Democrats are Increasingly the Anti-Science Party

Curt Schilling the Science Guy
From climate change to restrooms, Democrats are increasingly the anti-science party.


By
William McGurn April 25, 2016 6:42 p.m. ET

Let us stipulate that ESPN, as a private institution, was entirely within its rights to have sacked Curt Schilling for his combative Facebook post on the continuing national saga that is North Carolina restrooms. Let’s stipulate too that the way the former Red Sox pitcher advanced his case—sharing a meme featuring a grotesque fat man in a blonde wig pretending to be a woman—was not the line of argument that, say, William F. Buckley would have chosen.

But let us also note the irony. Mr. Schilling’s main contention—“a man is a man no matter what they call themselves”—is supported by DNA and those pesky X and Y chromosomes. In short, in this fight between science and authority, Mr. Schilling is in the amusing position of being the Galileo, with ESPN filling in for the Holy Office.

Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital, puts it this way: “Curt Schilling is of course correct with the science in saying that claiming to be a woman when you have the chromosomal and anatomical structures of a man does not make you such. You’re still a man no matter what you think or how you dress.”

It’s an interesting detail that has gone largely unaddressed since Mr. Schilling delivered his knuckleball. Nor is it hard to see why. For it contradicts the dominant narrative in which Democrats take their positions from a clear-eyed look at the science while Republicans are blinded by their religious, social and economic orthodoxies.

This was the trope Barack Obama invoked in his maiden inaugural address, when he promised to “restore science to its rightful place.” Well, the American people have now had almost eight years of it. Turns out that restoring-science-to-its-rightful-place comes with its own set of dogmas and orthodoxies.

It’s not just letting men into women’s restrooms, either. On a host of issues, upholding the progressive catechism these days apparently requires seeking out and punishing heretics too.

Start with climate change. It may well be, as Barack Obama declared in Paris in December, when he committed the U.S. to the global war on temperature, that “99.5 percent of scientists and experts” believe man-made climate change a fact and that “we have to do something about it.” His eventual presidential successor, he suggested, must never question this consensus.

Is there anything more inimical to the spirit of science than the idea of squelching further inquiry, freezing our existing understanding in place and silencing opposition? Because this is precisely what such phrases as “settled science” or “scientific consensus” are designed to do.

Indeed, in this climate (pun intended), we now have moves to criminalize scientific dissent. Only last month, a collection of state attorneys general met with activists to discuss ways to go after Exxon for its alleged heterodoxy on global warming.

Which hints at the real game, which is less about the earth’s warming than the hope that green enthusiasms can be used to push through a progressive economic and regulatory agenda with few questions asked. As Ottmar Edenhofer, the then co-chairman of Working Group III of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, put it a few years back: “We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

Or take abortion. In progressive dogma, the right to abort a fetus is not only settled science but settled law, which means you’re not only not allowed to question it, you must not stray from the approved vocabulary.

For example, if a couple is happy about a pregnancy, the two are perfectly free to share sonograms with friends and relatives and celebrate the pending arrival of their unborn child. But if this child is to be aborted, any talk of “person” or “child” becomes verboten, lest folks get too accurate an idea of what is happening.

Alas, even the truest believers slip up. So it was earlier this month on NBC’s “Meet the Press” when Hillary Clinton—who has in this election dumped the word “rare” from the earlier “safe, legal, and rare” Clinton formula on abortion—referred to the “unborn person” as having no constitutional rights.

Pro-lifers condemned her, as expected. As perhaps unexpected, she was also attacked by her pro-choice allies for uttering the words “unborn person.” Whatever position one takes on abortion, to say that the fetus is a person if the mother wants it and it’s not if she doesn’t is not science. It’s spin.

Each election season, the American people are treated to Republican candidates who fumble badly when challenged on, say, evolution or abortion. Fair enough. But the president and his allies also have orthodoxies that limit their openness to free inquiry and objective reality. The difference is these go largely unchallenged outside the conservative press.

Wouldn’t it be entertaining if someone would ask President Obama if Curt Schilling is right or wrong about the science?

Hypocrisy - Clinton Foundation Pays Female Executives 38 Percent Less Than Male Counterparts

 Just to be clear, pointing to a gap in total 'female vs. male' numbers and claiming discrimination isn't a legitimate way to evaluate compensation by gender.  Unfortunately, it's what 'fair pay' advocates do all the time, but apparently they fail to apply their biased standard to their own organizations.

Clinton Foundation Pays Female Executives 38 Percent Less Than Male Counterparts

Guy Benson | Apr 14, 2016

The "of course" piece of that headline is, needless to say, a reference to the many other "pay gap" violations of which Hillary Clinton has been guilty over the years. Under the Democrats' clumsy calculations, she has under-paid women in her Senate office and at her State Department. The Daily Caller documents the latest transgression. Why must the Clinton Foundation wage this brutal, mean-spirited war on women? Are they unsatisfied with their separate war on transparency and good government? Questions abound. Details:

Male executives at the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation earn 38 percent more than women executives, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of the foundation’s latest IRS tax filings. The foundation’s 2013 IRS form 990 reveals that nearly three times as many men as women occupy the executive suites at the Little Rock, Arkansas-based foundation. On average, top male executives at the foundation earn $109,000 more than the top female executives with positions in the C-suite.

