After all of the rail disasters that we have seen in recent years, they actually think that it is a good idea to lay off a big chunk of their track maintenance workers?
Lucky we have the Fed keeping the economy steady with all that printed money.
Is your job safe? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were more than 13 million layoffs and discharges in the United States during the first nine months of 2023, and now “layoff season” has arrived. As the end of the year approaches, companies start taking a hard look at the bottom line, and that can result in harsh job cuts. When I was growing up, most large companies would at least wait until after the holiday season to shove workers into the street, but these days they just don’t care. The moment you are no longer considered to be an asset, they will throw you aside like a rotten fish. We live in a cold, cruel world, and that isn’t going to change any time soon.
It’s December, which means more than just cooler weather and holiday celebrations. It’s also layoffs season.
Job cuts tend to spike in December and January as companies prepare for structural changes heading into the new year, as shown by data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Layoff season is hitting the media particularly hard.
Pink slips are flying around all over the place, and we are being told that a “bloodbath” has already begun…
Seasons greetings! And by “season,” we mean that surreal time of year between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day when media giants scramble to clear their books and pink-slip a bunch of employees. As 2023 nears its end, the media grinches are about to steal Christmas for many, as several key outlets are poised to suffer through a final wave of layoffs. The bloodbath began Thursday at Condé Nast, where about a dozen New Yorker staffers exited the famed magazine…
Perhaps if they tried to actually tell the truth, mainstream media companies would not have to let so many workers go.
According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, media companies laid off more than 19,000 employees between January and September.
That number was up 550 percent compared to the same time period in 2022.
Nothing to see here! Just a 550 percent increase. That seems perfectly “normal” to me.
Elsewhere, Pfizer has announced that it will be giving the axe to a large number of workers…
In recent months, a number of high profile individuals have made headlines by deciding to give their lives to Christ. So exactly what in the world is going on here? Is this the beginning of a new trend? Ultimately, I believe that these high profile conversions to Christianity are just a very small portion of a much larger picture. All over the world, the great battle between good and evil that has been raging for thousands of years is reaching a grand crescendo, and people are feeling compelled to pick a side. We live in a day and age when it is becoming increasingly difficult to stay on the fence. Darkness is rapidly growing all around us, and those that do not want to be part of that darkness are reaching out for the light.
This week, Daddy Yankee absolutely shocked millions of his fans when he announced that he will be devoting his life to Jesus from this point forward…
Daddy Yankee is officially retiring from reggaeton to devote his life to his religious faith, the rapper said after ending his farewell tour, La Meta (The Goal), Sunday night in his homeland Puerto Rico.
The 46-year-old singer made the announcement in a lengthy speech following a larger-than-life performance of his global hit “Gasolina,” a song that marked the beginning of the globalization of reggaeton and catapulted him into mainstream success back in 2004.
“My people, this day for me is the most important day of my life. And I want to share it with you because living a life of success is not the same as living a life with purpose,” the artist, who also popularized the 2017 megahit “Despacito” with Luis Fonsi, said in Spanish.
You may not be familiar with Daddy Yankee, but he is a really big deal in the Spanish-speaking world…
It seems clear on the basis of this analysis, then, that more realist logic dictates the allocating of the nearly $40 billion dollars in U.S. aid that annually flows out to regimes around the world. However, given just how bad Washington has proven at playing grand strategy, from handing Baghdad to some of Tehran’s closest friends in the region to turning Libya into an extremist breeding ground, to pushing Russia and China together, that rationale too should ring hollow.
The period 2003-2018 saw Washington annually spending hundreds of millions to tens of billions of dollars supporting regimes across the Middle East and North Africa. While some of the effects and outcomes of these “investments” are obvious, such as the lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the destruction of Libya, near destruction of Syria, and the rise of ISIS to name just a few, other outcomes and relationships are less readily apparent. Using a combination of the U.S. government’s own records of foreign aid contributions to each state in North Africa and the Middle East, and metrics calculating the relative protections accorded political rights and civil liberties in those same states, this statistical analysis focuses on the relationships, or lack of relationships, between these primary variables.
Below is a summary of its key findings:
First, changes in the amount of U.S. aid given had no statistically significant relationship with whether regimes backslid or improved in terms of protecting the civil liberties of their populations.
Second, changes in the amount of U.S. aid given had no statistically significant relationship with whether regimes backslid or improved in terms of protecting the political rights of their populations.
Third, similarly, there was no statistically significant relationship between a regime’s improvement or backsliding in the protection of the civil liberties of their populations and the amount of U.S. aid that regime received.
