Saturday, February 22, 2020
Conservative Musings: The Problem With Melanials
Conservative Musings: The Problem With Melanials: We don't know who wrote this, but it clearly points out the problems with Melenials. Read it and let us know what you think. Conserv...
The Problem With Melanials
We don't know who wrote this, but it clearly points out the problems with Melenials. Read it and let us know what you think.
Conservative Tom
Conservative Tom
My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity
Around Us!
I’m sitting in a small coffee shop near
Nokomis trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my news
feed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of Democratic candidates
calling for policies to “fix” the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my
phone down and continue to look around. I see people talking freely, working
on their MacBook’s, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by
outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most
prosperous nation and we’ve become completely blind to it. Vehicles, food,
technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose. These things are so
ingrained in our American way of life we don’t give them a second thought. We
are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times
above the global average. Thirty One Times. Virtually no one in the
United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time
where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our
doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful.
Our unappreciation is evident as the
popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow. Democratic
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about
the millennial generation, “An entire generation, which is now becoming one of
the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American
prosperity.”
Never saw American prosperity! Let that
sink in. When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite
literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I’ve ever heard in
my 26 years on this earth. Many young people agree with her, which is entirely
misguided. My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative
to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand.
I went to college, let’s just say I didn’t have the popular opinion, but I
digress.
Why then, with all of the overwhelming
evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do
we not view this as prosperity? We have people who are dying to get into
our country, people around the world destitute and truly impoverished.
Yet, we have a young generation convinced they’ve never seen prosperity, and as
a result, elect politicians dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism.
Why? The answer is this : My generation has only seen
prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn’t live in the Great Depression, or
Great Recession as adults, didn’t live through two world wars, the Korean War,
The Vietnam War or see the rise and fall of socialism and communism. We don’t
know what it’s like to live without the internet, without cars, color tv,
without smartphones. We don’t have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an
ungratefulness problem, and it’s spreading like a plague." We
all need to send this message to everyone we know as we all know that the biased
media would never go public with this. Just take a few seconds of your
time and forward it.
Thursday, February 20, 2020
fMonday, February 17, 2020
Socialism Is Baaaad!
History has Shown That Socialism Isn’t the Cure (rather the disease)
US Political News and Analysis
Long overdue redacted wake-up call from the brilliant Victor Davis Hanson
The Washington Times
November 11, 2019
(I started to make bold certain paragraphs of this article but I soon realized that the whole article should be in bold.
Dr. Hanson is speaking directly to all of us – regardless of your socio-economic status. So, read it as if your own butt is on the line – because it is) Jerome S. Kaufman
Multiple forms of socialism, from hard Stalinism to European redistribution, continue to fail. Russia and China are still struggling with the legacy of genocidal Communism. Eastern Europe still suffers after decades of Soviet-imposed socialist chaos.
Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, and Venezuela are unfree, poor, and failed states. Baathism — a synonym for pan-Arabic socialism — ruined the post-war Middle East.
The soft-socialist European Union countries are stagnant and mostly dependent on the U.S. military for their protection.
In contrast, current American deregulation, tax cuts and incentives, and record energy production have given the United States the strongest economy in the world.
So why, then, are virtually all the Democratic presidential contenders — either overtly or implicitly – running on socialist agendas in one form or another.
Why are the heartthrobs of American progressives — Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), and Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) — calling for socialist redistributionist schemes?
Why do polls show that a majority of American Millennials have a favorable view of socialism?
There are lots of catalysts for the new socialism.
Massive immigration is changing the demography of the United States. The number of foreign-born U.S. residents and their children has been estimated at almost 60 million, or about 1 in 5 U.S. residents. Some 27 percent of California residents were born outside of America.
Many of these immigrants flee from poor areas of Latin America, Mexico, Africa, and Asia that were wrecked by statism and socialism. Often, they arrive in the U.S. unaware of economic and political alternatives to state socialism.
When they reach the U.S. — often without marketable skills and unable to speak English — many assume that America will simply offer a far better version of the statism from which they fled. Consequently, many take for granted that government will provide them an array of social services, and they become supportive of progressive socialism.
Another culprit for the new socialist craze is the strange leftward drift of the very wealthy in Silicon Valley, in corporate America, and on Wall Street. Some of the new progressive rich feel guilty about their unprecedented wealth. So they champion redistribution as the sort of medieval penance that alleviates guilt.
Yet the influential and monied classes usually are so well off that higher taxes hardly affect them. Instead, redistributionist taxation hurts the struggling middle classes.
In California, it became hip for wealthy leftists to promote socialism from their Malibu, Menlo Park, or Mill Valley enclaves — while still living as privileged capitalists. Meanwhile, it proved nearly impossible for the middle classes of Stockton and Bakersfield to cope with the reality of crushing taxes and terrible social services.
From 2008 to 2017, the now-multimillionaire Barack Obama, first as candidate and then as president, used all sorts of cool socialist slogans, from “spread the wealth around” and “now is not the time to profit” to “you didn’t build that” and “at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”
Universities bear much of the blame. Their manipulation of the federal government to guarantee student loans empowered them to jack up college costs without any accountability. Liberal college administrators and faculty did not care much when graduates left campus poorly educated and unable to market their expensive degrees.
More than 45 million borrowers now struggle with nearly $1.6 trillion in collective student debt, with climbing interest. That indebtedness has delayed — or ended — the traditional forces that encourage conservatism and traditionalism, such as getting married, having children and buying a home.
Instead, a generation of single, childless, and mostly urban youth feels cheated that their high-priced degrees did not earn them competitive salaries. Millions of embittered college graduates will never be able to pay off what they owe — and want some entity to pay off their debts.
In paradoxical fashion, teenagers were considered savvy adults who were mature enough to take on gargantuan loans. But they were also treated like fragile preteens who were warned that the world outside their campus sanctuaries was downright mean, sexist, racist, homophobic, and unfair.
Finally, doctrinaire Republicans for decades mouthed orthodoxies of free rather than fair trade. They embraced the idea of creative destruction of industries, but without worrying about the real-life consequences for the unemployed in the hollowed out red-state interior.
Add up a lost generation of woke and broke college graduates, waves of impoverished immigrants without much knowledge of American economic traditions, wealthy advocates of boutique socialism, and asleep-at-the-wheel Republicans, and it becomes clear why historically destructive socialism is suddenly seen as cool.
Regrettably, sometimes the naïve and disaffected must relearn that their pie-in-the sky socialist medicine is far worse than the perceived malady of inequality.
And unfortunately, when socialists gain power, they don’t destroy just themselves. They usually take everyone else down with them as well.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump. @vdhanson
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