By • National Review
Whether due to the COVID-19 pandemic that began in Wuhan, China, or thanks to Beijing’s increasingly intimidating, if not aggressive, behavior in recent years, one of the more dramatic shifts in global opinion has started a long-overdue reconsideration of the liberal world’s relationship to the People’s Republic of China. In addition to a raft of high-level policy statements from the Trump administration, including the 2017 National Security Strategy, the 2019 Department of Defense Indo-Pacific Strategy report, and the 2020 “United States Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China,” a number of independent reports have been tracking Beijing’s predatory and threatening policies, whether in economics, security, or civil society. After decades of turning the other cheek to Beijing’s abuse of the free world’s open societies, all in order to maintain trade relations that themselves were turning increasingly one-sided, liberal states have begun the process of recalibrating their ties to China.
This is no easy task for America or other states, after nearly a half-century of engagement. How to reduce supply chain vulnerability without crashing current manufacturing models, how to support Taiwan and Hong Kong in the face of Beijing’s aggressive actions, whether to keep admitting hundreds of thousands of Chinese students to American universities, how to keep doing business with Chinese firms while defending rampant theft of intellectual property, the “to do” list goes on and on. The difficulty is a testament to just how thoroughly the post-Mao PRC intertwined itself with free economies and societies around the world, while at the same time resisting much, if not all, pressure to liberalize in turn. Despite decades of optimistic comments from Western leaders, including U.S. presidents, China under current Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary Xi Jinping has become an even more repressive and insular state, committed to the Leninist control by the CCP, and steadfastly opposed to liberal notions of free speech and free association. The PRC’s techno-authoritarian surveillance state has taken the world’s leading technologies, many originated in Western research institutes and universities, and twisted them into a comprehensive network of social control. Western businesses, media, universities, and the like have all submitted to Beijing’s pressure, self-censuring and apologizing for remarks critical of the PRC.
The great question facing the free world is how to deal with the PRC in this new era of competition. One answer is provided in a new “handbook” for democracies, published this week by the Halifax International Security Forum (HFX) to coincide with its annual conference. The handbook, entitled “China Vs. Democracy: The Greatest Game,” is a primer on how the PRC threatens the open global society that is the source for most of its own wealth and power (full disclosure: I am the senior advisor for Asia at HFX, and was part of the team that produced the handbook). Divided into chapters that look at the CCP’s oppression inside China, influence campaigns against democracies, the battle over global economic domination, the race for technological supremacy, and the military competition that may determine war or peace, the handbook is one of the first comprehensive attempts to chart the broad China challenge.
As the handbook notes, this is not the competition, or tension, that the liberal world wanted or expected when it opened its doors to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and his reform plans back in the 1970s. Betting on China made sense during the Cold War and in light of what appeared to be legitimate reform inside China. The failure of Washington and its allies to conduct due diligence over the succeeding decades, questioning whether Beijing was living up to its promises and was becoming a cooperative nation upholding international norms, gave the CCP a free hand to build up its global power while eliminating any threats to its continued control. By the end of the Obama administration, the severity of the challenge could no longer be ignored or explained away as the result of a China still attempting to find its way in the world.
Yet, it is in the hands of democracies to deal with the China challenge in a way that not only protects their interests, but also may one day help the people of China. As HFX president Peter Van Praagh, who initiated the project, notes in his introduction:
Working in concert, the world’s democracies have overwhelming advantages that China cannot meet. The challenge is no longer about trying to cooperate with a rising China governed by autocrats. The real China challenge for the world’s democracies is how to cooperate effectively with each other.
Indeed, that theme of the HFX China Handbook — democratic cooperation — is one increasingly echoed by other Western reports and studies on China. Despite the disruptions of 2020, from pandemic to elections, liberal societies and free states remain stronger and yes, more peaceful, than their authoritarian counterparts. Their politics may be messier and often inefficient, but they remain laboratories of innovation and magnets for those fleeing repressive systems. They remain more committed to equality and the long-term improvement of their governing mechanisms than states run by unelected oligarchs. More pertinently, democracies may find a renewed appreciation for the moral worth of their systems by working together to defend common interests, whether economic, social, or security, against a PRC that seeks to subvert liberal norms and make the world safe for autocracy.
Perhaps the most innovative part of the handbook is the “HFX China Principles,” a set of seven pledges to not be complicit in Beijing’s assault on democracy. The Principles include a pledge not to censor or self-censor criticism of China, not to punish those who critique the PRC, not to support Chinese businesses that participate in the oppression of the Chinese people, and not knowingly to patronize businesses that benefit from Chinese slave labor. Public pledges to adhere to the China Principles by governments, multinational corporations, universities, media companies, and ordinary citizens would be a beginning in right-sizing the world’s relations with the PRC, giving hope to those in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and bolstering democratic states in Asia, from the Philippines to Japan. As a form of thinking globally and acting locally, the Principles may give the free world the confidence to begin defending itself against the China challenge.
We might be in an Obi-Wan Kenobi moment, wherein striking Trump down will make his movement more powerful than anyone can possibly imagine.
By • The Federalist
If Joe Biden walks away with a presidential victory, conservatives will have many reasons to despair. This would portend some terrifying realities about propaganda and the manipulation of public opinion, the acceptance of potential fraud, and the willingness to accept the curtailment of basic liberties.
But it need not. In fact, conservatives have reason to be quite hopeful. We might be in an Obi-Wan Kenobi moment, wherein striking Trump down will make his movement more powerful than anyone can possibly imagine. Beyond the typical takes on the election that give conservatives hope — we appear to have kept the Senate, and socialism and critical race theory lost — we have five long-term reasons to be hopeful.
At some level, the left has to be jealous. For any chance of defeating Donald Trump, look what they had to settle for: a dementia-addled, 78-year-old fossil who’s spent 47 years in the Senate as a pandering politician straight out of Central Casting. But the Democrat establishment pushed him because he polled best against Trump and, as Democrats are so quick to remind us, “science and data.”
Ah, I remember those days. I remember hearing the smart set tell us how a Herman Cain would be an abject failure as a candidate or president, so we’d better go with a traditional politician, such as John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Jeb Bush.
Then came Trump, dismantling the entire paradigm. One of the most beloved politicians in our history, he showed us how a successful American with a love for his country can do great things, things politicians have been promising for years, such as lowering unemployment for minorities, increasing wages for the working class, sticking it to communist China, creating peace in the Middle East, giving us energy independence, restructuring bad trade deals, withdrawing from foreign entanglements, and revolutionizing the federal judiciary.
Meanwhile, the Democrats get to watch a doddering hack grapple with the wily Sen. Mitch McConnell for four years, while trying to pick up the pieces of an economy they tanked to get Biden elected president and nothing else. Or maybe they’re looking forward to a President Kamala Harris doing her “Excuse me! Excuse me!” routine like that vice principal you mocked in high school.
You almost have to laugh. While they’re locked into “establishment mode” for four years, pantomiming gravitas with their whole “adults in the room” schtick to impress the seven remaining people watching CNN, the right will be having a blast retaking the House, nurturing a new generation of Trump-like candidates, and choosing another unconventional leader for president in 2024 that we actually like and don’t have to hold our noses to select. We’re done with the establishment, and it feels so liberating.
Let’s get into that new generation of conservatives. Trump brought in a significant swath of working-class voters. The Blexit movement continues, with obvious results in the increased turnout of black voters for Trump. With Trump’s Hispanic gains, can we say the whole “demography is destiny” theory officially ran out of juice at, of all places, the Rio Grande and southern Florida?
The last these demographic groups tasted of genuine Trumpism — prior to the Wuhan virus — they were doing outstanding. Now they got Biden to build his case that destroying the energy sector and subsidizing green energy will really get things going again.
Who better than an old, pandering white guy to convince young minority Americans that maybe it’s time for a second exodus from the Democrat plantation? And who will be on the sidelines with a megaphone the whole time saying, “I told you so. Remember what you had under me?”
That of course leads to our third reason for long-term hope: Trump isn’t going anywhere. This is a man who did five to six rallies a day, speaking an hour and a half at each one, for two weeks after recuperating from COVID-19. He’s also a man who hates losing, and his family is completely invested in the movement he started.
