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‘‘Ed-exit’ to Protect Your Kids from Critical Race Theory’ – Ron Paul’s 19 July Column

Posted by M. C. on July 19, 2021

https://mailchi.mp/ronpaulinstitute/edexit?e=4e0de347c8

‘Ed-exit’ to Protect Your Kids from Critical Race Theory

Written by Ron Paul Monday July 19, 2021
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Parents across the country are fighting to stop government schools from indoctrinating their children with Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory is a form of Marxism that focuses on the “oppression” of racial minorities. Central to Critical Race Theory is the belief that free markets are a tool of racial oppression that must be abolished and replaced with socialism.

This is dangerous nonsense. History shows that governments, not free markets, are and always have been the instruments of racial oppression. For example, legislators passed Jim Crow laws because private businesses refused to voluntarily segregate their customers.

Numerous scholars have documented how the welfare state and the war on drugs, as well as minimum wage laws, occupational licensing laws, and other anti-liberty laws, disproportionately harm minorities. Some of these laws were passed with the explicit goal of protecting white workers from competition with minorities.

Public outrage over teaching children that the only way to overcome racism is to sacrifice liberty helped build efforts to pass laws banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory. Some of these efforts are accompanied by advancing mandates that schools promote a “positive” or “patriotic” view of America. This can replace one form of indoctrination with another.

A “patriotic” curriculum could teach children that the change from a constitutional republic to a welfare-warfare state was a victory for liberty. It could also teach that the American government is morally justified in, and capable of, managing the economy at home and spreading democracy abroad. It could teach children lies like capitalism caused the Great Depression.

Instead of arguing over what form of statism government schools should indoctrinate children in, liberty activists should work to replace government control of education with parental control.

The key to this is to restore parental control of education dollars though education tax credits and tax-free education savings accounts. This can enable parents to afford to “ed-exit” from government schools by sending their children to private schools. It can also help parents afford the costs associated with homeschooling. Increased charitable deductions can help fund private education for low-income families. Tax credits can be implementing without increasing the deficit by tying them to legislation closing the Department of Education.

Homeschooling is an increasingly attractive option for many parents. Parents interested in providing their children with a quality education should consider my homeschooling curriculum. The Ron Paul Curriculum provides students with a well-rounded education that includes rigorous programs in history, mathematics, and the physical and natural sciences. The curriculum also provides instruction in personal finance. Students can develop superior communication skills via intensive writing and public speaking courses. Another feature of my curriculum is that it provides students the opportunity to create and run their own businesses.

The government and history sections of the curriculum emphasize Austrian economics, libertarian political theory, and the history of liberty. However, unlike government schools, my curriculum never puts ideological indoctrination ahead of education.

Interactive forums ensure students are engaged in their education and that they have the opportunity to interact with their peers outside of a formal setting.

I encourage all parents looking at alternatives to government schools — alternatives that provide children with a well-rounded education that introduces them to the history and ideas of liberty without sacrificing education for indoctrination — to go to RonPaulCurriculum.com for more information about my homeschooling program.

Copyright © 2021 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.
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Paying People Not to Work Won’t Make Us Richer | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on July 19, 2021

I am reminded of a saying by one of my favorite economists, Murray Rothbard, “It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.”

https://mises.org/wire/paying-people-not-work-wont-make-us-richer

Paul T. Prentice

One of the most important principles of economics is that people respond to incentives. You get more of whatever you incentivize. You get less of whatever you disincentivize. This is irrefutable. The supplemental unemployment payment does both—it incentivizes people not to work, and simultaneously disincentivizes them from working.

See the rest here

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Sticks, Not Carrots: Vaccines Must Be Forced, Says Indiana University Health Chief | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on July 19, 2021

What the Indiana University chief health officer failed to mention in his case for the mass vaccination of children was that the mRNA shots are actually dangerous to that same age group.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) itself is investigating this, following a record-breaking increase in the number of adverse reactions suffered by people of all ages and a considerable increase in heart-related ailments suffered by the young and healthy following the Pfizer shots. 

https://mises.org/wire/sticks-not-carrots-vaccines-must-be-forced-says-indiana-university-health-chief

Alice Salles

Vaccine mandates are coming. Good, said Indiana University chief health officer Aaron E. Carroll. 

