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Posts Tagged ‘social engineering’

Doug Casey on “15-Minute Cities” and Penning You In for the Next Lockdown

Posted by M. C. on March 25, 2023

Doug Casey: It’s social engineering taken to a new level—trying to reform the way humans act and live.

Doug Casey: It’s all about control, but it won’t be sold as a military “you must do this” type of control. It will be a soft, “do it for your own good” type of control. And, of course, it’s part of the general climate insanity for the supposed good of Mother Earth. The idea is to get people to stay out of their cars and, for that matter, stay off of planes and even public transportation.

https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-on-15-minute-cities-and-penning-you-in-for-the-next-lockdown/

by Doug Casey

15-Minute City

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International Man: The “15-minute city” is an urban planning concept rapidly spreading in North America and Europe. They aim to make everything—where people work, shop, get their education, healthcare, and leisure activities—just 15 minutes away.

The idea is for bureaucrats to restrict—and eventually prohibit—car use because everything is within walking or biking distance. Phasing out hydrocarbons, in general, and cars with internal combustion engines, in particular, is a primary goal of the carbon hysterics.

Critics also argue that 15-minute cities will eventually allow for total surveillance and control of people’s lives, as governments will inevitably pair them with an ESG social credit system and central bank digital currencies.

What is your take on the 15-minute city concept?

Doug Casey: It’s social engineering taken to a new level—trying to reform the way humans act and live. In fact, it’s social engineering that’s expressed in the form of civil engineering, putting people in the kind of houses, environments, and locales that the elites—strike that, I mean parasites—prefer.

It’s as if the whole human race is taking a role in the Jim Carrey movie The Truman Show. But that’s way too benign. The way they’re trying to reform the cities and force people to stay in place in certain areas, it’s more like the panopticon, which was a type of prison where all people could be observed easily by the guards at all times.

Of course, keeping everybody within a 15-minute radius of their home sounds convenient, homey, and small town-like. But it just makes things much more convenient for artificial intelligence to monitor where everybody is. Not just in their vehicles, either, because the next step along this path will be to make it desirable for everybody to have a chip implanted so individual bodies can be monitored. The 15-minute city concept is just a step on the way to something much more dystopian.

International Man: 15-minute cities received a big boost from the Covid hysteria as many city councils and mayors sought to redesign city spaces amid the lockdowns.

The concept has spread to many areas in North America and Europe, with plans to transform parts of the biggest cities into numerous 15-minute city zones. We have already seen this happen in Ottawa, Oxford, and other large cities.

What is really going on here?

Doug Casey: It’s all about control, but it won’t be sold as a military “you must do this” type of control. It will be a soft, “do it for your own good” type of control. And, of course, it’s part of the general climate insanity for the supposed good of Mother Earth. The idea is to get people to stay out of their cars and, for that matter, stay off of planes and even public transportation.

See the rest here

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Clash Between People and the Deep State in Italy – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on August 27, 2021

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/08/no_author/clash-between-people-and-deep-state-in-italy/

By Vicit Leo
VicitLeo.org

Some years ago Italy was chosen by the global powers-that-be to become a social laboratory where the Great Reset would be tested and fine-tuned before being fully unleashed upon the world.

In the words of Monsignor Carlo Maria Viganò“Italy is a testing ground for the experiments of social engineering that the globalist agenda intends to extend to all governments over the span of the next ten years.”

On 30th August the Italian Health Dictatorship Regime intends to make what it thinks is a check-mate move and impose its COVID-19 vaccination passport, called the Green Pass, upon the entire population of Italy.
This discriminatory and coercive ‘Green Pass’ is without doubt contrary to both international law and the laws of most domestic legal jurisdictions.
It is creating a world where the majority of people are tricked or bullied, and generally compelled, into receiving a series of experimental gene modification jabs or vaccines still under clinical trial.
It is creating a world where a rebelling minority will be cast out and refused access to social amenities and social recreation.

A movement which started on Good Friday in 2020 when just a dozen or so people tried to break the lockdown cordons and get to Mass at the Church of St Maria Maggiore in Rome, gradually built and expanded to the point that in July 2021 up to twenty-thousand fed-up and rebellious Romans gathered together at the Piazza del Popolo to really make and continue to build a heavyweight challenge against the Health Dictatorship and the Great Reset.