Fourth, similarly, there was no statistically significant relationship between a regime’s improvement or backsliding in the protecting of the political rights of their populations and the amount of U.S. aid that regime received.
Finally, how much aid was dispersed, and which states received it, had no statistically significant relationship with whether or not a Democrat or Republican was in the White House.
The dataset utilized for the series of fixed effects (fe) panel regression analyses comprising this study was created by the author using the United States Agency for International Aid and Development (USAID) Greenbook data for U.S. government transfers to the states of North Africa and the Middle East for the years 2003-2018; while for those states’ political rights and civil liberties scores, the author used the annual “Freedom in the World” country by country report published by Freedom House. That report ranks the relative political rights and civil liberties in each state on a 1-7 scale, with lower numbers associated with more political freedom and better protections for civil rights. Lastly, other variables utilized over the course of the analyses included binary variables for which party controls the White House (1 for Republican, 0 for Democrat), whether the state receiving foreign aid experienced a military coup (1 for coup, 0 for no-coup), or whether there was serious civil unrest in a given country (1 for unrest, 0 for no-unrest).1
U.S. foreign aid programs, managed by organizations like USAID and supported by the U.S. State Department, aim to promote American values such as political freedom, civil liberties, democracy, and human rights across the globe. By providing assistance in various forms, including development aid, capacity-building, and humanitarian assistance, the United States claims to seek the strengthening of democratic institutions, support of civil society, and empowerment of individuals, thereby contributing to a more stable and prosperous world in line with alleged U.S. values. The first battery of tests put these goals under the statistical microscope; regressing U.S. aid by country with the annual fluctuations in its Freedom House scores for political rights and civil liberties for the years 2003-2018, the results are as follows:
That brings us back to the original question. What would happen if the United States stopped supporting Ukraine? We already know. Ukraine and Russia would work toward a deal. It won’t go as well for Ukraine as it did almost two years ago when they were stronger. But it’s not a path to fear. Because the alternative is that the White House gets its way and this brutal, unnecessary war carries on. And that’s so much worse.
Over the weekend, border-policy negotiations between Senate Democrats and Republicans fell apart. The talks were meant to firm up Republican support for the president’s massive $105 billion military support proposal ahead of Wednesday’s vote by including additional funds for border security in the spending package. Now, with no imminent approval of further aid to Ukraine, hawks in government and the media are trying to stoke panic about what will happen if Kyiv is cut off from US support.
In a letter to Congress Monday, White House budget director Shalanda Young told Congress the funds will dry up by the end of the year:
I want to be clear: without congressional action, by the end of the year we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine and to provide equipment from U.S. military stocks. There is no magical pot of funding available to meet this moment. We are out of money—and nearly out of time.
Young goes on to forecast disaster for Ukraine if more money isn’t allocated. But is that really accurate? Are the Ukrainian people doomed if Washington stops funding the war?
If we’re going to understand what might happen in the absence of US involvement in Ukraine, we must first understand Washington’s actual effect on the war, the true nature of which has been laid out brilliantly in a series of recent columns by Ted Snider.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began with a bombardment of cruise missiles on February 24, 2022. Later that day, infantry and armored divisions rolled in from Russia, Belarus, and Crimea while paratroopers dropped in around the capital city of Kyiv.
Days later, as the shock and confusion of the initial offensive began to dissipate, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky attempted to set up indirect talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Zelensky called then–Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett and asked him to contact Putin and to serve as a mediator. Bennett agreed.
Over the next week, Bennett had a series of phone calls with Putin before traveling to Moscow and Berlin to help organize diplomatic communication channels. His effort culminated in a March 10 meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian foreign ministers in Turkey.
In the series of talks that followed, Bennett described both sides as making “huge concessions” in pursuit of a ceasefire.
But Kyiv’s Western backers were resistant to the truce. At a special summit on March 24, NATO decided not to support or approve the peace negotiations. Still, Zelensky and Putin kept at it. And on March 29, the two sides reached an agreement.
According to a draft unsealed this past June, Russia had agreed to pull its forces back to prewar boundaries. In exchange, Ukraine had agreed it would not seek NATO membership.
So why didn’t it happen? Well, it may have started to. In early April, Russia withdrew its forces from northern Ukraine, around Kyiv—an action Putin later said was related to the Istanbul agreement.
But then, according to Bennett, former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, and the leader of the Ukrainian delegation to the talks, David Arakhamia, the West pressured Zelensky to abandon negotiations and fight.