“When it comes to incentives, most people like carrots,” Carroll wrote in his New York Times essay. “Sometimes, though, people need sticks.”

Carroll laments the fact that incentives such as access to events, donuts, french fries, and even hard cash are no longer moving many Americans to fall in line with what’s expected of them by the vaccine pushers. 

Does he mean that only the threat of violence will? His silence on what exactly the stick would be speaks volumes.

Carroll then points to George Washington, asking, If the Revolutionary War general could force the thousands of new Continental Army recruits to inoculate against smallpox in early America’s war against the British, then why can’t we jab a nation of 383 million to fight covid?  

But a workable approach isn’t what Carroll was after. He was, however, ready to compare covid-19, a virus associated with an infection that has a 99 percent recovery rate among the young and that poses a much lower death risk than influenza among children, with more deadly ailments caused by highly contagious pathogens.

When the United States was fighting smallpox long ago, it took mandates to get enough people vaccinated. To eradicate polio, the same was true. Nearly all major infectious diseases in the country—measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, diphtheria and more—have been managed through vaccine mandates by schools. The result is that the vast majority of children are vaccinated, and in time, they grow into adults who are vaccinated. That’s how the country achieves real herd immunity.

But this process can take decades. Covid-19 is an emergency, and we don’t have that much time.

Forcing parents to vaccinate kids against covid now, Carroll argues, might just do the trick.

It’s the Science, Stupid

What the Indiana University chief health officer failed to mention in his case for the mass vaccination of children was that the mRNA shots are actually dangerous to that same age group.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) itself is investigating this, following a record-breaking increase in the number of adverse reactions suffered by people of all ages and a considerable increase in heart-related ailments suffered by the young and healthy following the Pfizer shots. 

While the CDC is trying to downplay the issue, saying heart-related complications in children, teens, and young adults are rare and often mild, data from the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) paints another picture. in which hundreds of the vaccinated who suffer heart-related conditions turn up at the ER. Some are even dying as a result. 

In Carroll’s op-ed, he estimates that once the vaccines are fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it should be easy for federal and state officials to begin imposing mandates. But what would happen to the noncompliant? While the Indiana University health chief doesn’t acknowledge that the stick analogy could be interpreted as code for violence, he doesn’t offer a different interpretation.

Despite his faith in the process, it’s important to note that a full OK from the FDA doesn’t mean much. 

Cronyism: Bad for Your Health

It’s no secret that a number of major drug companies use the state to squash competition, not help patients. 

Agencies like the CDC take sizable donations from the very pharmaceutical companies that push the drugs and treatments approved by America’s health czars, while the FDA employs advisors tasked with reviewing new drugs and treatments who are directly paid by these same companies. For example, the four physicians who were on the reviewing committee for Brilinta, a drug produced and sold by AstraZeneca,  later accepted generous cash gifts from the same drug company, causing a scandal.  

But that’s not the only way the FDA helps pharmaceutical companies.  

By putting drug makers through a drug approval process that costs $3 billion on average, the FDA “eliminates any competition from un-patentable treatments,” author Hunter Lewis pointed out in this article for the Mises Institute. That money “also flows into the salaries of FDA employees, who consequently tend to take a friendly view of drug companies and zealously guard the legal exclusivity of their products.” 

Congress is also filled with lawmakers whose political campaigns were supported by the same type of professionals. This is the case of Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Chris Coons (D-DE), who after receiving over $100,000 each in political contributions from political action committees tied to drug manufacturers in 2019 are now fighting to expand the array of items eligible to be patented, a move that would directly benefit drugmakers and companies developing medical treatments. 

With several other examples proving that the relationship between healthcare giants and Congress clearly helps to guide health policy in America, it is clear that we’re far from having a free market in healthcare. Without a free market in healthcare, how can anybody trust the FDA and the drugs its bureaucratic apparatus approves?

