And if yesterday’s rants about Commies weren’t enough for you, we have this excellent sentiment from the normally-imperturbable Glenn Reynolds, commenting on this bullshit:
Marxists are trash, who in a just world would be treated like Nazis, their moral equivalents.
I think I’ll ask him if I can make a t-shirt with that on it.
I’ve been wondering where Socialist POTUS-candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have been getting the foundation for their Lefty economic policy proposals because, frankly, neither strikes me as much of an intellectual heavyweight — Warren’s tokenist Harvard Law degree notwithstanding.
I wonder no more, and the headline to this article alone tells us why:
Two French economists from Berkeley advising Warren and Sanders on wealth tax
As the expression goes, it’s hard to see how you could fit much more annoying shit into a single sentence. As for their economic philosophy, we have this:
There are competing explanations for the rise in inequality. Those on one side argue that wealth concentration is natural as a result of globalization, technology gains, and economic growth, which give enormous rewards to the smartest, innovative, and most hardworking people. Drastically increasing tax rates, they say, would discourage innovation and hurt the economy.
The other camp sees rising inequality as unfair, immoral, and a threat to society.
Saez and Zucman are firmly in the second camp.
…
Saez, 46, and Zucman, 32, are both originally from France and have each worked in the past with Thomas Piketty, the famous French economist whose research on wealth and income inequality made him a best-selling author.
Ah, jeez. Piketty’s work is horribly slanted — it’s full of the Chomskyist research “methodology” so eloquently debunked by Bill Whittle, in that by taking a shovelful of beach sand and extracting a few black grains and discarding the rest, one can “prove” that all beaches contain not white, but black sand. Ditto Piketty, whose oh-so data-driven proposals for taxing wealth (as opposed to just income) were initially latched onto by many European governments:
So far, at least 15 European countries have tried wealth taxes. All but four, though, have repealed them, most recently Saez’s and Zucman’s homeland of France.
As we saw recently with Frogland, when their dotgov imposed more and more restrictions on wealthy Frenchmen, capital and its owners simply fled the country for more tax-hospitable climes.
Which of course means that despite the documented failure of such policies, our own home-grown Lefties like Warren and Sanders are keen to implement them Over Here.
But that’s the Left for you: never let facts get in the way of theory. And the Marxist “problem” of “income inequality” has proven to be, well, insoluble short of outright Leninism — confiscation of wealth and murder of an entire economic class (the kulaks) being the hallmarks thereof. (And for Lenin’s “kulaks”, read our modern-day Leninists’ “gun owners” as the disposable class, cf. Beto and Swalwell’s statements thereof.)
Which should tell you all you need to know about Warren and Sanders. It’s not just your guns they’ll confiscate: it’s your pension fund, your property and your livelihood as well.
Prove me wrong.
Apparently Bernie Sanders, socialist Senator and POTUS wannabe, had a heart attack on the campaign trail but survived after some pretty nifty (and quick) medical care — after which the Commie asshole had the nerve to bellow: “Medicare For All!” (his campaign slogan).
As Dan Greenfield has pointed out:
While Bernie’s timetable of getting an angioplasty within a day might not sound that impressive to Americans, in the British NHS system, the median time from assessment to treatment is 55.3 days. Mean times for treatment have been cited as being 80 days. The maximum NHS waiting time is supposed to be 18 weeks and almost 16% of patients in the UK have to wait more than 3 months for an angioplasty.
Canada’s socialist system has angioplasty waiting times of around 11 weeks. And that’s after you get an appointment to see a specialist.
…
Bernie waited a day in Vegas to get his angioplasty. In Norway, he would have waited 39 days.
In Finland, which Bernie has also cited as an inspiration for his socialist program, he would have waited 22 days. In Sweden, another favorite of American socialists, Bernie would have waited 42 days.
Greenfield also points out (and I paraphrase) that as President Sanders, the man who would have implemented socialized medical care, Our Bernie wouldn’t ever be subject to the same kinds of waiting periods imposed on others: oh no. He’d have been whipped into Bethesda Naval Hospital within the hour, and had an angioplasty a couple hours later.
Which is always the way with Communists: the ordinary people suffer while the nomenklatura get only the best. And under socialism, ordinary individuals’ lives are irrelevant as long as the principle is upheld.
Well, I wish the evil old bastard had croaked, just on principle.
FFS, are these clowns serious?
Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang said the United States may have to eliminate private car ownership to combat climate change during MSNBC’s climate forum at Georgetown University Thursday morning.
He told MSNBC host Ali Velshi that “we might not own our own cars” by 2050 to wean the United States economy off of fossil fuels, describing private car ownership as “really inefficient and bad for the environment.” Privately owned cars would be replaced by a “constant roving fleet of electric cars.”
Ah yes, it’s all about “efficiency” (a recurring motif for totalitarians) and the environment. And who will be the actual owner of this “constant roving fleet of electric cars”? You bet it will be the State, either local government or similar. (And just try to catch one of these electric Noddy cars to go to a gun show… “Forbidden destination; please choose another.”)
You have to give it to them: they’re going Full Lenin on this one. No private ownership of cars, and — duh — no private ownership of guns. And by the time they’ve implemented inflicted their third Five Year Plan on our economy, nobody* will be able to afford their own house, so we’ll all be living in State-owned apartments.
And Yang is supposed to be one of the moderate clowns?
This isn’t serious public policy; this is middle-school daydreaming — right up until one of these socialist assholes gets his/her/xeir hands on the levers of power, when blue-sky unicorn-fart dreaming will become the law of the land.
And then the joke will be on the rest of us.
*nobody except the nomenklatura, of course — they’ll still own houses, cars (and probably guns too).
…wherein I couldn’t be bothered to post anything more than a one-line comment.
1) Stanford pushes separate physics course for minority students — the problem won’t be finding “minority” students for these classes — I fully expect them to be dumbed down to 10th-grade level so as to pass as many as possible– but I’m more interested in where Stanford will find the minority lecturers to teach them. (Also: which minorities? Can we insist that Physics For Minorities 1.0 must include Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Persian and Jewish students instead of just the stupid minorities?)
2) Global Warming High Priest Loses Court Case — He refused to reveal his “source” data because it was all invented and he knew that it wouldn’t even stand up to scrutiny by a freshman Statistics class. Quelle surprise.
3) BritPM Politely Tells The EU To Eff Off — this after hearing that the U.S. will give them a quick, yuge and profitable trade deal. In essence, Boris said “No deal? No exit fee.” (The EU will have difficulty staying together without Britishland’s annual contribution, which is why they’re trying to stop Brexit, as any fule kno.)
4) Joe Walsh Announces Presidential Run — Hey, he warned us that he would, many years ago.
Couldn’t do much worse than any of the Socialist candidates, IMO.
5) Lefties Start Turning Towards Violence — …and Kim buys more ammo and goes to the range. (Incidentally, when I took the Browning High Wall .45-70 Govt to the indoor range a couple days back, I told the nervous young clerk that the bullet wouldn’t go through the back wall, but it might push it over. Only the laughter from the older guys stopped him from doing something silly.)
At some highbrow website or other, the question is asked:
Why Isn’t AOC Taking Blame For Violent Attacks On ICE?
Seriously?
FFS: the Communists haven’t yet taken the blame for the policies which killed millions of Ukranians in the famine of the 1930s — what makes you think they’re going to accept blame for their inflammatory speech now?