G.K. Chesterton would declare that a commonsense Catholic medical response needs to put human dignity at the center of its work.
In sum, a Chestertonian approach to medical care requires the application of high doses of caritas and common sense. Our modern House of Medicine is built like a house of cards—newer regulatory fixes delicately balanced on top of yesterday’s solutions, which addressed the unintended consequences of previous years’ policies.
Recently, I came across an article in Becker’s Hospital Review celebrating the newest crop of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion officers” in health systems across the country. Among other vital tasks to the health of the nation, these newly deputized C-suite denizens are “instituting training sessions” and “improving hiring practices” in order to “uplift diverse populations” and “enhance health equity.”
The tenor of the article called to mind a quote from the joyful Catholic apologist and distributist G.K. Chesterton: “[No society can survive the socialist] fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them.”
As a physician and a Catholic (not necessarily in that order), I find that the antics of the self-anointed thought leaders in healthcare give me much reason to shake my head. Our professional elite class (in medicine as in nearly every other discipline) has been infected with a dangerous ideological contagion that is harder to cure than a rare, exotic infectious disease—the sort of condition, let’s say, that is characterized by symptoms of memory loss, visual disturbances, behavior change, and (eventually) death. There’s been a lot of this sort of thing going around in healthcare leadership circles these past few years. Striking Viking Vanill… Buy New $9.82 ($4.91 / Fl Oz) (as of 03:16 UTC – Details)
The fallacy of our modern-day medical soothsayers is in insisting that the prevailing model is capable of delivering “healthcare” that is efficient, cost-effective, “patient-centered,” and will produce “equitable” health outcomes across all demographic and identity groups, for every condition, all the time. This utopian ideal is just slightly out of reach, but it is attainable if only we grease the sprockets and lubricate the timing belt of the highly sophisticated Healthcare System (and let us not forget topping off the fluids with the $1.9 trillion, or 29 percent of net federal outlays, designated for healthcare spending).
In this context, the overgrowth of middle management in “healthcare”—exemplified by the proliferation of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” officers—underscores Chesterton’s point to a T. The DEI mentality is only the latest egregious example of how healthcare organizations have become distracted by the shiny objects and bright ideas of prevailing ideological trends (in this case identity politics) and have completely abandoned the notion of holistic attention grounded in the human dignity of each individual person presenting for care. In essence, the reductionist notion that some individuals are more “diverse” than others completely discounts the beautiful uniqueness that is inherent in each person’s condition as a child of God.
Of course, we are told that the sages at the forefront of the “medical equity” movement are merely trying to “right past wrongs” in the name of “social justice.” It is sad that it never occurred to them that this exercise in preferentialism for “the oppressed” over “the oppressors” would have unintended consequences that have contributed to the bankruptcy of trust in the medical profession. Indeed, the consensus among medical leaders is that acquiescing to “equity” is merely another example of medicine’s emptying itself of its past injurious biases and prejudices. After all, any medical professional worth his salt ought to check his moral hang-ups at the door of the exam room, so as not to appear judgmental, and in so doing be better able to provide exceptional customer service. Honest Amish – Heavy D… Buy New $12.87 ($6.44 / Fl Oz) (as of 03:16 UTC – Details)
The inconvenient fact for authorities setting the norms in medicine is that there happen to be two moral agents in every doctor-patient relationship (namely, the doctor and the patient). Editing the language of healthcare to rename “pregnant women” as “birthing persons,” advocating for the promulgation of harmful medical treatments for adolescents in the name of mystified gender ideology, and hitching their horses to the cart of unfettered abortion access in the name of “reproductive justice” (while blotting out the humanity of the unborn), are the antithesis of their idealized kind of medical care devoid of values-based bias. The manufactured consensus of medical specialty societies and journal editors who support such social engineering neglects to recognize the existence of numerous physician-constituents who are rather partisan to Judeo-Christian ethics and Hippocratic principles, thank you very much.
So, how can the wisdom of G.K. Chesterton inform our current predicament? In other words, what would G.K. Chesterton say about American healthcare today if he were a doctor?
As a starting point, I believe that he would rightly call out the misguided priorities in the prevailing utilitarianism of today’s healthcare. Rather than orienting the entire enterprise around the human being in need of care, today’s prevailing healthcare enterprise is focused on metrics—measurements of efficiency, cost-savings, clinical outcomes, and customer service. Ironically, the burgeoning public expenditure on healthcare (which increasingly pays venture-capitalist-sponsored private provider networks to deliver care in accordance with governmentally-defined metrics) means we get the worst of both socialist bloat and regulation, and monopolistic uber-capitalism—and we pay more for it year after year. (As Chesterton once said, “Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business.”)
