RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18825/great-reset-wef

Notice that no nation has managed merely to print money and tax its citizens on the path to prosperity. Real wealth cannot simply be conjured from thin air. There must be recognized value in what a nation and its citizens possess.

More than any other source for national wealth, however, one towers above the rest: innovation. The ability of the human mind to create something new and valuable provides society with endless wealth creation…. Innovation is the magic sauce for generating wealth.

Humans struggling merely to survive in the world do not waste time, labor, or resources on projects that offer no prospect for future reward. Humans working as servants to the state under centrally controlled economies have no incentive to innovate. Only when private ownership and personal liberty combine can human innovation flourish. Freedom is the secret ingredient to innovation’s magic sauce for increasing wealth.

A country whose institutions do not respect property rights or whose customs do not value freedom will remain a barren desert for human innovation. In this way, nations have a great incentive to liberalize over time. Should they not, they quickly become financially and militarily vulnerable to more innovative and wealthier nations. Observing this simple truth, classical liberals have always understood free markets as the gateway to human emancipation. Economic self-interest, in other words, ultimately leads to expansive human rights and liberties across the planet.

Nothing about Western politicians’ embrace of the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” or “Build Back Better” paradigms protects property rights or liberty in the slightest. The WEF’s agenda promotes radically anti-liberal programs… [that] will smother human innovation by first depriving Westerners of their freedoms.

Wealthy free nations are a threat to the WEF’s New World Order. If censorship must be embraced to control the “narrative,” then so be it. If citizens must be denied freedom of movement under the guise of a “health emergency,” no big deal. If private bank accounts must be seized to intimidate protesters, then such threats are the price for ensuring compliance. In this way, the WEF’s plans for a controlled economy intentionally reverse centuries of liberal progress. Political leaders today are dragging the West into the past.

First, individual liberties will continue disappearing. Then, the greatest economic engine of all, innovation, will dry up. Finally, wealth will return solely to the hands of a small “ruling class” minority. This is the future the World Economic Forum hails as “progress.” It is not. It is a recipe for human bondage.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/iranian-state-media-features-american-prof-new-robert-spencer/

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been engaging in a bit of damage control since the stabbing of Salman Rushdie. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, affectionately known as “The Butcher of Baghdad,” is set to come to New York to address the United Nations, and the Iranians don’t want to make the possibility that Old Joe Biden’s ultra-woke handlers would ban him from entering the country any less remote than it is now. And so Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani said Monday: “We categorically deny” any connection to the attack. “No one has the right to accuse the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

This being Iran, however, damage control is not always as smooth as we’re used to in the West. On Thursday, Iran’s state-controlled Press TV featured an American professor who said that the stabbing attack on Rushdie was the fault of…the Jews. The Press TV article was entitled “Rushdie attack might be Israeli plot to spread Islamophobia: Scholar.” Of course! Why didn’t anyone think of that before?

Press TV’s scholar was Kevin Barrett, whom it described variously as “an American writer and political analyst” and “an American author, journalist, and radio host.” Whatever else Barrett may be, he is a conspiracy-minded man who believes that he has been a victim of one himself. The bio he supplied to Amazon.com states that “From 1991 through 2006 Dr. Barrett taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris and Wisconsin.” But then he fell victim to the wicked conservatives: “In summer 2006 Dr. Barrett was attacked by a group of Republican state legislators who called for him to be fired from his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison due to his political opinions. Since 2007 Dr. Barrett has been informally blacklisted from teaching in American colleges and universities.”