Who knows how this will translate. There’s talk of him beginning a right-leaning media outfit to compete with Fox News. Will he continue doing rallies to inspire support for a transformed Republican Party? Will he do a Grover Cleveland number and run for president again?
Whatever it is he chooses to do, he remains the same person uniquely suited to the task at hand, of disrupting the status quo in Washington. He clearly has the support of half the country. Many love him like they’ve never loved any other politician because of how he spoke up for them. That doesn’t end.
The left displayed a real logic problem this year. I became alert to this problem when I heard Biden and others blame Trump for the COVID-19 deaths. Huh? Do people really fall this easily for the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy, the logic that “X is president during Y, therefore X caused Y”?
Of course they do. That defines the leftist mind, the hive mind, the belief that agency doesn’t reside in the individual but in collective systems. This is how they think. Consequently, they must run those systems. They must have power.
Their attraction to the swamp comes with an underlying presumption of incredible self-importance. They manage the economy. They keep peace in the world. They take care of us all, good people that they are.
So what do you suppose it means when precisely nothing happens 10 years from now, about the time the world is predicted to implode from climate change? If the left is in charge of things, you know exactly what that will mean: “Thanks to President Ocasio-Cortez’s extreme measures, we’ve saved the world from catastrophe.” We’ll get a preview of this propaganda when a President Biden announces the end of the pandemic due to his wise governance.
This is why they not only needed to win this year but win big, big enough to enact the Green New Deal. That, in turn, could only be sustained with court-packing and a few new states to ensure a friendly Senate for the foreseeable future. With each radical measure, they would use the COVID-19 response as a template. “We came together before to defeat coronavirus; let’s do the same to defeat climate change!”
Alas, this is not going to happen thanks to the GOP’s other 2020 election victories. Without new states and new senators, the midterms will remain seasons of GOP success. It’s difficult to imagine the next presidential election generating excitement for a second Harris or Biden term, at least enough to create coattails for a Democrat takeover of the Senate and House.
2030 will come with glorious weather, and the left will have had nothing to do with it. After a string of exposed lies — Russia, COVID-19 “science,” systemic racism, polls, climate change — how soon before the nation becomes wise to the fact that leftism is synonymous with lying?
The answer to that last question gets to the American DNA. Americans distrust power. The left does well appealing to that distrust, promoting a false narrative blaming the “powers that be” whenever they’re out of power. They milk that “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy for everything it’s worth. It comes more naturally to them than it does to the right.
How often, these past four years, did the leftist mind resort to “Orange Man Bad!” and a primal scream into the cosmos every time their car didn’t start, or they encountered a long line at McDonald’s, or they just felt blue? It’s their psychic makeup.
No more. The left is running their asylum now. They’re great at manufacturing fear about the bogeymen behind “the system,” but in actual governance, they do nothing but lose. Of course, the leftist answer to that conundrum is, “If we all just work together, nothing is impossible.” So they can continue to blame the Senate, disinformation, gridlock, those on “the wrong side of history,” and Trump.
The whole point of leftism is that it can’t succeed without total investment by everyone in its program. That’s why it’s “all hands on deck” from Big Tech, Big Media, Big Business, Hollywood, Wall Street, human resources departments, and the Washington swamp. That’s why cancel culture is integral to their success. Dissent, alternative information, and a muscular minority topples the whole house of cards.
We’re America. We left the tyrannies of the world to come here. We left our cultures and even families. We’re all just a few generations away from incredible risk-takers, fighters, and survivors. Rugged individualism is in our blood.
Add to that the brilliant system set up by the forefathers with its many checks and balances. The newly conservative federal courts, red state governments, and that troublesome right to free speech aren’t going anywhere for now. Meanwhile, the free market is begging for new social media platforms and a FBexit or Twexit movement.
The left tells Americans, “We’re all in this together,” but it won’t be too long before, well, 70 million people say, “Speak for yourself. We’ll speak for ourselves, thank you.” That 70 million isn’t going anywhere. It’s only growing.
The 2020 election was a referendum on the progressive elite, and they were soundly defeated
By • The Washington Free Beacon
In a week of surprises, California’s rejection of a ballot measure that would have allowed the state to resume its affirmative action program was among the most significant.
The measure, known as Proposition 16, wasn’t defeated by shy Trump voters. Polling showed Hispanic and other minority voters evenly split on the measure, and on Tuesday it was defeated in California’s most Latino counties.
California’s result is just one piece of the mounting evidence that voters on Tuesday threw a wrench in the progressive plan to leverage a “coalition of the ascendant” and an “emerging Democratic majority” to turn the country into a woke utopia.
The 2020 election was in large part a referendum on Democrats’ race baiting and pandering, starting with the party’s own elevation of Biden to the top of the ticket. Democrats’ rejection of Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris was a leading indicator that the media missed.
Millions of voters of all races made clear that they instead prefer the old ideals: equality of opportunity, economic freedom, and a society that judges its citizens not by the color of our skin, but the content of our character.
Beyond that, the president whom Democrats have lambasted for four years as a racist and a xenophobe turned out more minority voters than any Republican candidate in decades. It’s not just that right-wing Cubans handed Trump a surprise victory in south Florida; he clinched some of the nation’s most Latino counties, improved his margins with black men and women, and even earned commanding majorities in some Native American counties. And that exit poll data does not account for the shy Trump voters, an effect we presume may well be exaggerated among black and Hispanic voters.
Senate races yielded more bad news for the progressive left. Even if Joe Biden wins the White House, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), who easily overcame an $80 million challenge, will serve as a check on the ascendance of socialists such as Sens. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) to the Biden cabinet. Voters may have wanted Biden, but there’s a whole wing of his party they’d prefer to do without.
Some House Democrats can see the writing on the wall. Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D., Va.) reportedly told her caucus that the progressive push to defund the police and embrace “socialism” almost cost them the majority. Rep. Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.) advised Democrats to drop the woke speak, starting with the bizarre “Latinx.”ADVERTISING
Tuesday’s results should shatter the Democratic presumption that their party is destined to command the overwhelming and eternal support of minority voters—but it won’t. The politics fueled by racial grievance and personified by the “squad” of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib is a cancer on the Democratic Party that it indulges at its own peril.
By • DrLarryOnline.com
Last week’s column attempted to illustrate how a new feudalism can occur under the guise of a Socialist takeover of the government. The are many moving parts to this movement, and a number of the key elements are already in place. The trap is nearly ready to be sprung. The only obstacle in the new Republican Party of Donald J. Trump. This is why such frantic efforts are continually sustained to defeat him.
In order to more easily understand how this takeover will work, the key pieces of the puzzle will be presented here in a notebook format. (More detail can be seen in last week’s column, “How the new feudalism will happen” (See DrLarryOnline.com)
The underlying issue of this entire movement is the wealth gap which exists in the United States between the mega-billionaires who constitute about 1% of the population and who soon will own about 80% of the financial and real assets of the United States of America and the rest of us. The reasons this trend constitute such a threat to the Republic are several: first, 68% of the US Gross National Product (GDP) – that is the sum of all the economic activity in the entire country – depends on consumer spending. But if the consumer cannot afford to buy those products and services, the economy will shrink, jobs will be lost, more people will be on welfare, and only the wealthy will continue to thrive.
This is true, because the very rich do not do as much purchasing of goods and services as the majority of people do. For example, how many shirts can one man wear? He will spend his money on stock, buying other companies and other investments, thus increasing his wealth. Eventually he and his peers will own or control everything, and everyone will be working directly or indirectly for the billionaires.
This trend has been going on for a long time, aided by the digital revolution and internationalism. The reason I have called this trend “feudalism” is because this kind of economic system was called “feudalism” in the Middle Ages. The nobility owned all the land and all the “serfs” worked for them. Although the serfs were called “free”, they were in fact as tied to their master and his land as any slave.
So, the second reason why the new feudalism is such a threat is the reversal of the Western world’s march toward freedom and equality most notably, and the United States of America most notable of all. The lighted city on the hill would be darkened, its beacon extinguished, its spirit crushed.
