about the environment, it shouldn’t abandon the profit motive’s efficient resource management that has proven to be a more effective pollution reducer than central control.

amgreatness.com/2019/09/04/antifa-gives-progressives-a-tin-pot-dictator-high/

What are you supposed to do if a mob attacks you? If you have reason to believe that the mob intends to hurt you or could kill you, do you have the right to defend yourself with deadly force? Do you even have the right to say you would? Given proper policing, such questions should not even arise. But if they do, the First and Second Amendments should answer them. Increasingly, that is no longer the case.

Antifa, short for the German word antifashistisch, is a congerie of anarchists, socialists, Communists, liberals, and social democrats who disrupt, break, beat, and make it physically impossible for those whom they deem fascists, capitalists, white supremacists, etc. to carry on their activities. Antifa’s slogan is “abolish capitalism, antifascist action, smash fascism.” Their members dress in black, wear masks, and fight under black and red banners. Footage of their violence is readily available online.

In recent years, similarly violent groups have “occupied” Wall Street, shut down freeways in Chicago and Oakland, California, disrupted Trump’s campaign rallies, trashed Washington, D.C. during the 2017 presidential inaugural, and chased conservative speakers from college campuses.

The most interesting thing about this left-wing violence is that it happens almost exclusively in places where the police power is in the hands of progressives—whether mayors or university administrators—whose police stand aside as the violent ones do their work, and who have not prosecuted them. Moreover, since the persons whom these groups attack physically are the very ones whom the media and the Democratic Party attack verbally, it is not surprising that the media tries to put the best face on the violence.

Hence it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the violent groups merely do the dirty work of progressives—indeed that violence in society is essential to progressives’ quest for power. The progressive powers’ constraint of the victims’ right to self-defense caps the conclusion.

Antifa is not a problem in and of itself, any more than any mob would be. Where they lack officials’ protection, Antifa’s numbers and their capacity for mayhem are no match for ordinary police forces—nor for armed citizens.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/socialism-is-for-the-incurious-11567460002

I was struck by a news report this summer about Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. It has long been known that he and his wife chose to spend their honeymoon in the Soviet Union. But it was news that he never availed himself of the opportunity to visit Alexander Solzhenitsyn when the great writer and moral witness was living as a refugee in Cavendish, Vt., between 1976 and his death in 2008.

Some comments about that story attribute Mr. Sanders’s negligence to ideology, as if he, being a fan of the Soviet Union, made a silent protest by ignoring the famous anti-Soviet figure in his midst. But I think the deeper reason for his neglect was a quality of the socialist or communist or revolutionary sensibility that is too little remarked. I mean its ingrained, indeed its programmatic, lack of curiosity about other people.

The philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, in a thoughtful anatomy of the French Revolution, is one of the few people to underscore this feature of the totalitarian habit of mind. “This absence of curiosity,” Mr. Scruton notes, “is a permanent characteristic of the revolutionary consciousness.”

An important reason for this lack of curiosity is the prominent role that abstractions play in the mental and moral metabolism of the totalitarian sensibility. This feature was articulated with some poignancy by Rousseau, who, at the end of his life, sadly observed: “I think I know man, but as for men, I know them not.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274819/progressives-cynical-exploitation-mass-shootings-bruce-thornton

The second multiple-victim shooting in Texas in a week brought out the usual clichés and useless policy prescriptions from the progressive media and Democrats running in the presidential primary. And also as usual, the protestations of being “heartbroken,” and the demands for banning and confiscating certain weapons, are rote responses that apart from having little material value, display a cynical exploitation of suffering for political gain.

One wonders, for example, why all this “heartbreak” and “thoughts”––“prayers” are now verboten for progressives––are never publicized about the lethal violence in Chicago, Baltimore, and other blue-state fiefs. Fifty-three people died in August from mass shootings, an unusually high amount. The August toll in the Windy City was 46 murdered––almost a quarter fewer than last year. And these sorts of numbers happen every month of the year in Chicago totaling 539 dead in 2018. But do we hear politicians preening their “heartbreak” over these deaths? Are not those lives as precious as those of mass shooting victims? Aren’t those families of the victims just as devastated?

Most of the victims in Chicago and Baltimore are black, as are most of the murderers. I guess “black lives matter” only when the police are involved, or the perpetrator isn’t black. Black-on-black crime doesn’t fit the narrative of “racism,” “white privilege,” or “white supremacism”––unless one wants to depict blacks as helpless victims of “racism,” powerless to control their behavior. By the way, that claim has been an argument for slavery and segregation going all the way back to Aristotle. And just who created the character-degrading, family-destroying, federally subsidized blue-city hell-holes that comprise the “environment” manipulating black people into crime? No wonder race-industry progressives don’t want to call attention to these grisly facts.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/are_american_voters_helpless.html

America the land of the free, is under assault by the deadly ideology of Islamic subversion.

There is not a day that goes by that I read comments from all over the social media on major issues that threaten this land of the free. Many Americans know what the problems are, but they are helpless in solving them alone. Why? Because we are a representative republic and expect our elected representatives to know the problems and solve them. Americans love courageous leaders like President Trump and Senator Ted Cruz and despise weak politicians whose only art is playing with nonsocial words.

When was the last time you witnessed a courageous and knowledgeable representative stand up in the U.S. Congress to address the vital issue of Islam’s stealth jihad or Islamic subversion currently exploiting all aspects of American life? I do not remember.

