Economic Myths
By John Stossel
Hillary Clinton: "Of course we want to raise the minimum wage!"
Donald Trump: If we trade with China, "they suck us dry ... take everything. We get nothing!"
Bernie Sanders: "Ordinary Americans are working longer hours for lower wages."
But it's not true! Politicians are so ignorant about economics.
On his blog, Cafe Hayek, George Mason University professor Donald Boudreaux says his main job is showing students that much of what they believe about economics is wrong. I wish he taught presidential candidates.
Hillary Clinton: "Of course we want to raise the minimum wage!"
Donald Trump: If we trade with China, "they suck us dry ... take everything. We get nothing!"
Bernie Sanders: "Ordinary Americans are working longer hours for lower wages."
But it's not true! Politicians are so ignorant about economics.
On his blog, Cafe Hayek, George Mason University professor Donald Boudreaux says his main job is showing students that much of what they believe about economics is wrong. I wish he taught presidential candidates.
Wishing my cancer kills me --- for idological reasons
By John Stossel
Last week's column on my lung surgery struck a nerve. Many of you wished me well. Others said I deserve to die.
"He likes free markets?" sneered one Internet commenter. "In a truly free market, society wouldn't subsidize the cost of his smoking. In a truly free market, he'd be dead."
No, I wouldn't be dead. In a real free market, I would pay for my own care and that care would be cheaper and better because that's what market competition does .
Also, I've never smoked cigarettes. Some people who don't smoke get lung cancer, too.
The angriest comments were in The Washington Post: "Stossel should ask for his money back and the doctors should put cancer back into his lungs. That's what happens in a consumer-driven market, right?"
Lack of American commitment makes this a dangerous time
By Victor Davis Hanson
In 1939, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier warned Adolf Hitler that if the Third Reich invaded Poland, a European war would follow.
Both leaders insisted that they meant it. But Hitler thought that after getting away with militarizing the Rhineland, annexing Austria and dismantling Czechoslovakia, the Allied appeasers were once again just bluffing.
England and France declared war two days after Hitler entered Poland.
Once hard-won deterrence is lost, it is almost impossible to restore credibility without terrible costs and danger.
What if the Minimum Wage Increase Is a Fraud?
By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano
What if the latest craze among the big-government crowd in both major political parties is to use the power of government to force employers to pay some of their employees more than their services are worth to the employers?
What if this represents an intrusion by government into the employer-employee relationship? What if this consists of the government's effectively saying that it knows the financial worth of employees' services better than the employers and the employees do?
What if the minimum wage, now on the verge of being raised to $15 per hour everywhere in the land, is really the government's using threats of ruin and force to transfer wealth? What if the $15-per-hour figure is based on a political compromise rather than on free market forces or economic realities?
What if these wealth transfers will have profound unintended economic consequences and will negatively affect everyone?
The Contagion of Government Lying
By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano
"Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy." — Justice Louis Brandeis (1856-1941)
Last week, this column chronicled the startling admissions of lying by White House senior adviser Ben Rhodes. Rhodes readily acknowledged to The New York Times that he lied to the public and to members of Congress during the negotiations that produced the recent Iranian nuclear deal so as to temper the "irrational" fear that some senators and representatives had of the mullahs who run the government in Iran.
He was asked — not subpoenaed — to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about his lying, and he refused to show up, claiming his lies were protected by executive privilege. Because he spoke publicly about this, he has no privilege, yet nothing further happened. The committee gave up the ghost.
Enough with Hollywood's Pendulous Boobery
By Michelle Malkin
From runways to red carpets to Instagram and Snapchat, celebrity overexposure is inescapable. We're drowning in underboob. Bombarded with sideboob. Nip slips. Crotch slips. Bare-bottom flashes. All of the above, all at once.
The problem, my fellow Americans, is not that we live in an age of wardrobe malfunctions. It's that we live in an age of dignity malfunctions.
It's one thing for the notorious Kim Kardashian, sex-tape celebrity-turned-sex-tape celebrity, to trounce into the Rome Opera House flashing her cartoon cleavage and industrial-strength Spanx for the cameras as she did last weekend.
The trouble is that the Kardashian deviancy is now the norm among female entertainers who consider themselves trailblazing feminists.
A revolutionary year in America
Newt Gingrich and Callista Gingrich
Posted with permission from The Washington Times
This election year has been defined by candidates in both parties
who are promising a political revolution. A majority of the American
people are calling out for real change -- for dethroning a comfortable
and overbearing elite and replacing it with a more accountable
government.
But if 2016 is a revolutionary year, it is also an appropriate year to remember the real revolution in our American history.
After all, in this 240th anniversary year of American independence, who better to look to than the key figure of the American Revolution, George Washington? Certainly his contemporaries -- men like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison -- saw Washington as the greatest of them all.
The Founding Fathers knew that George Washington was truly the indispensable man, as we portray in our new documentary film, "The First American." While many of the Founders focused on words and ideals, it was up to Washington to win the war and hold the new nation together.