The basic strategy is for the billionaires to form what I have called “an unholy alliance” by which they would pool resources and secure the levers of power (the “players” below). The main obstacle to this alliance besides Trump is the reluctance of some major players to join the group. There hasn’t yet been a room big enough to hold all the giant egos. But it will soon come.
Clearly, much of this agenda had already been achieved. The only remaining task is to bring together all the players under one tent. The winning of the 2020 elections with sufficient positions to control the federal government should convince all the players to join the Unholy Alliance and take over the country.
The observation has been made that the takeover of the new oligarchy will be a “soft revolution”, meaning without violence or bloodshed. It will be done through automation, With the communications of the entire nation under the control of High-Tech, the citizens will not be able to communicate except in person or through “Big Brother” as George Orwell predicted in his book, 1984, (he may have been early in his timing, but his description of ordinary life was very revealing!).
From last week’s column, “Most of this scenario has already taken place. The 2016 election was a trial run for the future. The planners believe that the mistakes of 2016 have been analyzed and corrected. The only obstacle is Donald J. Trump. He should have been one of the oligarchs but instead chose to defy the entire alliance, so they tested their system by using the press to neutralize him by a hate campaign, used their bought House of Representatives to impeach him based on their enlistment of the Deep State to provide false evidence.
“They came within one Senate vote of succeeding.
“But still he stands – between total power and secondary status of the Unholy Alliance. He had better beware – if he wins the pending election, he may be walking around with a target on his back.
“The table is set by the Unholy Alliance to take over the country. All that is lacking is a Biden victory in the coming election. The only force standing in the way is Donald J. Trump.
Unless we stand with him.”
By • American Action News
Former Vice President Joe Biden, who’s deliberately projecting a moderate image in his campaign against President Donald J. Trump, was accused Monday of being “firmly planted to the left” by Republican National Committee Chairman Ronna Romney McDaniel.
Ms. McDaniel, the niece of one-time GOP presidential nominee Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, told FBN’s Stuart Varney that Biden, to win the backing of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other hard-left leaders in the Democratic Party, had positioned himself well outside the mainstream of U.S. politics in his latest effort to win the White House.
“I do think he is firmly planted in the left,” the top RNC official said, citing Biden policies that would raise taxes and abolish jobs in the U.S. energy industry to underscore her point. Rather than be vague or misleading about his intentions as he has been doing, she said it would be fairer to the voters if the onetime U.S. Senator from Delaware went “on the road with Bernie and AOC” to talk about his real agenda.
Objectively, Biden is running farthest to the left of any Democrat seeking the presidency since Michael Dukakis ran in 1988. After famously bragging that he was a “card-carrying member of the ACLU” and defending the controversial state prison furlough program that allowed even those convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole to be allowed out on weekend passes, the former Massachusetts governor ended up losing the popular vote to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush in what amounted to an Electoral College landslide.
Biden has vowed to roll back the recent tax cuts that sparked considerable job creation and growth in the U.S. economy before the economic lockdowns instituted in many states because of the onset of the novel coronavirus brought on a recession. He’s also pledged to end fracking, which would severely threaten America’s new-found energy independence, expand Obamacare, and has suggested he would abolish the federal law preventing labor unions from requiring workers to join them as a condition of employment. He’s also suggested that as president he would push for the repeal of the so-called “Hyde Amendment” that prohibits federal dollars from being used directly to fund abortions.
The political potency of the abortion issue, which generally adheres to the benefit of candidates who take what is known as “the right to life” position, will be tested in the upcoming election. Trump has made his opposition to abortion rights a cornerstone of both his campaign and his presidency, pointing frequently to the number of judges he has appointed to the federal bench whom he believes are in sync with his thinking on the issue. Stunningly, several recent polls suggest that Biden is nonetheless gaining support among Catholics and self-described evangelicals who the abortion issue is a major motivating factor in determining how they will vote.
Biden and his running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, are also on the leftward edge of the gun issue. During the campaign, both have talked openly about banning the private ownership of certain kinds of weapons and accessories like high-capacity magazines as well as suggesting they are willing to consider confiscation of firearms already in private hands.
By • The Orange Country Register
The California Legislature is back from its summer recess and has frantically resumed its quest for new revenue sources.
One of the latest ideas is Assembly Bill 1253. This proposed legislation would add new income tax brackets for high earners on top of the existing ones.
Income between $1 million and $2 million would receive a one percentage point surcharge, bringing the marginal rate to 14.3 percent. Those earning between $2 million and $5 million would pay an additional three percentage points, and those earning over $5 million would pay an additional 3.5 percentage points, bringing their marginal rates to 16.3 percent and 16.8 percent respectively.
This plan constitutes a continuation of California’s soak-the-rich approach to raising revenues.
While some seem to believe that high earners can provide unlimited resources, the evidence from prior tax hikes suggests that the introduction of these tax rates is not even likely to raise revenue for the state. At the same time, it will hammer job creation.
The problem is that high earners do not simply sit there and take it when the state goes after their income.
In a detailed study of the 2012 California ballot measure that raised the top state rate to 13.3 percent, Ryan Shyu and I found that just two years later, the state was only collecting 40 cents of every dollar that it had hoped to raise from the tax increase.
The reason?
High income taxpayers affected by the 2012 tax increase suddenly began to flee the state at higher rates, especially to zero tax states like Nevada, Texas, and Florida.
Even more importantly for the state budget, those that stayed began declaring considerably less taxable income than they would have otherwise, apparently either scaling back their productive activities or engaging in tax avoidance.
The economist Arthur Laffer has famously argued that there is a tax rate beyond which a government’s revenue will decline if it raises taxes further, due to the disincentive effects of high taxes.
While the federal government may be helped by limits on what American citizens can do to escape federal taxation, state governments tread on much thinner ice when faced with the ability of taxpayers to move their residences and their earnings generation to other states.
In 2012, California was at least still at the point where raising top income tax rates led to some increase in near-term revenue, albeit with grave long-term consequences.
Today, however, the state is starting from a 13.3 percent tax rate that is the highest in the nation.
Furthermore, Congress has since moved to protect federal taxpayers against bloated state spending by placing a $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions as part of the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act.
So while the blow of a 3 percentage point tax increase in 2012 was strongly cushioned by deductibility against top-bracket federal rates, California taxpayers today would feel the full force of this proposed round of increases.
Once taxpayers have responded by voting with their feet, reducing their business activities, and re-upping with their tax attorneys, the state will likely lose revenue if it attempts to increase rates.
To make matters worse, Sacramento’s narrow focus on tax revenues ignores that fact that this tax avoidance behavior will lead to job losses. These rates also apply to business income to non-corporate entities (such as partnerships and LLCs) which account for over half of all employment in the US.
In another study, Xavier Giroud and I found that each percentage point increase in individual tax rates that the average state implements leads to losses of up to 0.4 percent of all non-corporate jobs in the state.
Starting from California’s already astronomical top rate, the impact would be expected to be even larger.
These job losses will negatively impact the well-being of Californians and further reduce state tax revenues.
California’s approach to relying on the taxation of top earners has sown the seeds of its own destruction. The top 0.5 percent of taxpayers pay over 40 percent of individual income taxes in the state.
Officials are blaming COVID-19 for the budgetary havoc, but this structure means that in any downturn, California revenues will tank due to the excessive reliance on both the ordinary income and capital gains of top earners.
If the Legislature is interested in promoting economic growth and prosperity in the California, and securing the state’s own fiscal future, it should reject further top income tax rate increases.
Instead, it should work towards putting the state back on a path towards being a competitive place for high-income individuals and businesses to locate their economic activity.
By • Townhall Finance
The politicians in Washington rarely let the important get ahead of the urgent and expensive. The spending spree they’ve engaged in to offset the economic impact of the coronavirus lockdown has obligated our children and grandchildren to trillions in debt it won’t be easy to pay off.
How did we get here? The blame doesn’t rest largely or even mostly with the Trump Administration. It goes back over several presidencies and springs from the unwillingness of Congress, no matter which party was in charge, to tackle the thorny issue of entitlements and the financial obligations they place on future generations.