Not surprisingly, statists never express any concern for real monopolies like the Postal Service. They just hate the big, successful private firms and want to see them broken up or even destroyed. Using the force to government to target “the rich” makes them feel good.
Among the best things Americans could ever do to restore a genuine free market to our land is abolish antitrust laws, the FTC, and genuine monopolies like the Postal Service.
The FTC’s current lawsuit against Amazon is a perfect example of the statist mentality that undergirds antitrust laws. Amazon is an enormously big and hugely successful business enterprise. Therefore, according to statists, it must be an anti-competitive “monopoly.” The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department, the argument goes, need to take judicial action against Amazon to “weaken it” by breaking it into independent competitive parts. In this way, America’s “free-enterprise” system will be strengthened.
It’s all pure, unadulterated economic nonsense, oftentimes driven by envy and covetousness.
In a free-market economy, a company gets big and successful by satisfying consumers. If it produces goods or services that consumers like, it makes money. Amazon has clearly done that. Beginning as a book seller, Amazon now sells everything under the sun. The reason it is so big and successful is that it has satisfied consumers.
In a free society, a company has the right to become as big and successful as it wants. In the absence of fraud, a company’s bigness and success is none of the government’s business. This includes the right to merge with other companies, thereby becoming even bigger. After all, we are talking about private property. A person’s private property is his. As such, he has the right to sell his business to whomever he wants, including a larger firm, even if the sale means a smaller number of competitors in the marketplace.
Statists claim that if enterprises are free of government control and regulation, a few businesses will get bigger and bigger and finally “monopolize” major sectors of the economy.
Really?
Then how do they explain the fact that the most of the top 50 companies in the United States in the 1960s are no longer in the top 50 today? If big companies just keep getting bigger and more powerful, then those top 50 companies in the 1960s should be gigantic enterprises today. But they’re not.
The reason is consumer sovereignty. By their purchases, consumers decide which companies are going to be big and prosperous. Those top 50 companies in the 1960s were unable to continue satisfying consumers. Other businesses induced their customers to shift to the new companies.
Thus, in a genuinely free market, there is constant dynamism taking place. Companies become big and successful by satisfying consumers. At the same time, there are other companies entering the marketplace that begin attracting consumers. Over time, the big, successful companies lose market share. The new ones take their place. The process is continuous.
Thus, people don’t need the FTC or antitrust laws to protect society from big, successful companies like Amazon. A free market does that job. Like all other companies, Amazon is under constant pressure to continue satisfying consumers. If it fails to do so, it falters, just as those top 50 companies in the 1960s ended up faltering.
What the FTC and the Justice Department do, however, is take a snapshot in time. They see Amazon as a big, successful company today and decide that they need to break it up. They are unable to see the dynamism of a free market over a long period of time. In the process, they end up destroying or damaging companies that are doing a fantastic job in satisfying consumers.
Just as the agricultural revolution put an end to tribalism and the industrial revolution killed the kingdom, I think we’re heading for another multipronged revolution that’s going to make the nation-state an anachronism. It won’t happen next month, or next year. But I’ll bet the pattern will start becoming clear within the lifetime of many now reading this.
What pattern am I talking about? Once again, a reference to the evil genius Karl Marx, with his concept of the “withering away of the State.” By the end of this century, I suspect the US and most other nation-states will have, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist.
There have been a fair number of references to the subject of “phyles” in this publication over the years. This essay will discuss the topic in detail. Especially how phyles are likely to replace the nation-state, one of mankind’s worst inventions.
Now might be a good time to discuss the subject. We’ll have an almost unremitting stream of bad news, on multiple fronts, for years to come. So it might be good to keep a hopeful prospect in mind.
Let’s start by looking at where we’ve been. I trust you’ll excuse my skating over all of human political history in a few paragraphs, but my object is to provide a framework for where we’re going, rather than an anthropological monograph.
Mankind has, so far, gone through three main stages of political organization since Day One, say 200,000 years ago, when anatomically modern men started appearing. We can call them Tribes, Kingdoms, and Nation-States.
Karl Marx had a lot of things wrong, especially his moral philosophy. But one of the acute observations he made was that the means of production are perhaps the most important determinant of how a society is structured. Based on that, so far in history, only two really important things have happened: the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Everything else is just a footnote.