There are three main objectives:
1) To unite the people beyond the old, sterile, worn-out, and divisive, labels of Left and Right.
2) To draw together disparate groups and associations of un-skilled workers, tradesmen, restaurateurs and hoteliers, and medical and scientific professionals.
3) To stand united together and act as one until the Green Pass is defeated.
The movement grew rapidly throughout Italy uniting more than a million people in a city by city mobilization.

On the 28th August, two days before the introduction of the Green Pass, a massive demonstration is due to take place in Rome along with other big protests in towns and cities all over the country.
The Regime has long braced itself to meet, sometimes very violently, growing street protests but unexpectedly, and dangerously, for the Health Dictatorship something else has happened.
A lawyer, Avv. Nicola Trisciuoglio, representing 52 of his colleagues in the legal profession, filed criminal complaints against the Italian Prime Minister, Draghi, and other public figures, accusing them of very serious offences such as conspiracy, murder, and manslaughter.
The criminal accusations were filed with all 140 Public Prosecutors spread in all the Italian main cities of Italy.

In this way it will be very difficult, if not impossible, for the Regime to call in favours or intimidate all of the Public Prosecutor Offices to drop the criminal investigations.
Indeed, nearly 100 of the Public Prosecutors have already begun to pursue criminal investigations based upon the complaints.

It’s expected that at least one of the Prosecution Offices will ask the Constitutional Court to examine the legality of the ‘Green Pass’.

In the las few hours the Procura di Avellino has decided to send the Green Pass to the Constitutional Court to decide whether it complies or not with Italian and European law.
As part of this legal investigation the Public Prosecutors have also been requested to seize samples of the so-called vaccines so they can be independently analysed in neutral laboratories and the precise ‘ingredients’ established.
The complex action against the tyrannical regime, the criminal actions commited and the struggle against the Green Pass are finally giving results.

WHETHER YOU ARE AMERICAN, BRITISH, CANADIAN OR FROM ANY OTHER PART OF THE WORLD PLEASE HELP ITALY AND ITALIANS IN THIS STRUGGLE THAT WILL REFLECT ON LIVES OF PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD.

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Infrastructure Bill as Political Plunder and Social Engineering – The Future of Freedom Foundation

Posted by M. C. on August 5, 2021

With no markets or prices in most instances for finding out where and what types of roads and bridges people might be interested in having produced and supplied for their travels, it has contained all the economic irrationality of other forms of monopolized government central planning.

https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/infrastructure-bill-as-political-plunder-and-social-engineering/

by Richard M. Ebeling

Nothing says you really “care” in politics as much as a willingness and, indeed, a demand to spend at least $1 trillion of other people’s money on some supposedly essential public “need.” So, not surprisingly, a bipartisan infrastructure bill is working its way through Congress with just such a $1 trillion price tag.With no markets or prices in most instances for finding out where and what types of roads and bridges people might be interested in having produced and supplied for their travels, it has contained all the economic irrationality of other forms of monopolized government central planning.
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Also, nothing says you are desperate for constituent votes in an upcoming election more than promises to spend large sums of that money in the state in which you will be running for reelection to either the House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate. I know that it seems like only a mere nine months ago that we were all being bombarded as voters to cast our ballots for the Office of the Presidency, the 435 House seats, and one-third of the Senate. But it must be remembered that even before the November 2020 election voting results were all fully announced, the winners and a host of new contestants were already looking forward to the elections of 2022 and beyond.

Political Pandering for Donor Dollars

That’s the politician’s dilemma with democracy – no guaranteed job security. Yes, it is true that incumbents have strong advantages that result in members of the House of Representatives being reelected around 90 percent of the time, with the incumbency rate in the U.S. Senate being about 85 percent, when looking over the elections between 1964 and 2018, according to the non-profit “Open Secrets” that tracks national political campaigns and from whom the campaign funding comes. But a politician has to keep making sure that his constituents view him as bringing more taxpayers’ money into their pockets than are going out, for them to keep voting his way every time they cast their ballot.

In the 2019-2020 election cycle, construction companies donated, in total, over $202.3 million to candidate campaigns, while transportation businesses gave more than $147 million in campaign contributions. Labor unions, many of whom are directly or indirectly connected with the construction and transportation sectors of the economy (and therefore government spending), gave $259 million. Considering the hundreds of billions of dollars that will be coming their way in any implemented infrastructure bill, investing hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to help make it possible does not seem like such a bad rate of return.