The piece goes on to note that Mrs. Clinton was out beating the drums on this very "issue" earlier in the week, highlighting the fact that the presumptive Democratic nominee timed her campaign launch last year to coincide with the annual made-for-politics "equal pay day:"

Clinton has called for a multi-pronged effort to close the gap, starting by passing the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would add some teeth to the 50-year-old Equal Pay Act by preventing employers from retaliating against workers who share wage information. She’s also called for a higher federal minimum wage and new laws requiring employers to provide paid family and medical leave (she and her opponent Bernie Sanders agree on that front). “I feel like [equal pay] is something that’s long overdue but I know we’ve got to keep moving forward,” Clinton said. Equal Pay day this year falls on the one-year anniversary of the launch of Clinton’s presidential campaign. At the kickoff event held in New York City that day, Clinton promised to keep pay parity front and center in her bid for the Democratic nomination. “It is way past time to end the outrage of so many women still earning less than men on the job — and women of color often making even less,” she said. “This isn’t a women’s issue. It’s a family issue.”

As for Clinton's hypocrisy, Democrats will indignantly link to various fact-checkers who've "debunked" the numbers, explaining that the calculations involved are somewhat cherry-picked and fail to take important factors into account.  Which is exactly the point.  Lefties do precisely the same thing when they wield deeply misleading "X cents on the dollar" statistics as a cudgel to hammer Republicans who oppose their latest pointless, coercive government "solution" to a problem that they deliberately inflate with bogus numbers, derived from wildly simplistic math.  As we've documented in the past, the alleged 'pay gap' almost entirely vanishes when the data is analyzed in a thoughtful, nuanced way -- and that most of that gap is due to women's choices, as opposed to discrimination.  But because Democrats only apply nuance to themselves, Republicans can be forgiven for responding in kind and asking why the Clinton Foundation hates women, and not just as it relates to the mega-bucks it pulls in from undisclosed foreign donors and authoritarian regimes with terrible records on women's rights.  Should Hillary Clinton pay a political price for this two-faced nonsense?  Sure.  Will she?  In light of Donald Trump's extraordinarily horrendous ratings among female voters, it seems unlikely.  I'll leave you with this data point on married women, a demographic Republicans traditionally win.  Yeesh:

Equal Pay Day and the 23% gender pay gap myth

Some thoughts on Equal Pay Day and the 23% gender pay gap myth 

Mark J. Perry 

The American Association of University Women (AAUW), along with the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE), are major participants in the feminist propaganda machine that mobilizes its forces every April and engages in statistical misrepresentations to publicize the annual feminist holiday known as Equal Pay Day. Last April, AAUW executive director Linda D. Hallman sent a mass email that made this verifiably false statement (emphasis added):

Think about it: Women have to work almost four months longer than men do to earn the same amount of money for doing the same job. What’s more, we have to set aside a day each year just to call the nation’s attention to it.

Hallman’s statement is a statistical fairy tale because it’s based on the false assumption that women get paid 23% less than men for doing exactly the same work in the exact same occupations and careers, working side-by-side with men on the same job for the same organization, working the same number of hours per week, traveling the same amount of time for work obligations, with the same exact work experience and education, with exactly the same level of productivity, etc. In other words, the AAUW, NCPE, progressives, and gender activists falsely assume that employers all across America are using coupons like the one above to get a 23% wage discount for every woman they hire, and it’s that rampant, unjust and blatant gender discrimination that is the culprit behind the gender pay gap.

For example, Sen. Gary Peters (MI-D) said at this time last year that (emphasis mine): “Today, April 14th marks Equal Pay Day, the date by which women have made up for the wage discrimination they suffered during the previous year.” That’s complete statistical nonsense.
The reality is that you can only find a 23% gender pay gap by comparing raw, aggregate, unadjusted full-time median salaries, i.e. when you control for NOTHING that would help explain gender differences in salaries like:

1. Hours Worked: The average man working full-time worked almost two more hours per week in 2014 compared to the average woman, see my analysis here.

2. Type of Work: As I reported a few days ago, men represented 92.3% of workplace fatalities in 2014 (and the male share of job-related deaths has been consistently that high in every previous year) because men far outnumber women in the most dangerous, but higher-paying occupations like logging, mining and roofing that have the greatest probability of job-related injury or death. In contrast, women, more than men, show a demonstrated preference for lower risk occupations with greater workplace safety and comfort, and they are frequently willing to accept lower wages for the greater safety and reduced probability of work-related injury or death.

3. Marriage and Motherhood: a) single women who have never married earned nearly 94% of male earnings in 2014 (but that does not control for anything else like hours worked, age, experience, education, occupation, etc.); b) more women than men leave the labor force temporarily for child birth, child care and elder care, and c) women, especially working mothers, tend to value “family friendly” workplace policies more than men, according this Department of Labor study.