It’s not just Social Security and Medicare that threaten to bankrupt us when they reach the tipping point. The problem of there being too many retirees living longer and healthier than the existing workforce can support is just a drop in the bucket compared to other worries that can already be seen coming at us over the horizon.
Take for example the issue of the many public and private pension plans these same retirees are counting on to provide for them in their golden years crash are now badly underfunded. If they’re allowed to come crashing down it will make what happened after Lehman Brothers failed look like a slight downturn in the markets.
You can blame the politicians for that too, not that it will do much good. The plans they created and authorized, in Washington and at the state level and for employees in the private sector were masterpieces of wealth concentration controlled by so-called experts who keep it all safe for later.
We know now it wasn’t true. These plans have been abused and raided for decades, more than once leaving the workers who funded them holding not the bag but nothing. Alternatives do exist now like Roth IRAs and 401(k)s. Anyone can open one, and often do with their employer contributing or even matching what an individual puts in. They’re preferable to the defined benefit plans of the past, not just because they don’t leave everyone exposed to a potential taxpayer-funded bailout if they go bankrupt but because the individual plans give workers at every level a significant measure of control over the retirement finances.
Every retirement plan should be moving in that direction. Even Social Security needs to make room for private accounts. But all thats’ for later, for the next generations of retirees. There are still problems endemic to the existing system that must be addressed.
One of the most urgent involves the nation’s approximately 1,400 multi-employer plans. As defined by the federal Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation they are “collectively bargained plan(s) maintained by more than one employer, usually within the same or related industries, and a labor union.” More than one is in financial trouble and all need structural reform.
About 10 million workers are participating in these plans in fields from mining to manufacturing to trucking. They’re not only the so-called essential employees who’ve kept the rest of us supplied with foods and other goods and help keep the lights on and the Internet access up, they’re a powerful voting block.
If Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican who runs the Senate wants to continue to doing so for the next two years, he needs to make the issue more of a priority than it’s been according to a survey commissioned by the Retirement Security Coalition.
The group, which has conducted polling in the swing states where control of the U.S. Senate over the next two years will be decided, found voters care deeply about the issue. In Michigan, where the latest polls show the race very tight between incumbent Democrat Gary Peters and GOP challenger John James, a whopping 70 percent of the more than 440,400 people surveyed agreed these plans are endangered and in need of reform. Similar numbers come from states where other Senate races will help determine control of the chamber like Iowa, North Carolina, and Georgia.
Time is running out. Ohio Republican Rob Portman, a leading advocate for the reform of multiemployer plans, estimates they were underfunded by more than $638 billion before the coronavirus lockdowns went into effect. The number is almost certainly bigger now while the PBGC, which is the government guarantor for pension plans, is projected to become insolvent in less than five years.
Portman’s proposed a set of commonsense reforms that at least deserve a hearing – preferably before retiree benefits start getting cut and the demand for bailouts start.
By • DrLarryOnline.com
(Washington DC, July 19, 2020) Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace interviewed President Donald J. Trump for nearly 50 minutes today. The two men clashed on nearly every topic introduced by Wallace – Covid-19, national polls (especially Fox News polls), Joe Biden, and even a segment on Wallace trying desperately (and unsuccessfully) to convince Trump that he (Wallace) is objective and neutral in his reporting.
Each tried to persuade the other that he was presenting the truth, based on evidence in hand. The difference, of course, was the source of the “facts” which each was using. Wallace slavishly follows the statistics developed by the typical establishment sources, such as the Congressional Budget Office, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the World Trade Organization, and the World Health Service. What he never seems to understand is that each of these sources has proven over time to publish data which are sometimes deemed controversial for one reason or another by other authorities.
Some, such as the CBO habitually present predictions which are derived from controversial assumptions which undercut Republican (including the Trump Administration) positions on virtually every topic they cover, whether the national debt or the cost of health care. Others, such as Johns Hopkins, follow policies of the profession they represent – in this case Public Health – which are frequently at odds with either the trends or the actual policies of the Administration. For example, Hopkins chooses to focus on the number of COVID cases rather than mortality rates, which is the emphasis of the Administration. Hopkins also relies on locally collected data regarding the Coronavirus, over which anecdotal evidence – especially on social media – is casting an ever darker shadow.
The same pattern applies to pollsters who typically depend on brief telephone interviews with registered voters, who are home and willing to take the pollster’s call, and who are chosen according to a formula heavily weighted with Democrat voters (typically 22% of the sample) – among other questionable assumptions. As we saw in 2016, the polls on which the Real Clear averages are based can be very misleading.
What Wallace just cannot seem to understand is that his assumption of the neutrality and objectivity of these traditional data sources is misplaced, sometimes wildly so, as in the case of the differences between the actual and the polls’ predictions of the 2016 election.
Chris Wallace represents the few political commentators who are honestly trying to live up to the traditional standards of non-partisan, objective journalism exemplified by Mike Wallace, Chris’ father. What they don’t understand is the extent of Mr. Trump’s unorthodox perspective on political topics.
In this regard, the traditional resources we have been discussing are also consistently measuring and reporting Mr. Trump’s words and actions by standards which he has no intention of honoring. For example, Trump’s descriptions of his strategies on foreign affairs tend to be sketchy and easily open to misinterpretation, as in his statements on talks with the Chinese. He will typically say things like, “I have a good relationship with President Xi (or Vladimir Putin)” in response to a question about the progress of negotiations between the countries.
This is interpreted by the press as “Trump declined to discuss the talks”; or “He has no strategy”; or “Trump is being hoodwinked by the Chinese”; or the like. What he intends to reveal is nothing about the talks or his strategy because he does not want the other side to understand his strategy. In general, Trump will give similar answers to all questions which involve predictions.
The press (and pundits who rely on the press) choose to interpret these exchanges as insults, since they feel ordained by custom to be the final arbiters of what is good or bad about politicians’ words and actions. When they don’t know what the policy or strategy is, they have two choices: 1) admit they don’t know, or 2) pretend they do know. Clearly, admitting they don’t know the strategy is beneath their dignity as the all-knowing press. So, fake news is born.
This is not to say that Donald J. Trump is the soul of discretion! On the contrary, he might be called the master of hyperbole, ridicule and arrogance. These characteristics tend to mask for many his patriotism, courage, and compassion. On the other hand, working people such as truck drivers, construction workers, factory workers, and tradesmen like the way he talks because they understand him. Many recognize his plain talk, humor and fearlessness and admire him. What offends the college-educated elite speaks loudly to many others. These differences are reflected in the voting public.
Needless to say, Chris Wallace and his like-minded cohorts in the press do not fall in the ranks of the working class. In the televised interview on Sunday, the clash between these two men in some ways symbolized the cultural tension between the different strata of American society.
Neither man came out the winner of this contest. Unfortunately, the only enlightenment which came from the confrontation was perhaps demonstrated in the final segment. Wallace made a repeated plea for the President’s agreement that he (Wallace) was in fact a non-partisan commentator. All he got was the President’s opinion that Chris favored the Democrats, but that he has the right to do so.
Poor Chris!
Sixteen Thirty Fund acts as network for liberal donors to anonymously give to Democratic committees
By • The Washington Free Beacon
Deep-pocketed liberal donors are using a massive dark money network to conceal the source of nearly $20 million in donations to pro-Biden PACs.
At least $19.8 million has made its way through the Sixteen Thirty Fund to liberal PACs for the 2020 cycle. The fund, which normally works with advocacy organizations, has switched its focus to the election in recent months, sending large amounts to groups supporting Joe Biden in the presidential race. Wealthy donors push cash into the Sixteen Thirty Fund—an entity housed at the D.C.-based dark money network Arabella Advisors—which then disburses the money to prominent Democratic committees.
Arabella Advisors operates as an important funding avenue for wealthy liberal donors, allowing them to contribute to political groups anonymously. Each of several funds within Arabella, including the Sixteen Thirty Fund, acts as a “fiscal sponsor,” providing its legal and tax-exempt status to dozens of liberal groups that fall under its auspices. That status absolves the groups from having to disclose their donors. Donors’ use of the Sixteen Thirty Fund as a vehicle for election PAC donations marks a departure from the group’s normal operations. It normally serves as a pass-through entity to bankroll shadowy nonprofit groups behind left-wing initiatives. This year, however, Democratic candidates including Joe Biden will benefit from the fund’s disbursements despite railing against secret money in politics.