Infrastructure Spending Provides Political Profit-Making

While less than the original $2.6 trillion bill that President Biden had proposed earlier this year, the planned infrastructure spending, which includes new or additional spending of about $550 billion, still will have plenty to make happy those who want to have taxpayers cover some or all of their costs of doing business. There will be $7.5 billion to help build electric car charging stations across the United States. There will be $5 billion to pay local communities to switch to electric and lower-emission school buses around the country. There will be almost $40 billion for public transit systems to shift to zero or reduced polluting electric buses.

How convenient this is for electric automobile manufacturers and existing or potential electric fuel station companies and franchises who will not have to actually cover all the expenses of making their products’ price and availability attractive enough for consumers and school districts to be willing and able to buy their electric modes of transportation without Uncle Sam’s fiscal assistance.

See the rest here

This post was written by: Richard M. Ebeling

Dr. Richard M. Ebeling is the BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel. He was formerly professor of Economics at Northwood University, president of The Foundation for Economic Education (2003–2008), was the Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College (1988–2003) in Hillsdale, Michigan, and served as vice president of academic affairs for The Future of Freedom Foundation (1989–2003).

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From Lockdowns to “The Great Reset” | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on August 4, 2020

The truth, however, is that this new world order of digital tyranny comes with a comprehensive social credit system. The People’s Republic of China is the pioneer of this method of surveillance and control of individuals, corporations, and sociopolitical entities.

For the individual, one’s identity is reduced to an app or chip that registers almost any personal activity. In order to gain a few individual rights, and be it only to travel to a certain place, a person must balance such apparent privileges with his submission to a web of regulations that define in detail what is “good behavior” and deemed as beneficial to humankind and the environment. For example, during a pandemic, this sort of control would extend from the obligation of wearing a mask and practicing social distancing to having specific vaccinations in order to apply for a job or to travel.

https://mises.org/wire/lockdowns-great-reset?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=184ee9ccf4-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-184ee9ccf4-228343965

The lockdown in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the implementation of long-held plans to establish a so-called new world order. Under the auspices of the World Economic Forum (WEF), global policymakers are advocating for a “Great Reset” with the intent of creating a global technocracy. It is not by coincidence that on October 18, 2019, in New York City the WEF participated in “Event 201” at the “high-level” pandemic exercise organized by the John Hopkins Center for Health Security.

This coming technocracy involves close cooperation between the heads of the digital industry and of governments. With programs such as guaranteed minimum income and healthcare for all, the new kind of governance combines strict societal control with the promise of comprehensive social justice.

The truth, however, is that this new world order of digital tyranny comes with a comprehensive social credit system. The People’s Republic of China is the pioneer of this method of surveillance and control of individuals, corporations, and sociopolitical entities.

For the individual, one’s identity is reduced to an app or chip that registers almost any personal activity. In order to gain a few individual rights, and be it only to travel to a certain place, a person must balance such apparent privileges with his submission to a web of regulations that define in detail what is “good behavior” and deemed as beneficial to humankind and the environment. For example, during a pandemic, this sort of control would extend from the obligation of wearing a mask and practicing social distancing to having specific vaccinations in order to apply for a job or to travel.

It is, in short, a type of social engineering which is the opposite of a spontaneous order or of development. Like the mechanical engineer with a machine, the social engineer—or technocrat—treats society as an object. Different from the brutal suppressions by the totalitarianism of earlier times, the modern social engineer will try to make the social machine work on its own according to the design. For this purpose, the social engineer must apply the laws of society the way the mechanical engineer follows the laws of nature. Behavioral theory has reached a stage of knowledge that makes the dreams of social engineering possible. The machinations of social engineering operate not through brute force, but subtly by nudge.

Under the order envisioned by the Great Reset, the advancement of technology is not meant to serve the improvement of the conditions of the people but to submit the individual to the tyranny of a technocratic state. “The experts know better” is the justification.

The Agenda

The plan for an overhaul of the world is the brainchild of an elite group of businessmen, politicians, and their intellectual entourage that used to meet in Davos, Switzerland, in January each year. Brought into existence in 1971, the World Economic Forum has become a megaglobal event since then. More than three thousand leaders from all over the world attended the meeting in 2020.

