An evolutionary psychologist asserts that evolution in the ways humans use their brains, influenced exclusively by external, materialistic conditions, has made our era the least violent period in history. Professor Steven Pinker’s latest book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, raises two important questions: has the world in fact become...
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Superficiality is a necessary part of liberal-progressive-socialism. Without bothering to determine how deep the water or how many boulders lie just below its surface, liberal-progressives are ready to leap head first off the cliff into any pool that looks nice on the surface, from afar. A typical example of such superficiality is described in...
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Politicians will always falsely blame inflation on businessmen’s “greed.” But only government deficit spending using fiat money can create inflation. Inflation consists in increasing the money supply faster than the increase in production of goods that people want, the condition we endure today, in spades. If it were true, as liberal-progressives and politicians of...
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Inflation that affects the entire economy originates with government action. Price increases that arise from temporary imbalances between supply and demand in specific product markets are not examples of general inflation. If bad weather or other factors reduce the yield of food crops like wheat or corn, the lowered supply (or anticipation of reduced...
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It doesn’t mean wife-swapping, marital infidelity, or sexual promiscuity. In today’s sermon at the Cohocton (NY) Assembly of God church, Pastor Dan Gardner’s text was Roman 13:8-10: 8 Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. 9 The commandments, “You shall...
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Keynesian macroeconomics is inconceivable without Darwinian evolution and secular socialism. Keynesian macroeconomics is, at heart, a rationalization for collectivized state planning . Its progenitor was the 18th century quest to discover social science laws of behavior paralleling Newton’s mathematics and laws of motion that explained movements of the planets and of the earth around...
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Fed chairman Ben Bernanke apparently is misled by fictionalized versions of two economic models: Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal Keynesianism and Japan’s deflation and economic stagnation. Mr. Bernanke reads New Deal economic history with blinders firmly affixed to narrow the breadth of his vision. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he holds...
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Declining prices are not necessarily bad. The Fed plans to add massively to the supply of phony money by monetizing the Federal debt with QE2, its latest multi-trillion dollar intervention to manipulate the financial system and to control business production and employment decisions. The effect, in the short run, is to inflate further the...
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James T. Kloppenberg is Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University. His featured article in the November-December 2010 edition of the Harvard alumni magazine explains why academics find President Obama so attractive. The article title – From Hull House to the White House – sets the tone. Unfortunately the internet version of...
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Obama, the self-styled man of peace, the reconciler, and the hope of mankind, is cozy with violence, from Islam to labor unions. Labor Day should be a reminder that labor unions are quintessentially socialist organizations, taking their origin and character from the Marxian doctrine of class struggle. Employers are the enemy, to be hammered...
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The events triggered by the Declaration of Independence were not a revolution. They were a struggle to gain independence from arbitrary exercise of government power. Few people ever read beyond the stirring opening sentences of the Declaration. The meat of the document is in the bottom part of the second paragraph: But when a...
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Original provisions of the Constitution intended to prevent Congress from enacting “dumb” laws were vitiated by ratification of the 17th Amendment. Before ratification of the 17th Amendment it’s unlikely that a Senate committee would have needed to raise the sort of question posed by Senator Coburn during confirmation hearings on Elena Kagan’s nomination to...
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Abandoning our western heritage of Judeo-Christian religious morality has pushed us toward social and economic disintegration. Guy Sorman’s City Journal essay deals primarily with the European Union. But his assessment applies equally to the United States. Our deficit spending and huge national debts, on both sides of the Atlantic, have their root cause in...
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Marxian economic dogma explains why liberal-progressives, the Obama administration in particular, push for restructuring our constitutional government to concentrate more power in the hands of labor unions and the Federal government. Marxian economic dogma has been emphasized to an increasing degree in our colleges and universities, even in our high schools, since Franklin Roosevelt’s...
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The housing market is the most recent of many examples of the failure of Obama’s stimulus plans to revive the economy by repealing principles of human economic behavior. Predictably, the still vastly overbuilt and over-supplied housing market drops dead, as it should, when not artificially supported by socialistic government subsidies. The Wall Street Journal...
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A central tenet in liberal-progressive-socialism is re-directing allegiance from the family as the primary social unit and elevation of the political state as the sole source of individual well-being. Ultimately fathers' role in this social paradigm is relegated to anonymously furnishing sperm to donor banks.
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The Obama administration continues the nation’s travels, since Franklin Roosevelt’s socialist New Deal in the 1930s, along what Friedrich von Hayek called The Road To Serfdom. The fundamental thrust of liberal-progressive-socialist governments such as that of President Obama is to abrogate the rights of private property, aiming at the holy grail of their secular...
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Right or wrong, the charges against Goldman Sachs highlight divergent standards of banking. There is every reason to suspect that the charges against Goldman Sachs are little more than a political ploy by the administration to shift attention away from its own financial improvidence and to add impetus to its proposed regulatory strangulation of...
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Liberal-progressives, almost universally, misuse the terms Nazi and Nazism. Liberal-progressives reflexively use the term Nazi to denigrate anyone or any point of view they dislike. Doing so is the equivalent of civil rights activists seeking to damn Ku Klux Klan members by calling them Abolitionists. The name Nazi, apparently unknown to liberal-progressives, is a...
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The commonly used definition is wrong. News reporters, editorialists, academics, and liberal-progressive politicians generally deny that the Obama administration is socialistic. Socialism, they say, is a political state in which the government owns the means of production and distribution of goods and services. Because some businesses still are privately owned, ipso facto, ours is...
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