The fund’s relationship to liberal nonprofits has raised eyebrows among money-in-politics watchdogs. Anna Massoglia, a dark money researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics, said the Sixteen Thirty Fund “has taken dark money in politics to a new level of opacity by channeling money from secret donors to political groups while steering funds into its own fiscally sponsored operations.”
“Sixteen Thirty Fund’s fiscal sponsorship scheme not only enables seemingly independent groups to operate under its umbrella with little or no paper trail but also enables them to engage in a level of political activity that might not be possible if they operated as separate tax-exempt nonprofits,” Massoglia said.
Several election-focused PACs received large sums from Sixteen Thirty, according to FEC filings. The pro-Biden Unite the Country PAC, liberal operative David Brock’s American Bridge PAC, and a joint fundraising venture between the two groups hauled in a combined $11.4 million from the fund last month. Priorities USA Action, the largest Democratic super PAC, received $3.5 million. The Black PAC, a progressive group focused on black voter turnout, received $2.25 million from the dark money entity—nearly all of the $2.5 million the committee raised in June.
The Sixteen Thirty Fund pushed more than $2.5 million to other Democratic PACs earlier this cycle, including six-figure sums to the Nancy Pelosi-linked House Majority PAC, Shaun King’s Real Justice PAC, and Forward Majority Action. It also sent seven-figure sums to Future Forward USA PAC.
“Liberal dark money groups outspent their conservative counterparts in 2018 for the first election cycle since Citizens United,” Massoglia said. “But direct spending by groups like 501(c)(4) nonprofits is only a fraction of the secret donor money seeping into U.S. elections since dark money groups also steer donations to groups like super PACs.”ADVERTISING
Arabella’s massive network has facilitated the transfer of more than $1 billion from Democratic donors to powerful liberal groups and initiatives in 2017 and 2018 alone.
“The Sixteen Thirty Fund provides support to advocates and social welfare organizations around the country, and we will continue to grow our program,” Amy Kurtz, the fund’s executive director, told the Washington Free Beacon. She added that the fund would continue to support groups that work on causes such as “economic equity, the climate crisis, racial justice, and participation in our democracy.”
To know what the Chinese are really up to, read the futuristic novels of Liu Cixin.
By • Belfer Center
“We are in the foothills of a Cold War.” Those were the words of Henry Kissinger when I interviewed him at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Beijing last November.
The observation in itself was not wholly startling. It had seemed obvious to me since early last year that a new Cold War — between the U.S. and China — had begun. This insight wasn’t just based on interviews with elder statesmen. Counterintuitive as it may seem, I had picked up the idea from binge-reading Chinese science fiction.
First, the history. What had started out in early 2018 as a trade war over tariffs and intellectual property theft had by the end of the year metamorphosed into a technology war over the global dominance of the Chinese company Huawei Technologies Co. in 5G network telecommunications; an ideological confrontation in response to Beijing’s treatment of the Uighur minority in China’s Xinjiang region and the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong; and an escalation of old frictions over Taiwan and the South China Sea.
Nevertheless, for Kissinger, of all people, to acknowledge that we were in the opening phase of Cold War II was remarkable.
Since his first secret visit to Beijing in 1971, Kissinger has been the master-builder of that policy of U.S.-Chinese engagement which, for 45 years, was a leitmotif of U.S. foreign policy. It fundamentally altered the balance of power at the mid-point of the Cold War, to the disadvantage of the Soviet Union. It created the geopolitical conditions for China’s industrial revolution, the biggest and fastest in history. And it led, after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, to that extraordinary financial symbiosis which Moritz Schularick and I christened “Chimerica” in 2007.
How did relations between Beijing and Washington sour so quickly that even Kissinger now speaks of Cold War?
The conventional answer to that question is that President Donald Trump has swung like a wrecking ball into the “liberal international order” and that Cold War II is only one of the adverse consequences of his “America First” strategy.
Yet that view attaches too much importance to the change in U.S. foreign policy since 2016, and not enough to the change in Chinese foreign policy that came four years earlier, when Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Future historians will discern that the decline and fall of Chimerica began in the wake of the global financial crisis, as a new Chinese leader drew the conclusion that there was no longer any need to hide the light of China’s ambition under the bushel that Deng Xiaoping had famously recommended.
When Middle America voted for Trump four years ago, it was partly a backlash against the asymmetric payoffs of engagement and its economic corollary, globalization. Not only had the economic benefits of Chimerica gone disproportionately to China, not only had its costs been borne disproportionately by working-class Americans, but now those same Americans saw that their elected leaders in Washington had acted as midwives at the birth of a new strategic superpower — a challenger for global predominance even more formidable, because economically stronger, than the Soviet Union.
It is not only Kissinger who recognizes that the relationship with Beijing has soured. Orville Schell, another long-time believer in engagement, recently conceded that the approach had foundered “because of the CCP’s deep ambivalence about the way engaging in a truly meaningful way might lead to demands for more reform and change and its ultimate demise.”
Conservative critics of engagement, meanwhile, are eager to dance on its grave, urging that the People’s Republic be economically “quarantined,” its role in global supply chains drastically reduced. There is a spring in the step of the more Sinophobic members of the Trump administration, notably Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger and trade adviser Peter Navarro. For the past three and a half years they have been arguing that the single most important thing about Trump’s presidency was that he had changed the course of U.S. policy towards China, a shift from engagement to competition spelled out in the 2017 National Security Strategy. The events of 2020 would seem to have vindicated them.
The Covid-19 pandemic has done more than intensify Cold War II. It has revealed its existence to those who last year doubted it. The Chinese Communist Party caused this disaster — first by covering up how dangerous the new virus SARS-CoV-2 was, then by delaying the measures that might have prevented its worldwide spread.
Yet now China wants to claim the credit for saving the world from the crisis it caused. Liberally exporting cheap and not wholly reliable ventilators, testing kits and face masks, the Chinese government has sought to snatch victory from the jaws of a defeat it inflicted. The deputy director of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s information department has gone so far as to endorse a conspiracy theory that the coronavirus originated in the U.S. and retweet an article claiming that an American team had brought the virus with them when they participated in the World Military Games in Wuhan last October.
Just as implausible are Chinese claims that the U.S. is somehow behind the recurrent waves of pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong. The current confrontation over the former British colony’s status is unambiguously Made in China. As Pompeo has said, the new National Security LawBeijing imposed on Hong Kong last Tuesday effectively “destroys” the territory’s semi-autonomy and tears up the 1984 Sino-British joint declaration, which guaranteed that Hong Kong would retain its own legal system for 50 years after its handover to People’s Republic in 1997.
In this context, it is not really surprising that American public sentiment towards China has become markedly more hawkish since 2017, especially among older voters. China is one of few subjects these days about which there is a genuine bipartisan consensus. It is a sign of the times that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign clearly intends to portray their man as more hawkish on China than Trump. (Former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s new memoir is grist to their mill.) On Hong Kong, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House, is every bit as indignant as Pompeo.
I have argued that this new Cold War is both inevitable and desirable, not least because it has jolted the U.S. out of complacency and into an earnest effort not to be surpassed by China in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other strategically crucial technologies. Yet there remains, in academia especially, significant resistance to my viewthat we should stop worrying and learn to love Cold War II.
At a forum last week on World Order after Covid-19, organized by the Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, a clear majority of speakers warned of the perils of a new Cold War.
Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Google, argued instead for a “rivalry-partnership” model of “coop-etition,” in which the two nations would at once compete and cooperate in the way that Samsung and Apple have done for years.
Harvard’s Graham Allison, the author of the bestselling “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?”, agreed, giving as another example the 11th-century “frenmity” between the Song Emperor of China and the Liao kingdom on China’s northern border. The pandemic, Allison argued, has made “incandescent the impossibility of identifying China clearly as either foe or friend. Rivalry-partnership may sound complicated, but life is complicated.”