But if 2016 is a revolutionary year, it is also an appropriate year to remember the real revolution in our American history.
After all, in this 240th anniversary year of American independence, who better to look to than the key figure of the American Revolution, George Washington? Certainly his contemporaries -- men like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison -- saw Washington as the greatest of them all.
The Founding Fathers knew that George Washington was truly the indispensable man, as we portray in our new documentary film, "The First American." While many of the Founders focused on words and ideals, it was up to Washington to win the war and hold the new nation together.
Who will follow Trump off the cliff?
By George Will
— March 31 Fortune: "You’ve said you plan to pay off the country’s debt in 10 years. How’s that possible?"
Trump: "No, I didn’t say 10 years."
— April 19
Speaking on "Fox & Friends," of course, Trump revealed something he learned from the National Enquirer, of course. Although the Kennedy assassination is one of history’s most minutely studied events, all previous scrutiny missed something the supermarket tabloid discovered for people like Trump — a connection between Ted Cruz’s father and the murder of the 35th president. Trump said:
"You know, [Cruz’s] father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being, you know, shot. I mean the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up. I mean they don’t even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it. But I think it’s horrible. I think it’s absolutely horrible that a man can go and do that, what he’s saying there."
Fox host: "Right. There was a picture out there that reportedly shows Rafael Cruz standing with Lee Harvey Oswald —"
Americans should pay close attention: Why the 'Brexit' debate concerns matters germane to their present and future
By George Will
LONDONSixty-five years ago, what has become the European Union was an embryo conceived in fear. It has been stealthily advanced from an economic to a political project, and it remains enveloped in a watery utopianism even as it becomes more dystopian. The E.U.’s economic stagnation — in some of the 28 member nations, youth unemploymentapproaches 50 percent — is exacerbated by its regulatory itch and the self-inflicted wound of the euro, a common currency for radically dissimilar nations. The E.U. is floundering amid mass migration, the greatest threat to Europe’s domestic tranquility since 1945.
Monday, May 30, 2016
The Inaugural Address We Should Hear
The mere possibility of a Donald Trump
presidency — gold-plated faucets in the house first occupied by John
and Abigail Adams — will perhaps have a salutary effect. It might
demystify an office that has become now swollen with inappropriate
powers and swaddled in a pretentiousness discordant with a republic’s
ethic of simplicity. This wholesome retreat from presidential
grandiosity would be advanced if on Jan. 20, 2017, the 45th president
delivered the following inaugural address:My fellow Americans, brevity is not only the soul of wit and the essence of lingerie, it is, on occasions such as this, polite. You who are arrayed in front of me, losing the feeling in your feet as you stand on the frozen Mall, should be spared a long soliloquy by someone who, as a presidential candidate, inflicted on you an excruciating amount of talk.
You Are What You Say You Are
Last year, I declared myself a
springbok trapped in a human body. A springbok is a highly agile
individual who is among the “least concern” species and resides in the
southeastern part of the African continent. With such a declaration,
some people will suggest that I am suffering from a condition known as
species dysphoria, in which one thinks he is a wild animal trapped in a
human body. Species dysphoria is similar to gender dysphoria, a
condition in which a person believes he is a woman trapped in a male
body or a man trapped in a female body.#US Politicians Without Borders – by John Stossel
#US Politicians Without Borders – by John Stossel
When driving on treacherous roads, guardrails are useful. If you fall asleep or maybe you’re just a bad driver, guardrails may prevent you from going off a cliff.
Recently, The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel used the phrase “no political guardrails” to point out how many of today’s politicians seem to lack any constraints, any safeguards against their use of power. She’s onto something.
“Mr. Obama wants what he wants. If ObamaCare is problematic, he unilaterally alters the law,” Strassel writes. “If the nation won’t support laws to fight climate change, he creates one with regulation. If the Senate won’t confirm his nominees, he declares it in recess and installs them anyway.”
Why does Silicon Valley seem to love Democrats and dismiss the GOP? A Q&A with journalist Greg Ferenstein
A lot has been made of the tech world’s growing involvement in politics — from accusations that social media sites such as Facebook are politically biased, to questions over certain Silicon Valley leaders’ endorsements, to the sector’s support of issues such as more high-skill immigration.
Republicans and other on the right bemoan that Silicon Valley tends to go blue. They’re confused. How could this hotbed of entrepreneurship and wealth creation be largely pro-Democrat? But Silicon Valley boasts a unique culture that emerges from an environment of competition, innovation, government involvement, and collaboration. As journalist Greg Ferenstein has written, these “hippies who dig capitalism and science” – many of them millennials – are hard to label. They go with the public policies that make their ventures possible.
So what is the “political philosophy” of Silicon Valley? And what do these tech leaders want from public policy? I sat down with Greg, editor of the Ferenstein Wire and author of The Age Of Optimists, a free book on Silicon Valley’s political endgame, available on Medium. Here’s some of our conversation, which you can listen at in full over on Ricochet.
Silicon Valley from above. Flickr.
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