By giving the state yet more power to dictate our health decisions, we also hand the same large companies that fund health officials carte blanche to push experimental treatments on the young and old alike, all the while actively playing down any reports of injury, disease, or death associated with these treatments. 

If Indiana University’s chief health officer wants to give these power players even more control over his students’ health, he won’t be doing Hoosiers any favors. Instead, he will be simply serving as an enabler of tyranny. Author:

Alice Salles

Alice Salles was born and raised in Brazil but has lived in America for over ten years. She now lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana with her husband Nick Hankoff and their three children.  

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The White House Just ADMITTED To Colluding With Social Media To CENSOR Speech They Consider “Misinformation”

Posted by M. C. on July 19, 2021

Please read this before Jen Psaki can contact Zuck.

Fascism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism[1][2] characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and of the economy,[3] which came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe.[4] The fir.. fasci.. moveme... in Ita…………………………..

The White House Just ADMITTED To Colluding With Social Media To CENSOR Speech They Consider “Misinformation”
The White House Just ADMITTED To Colluding With Social Media To CENSOR Speech They Consider “Misinformation”

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Biden Tells Social Media Who Must Be ‘Cancelled’

Posted by M. C. on July 19, 2021

In a stunning admission, a White House Spokesperson said last week that the US Administration is instructing social media companies which posts must be taken down. Is the First Amendment fully dead?

YES

Plus today: The ‘woke’ Olympics, Covid suicides, and why are we shipping millions of jabs overseas? Upper-division undergrad or grad student interested in foreign policy? Apply to participate in our Ron Paul Scholars’ Seminar, taking place in Washington DC on Sept. 3rd. Details here: https://bit.ly/3hRsI5w

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The Real Anti-Asian Crime the Media Ignores

Posted by M. C. on July 19, 2021

New Thomas Sowell Channel — https://bit.ly/3snPCUL In this video, Thomas Sowell explains how everyone is left worse off by Affirmative action and other preferential policies; especially blacks who were supposed to be helped by these policies. To get a comprehensive view of this topic, read Thomas Sowell’s classic ‘Affirmative Action Around the World’ — https://amzn.to/3w712i6

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NYC’s reopening, but businesses aren’t coming back

Posted by M. C. on July 19, 2021

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bionic mosquito: Why They Hate Natural Law

Posted by M. C. on July 19, 2021

“Natural law does stand in stark opposition to racism because God breathed into man – all men and all women.  Yes, this specific form and meaning of equality can be known and discovered by believer and non-believer alike.”

“That would be pretty much all of the children of our modern libertine society and those who gladly use them in order to further consolidate wealth, power and control.  Which pretty much describes the left in the West today, which includes the Democrat party and most of the Republican party.  All of these would be against natural law, because it would bring an end to their game.”

http://bionicmosquito.blogspot.com/2021/07/why-they-hate-natural-law.html

A friend sent me an essay by John Daniel Davidson, entitled “Calling Natural Law ‘White Nationalism’ Is Racist, Period.”  For the background behind the purpose of Davidson’s essay:

An innocuous comment from Washington Examiner columnist Tim Carney, suggesting we need to teach natural law in public schools, prompted Matthew J. Peterson to reply that it’s not enough to ban critical race theory, we need to replace it with natural law. This in turn inspired Yale University philosophy professor Jason Stanley to aver (in a since-deleted tweet) that natural law is “a dogwhistle to white Christian Nationalism.”

What followed, as described by Davidson, was…

…a string of outraged tweets about natural law, mostly from people who don’t seem to know what natural law is, confusing it for social Darwinism or some such.

It is clear that many people do not understand natural law.  I suspect this is by design, an intentional effort via public education, mass media, and government policy developed to supply a compliant and malleable population, one that is left with a superficial understanding of liberty – the same liberty held by the lion in the zoo.

But what about the idea that natural law is confused with Social Darwinism?

Social Darwinists held that the life of humans in society was a struggle for existence ruled by “survival of the fittest,” a phrase proposed by the British philosopher and scientist Herbert Spencer.