“The establishment of a productive and predictable US/China relationship,” wrote John Lipsky, formerly of the International Monetary Fund, “is a sine qua non for strengthening the institutions of global governance.” The last Cold War had cast a “shadow of a global holocaust for decades,” observed James Steinberg, a former deputy secretary of state. “What can be done to create a context to limit the rivalry and create space for cooperation?”
Elizabeth Economy, my colleague at the Hoover Institution, had an answer: “The United States and China could … partner to address a global challenge,” namely climate change. Tom Wright of the Brookings Institution took a similar line: “Focusing only on great power competition while ignoring the need for cooperation will not actually give the United States an enduring strategic advantage over China.”
All this sounds eminently reasonable, apart from one thing. The Chinese Communist Party isn’t Samsung, much less the Liao kingdom. Rather — as was true in Cold War I, when (especially after 1968) academics tended to be doves rather than hawks — today’s proponents of “rivalry-partnership” are overlooking the possibility that the Chinese aren’t interested in being frenemies. They know full well this is a Cold War, because they started it.
To be sure, there are also Chinese scholars who lament the passing of engagement. The economist Yu Yongding recently joined Kevin Gallagher of Boston University to argue for reconciliation between Washington and Beijing. Yet that is no longer the official view in Beijing. When I first began talking publicly about Cold War II at conferences last year, I was surprised that no Chinese delegates contradicted me. In September, I asked one of them — the Chinese head of a major international institution — why that was. “Because I agree with you!” he replied with a smile.
As a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, I have seen for myself the ideological turning of the tide under Xi. Academics who study taboo subjects such as the Cultural Revolution find themselves subject to investigations or worse. Those who take a more combative stance toward the West get promoted.
Yan Xuetong, dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua, recently argued that Cold War II, unlike Cold War I, will be a purely technological competition, without proxy wars and nuclear brinkmanship. Yao Yang, dean of the National School of Development at Peking University, was equally candid in an interview with the Beijing Cultural Review, published on April 28.
“To a certain degree we already find ourselves in the situation of a New Cold War,” he said. “There are two basic reasons for this. The first is the need for Western politicians to play the blame game” about the origins of the pandemic. “The next thing,” he added, “is that now Westerners want to make this into a ‘systems’ question, saying that the reason that China could carry out such drastic control measures [in Hubei province] is because China is not a democratic society, and this is where the power and capacity to do this came from.”
This, however, is weak beer compared with the hard stuff regularly served up on Twitter by the pack leader of the “wolf warrior” diplomats, Zhao Lijian. “The Hong Kong Autonomy Act passed by the US Senate is nothing but a piece of scrap paper,” he tweeted on Monday, in response to the congressional retaliation against China’s new Hong Kong security law. By his standards, this was understatement.
The tone of the official Chinese communiqué released after Pompeo’s June 17 meeting in Hawaii with Yang Jiechi, the director of the Communist Party’s Office of Foreign Affairs, was vintage Cold War. On the persecution of the Uighurs, for example, it called on “the US side to respect China’s counter-terrorism and de-radicalization efforts, stop applying double standards on counter-terrorism issues, and stop using Xinjiang-related issues as a pretext to interfere in China’s internal affairs.”
And this old shrillness, so reminiscent of the Mao Zedong era, is not reserved for the U.S. alone. The Chinese government lashes out at any country that has the temerity to criticize it, from Australia — “gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe” according to the editor of the Party-controlled Global Times — to India to the U.K.
Those who hope to revive engagement, or at least establish frenmity with Beijing, underestimate the influence of Wang Huning, a member since 2017 of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the most powerful body in China, and Xi’s most influential adviser. Back in August 1988, Wang spent six months in the U.S. as a visiting scholar, traveling to more than 30 cities and nearly 20 universities. His account of that trip, “America against America,” (published in 1991) is a critique — in places scathing — of American democracy, capitalism and culture (racial division features prominently in the third chapter).
Yet the book that has done the most to educate me about how China views America and the world today is, as I said, not a political text, but a work of science fiction. “The Dark Forest” was Liu Cixin’s 2008 sequel to the hugely successful “Three-Body Problem.” It would be hard to overstate Liu’s influence in contemporary China: He is revered by the Shenzhen and Hangzhou tech companies, and was officially endorsed as one of the faces of 21st-century Chinese creativity by none other than … Wang Huning.
“The Dark Forest,” which continues the story of the invasion of Earth by the ruthless and technologically superior Trisolarans, introduces Liu’s three axioms of “cosmic sociology.”
First, “Survival is the primary need of civilization.” Second, “Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.” Third, “chains of suspicion” and the risk of a “technological explosion” in another civilization mean that in space there can only be the law of the jungle. In the words of the book’s hero, Luo Ji:
The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost … trying to tread without sound … The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life — another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people … any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out.
Kissinger is often thought of (in my view, wrongly) as the supreme American exponent of Realpolitik. But this is something much harsher than realism. This is intergalactic Darwinism.
Of course, you may say, it’s just sci-fi. Yes, but “The Dark Forest” gives us an insight into something we think too little about: how Xi’s China thinks. It’s not up to us whether or not we have a Cold War with China, if China has already declared Cold War on us.
Not only are we already in the foothills of that new Cold War; those foothills are also impenetrably covered in a dark forest of China’s devising.
If we’re inclined to glide past the Marxist fingerprints all over America’s current turmoil, assuming its ideas will flare up for a while and then burn out, we’re not paying attention.
By • The Federalist
American institutions have stoked the coals of Karl Marx’s destructive ideology, fanning its flames until his notions have consumed our cultural pillars.
Far from being forgotten and irrelevant, Marx’s ideas pervade key institutions, from universities and schools, to mass media and popular entertainment, to major corporations and medicine, to the arts and sciences. They’ve even seeped into many churches and seminaries. Of course, they also define the Democratic Party, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi no less than Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama.
I don’t mean such clunky ideas from “Das Kapital” as the dictatorship of the proletariat, the labor theory of value, or the withering away of the state. No, we’re talking about the substratum of assumptions about how the world works, underlying those discredited notions from bygone days.
The poisoned root of all of it is something called “dialectical materialism,” a concept Marx borrowed from Hegel that describes how material needs create social conflict. The two men saw the material world as distinct and independent from the spirit and mind, and maintained that attempting to combine the material and immaterial bred inconsistencies. For our purposes here, suffice it to say the “materialism” part disallows all things spiritual, and the “dialectical” part disallows all things fixed or permanent or unchanging.
So we’re left with nothing but atoms in endless flux, physical forces violently colliding in a grim world where might makes right and brutal will reigns supreme. If that sounds like the radical autonomous zone in Seattle, it’s no coincidence.
Cultural Marxism is increasingly defining the worldview within which all debates and decision-making take place, even for most of those who rightly fear and despise Marx. This philosophy is on an accelerating trajectory to deconstructing the American way of life from top to bottom, leaving no sphere of our daily lives untouched.
Its deconstruction agenda takes three main forms: Marxism dehumanizes all persons, demoralizes all relationships, and decivilizes all institutions.
Dehumanizing all persons. No one is anything more than his or her DNA and appearance, plus whatever animal instincts he happens to feel at a given time. From this comes identity politics, racial and sexual polarization, group victimhood, and group guilt. This logically results in demoralizing relationships.
Demoralizing all relationships. Since individuals are mere meat in motion, and existence is mere randomness, morality as all the world religions have known it is gone. No two people can interact on the basis of objective right and wrong.
What’s right or good is instead the mere product of quantitative mass (how many persons want it) times qualitative intensity (how much emotion they express). Dignity, property, marital and family ties, marketplace exchanges, contracts and promises, tradition and heritage, vulnerability, duty, love, and life itself — all go to zero.
Decivilizing all institutions. People and relationships having thus been zeroed out. Institutions of whatever sort, including communities or nations, obviously cannot stand either. An institution is but an agreement or understanding entered into by people, meant to outlive them and endure through time, all of which is viewed as absurd and dissolves under the acid of dialectical materialism. All bets are off.