Under the guidance of the WEF, the agenda of the Great Reset says that the completion of the current industrial transformation requires a thorough overhaul of the economy, politics, and society. Such a comprehensive transformation requires the alteration of human behavior, and thus “transhumanism” is part of the program.

The Great Reset will be the theme of the fifty-first meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2021. Its agenda is the commitment to move the world economy toward “a more fair, sustainable and resilient future.” The program calls for “a new social contract” that is centered on racial equality, social justice, and the protection of nature. Climate change requires us “to decarbonize the economy” and to bring human thinking and behavior “into harmony with nature.” The aim is to build “more equal, inclusive and sustainable economies.” This new world order must be “urgently” implemented, the promotors of the WEF claim, and they point out that the pandemic “has laid bare the unsustainability of our system,” which lacks “social cohesion.”

The WEF’s great reset project is social engineering at the highest level. Advocates of the reset contend that the UN failed to establish order in the world and could not advance forcefully its agenda of sustainable development—known as Agenda 2030—because of its bureaucratic, slow, and contradictory way of working. In contrast, the actions of the organizational committee of the World Economic Forum are swift and smart. When a consensus has been formed, it can be implemented by the global elite all over the world.

Social Engineering

The ideology of the World Economic Forum is neither left nor right, nor progressive or conservative, it is also not fascist or communist, but outright technocratic. As such, it includes many elements of earlier collectivist ideologies.

In recent decades, the consensus has emerged at the annual Davos meetings that the world needs a revolution, and that reforms have taken too long. The members of the WEF envision a profound upheaval at short notice. The time span should be so brief that most people will hardly realize that a revolution is going on. The change must be so swift and dramatic that those who recognize that a revolution is happening do not have the time to mobilize against it.

The basic idea of the Great Reset is the same principle that guided the radical transformations from the French to the Russian and Chinese Revolutions. It is the idea of constructivist rationalism incorporated in the state. But projects like the Great Reset leave unanswered the question of who rules the state. The state itself does not rule. It is an instrument of power. It is not the abstract state that decides, but the leaders of specific political parties and of certain social groups.

Earlier totalitarian regimes needed mass executions and concentration camps to maintain their power. Now, with the help of new technologies, it is believed, dissenters can easily be identified and marginalized. The nonconformists will be silenced by disqualifying divergent opinions as morally despicable.

The 2020 lockdowns possibly offer a preview of how this system works. The lockdown worked as if it had been orchestrated—and perhaps it was. As if following a single command, the leaders of big and small nations—and of different stages of economic development—implemented almost identical measures. Not only did many governments act in unison, they also applied these measures with little regard for the horrific consequences of a global lockdown.

Months of economic stillstand have destroyed the economic basis of millions of families. Together with social distancing, the lockdown has produced a mass of people unable to care for themselves. First, governments destroyed the livelihood, then the politicians showed up as the savior. The demand for social assistance is no longer limited to specific groups, but has become a need of the masses.

Once, war was the health of the state. Now it is fear of disease. What lies ahead is not the apparent coziness of a benevolent comprehensive welfare state with a guaranteed minimum income and healthcare and education for all. The lockdown and its consequences have brought a foretaste of what is to come: a permanent state of fear, strict behavioral control, massive loss of jobs, and growing dependence on the state.

With the measures taken in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, a big step to reset the global economy has been made. Without popular resistance, the end of the pandemic will not mean the end of the lockdown and social distancing. At the moment, however, the opponents of the new world order of digital tyranny still have access to the media and platforms to dissent. Yet the time is running out. The perpetrators of the new world order have smelled blood. Declaring the coronavirus a pandemic has come in handy to promote the agenda of their Great Reset. Only massive opposition can slow down and finally stop the extension of the power grip of the tyrannical technocracy that is on the rise.

Author:

Antony P. Mueller

Dr. Antony P. Mueller is a German professor of economics who currently teaches in Brazil. Write an e-mail. See his website and blog.

