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Bernie Sanders Fans: How to Overcome Socioeconomic Ignorance

December 15, 2017 by tornado Leave a Comment

Bernie Sanders lost in a rigged and patently unfair primary process over a year ago to the neoliberal establishment candidate and paid Goldman Sachs shill, Hillary Clinton. I get that. I agree with that. However, it’s time to grow up and lose the notion that what he had to say substantively was worth the electrons used to broadcast it to your screen.

Bernie-lemming “democratic socialists”: what is your major malfunction? Your very slogan — democratic socialism — is a self-contradictory, oxymoronic, and just plain moronic load of bull cookies.

Equality and fairness are not synonyms! We may be loved equally in God’s eyes, but God did not give us equal genetics, sizes, shapes, interests, intellects, or talents. No matter how hard I try, I cannot play basketball like MJ. MJ was not constructed to lift weights like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold could never be the kind of scientist his fellow German-speaker Einstein was. Einstein wasn’t able to be on Mozart’s musical level…and so forth.

We each, individually, have different individual abilities, purposes and motivations. That’s true diversity! We are not made to benefit equally from economic outcomes, and therefore, we should not.

Socialism innately dissuades both diversity and productive quality. When you force equal outcomes across unequal individuals, by whatever sociopolitical means, you disincentivize productivity because (please read carefully!) human nature is fundamentally both selfish and survivalist. That’s just the cold, brutally honest truth, and you are not going to change that. People want reward for work, and consistent with human nature, that means money to buy what they both need and want. Having things provided for people “for free’ (at someone else’s expense, naturally) only incentivizes dependency. Dependency, in turn, yields sloth.

It’s not your job to decide what someone else should or should not possess — despite the patronizing attitudes of white liberals toward minority “needs”, and despite the fundamental arrogance of the socialist myth that the rich man’s money belongs to others who haven’t earned it. Yes, humans at all levels of the ladder are fundamentally selfish, economically. Anecdotal exceptions of altruism aside, people by in large demand tangible incentive (capital) to produce, to create, to innovate.

Less innovation, less incentive, less progress, less efficiency, slower gains, and loss of personal freedom…is this what you want, you fools? Because if you entrust centralized, federal Big Bureaucracy to mechanisms now done by for-profit business (however imperfect they are now), they will become more imperfect, more inefficient, with bigger overhead, less creative, slower, and more wasteful. Such is the historical, inherent, unavoidable, and inevitable nature of distant and detached central bureaus. If you do not believe this, then for once, study history. Or if in government, join a federal employees’ union, like I have — ironically, being a union member has shown me more than I ever could read in a textbook about the ineptitude, nefariousness and oppressiveness of upper management in a governmental bureaucracy!

There’s a lot more to this than I can give you here, and you need to do most of the lifting and learning yourself. For starters, though, look up and read and watch the related material from two highly regarded economists: late, Nobel-prizewinning economics professor Milton Friedman, and the Jim Crow-era North Carolina/Harlem-raised black economist and writer, Thomas Sowell.

Their expertise and credentials in these issues are much greater than yours, and you need to learn from them. And after doing so, don’t come back to me with the ridiculous and baseless arguments akin to, “That was then, this is now, we are better.” No provable basis exists for that argument. It is a logical and rhetorical recency fallacy, a head-in-sand mentality that ignores precedent and reality, in favor of a nonexistent Utopian dreamland full of unicorns crapping Skittles.

Consider health care and public policy…Bernie vs. Friedman:

And more general discussion on the end game of socialism itself:

In fact, in the last 100 years, the great majority of the tangible economic and efficiency gains in modern society are the result of capitalistic business. Yes, here in the U.S., government research developed many great ideas (lots of basic science and tech research), along with some horrible ones (nuclear war and forms of eugenics) that get ignored by pro-bureaucracy socialists. Private enterprise also developed others (such as Texas Instruments with the transistor…look where that has gone!). But only capitalistic business and its incentive to profit and make jobs took them from the ivory towers and flourescent-lit labs, made them real and mass-producible and tangible and workable, and put them into your hands. Never, ever, ever forget that.

      “Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

      “Social injustices are clearly greatest where you have central control.”

      “Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.”

      “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

— Milton Friedman

      “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

      “Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.”

      “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”

      “When Senator Sanders cries, ‘The system is rigged!’ no one asks, ‘Just what specifically does that mean?’ or ‘What facts do you have to back that up?’ In 2015, the 400 richest people in the world had net losses of $19 billion. If they had rigged the system, surely they could have rigged it better than that.”