Civis, Latin for city, which gives rise to our ideas of civilization and civility, civics and the citizen, goes on the ash heap of history. Language, the institution enabling people in communities to communicate — even to seek and express truth — gets trashed as well. Truth is whatever one wants it to be. Plain speaking must bow to political correctness, itself a purely Marxist term.
It bears repeating that life is devalued to zero under this nightmare of deconstruction America is now experiencing. One can draw a connection to George Orwell’s anti-Marxist masterpiece “Animal Farm.” All animals are equal, says Napoleon the pig reassuringly. It’s just that some animals are more equal than others.
In the same way, we’re now being told some lives matter more than others by the leaders of a mass movement decivilizing our cities and seeking to incite a race war. It shouldn’t surprise us that one of those leaders has bluntly and proudly said on camera, “We’re trained Marxists.” Hearing that, do we shrug and make excuses for her since, after all, a lot of pain can accompany being black in this country?
Or are we shocked at the cynicism that would so disserve the very people her movement claims to champion? Are we surprised at the gullibility of so many of our fellow citizens of all colors who would trust a Marxist to do anything but defame and damage the United States of America at every opportunity?
If we’re not shocked, angered, and determined to turn back this and every attempt at deconstructing our country by the disciples and dupes of Marx, a hater of humanity and agent of evil, we are unworthy of our forebears’ sacrifices and our descendants’ hopes.
If we’re inclined to glide past the Marxist fingerprints all over America’s current turmoil, chalking it up to “wokeness” or “cancel culture” or “the left” or some other vague fad we assume will flare up for a while and then burn out, we’re not paying attention.
It was specifically Marx’s ideas, according to the “Black Book of Communism,” that took 100 million lives worldwide in the last century. How many more will they take in this one? That’s up to you and me. We can’t say we weren’t warned.
Editor’s Note: This is an edited excerpt, comprising the Introduction and Conclusion, from a longer essay by Mr. Atlas. Titled ‘The Costs Of Regulation And Centralization In Health Care,' it is published by the Hoover Institution as part of a new initiative, "Socialism and Free-Market Capitalism: The Human Prosperity Project."
Introduction
The overall goal of US health care reform is to broaden access for all Americans to high-quality medical care at lower cost. In response to a large uninsured population and increasing health care costs, the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or “Obamacare”) aimed first and foremost to increase the percentage of Americans with health insurance. It did so by broadening government insurance eligibility, adding extensive regulations and subsidies to health care delivery and payment, and imposing dozens of new taxes. The ACA was projected to spend approximately $2 trillion over the first decade on its two central components: expanding government insurance and subsidizing heavily regulated private insurance.
Through its extensive regulations on private insurance, including coverage mandates, payout requirements, co-payment limits, premium subsidies, and restrictions on medical savings accounts, the ACA counterproductively encouraged more widespread adoption of bloated insurance and furthered the construct that insurance should minimize out-of-pocket payment for all medical care. Patients in such plans do not perceive themselves as paying for these services, and neither do physicians and other providers. Because patients have little incentive to consider value, prices as well as quality indicators, such as doctor qualifications or hospital experience, remain invisible, and providers do not need to compete. The natural results are overuse of health care services and unrestrained costs.
In response to the failures of the ACA, superimposed on decades of misguided incentives in the system and the considerable health care challenges facing the country, US voters at the time of this writing are being presented with two fundamentally different visions of health care reform: (1) a single-payer, government-centralized system, including Medicare for All, the extreme model of government regulation and authority over health care and insurance, which is intended to broaden health care availability to everyone while eliminating patient concern for price; or (2) a competitive, consumer-driven system based on removing regulations that shield patients from considering price, increasing competition among providers, and empowering patients with control of the money. This model is intended to incentivize patients to consider price and value, in order to reduce the costs of medical care while enhancing its value, thereby providing broader availability of high-quality care.
Outside a discussion of the role of private versus public health insurance are two realities. First, America’s main government insurance programs, Medicare and Medicaid, are already unsustainable without reforms. The 2019 Medicare Trustees report projects that the Hospitalization Insurance Trust Fund will face depletion in 2026. Most hospitals, nursing facilities, and in-home providers lose money per Medicare patient. Dire warnings about the closure of hospitals and care provider practices are already projected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid due to the continued payment for services by government insurance below the cost of delivery of those services. Regardless of trust fund depletion, Medicare and Medicaid must compete with other spending in the federal budget. America’s national health expenditures now total more than $3.8 trillion per year, or 17.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and they are projected to reach 19.4 percent of GDP by 2027. In 1965, at the start of Medicare, workers paying taxes for the program numbered 4.6 per beneficiary; that number will decline to 2.3 in 2030 with the aging of the baby boomer generation. Unless the current system is reformed, federal expenditures for health care and social security are projected to consume all federal revenues by 2049, eliminating the capacity for national defense, interest on the national debt, or any other domestic program.
Second, beyond the growing burden from lifestyle-induced diseases, including obesity and smoking, that will require medical care at an unprecedented level, America’s aging population means more heart disease, cancer, stroke, and dementia—diseases that depend most on specialists, complex technology, and innovative drugs for diagnosis and treatment. The current trajectory of the system is fiscally unsustainable, and millions are already excluded from the excellence of America’s medical care.
Conclusion
In most nations, heavy regulation of the supply of health care goods and services care is coupled with marked centralization of payment for medical care. The United States has a far less centralized but still highly regulated system in which health expenditures are roughly equal from public and private insurance. The system is characterized by its unique private components: more than 200 million Americans, including most seniors on Medicare, use private insurance. The US system is the world’s most effective by literature-based, objective measures of access, quality, and innovation, but US health care demands reform. Health care costs are high and increasing, and the projected demand for medical care by an aging population and the future burden of lifestyle-related disease threaten the sustainability of the system.
Although the regulatory expansion under the Affordable Care Act reduced the uninsured population, it generated increased private insurance premiums, a withdrawal of insurers from the market, and sector-wide consolidation that is historically associated with higher prices and reduced choices of medical care. In its wake, American voters are now presented with two fundamentally different visions for reform that have a diametrically opposed reliance on regulation and centralization: (1) the Democrats’ single-payer proposals, including Medicare-for-All, based on the most extreme level of government regulation and authority over health care and health insurance; or (2) the Trump administration’s consumer-driven system that relies on strategic deregulation to increase market-based competition among providers and empowering patients with control of the money. Both pathways are intended to contain overall expenditures on health care and broaden access.
Intuitively, a single-payer model of health care represents a simplification, but the reality is that such centralized systems impose overwhelming restrictions on both demand and supply. Government-centralized single-payer systems actively hold down health care expenditures mainly by sweeping restrictions on the utilization and payment for medical procedures, drugs, and technology under the single authority of the central government. The overall costs of this false simplification are enormous, creating societal costs that extend beyond calculated tax payments that are required to support such a system.
The alternative approach involves rule elimination and decentralization, that is, strategic deregulation, to induce competition for value-seeking patients. Reducing the price of health care by competition, instead of more regulation, generates lower insurance premiums, reduces outlays from government programs, and broadens access to quality care. Broadly available options for cheaper, high-deductible coverage less burdened by regulations; markedly expanded health savings accounts; and tax reforms to unleash consumer power are keys to achieving price sensitivity for health care. Reforms to increase the supply of medical care by breaking down long-standing anti-consumer barriers to competition, such as archaic certificates‐of‐need for technology, unnecessary state‐based licensure of physicians, and overly regulated pathways to drug development, while facilitating transparency of price and quality among doctors and hospitals, would generate further competition and reduce the price of health care. Preliminary results from such deregulatory actions demonstrate promising results and offer an evidence-based context for the broader discussion of the role and reach of government regulation in socialism compared with free-market systems.
By • barefootsworld.com
I remember this one teacher. To me, he was the greatest teacher, a real sage of my time. He had such wisdom. We were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and he walked over. Mr. Lasswell was his name….He said:
“I’ve been listening to you boys and girls recite the Pledge of Allegiance all semester and it seems as though it is becoming monotonous to you. If I may, may I recite it and try to explain to you the meaning of each word:
I – me, an individual, a committee of one.
PLEDGE – dedicate all of my worldly goods to give without self-pity.