 

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Remember America’s Great Kosovo Ally? Never Mind the War Crimes! – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on June 26, 2020

https://original.antiwar.com/doug-bandow/2020/06/25/remember-americas-great-kosovo-ally-never-mind-the-war-crimes/

The Trump administration, in the personality of Richard Grenell, former U.S. ambassador to Germany, has become intricately and bizarrely involved in Balkan politics. His effort to reconcile Kosovo and Serbia, from which the former seceded in 2008, risks an embarrassing crash after the indictment of Kosovar President Hashim Thaci of war crimes. But Grenell has achieved more success than all the European Union’s diplomats over the last decade.

One of the most perspicacious insights of famed German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was that the Balkans was not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Had his successors in Germany, as well as statesmen across Europe, heeded his admonition World War I would have been avoided. And with it an even worse conflict a generation later, as well as the ensuing Cold War. As Bismarck feared, “it will be some damn foolish thing in the Balkans that sets off” a disastrous human conflagration.

Alas, the US repeated that mistake three decades ago as Yugoslavia disintegrated. What seemed to most attract the Clinton administration was the fact that America had no conceivable security interests at stake in the region. It was the ultimate example of what Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University termed “foreign policy as social work.”

Like so many international controversies, the extended Yugoslav civil war always was more complicated than the simple morality play portrayed by Washington’s establishment hawks. The death of Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito in 1980 and collapse a decade later of the Soviet Union, which long threatened Yugoslavia’s independence, set the stage for the latter state’s dissolution.

The US and European governments violently resisted their own secessionist movements but adopted a different position toward Yugoslavia. Germany took the lead in encouraging the Serb-dominated polyglot nation’s breakup. But the allies decided that ethnic minorities newly subjected to the vagaries of ethnic rule, meaning Serbs, should not secede.

Unfortunately, Croatia and Bosnia included substantial numbers of Serbs, who had no reason to trust newly ascendant local ethnic groups. For instance, Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman was an anti-Semite and violent anti-Serb – though he had no love for Muslims either. Although the Yugoslav military and Serbian forces committed the worst war crimes, Croat, Bosnian Croat, and Bosniak militias also were responsible for manifold atrocities.

The only consistency in US policy was that the Serbs always lost. Read the rest of this entry »

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Another Reason Why This ‘Pandemic’ Is Looking More Like A Social Engineering Experiment – Collective Evolution

Posted by M. C. on May 19, 2020

https://www.collective-evolution.com/2020/05/18/another-reason-why-this-pandemic-is-looking-more-like-a-social-engineering-experiment/

In Brief

  • The Facts:The ‘thanks’ proffered by our authority to our health-care workers during this pandemic is so ubiquitous, it should have us all wondering about the true motive behind it.
  • Reflect On:What would our world be like if we were no longer affected by our authority’s tried-and-true social programming methods?

Why This Pandemic Is Looking More Like A Social Engineering Experiment, Part 1

When something is repeated over and over, it often has the capacity to put us to sleep. But occasionally, it has the opposite effect. Sometimes in the wake of redundant messaging our senses are aroused to a bitter taste or a stale odor that tells us something is just not right.

I had such an experience in tuning in to Ontario’s daily COVID-19 briefing today which I had done, optimistically, to see if there was any advance on when schools would be opening for my 6-year old. (no such luck). It came at the beginning of health minister Christine Elliot’s segment:

Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge and celebrate our amazing nurses, on this first day of National Nurses Week. Day and night our heroic nurses work tirelessly to care for the people of Ontario. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. Over the past few months, Ontario’s health care system has demonstrated remarkable responsiveness to the COVID-19 outbreak. That is in large part to our partners on the front lines, including our nurses, doctors, homecare, hospital and long-term care staff, personal support workers, and first-responders among many others. As we’ve confronted COVID-19, we’ve made historic investments to dramatically expand hospital capacity, and support the brave heroes working on the front lines of our healthcare system.

Elliot was literally gushing as she extolled the virtues of our health care workers. It was almost as though she had convinced herself that her plaudits were sincere.

What’s The Motive?

The surface political motive for many of our leaders to heap praise on health care workers, and encourage the public to do the same, is fairly straightforward. In thanking others, one gets to bask in the reflected glory of their accomplishments.