I will suggest…if man does not have as his telos, his purpose – in fact, his highest purpose – as love, Social Darwinism is quite natural.  Instead of natural law, we get the law of nature – similar words, very different meaning: survival of the fittest.  But natural law grounded in and refined through Christianity holds no such view.  Love is man’s purpose, his telos.  Survival of the fittest does not fit into a worldview that is guided by a natural law ethic.

Returning to Davidson, and writing about Professor Stanley:

He should also know that suggesting, as Peterson did, that an education grounded in natural law is infinitely superior to one grounded in critical race theory isn’t some kind of racist dogwhistle.

If we want to live as human beings, it is true.  Of course, who is any longer surprised about the quality and substance of the professors at the top universities in the country?  The long march through the institutions didn’t take very long after all.

Indeed, he should know that natural law stands in stark opposition to racism of any kind, because it posits that all human beings, regardless of their race or any other characteristic, have inherent rights, which can be discovered and applied through reason. Those rights arise from the fact of their humanity, not their race or religion.

Yes…and no.  Natural law does stand in stark opposition to racism because God breathed into man – all men and all women.  Yes, this specific form and meaning of equality can be known and discovered by believer and non-believer alike.

But, no: natural law should not be confused with natural rights.  Natural law is an ethic, describing how one should behave and act; natural rights are behaviors that one can demand from another.  Natural law demands that I act charitably, however no one has a natural right to force me to do so.

My natural rights are limited to my body and my property.  Don’t hit first, don’t take my stuff.  The non-aggression principle.  This isn’t just me saying it; Thomas Aquinas deals with this in question 96 in the Summa: The power of human law.  In Article 2, he asks “Whether it belongs to the human law to repress all vices?”  He answers:

Now human law is framed for a number of human beings, the majority of whom are not perfect in virtue. Wherefore human laws do not forbid all vices, from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained: thus human law prohibits murder, theft and such like.

Human law prohibits murder, theft and such like.  In other words, don’t hit first, don’t take my stuff.  Thomas continues:

The natural law is a participation in us of the eternal law: while human law falls short of the eternal law.

Look, I know what I am about to write is doctrinally unsound, but give me a little leeway… God tried it the “law” way, dictating hundreds of laws and commands to try to shape a virtuous people.  It didn’t work for God, so why would it work for us?  Instead, He tried a different way, summing all the commandments into two: love God, love your neighbor.  Love being the ultimate telos for human beings.  The force of law doesn’t bring on virtue; aiming at virtue is the only way one might approach becoming a virtuous person. 

Continuing with Thomas:

Now Augustine says (De Lib. Arb. i, 5): “The law which is framed for the government of states, allows and leaves unpunished many things that are punished by Divine providence. Nor, if this law does not attempt to do everything, is this a reason why it should be blamed for what it does.” Wherefore, too, human law does not prohibit everything that is forbidden by the natural law.

Natural law: acting according to one’s nature, with love as man’s highest purpose; human law: don’t hit first, don’t take my stuff.

Returning, again, to Davidson:

As Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas once said, “Those who deny natural law cannot get me out of slavery.”

Of course, he is right.  Without natural law, we have Social Darwinism.  Superior and inferior, based on race, eugenics, might makes right, survival of the fittest.

[Professor Stanley] might even know that one of the foremost proponents of natural law today is Francis Arinze, a Nigerian cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. If natural law has anything to do with white Christian nationalism, no one has apparently told Cardinal Arinze.

This reminds me…the loud and obnoxious Stephen A. Smith got into hot water twice this week: first, for criticizing Shohei Ohtani for not being able to speak English, and second, for making fun of the names of the Nigerian basketball players that just beat the team from the United States.  Had a white ESPN personality done either of these things…sayonara, bro’.  Instead, just another day at the racist, virtue-signaling mothership of sports broadcasting.