ALLEGIANCE – my love and my devotion.
TO THE FLAG – our standard, Old Glory, a symbol of freedom. Wherever she waves, there is respect because your loyalty has given her dignity that shouts freedom is everybody’s job.
OF THE UNITED – that means that we have all come together.
STATES OF AMERICA – individual communities that have united into [our] great states. . . individual communities with pride and dignity and purpose, all divided with imaginary boundaries, yet united to a common purpose, and that’s love for country.
AND TO THE REPUBLIC – a state in which sovereign power is invested in representatives chosen by the people to govern. And government is the people and it’s from the people to the leaders, not from the leaders to the people.
FOR WHICH IT STANDS.
ONE NATION – meaning, so blessed by God.
INDIVISIBLE – incapable of being divided.
WITH LIBERTY – which is freedom and the right of power to live one’s own life without threats or fear or some sort of retaliation.
AND JUSTICE – the principle or quality of dealing fairly with others.
FOR ALL – which means it’s as much your country as it is mine.”
Since I was a small boy, two states have been added to our country and two words have been added to the Pledge of Allegiance – “under God”.
Wouldn’t it be a pity if someone said, “That’s a prayer” and that would be eliminated from schools, too?
By • Newsweek
With the anniversary of our independence from Britain just around the corner, the social strife now appearing ubiquitously on social media has many of us questioning what is happening to America. From those whose lineage goes back to the original European settlers to those who earned their citizenship in just the last few years, we’re wondering, some of us, if the nation as we’ve known it can survive.
It can—and it will. We’ve been through worse and come out the better for it. We are not perfect and never have been. We are, however, still what Lincoln called “the last, best hope of earth.”
Are there inequities? Sure, just as there are in any country. Here we have freedoms guaranteed to us by our Founding documents that allow us wide latitude—some would say too wide, these days—to express our concerns about our leaders and about the policies that shape the nation. This is not the case in China, Somalia, Cuba, Venezuela or any of the other dictatorships that many of the young Americans now protesting only know as dots on a globe or listings on Wikipedia. Yet few of them, given the chance, would swap our system of government, the rights we enjoy and the economic realities of living in those countries for life in the United States.
Some are nonetheless cheering on those who’ve chosen violence. Most of us still abhor the rioting and looting and the assaults and murders of police officers and others seeking to keep the peace. We can see no justification for it, no matter how serious the perceived injury might be. That speaks well of the majority. We are not yet the kind of animals those who would bring the entire system crashing down, though some would like to get us there on the fast train.Ads by scrollerads.com
Some of them believe, and they’ve made this abundantly clear, that the social contract has been broken. That the government we have now lacks the consent of the governed and, according to Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers, the people have the right to seek a replacement by any means necessary.
They’re within their rights to think that and to proclaim it. To most of us, though, this is nonsense. And it will continue to be nonsense as long as peaceful means remain available to bring about change in government.
Are we perfect? No, and we never have been. Are we better than every other country? Many would say yes but, to be fair, let’s agree that we at least consistently rank in the top ten. Rather than feel we are inexorably stained by our slaveholding past—a past not unique to this country, and a practice that still exists in other parts of the world—and that there is no way to overcome it, let us celebrate how far we have come. As Independence Day approaches, let us remember how America has consistently led the world, how we have been a haven for the oppressed, how our sons and daughters have given life and limb in the fight against tyranny in many parts of the world and how we remain a beacon to those longing for freedom and as close to a true meritocracy as any nation that has ever existed.
America is the place where you can rise above the circumstances of your birth to accomplish and acquire. It is also where you can fall from great heights, sometimes spectacularly, and lose everything. Elites and establishments do exist in just about every walk of life, but they are more open and democratic here than in most other parts of the world. Meanwhile, we have become the place where, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said so many years ago, the sons and daughters of former slaves and former slave owners can meet together over the table of brotherhood.
To some, none of that matters. They want to remake America according to what they feel and follow the dictates of largely ill-considered contemporary truths that have failed as governing principles in the other nations that have tried to implement them. They ignore at their peril the eternal truths expressed and refined through thoughtful debate by the Founders who, while not perfect, should be judged by history and by us for the body of their accomplishments and the sum of their lives. “If men were angels,” James Madison said, “no government would be necessary.”
Well, men are not angels and those who conceived and wrote the governing compacts still in force today should be praised for their vision and for their belief that what “this new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” had to offer, has to offer, and will have to offer in the future. It is superior to what any other nation on earth at the time could do. Lincoln Steffens was wrong. The future did not work.
Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness. The American story is just as much about the ongoing struggle to secure these for everyone, generation after generation, as it is about anything else. Some things have come easier than have others. The struggle endures but shall not end until those objectives have been achieved. Freedom is the aim and always, God willing, shall be.
U.N. reprimands Tehran amid ongoing nuclear ramp-up, development of missiles
By • The Washington Free Beacon
Iran engaged in covert nuclear work that breached international accords as recently as 2019, according to nuclear inspectors who have been blocked from accessing these contested military sites.
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) board of governors officially reprimanded Iran on Friday for denying inspectors access to at least two sites now known to have been part of Tehran’s secretive atomic weapons program.
The two locations have remained off limits to the IAEA despite evidence they were used for illicit nuclear operations in the last year. At least one of these sites contained a secret high-explosives testing site that could have been used to advance Tehran’s nuclear know-how.
The resolution was forwarded by France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, all of which are still party to the nuclear accord with Tehran. While these nations have sought to preserve the accord, their willingness to publicly reprimand Iran is a new sign of mounting frustration with the country’s behavior. In addition to blocking IAEA access, Iran has ramped up its development of advanced missiles and enrichment of uranium, the key component in a nuclear weapon, to levels needed for a bomb.
The resolution highlights what these nations described as a “continued lack of clarification regarding Agency questions related to possible undeclared nuclear material and nuclear related activities in Iran.”
The move was met with anger by Iranian officials, who said they will continue to block access until the international community offers greater concessions, particularly relief from biting economic sanctions that have crippled the country’s economy.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Iran’s behavior is proof that it continues to lie to the world about its development of nuclear arms and has no intention of curtailing its nuclear program.
“Iran’s denial of access to IAEA inspectors and refusal to cooperate with the IAEA’s investigation is deeply troubling and raises serious questions about what Iran is trying to hide,” Pompeo said in a statement.
Meanwhile, Iranian military leaders announced on Thursday the successful test-firing of both short- and long-range cruise missiles, which could be used in a conflict with the United States and allied partners operating in the region. The firing of these missiles runs counter to United Nations restrictions on Iran’s missile program.
The tests were conducted in the Indian Ocean and Sea of Oman, according to reports from Iran’s state-controlled media. Tehran claims the military operation was “more sophisticated” and “more difficult” than previous drills.
The launch marks a significant escalation in Tehran’s ongoing standoff with U.S. military vessels operating in the region. Iranian military boats have routinely harassed American ships and sought to choke off access to key shipping lanes in international waters. The display of new cruise missiles is a warning to the United States that the Iranian regime is ready for a military confrontation.
A United Nations embargo on Iran’s purchase of advanced weaponry is set to lift later this year. If the United States fails to extend the ban, nations will be able to legally sell Iran missiles and other offensive weapons. The Trump administration is currently pressing its allies at the U.N. to extend this embargo, though these efforts are likely to be blocked by Russia and China, Tehran’s top patrons.
If the arms embargo lapses, the United States is likely to push for a so-called snapback, the reimposition of all international sanctions that were lifted as part of the nuclear deal.
An Iran analyst said Tehran’s latest moves are a ploy to stave off international scrutiny.
“All eyes should be on Iran now to see how it will make good on its threats which were intended to scare and prevent the vote on this critical [IAEA] resolution,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish think-tank with close ties to the Trump administration. “Tehran often uses such flashpoints to incrementally ratchet up the pressure through expansion of its nuclear program.”
Ben Taleblu said that nations such as France, Germany, and the U.K. will have to get tougher on Iran if they want to change its behavior. Although they backed the IAEA’s latest censure, these nations also have worked to block the reimposition of major sanctions on Tehran.