But upon deeper reflection, one can see that this strategy is so widely employed in the case of this pandemic because it simultaneously touches on all the bases that our authority want conveyed during their public proclamations. In fact, there are few social programming techniques that I can think of that are more powerful or effective. Let’s touch on a few of the bases ourselves:

Amplifying the Severity of the Pandemic. Through the clever sleight-of-hand of the praise of others, which the listening audience tends to take in readily with their guard down and their discernment filters on pause, the speaker is able to fully convince us of the danger we are facing, by commending health care workers for being willing to confront this danger. The more heroic we are made to think they are, the more danger that is implied. While the praise towards our fellow human beings (who are not part of the authority) makes us feel good to a certain extent, what is really being heightened in us is that low-level fear that this virus is lurking, ready to pounce on us at any misstep. A public that is in this state of fear is much easier to control and manipulate.

 

Legitimizing Western medicine. Listen to her terminology. ‘our partners on the front lines…the brave heroes working on the front lines.’ Why ‘Front lines’? Why is health care a ‘fight,’ always some kind of ‘war’? Because this has been the pre-eminent strategy of Western medicine all along–to make us feel that there has been an enemy invasion (a virus). To make us feel that our body does not have the necessary defense mechanisms (Western medicine virtually ignores our immune system). To make us feel that we are under attack, need protection, and the army of doctors and researchers spawned from Western medical school is our only hope (of course this is why traditional medicine, which works in concert with the immune system, has for so long been labelled quackery and pseudoscience).

Reinforcing government authority. In praising the health care workers and the system they operate within, our authority is actually reinforcing its own praiseworthiness without saying it directly. Instead, the government is seen as the benevolent manager of the whole process, ‘partnering’ with those laudable heroes in the health care system. So when the government brags that they’ve ‘made historic investments to dramatically expand hospital capacity,’ should we be standing up and applauding? Or should we be asking, if this whole government-medical system partnership is working so well, shouldn’t we be seeing a reduction in hospital beds instead of a constant increase? Shouldn’t the citizens as a whole be getting healthier, rather than getting sicker and more in need of drugs and treatments, as all the evidence and statistics tell us?

Nobody’s Knocking Our Health Care Workers

Now before anybody starts saying I’m knocking our health care workers, stop. Actually, if you’ve gotten this far in the article, I probably don’t have to worry about you. It is those who just read the headlines and then feel justified in making their outrage known on Facebook about seeing ‘another ridiculous conspiracy theory.’ The fact is, a bit of honest reflection will force us to admit that at some level we all know that our authority is trying to pull something on us every time they speak.

Just for the record, I believe health care is a very noble profession, with a majority of those working within the system being truly dedicated to the health and well-being of the patients they come into contact with.

However, this pandemic has not turned everybody working in health care into Florence Nightengales, as our leaders and mainstream media would have us believe. Those who were competent and caring in 2018 and 2019 are competent and caring in 2020 during this pandemic. Those who were incompetent and apathetic to their patients in the past have for the most part probably remained that way under the circumstances we currently face. Like in any occupation, there are good workers and bad workers. When a patient says ‘thank-you’ to a nurse or doctor for their service and care, it is spontaneous and authentic. It is meaningful. On the other hand, calling on the entire public to say ‘thank you’ to all health care workers, in speeches and promotional ads everywhere, 24/7, is likely staged and grounded in a very different agenda.

The Takeaway

The sooner we see through the motives behind these attempts to tell us what to think and how to feel, the sooner we will have a society founded on truth and authenticity.

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Philadelphia’s Soda Tax Was a Win for Politicians, A Loss for Everyone Else | Mises Institute

Posted by M. C. on February 2, 2019

https://mises.org/power-market/philadelphias-soda-tax-was-win-politicians-loss-everyone-else

Daniel J. Mitchell

I’ve periodically opined about why politicians should not try to control people’s behavior with discriminatory taxes, such as the ones being imposed on soda.

And I’ve cited some examples of how these taxes backfire.

The big drop in soda purchases after a tax on sugary drinks was imposed in Berkeley.

The big drop in soda sales after a big tax on sugary products in Mexico.

The big drop in soda purchases expected to occur following Seattle’s new tax.

If the following headlines are any indication, we can add Philadelphia to that list.

For instances, this story from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Jan-28-19-Inquirer.jpg

Or this story from the local CBS affiliate.

Jan-28-19-CBS-Philly.jpg

These examples reinforce my view that it is not a good idea to let meddling politicians impose more taxes in an effort to control people’s behavior… Read the rest of this entry »

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