Returning to Davidson’s essay…what does this have to do with why they hate natural law?  Well, Davidson was focused on one point addressed by natural law – critical race theory.  I started thinking about other issues also addressed by natural law, and replied this way to the friend who sent me the link to the piece:

Natural law speaks not only against critical race theory, but also against gender fluidity, marital confusion, child mutilation, abortion, egalitarianism of all varieties, forced human lab experiments, compulsory public education (indoctrination), overseas war, central banking (the source of the only kind of usury worth condemning), taxation (at least to the extent taxes are used to fund any of the above, which is probably 90% of taxes), and monopoly governance institutions.

In other words, it is pretty much against the reigning culture, economics, and politics of modern Western society.

Natural law, when developed through the Christian lens (the only lens through which it ever gained full form) also offers the opportunity for meaning.

An ethical regime that comports with natural law and a law regime that comports with natural rights, giving each individual room and cover to find proper liberty and use it to fulfill his telos.  This is what gives man meaning.

So, I ask you: who could be against natural law?  To ask the question is to answer it.

That would be pretty much all of the children of our modern libertine society and those who gladly use them in order to further consolidate wealth, power and control.  Which pretty much describes the left in the West today, which includes the Democrat party and most of the Republican party.  All of these would be against natural law, because it would bring an end to their game.

And that’s why they hate it.

Posted by bionic mosquito

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No One Has a “Fair Share” of Taxes – by Brian McGlinchey – Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey

Posted by M. C. on July 19, 2021

There’s nothing fair about the coerced funding of unlawful, wasteful and morally repugnant pursuits

https://starkrealities.substack.com/p/no-one-has-a-fair-share-of-taxes

Brian McGlinchey

A recurring theme in national tax debates is the idea that everyone should pay their “fair share” of taxes.

While that aspiration’s validity is widely taken for granted, the stark reality is there’s no such thing as a “fair share” of federal taxes.

To understand why, let’s first scrutinize what’s meant by “fair.” When paired with “share,” the most fitting definition is “reasonable, right and just.”

If the United States government were limited to its only morally sound function—protecting rights, liberties and lives—perhaps one could entertain the theoretical notion of a “reasonable, right and just” share of the cost.

However, that ideal is far from today’s grim reality, as tax revenue is used to assault rights, liberties and lives of Americans and people around the world—to say nothing of the sprawling waste and cronyism associated with a 2021 budget of $6.8 trillion.

So tell me:

  • What exactly is my “fair share” of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which enforces economic sanctions that purposefully inflict suffering on innocent civilians in foreign lands?
  • What’s my fair share of the tyrannical practice of civil asset forfeiture, in which cash and other property is seized from citizens without any requirement to file charges?
  • What’s my fair share of the $1.2 trillion allocated in 2021 for the unconstitutional Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Labor, Education and Transportation, and Small Business Administration?
  • What’s my fair share of the cages in which the government confines people for choosing to intoxicate themselves with a plant or a powder rather than a bottle?
  • What’s my fair share of the several trillion dollars spent on the overwhelmingly pointless war in Afghanistan or the even more catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq?
  • What’s my fair share of so-called “Covid relief” money used to bail out fiscally irresponsible state and local governments and pay unemployed people more than they were making on the job?
  • What’s my fair share of the jaw-dropping $81 million the CIA paid to two depraved psychologists who crafted the agency’s immoral and ineffective post-9/11 torture program?
  • What’s my fair share of the unjust prosecution of journalist Julian Assange for publishing documents that revealed wrongdoing and embarrassed powerful politicians?
  • What’s my fair share of the $3.8 billion handed over to the Israeli government this year—with every one of those dollars violating a U.S. law?
  • What’s my fair share of the $1.6 trillion cost of the snakebit, contractor-enriching F-35 fighter jet program—which the Pentagon already wants to replace with something else?
  • What’s my fair share of the ongoing salary of the U.S. Central Command’s General Kenneth F. McKenzie, who betrayed his oath to the Constitution by carrying out President Biden’s unlawful orders to bomb Syria?
  • What’s my fair share of $1.5 million spent encouraging eastern Mediterranean youth to stop smoking hookah?

Anticipating objections, please note that the moral standing of federal income taxation isn’t buttressed by whatever few authorized, proper, efficient and beneficial undertakings it finances.