Israel is like, “We’re not killing children in Gaza, those are dolls. Okay maybe they’re not dolls, but Hamas is lying about death tolls. Okay maybe they’re not lying about death tolls, but they’re using human shields and they did 10/7, so every child we’re killing was actually killed by Hamas.”
I promise there is nothing you can say to me that will cause me to cease opposing the murder of thousands of children in Gaza. There is no name you can call me, no accusation you can scream at me, no talking point you can regurgitate at me that will ever make me shut up and accept this.
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The unexamined premise behind the frenetic push to reignite outrage over October 7 using rape allegations is that if Hamas fighters did sexually assault any Israeli women during the attack, then everyone has to shut up and let Israel keep murdering children by the thousands. This is self-evidently stupid.
Western and Israeli propagandists are going to keep trying to find new reasons for you to reignite your outrage over October 7, because October 7 is their side’s only justification for a months-long mass atrocity that is far, far worse than anything that happened on October 7.
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The US House of Representatives just passed a resolution saying that Judaism is synonymous with a colonialist ideology which routinely murders children.
SHAMEFUL.
The House just passed a resolution wrongly conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
While countless Americans of all faiths march against Zionism and for peace in Palestine, Congress is more concerned about condemning them than ending the American-backed genocide. pic.twitter.com/PvMK8mxz4r
I personally do not believe it’s anti-semitic to criticize Israel’s murderous actions in Gaza. See I have this wild idea that murdering children is not an aspect of the Jewish faith, and that saying otherwise actually has a very ugly history in our society.
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The only way to have more sympathy for the 1200 Israelis killed on October 7 than the 16,000+ Palestinians who’ve been killed in Gaza since is to believe Palestinians are subhumans whose lives are worth a tiny fraction of what Israeli lives are worth. That’s the one and only way.
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A recent poll found that 57.5 percent of Israelis believe the IDF is using too little firepower in Gaza, while 36.6 percent said it’s using just the right amount, with 4.2 percent saying they’re unsure and just 1.8 percent saying the IDF is using too much firepower.
One reason Israeli officials keep saying shockingly genocidal and fascistic things is because the kind of talk you have to use to win the support of Israelis is completely different from the talk you have to use to win the support of western liberals.
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Jerusalem Post Retracts Article Claiming That Dead Palestinian Baby Was a Dollhttps://t.co/l1InwqkmcJ
Israel is like, “We’re not killing children in Gaza, those are dolls. Okay maybe they’re not dolls, but Hamas is lying about death tolls. Okay maybe they’re not lying about death tolls, but they’re using human shields and they did 10/7, so every child we’re killing was actually killed by Hamas.”
President Joe Biden’s 2021 infrastructure bill boasts a $7.5 billion investment in electric vehicle (EV) chargers, and his administration insists the country is “on track” to install over a million public chargers by the end of the decade—but reports indicate that so far not a single one has actually been built.
Electrical vehicle chargers in Irvine, Calif., on July 12, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
A key part of the Biden administration’s push to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 is to sharply expand the nation’s charging infrastructure for plug-in EVs in order to align with President Biden’s goal of having half of all new vehicles sold in the United States to be electric by 2030.
At the forefront of this effort is the federal government’s commitment to pour in $7.5 billion as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) to build 1.2 million public chargers to keep up with what the White House said over the summer was rapidly growing demand for EVs.
The $7.5 billion federal funding plan for EV chargers consists of the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program and the $2.5 billion Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program, both of which are being administered through agencies affiliated with the Department of Transportation (DOT).
However, despite more than $2 billion of the $7.5 billion in federal EV charger funding already authorized under the programs, not even half of states have started to take bids from contractors for construction—and not a single new public charger has been built.
“Already, seven states have issued conditional awards for new NEVI stations amounting to $101.5 million, two states have agreements in place, and 17 states are soliciting proposals for new stations,” the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, which is leading the Biden administration’s EV charger efforts, said in an update at the end of October.
An initial wave of 26 states are leading the effort to build out the public EV charger network, with Ohio being the first to break a public EV charger construction project funded by the NEVI program.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), which is administering the $5 billion NEVI program, with a request for more up-to-date information about the status of the various federally-funded EV charger projects.
Many Republicans have been lukewarm on the idea of federal funding for EV infrastructure, with former President Donald Trump voicing staunch opposition to EV subsidies, arguing that the government should step aside and let market forces decide what vehicles people drive.
‘On Track’?
While EV sales in the United Sates hit a record 313,086 in the third quarter of 2023, many carmakers are sounding the alarm, saying that demand isn’t keeping up with expectations, forcing them to scale back some EV expansion plans.