Well, let’s ask a few questions. Aren’t these people elected to keep America safe? Don’t these elected officials work for their constituents? Haven’t they sworn that they “will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and that they “will bear true faith and allegiance to the same?”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/35-obama-gaffes-to-make-joe-biden-feel-better-about-himself/

Lately, it seems we can’t go a day without a new gaffe from Joe Biden. When you have to tell your supporters “I’m not going nuts,” it’s clear things aren’t exactly going well for you. So, to make Joe Biden feel better I thought it would be nice to compile the top thirty-five gaffes from Barack Obama, the man whose coattails Joe Biden is so desperately trying to ride.

35. Obama doesn’t know what committee he’s on.

While speaking in Israel during his first presidential campaign, Obama claimed to be on a committee that he was not on. “Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee — which is my committee — a bill to call for divestment from Iran as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon.”

34. Plagiarizing his campaign speech

We all know that Biden’s first presidential campaign was thwarted by revelations of plagiarism. Obama was also discovered to have plagiarized a campaign speech. Perhaps that’s really why he picked Biden as his running mate, they had that in common.

In 2006, former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick said the following in a campaign speech:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’-just words. Just words. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’-just words. ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country’-just words. ‘I have a dream’-just words,”

In 2008, Obama said these words in his own campaign speech:

“Don’t tell me words don’t matter! ‘I have a dream.’ Just words. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ Just words. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Just words, just speeches,”

Obama obviously survived the scandal, unlike Joe Biden.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14794/the-dangerous-stalinism-of-the-woke-hard-left

People on the “woke” hard-left seem so self-righteous about their monopoly over Truth (with a capital T) that many of them apparently see no reason to allow dissenting, politically incorrect, views to be expressed. Such incorrect views, they claim, make them feel “unsafe.” They can feel safe only if views they share are allowed to be
expressed. Feeling unsafe is the new trigger word for demanding censorship.

The other dangerous similarity between the Stalinists and the “wokers” is that both disdain due process for those they deem guilty of political incorrectness or other crimes and sins. They reject any presumption of innocence or requirement that the accuser bear the burden of proof.

For Stalinist and “wokers,” there is no uncertainty or fallibility. If they believe someone is guilty, he must be. Why do we need a cumbersome process for determining guilt? The identities of the accuser and accused are enough. Privileged white men are guilty perpetrators. Intersectional minorities are innocent victims. Who needs to know more? Any process, regardless of its fairness, favors the privileged over the unprivileged.

That is why I make the controversial claim that today, the “woke” hard-left is more dangerous to civil liberties than the right. To be sure there are hard right extremists who would use — and have used — violence to silence those with whom they disagree. They are indeed dangerous. But they have far less influence on our future leaders than their counterparts on the hard-left. They are not teaching our college age children and grandchildren. They are marginalized academically, politically and in the media. The opposite is true of hard-left Stalinists. Many have no idea who Stalin even was, but they are emulating his disdain for free speech and due process in the interests of achieving the unrealizable utopia they both sought. They also have in common the attitude that noble ends justify ignoble means.

We must always remember that it is not only the road to hell that is paved with good intentions. It is also the road to tyranny.

Civil liberties are in greater danger today from the intolerant hard-left than from the bigoted hard-right. This may seem counterintuitive: There has been far more violence — mass shootings in malls, synagogues and other soft targets — from extremists who identify more with the hard-right than with the hard-left. But the influence of the hard-left on our future leaders is far more pervasive, insidious and dangerous than the influence of the hard-right.

People on the “woke” hard-left seem so self-righteous about their monopoly over Truth (with a capital T) that many of them see no reason to allow dissenting, politically incorrect, views to be expressed. Such incorrect views, they claim, make them feel “unsafe.” They can feel safe only if views they share are allowed to be expressed. Feeling unsafe is the new trigger word for demanding censorship.

amgreatness.com/2019/08/30/the-boomer-revolution-and-its-consequences/

The Wall Street Journal this week published the results of a survey that found Americans’ values are shifting drastically, and not in a good way.

The poll, conducted with NBC News, found that Americans care less about patriotism, family, and faith than they did 20 years ago. The percentage of Americans who regard family as very important dropped 16 points, to a mere 43 percent. The importance of religion dropped 12 points, to 48 percent; and patriotism fell 9 points, to 61 percent.

The trend was most pronounced among Millennials and older members of  Gen Z—or Zoomers, as they are sometimes known, who consistently rated these values lower than older Americans: 79 percent of Americans 55 and older valued patriotism, compared with 42 percent of younger Americans; nearly two-thirds of older Americans say they value religion highly, compared with less than one-third of younger Americans.

Taken together, the statistics tell a neat story of moral decline. So young people really are a bunch of godless egoists who think brunch and having pets instead of children is the summum bonum! It’s not quite wrong, but it isn’t quite fair, either.

Young people get a lot of grief from Boomers, but their confusion wasn’t formed in a vacuum. Sure, university, mass culture, and public schooling all have played a role in bringing about these changes, but Millennials are the products of the Boomers, the first true “Me Generation” in American history.

The shifts in core values reflect the ascendance of a culture of selfishness and mindless consumption, but that culture didn’t come from the Millennials or the Zoomers. Before today’s “Me Generation” came into being, there were the hedonist faux-ascetics of the 1960s who melted their brains with hallucinogens while dabbling in Eastern religions of self-denial to stick it to their uptight suburban parents.