Let’s say your homeowners association does a fine job providing basic services and maintaining common facilities, and you contentedly pay your annual “fair share” of $2,500.

However, the HOA then announces it will:

  • Spend $80,000 to impose unemployment, malnutrition and the degradation of medical services in a neighborhood across town
  • Give a contractor friend of the HOA president $200,000 to do $50,000 worth of sidewalk work
  • Pay two men $90,000 a year to torture suspected car burglars and vandals

Shrugging off your objections that the proposed new undertakings are immoral, corrupt, wasteful and unauthorized by the HOA bylaws, the board informs you that—using the same allocation method as before—your dues have doubled to $5,000.

“You may not like everything we’re doing now,” they say, “but don’t forget—some of the money goes to plow snow and maintain the swimming pool. You benefit from that.”

Given how half the money will be used, do you think one can rationally insist it’s only “fair” that you pay the $5,000?

For the record—and the benefit of our government monitors—I pay every dollar demanded by the federal tax code. I pay not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s the coerced thing to do. And if the lawless, immoral HOA threatened to lock you in the clubhouse basement if you didn’t fork over the $5,000, I’m sure you’d pay them too.

But, like me, you’d thoroughly reject the idea that there can be anything “fair”—that is, reasonable, right and just—about your share of the coerced funding of unlawful, wasteful and morally repugnant pursuits.

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Trying to Put All America Behind – Edward Curtin

Posted by M. C. on July 19, 2021

Stone is out front where you can see and hear him, while the CIA always operates behind our backs.

http://edwardcurtin.com/trying-to-put-all-america-behind/

ejcurtin

Sixty years ago this summer, on August 7, 1961, President John Kennedy signed the bill creating The Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts.  It consists of forty miles of immaculate sandy beach, marshes, ponds, and upland along the Atlantic Ocean, with some portions stretching across the land to Cape Cod Bay in the west.  Henry Thoreau walked this wild Outer Atlantic Beach in 1849.  He said you can stand there and look out to sea and “put all America behind” you.

I am trying to do that as I stand looking at the waves breaking on a foggy early morning shore.  I am alone except for the hundreds of seals moaning on a sand bar and the gulls fishing in the tidal inlet at the far southern end of Coast Guard Light Beach.  A few laughing gulls swoop by as if to mock me with their laugh-like calls.

It is very hard to put the United States of America behind you when the fog of an endless propaganda war warps your mind and tries to crush your spirit even when you look away as far as the eye can see.

Across the ocean to the northeast, Mathew Arnold, on a far distant shore in England, wrote his famous poem “Dover Beach” at about the same time that Thoreau was walking where I stand.  Two very different men standing in different worlds, not just one at a window and the other in the blowing wind.

The former was an academically connected school inspector whose faith, vague as it was, was falling away as he described in “Dover Beach”: the turbulent ebb and flow of the breaking waves of faith that was being replaced by the sad withdrawing roar of melancholic human misery, devoid of love, light, joy, certitude, or help for pain.  It was the rhythmic sound of world weariness and declining faith in the Old World.

The latter, a child of the New World, harsh critic though he was of the resigned lives of quiet desperation most people live, was still a man of deep if unorthodox faith in the divine, telling us that most people are determined not to live by faith if they can help it, as if anyone could live without faith in something, whether that something be God, skepticism, atheism, or the then emerging new god of science. He considered people’s constant distrustful anxiety an incurable disease and he would no doubt consider the current religion of science a subject for his withering scorn and underappreciated humor.  Try imagining the government telling Thoreau that he had to be vaccinated and he needed a document to travel by stagecoach from his home in Concord to the Cape.

The young rebel Thoreau (he was in his early thirties like Arnold) still held to the conviction that if enough people gave serious attention to the transcendent nature of their natural surroundings and lived by its divine revelations, a new world was possible.  But also only if they simplified their lives and lived by principles that excluded the mad pursuit of money, slavery, and the worship of false gods.  This was eleven years before the American Civil War, which Thoreau didn’t survive.  He died on May 6, 1862.  His final words were: “Now comes good sailing.”

See the rest here

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