      “The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”

— Thomas Sowell

Filed Under: Not weather Tagged With: Bernie Sanders, bureaucracy, capitalism, centralization, democracy, democratic socialism, greed, health care, history, inefficiency, Milton Friedman, overhead, recency fallacy, socialism, Thomas Sowell, waste

Utopian Liberalism vs. Real World: A Prime Example

February 15, 2013 by tornado Leave a Comment

Far too many coffee-shop liberals who never have been directly and chronically involved in the welfare system (unlike yours truly), who never have sniffed American “poverty” (unlike yours truly), and who therefore don’t understand jack-sqaut about the “other” side of it (unlike yours truly), haven’t got the slightest clue about the rampancy of abuse out there in the real world. I promise you, it’s nothing new, and nothing small. This story points out but one relatively tiny example in one locality with one program, among countless possibilities nationwide.

“Despite Reforms, Federal Cell Phone Program Still Plagued By Fraud” [Link may be perishable…if it fails, use Google.]

That is but a tiny, flyspeck-small glimpse of the real world of welfare, folks…the real world–not some ivory-tower, academic version thereof where everybody is honest and pure in intentions, government aid runs with fine-tuned efficiency, and distant suits and ties in DC or insular professors at Harvard with zero street cred actually know what’s best for the poor. And don’t you know it, there are unicorns crapping Skittles.

Lying, cheating, scams, theft, hustles…they’re everywhere. I mean all over–rampant, dripping from every pore of the obese bag of bloat that is the welfare system. News flash: human beings are not fundamentally good. [If we were, we wouldn’t kill each other by the hundreds of millions over the course of the last 500 years, sin in even the most minor of ways on the individual level, or ransack the planet.] No, it is basic human nature to take fullest advantage of every possible out, to take shortcuts, to cheat, to game the system in any way possible–especially the more seemingly dire the circumstances. Greed is a vice common to rich and poor alike. I saw it first-hand in the inner city 30 years ago, and you’re dreaming Utopian delusions if you think it’s any better now, in a worse economy, with higher unemployment and public-aid rates.

As with massive infestations of cockroaches in decrepit rental homes (something else with which I have first-hand experience), this problem with the welfare phones is simply one little roach running along a baseboard in the labyrinthine haunted house of governmental welfare. For every one you see, countless bazillions more are crawling behind the walls.

The intentions, as with all such programs, were good: get low-cost phones into the hands of the poor so they could communicate for the sake of emergency security and jobs. It helps hugely to have a phone number to put on a job application if one’s priority is to get a job (that priority a dubious assumption in many but not all cases). Yet it’s laughably easy to procure numerous phones and fence them on the black market for drugs cigarettes stolen goods booze sex basic living expenses. Those who, through no fault of their own, truly are in dire need should be the most up in arms about all this, as it is they (and once was “we”) who lose out thanks to to the undeserving, in more ways than one.

In the case of the phones, and similar heavily subsidized, top-down programs, it’s not the heartfelt idea with which I have a problem–but the real-world execution. The waste and abuse isn’t just the end level, but all the way up the chain to the top. For example, one facet of the current version of the phone program involves a government contract for smartphones (Welfare smartphones??? Why not just basic talk phones?) awarded to one of Barack Obama’s campaign-money suppliers. Oh, now I see…

I don’t believe in complaints without solutions, and I have offered some to the welfare and poverty problem. Solutions at the governmental level are not helped by political payback, cronyism, and administrative overhead and inefficiency. How can any thinking person trust this or other welfare programs, administered by distant and unfamiliar bureaucrats, contracted with Chicago-style cronyism at the top, rife with layered overhead throughout, and riddled with rampant abuse on the field side? I guess if you’re a latte-sipping Utopian dreamer, you’ve never seen or even imagined the toxins of the system from well within. Being so ignorant of what’s happening on the streets, enough cognitive dissonance sets in so that the real world is but an inconvenient truth. You think throwing money at the problem solves it. [Of course, that usually and selfishly means someone else’s money too.] As if…

Wake up. As I’ve said before:

    Government hasn’t solved American “poverty” in twenty decades of trying. What makes higher-tax advocates think that will change? It won’t, no matter how much money we feed to the red-tape-covered entitlement monster and mass-promoter of public-dependency addiction that is big government. We cannot tax our way out of “poverty”.

Therefore, I have a modest proposal:

Before mindlessly across-the-board cutting of essential programs for safety (such as national defense, border security, meat inspections, air traffic control, storm forecasting, etc.)., and before raising taxes in any way, for anyone, there must come this firm and non-negotiable precondition: Eliminate every last dollar of waste, fraud and abuse everywhere in government, period. I mean every single dollar of waste–not half, or 75% or 99.9%–all of it–before a penny of tax or fee increases can occur! Now there’s a goal worth striving for.

Filed Under: Not weather Tagged With: abuse, bureaucracy, cronyism, Federal cell phone program, fraud, liberal delusions, Obama phones, politics, waste, welfare, welfare abuse, welfare fraud, welfare phones

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