Studies show that a key factor hampering widespread EV adoption is so-called “range anxiety,” which is the fear among drivers that their EV will run out of power and grind to a halt on the side of the road with no charger in sight.
In order to alleviate drivers’ range anxiety and support growing EV demand, a recent study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimated that the size of the national charging network needs to grow from roughly 3.1 million ports in 2022 to 28 million by 2030, with the vast majority being private chargers.
There are several labeled ‘right-wing’ candidates being touted as saviors by the maniacal herd, especially those blind ‘pro-freedom’ pretenders, who continue to trust the State and the heinous and fraudulent political process, while leaping on the band wagon with both feet of every single candidate promising them to do it right this time. It would be difficult to find a more pathetic exercise than this, but at least it is eternally predictable.
“I have never voted in my life… I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it’s certain they will win.”
~ Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Here we go again. Each side of the coin being flipped is the same; both sides indicating parties of evil. It is the same game as always, and the same stupid people jump on board because this time, things will be different, and your guy will fix everything. This story is as old as time, but gets even more idiotic each and every election, as even more historical evidence and fact exposing the voting scam are easily obvious, showing the pure idiocy of voting for a master. For the thousandth time, doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different outcome, but finally, the good guy is here to save you. What a crock of crap is this, and how can any sane, thinking individual, fall into that same trap every election, without once understanding that he is in a circular game of hysterical lunacy?
There are several labeled ‘right-wing’ candidates being touted as saviors by the maniacal herd, especially those blind ‘pro-freedom’ pretenders, who continue to trust the State and the heinous and fraudulent political process, while leaping on the band wagon with both feet of every single candidate promising them to do it right this time. It would be difficult to find a more pathetic exercise than this, but at least it is eternally predictable. If human nature is nothing else, it is a showcase for hypocrisy and gullibility, and in light of this current trend, those falsely calling themselves ‘libertarians,’ anarcho-capitalists,’ staunch ‘conservatives,’ and fighters for freedom, are all showing their bare asses in broad daylight. It is a sad sight to be sure.
There have been several of these claimed freedom ‘pretenders,’ immigration ‘warriors,’ monetary fixers, and free-trade imposters, who have been recently elected around the world, and the faux alternative media sites have bought the hype hook, line, and sinker, without once standing in any light of reality. For purposes here, let us concentrate on just one of these trimmers; the most flamboyant in fact, although they all can be lumped together concerning much of their ridiculous rhetoric.
Javier Milei has captured the hearts and minds of most all those who loudly pretend to oppose the State, while believing that the answer to freedom lies with the State. No, I did not make that up, it is the common attitude accepted every time a new face says the ‘right’ things when attempting to gain great power as a ruler in a State system, while at the same time, promising to tear down that same system. This time is no different, and this is so simple to point out and see, but it belies imagination that most people who vote for their next ruler, never learn anything at all from thousands of years of mistakes. All these candidates are Statists, whether they claim that status or not, so are their supporters really fooled, or are they exposing their real character and lack of intellectual reasoning, by embracing complete contradiction?
Milei has said that he will “blow up the central bank” in Argentina, but how is he supposedly going to achieve that goal? He states that he will eliminate central banking, but he has no plans whatsoever to use any free market in money. He also said he would name a new central bank head, and would appoint a new economic team, which is a total contradiction of his statements, leaving government in charge of all monetary policy. While saying he will tear down the central banking system, he is mandating the use of the U.S. dollar. The U.S. dollar is a failing currency, but is also dependent on the most evil central bank in the world, so in essence, Milei is planning on partnering with the most powerful and criminal central bank to affect ‘his new system.’ He has not mentioned any free market alternative that the people could freely choose themselves, as he wants to force ‘his’ choice as the only choice. This is an extremely complicated process, and the problems that will arise would likely be monumental. These consequences could easily cause more major economic problems. While Argentina is in the midst of economic hell, a common problem that has plagued that country for decades, all due to government control and corruption, will this change simply due to a different government controlling everything? I think not.
Milei has also said he will cut ties with Russia, China, and Brazil, but does that not eliminate markets for all Argentinians, all at the whim of Milei? He claims to be ‘libertarian,’ but also an ‘anarcho-capitalist.’ This must be a big lie. An anarcho-capitalist would necessarily have to rely on being an anarchist, which means no rule, but did he not just seek rule, and win rule, and now plans to put ‘his’ policies in place by fiat?
MCViewPoint 