Most economic studies that control for all of those variables conclude that gender discrimination accounts for only a very small fraction of gender pay differences, and may not even be a statistically significant factor at all. For example, as Andrew Biggs and I pointed out in a 2014 WSJ op-ed:

In a comprehensive study that controlled for most of the relevant labor market variables simultaneously—such as that from economists June and Dave O’Neill for the American Enterprise Institute in 2012—nearly all of the 23% raw gender pay gap cited by the UUAW can be attributed to factors other than discrimination. The O’Neills conclude that, “labor market discrimination is unlikely to account for more than 5% but may not be present at all.”

On Equal Pay Day, when groups like the AAUW and NCPE point to a 23% unadjusted gender pay gap and demand that the pay gap be completely closed, what they are really saying is that they want women to:

• Work longer hours on average like men do;
• Work in riskier, less safe occupations like logging and commercial fishing like men do where the chances of getting injured or killed are much greater;
• Work in more physically demanding occupations like farming, construction, roofing, logging and working on oil rigs, where they’d be working alongside men outside in 100 degree weather in the summer and below zero weather in the winter;
• Accept fewer jobs in family-friendly workplace environments like teaching elementary school that coincide with their children’s schedules (with summers off, etc.), and accept more jobs in less family-friendly workplace environments like being an over-the-road truck driver or being an oil field worker.
• Take less time off, or no time off, for child birth and child care to minimize their time away from the labor force that might affect their earnings.

Bottom Line: Those who publicize Equal Pay Day and demand that the unadjusted 23% pay gap be reduced to zero are unknowingly really advocating that men and women play completely interchangeable roles in the labor market and identical roles in their family responsibilities; and that’s an outcome I don’t think most women (or men) really want. As the Department of Labor concluded in 2009, “The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.” They also concluded that “the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action.”

As I concluded on my recent related post, once we adjust for all of the factors that contribute to the raw difference in pay by gender, Equal Pay Day actually probably fell close to December 31 of last year. Or maybe the first week of January…. but NOT the second week of April. Women should be embarrassed by the economic myth that is annually perpetuated on their behalf by Equal Pay Day, which suggests that gender discrimination in the labor market burdens them with 14 additional weeks of work to earn the same income as their male counterparts earned the previous year – when that’s not even remotely true.

Ask Hillary Clinton Why Abortion Is A ‘Difficult Decision’

Ask Hillary Clinton Why Abortion Is A ‘Difficult Decision’
When Hillary Clinton labels abortion ‘difficult,’ she concedes almost every argument of the pro-life movement.

By Hans Fiene
April 8, 2016

During Hillary Clinton’s recent appearance on ABC’s “The View,” co-host Paula Faris asked the presidential candidate about her assertion that an unborn person has no constitutional rights. Clinton, never missing an opportunity to proclaim her commitment to restriction-free abortion on demand, responded with the following words:

“Under our law that is the case, Paula. I support Roe versus Wade because I think it is an important — an important statement about the importance of a woman making this most difficult decision with consultation by whom she chooses: her doctor, her faith, her family. And under the law and under certainly that decision, that is the way we structure it.”

Clinton’s response was, of course, hardly surprising, as pro-choice politicians have spent a few decades labeling abortion a “difficult decision” to derail any conservative attempts to limit access to it, because everyone knows that government bureaucrats are woefully unqualified to make difficult decisions for you. Well, government bureaucrats are perfectly capable of deciding for you that providing flowers for a gay couple’s wedding doesn’t violate your religious beliefs, but everyone knows that once “difficult decisions” migrate from the heart down to the uterus, government bureaucrats can no longer be trusted.

Why Is Abortion a Difficult Decision?

What was also unsurprising about this exchange on “The View” was that Faris neglected to parse Clinton’s response. The “difficult decision” verbiage is, after all, rather par for the political course at this point, so it’s understandable that your average journalist wouldn’t try to discover something new hidden in a phrase that’s been tossed around approximately eleventy billion times since 1973.

Within the heart of that phrase dwells a monstrously self-defeating implication that ought to be obvious to any journalist striving for a modicum of objectivity.

But within the heart of that phrase dwells a monstrously self-defeating implication that ought to be obvious to any journalist striving for a modicum of objectivity. Therefore, as a challenge to any journalist desiring to cover the abortion issue fairly, I beg they ask Clinton or any other politician who tosses out the “abortion is a difficult decision” line the following question: Why is abortion a difficult decision?

After all, the difficulty spoken of here is obviously one of a moral nature, and most medical procedures are not steeped in moral difficulty. They may be difficult in the sense that you are afraid to undergo them, but they’re not difficult from a right versus wrong perspective. A woman may ask her priest to pray with her before undergoing an appendectomy out of fear, for example, but she’s not going to ask him to pray with her out of guilt for expelling the inflamed organ from her digestive system. Likewise, no woman lays awake the night before cancer treatment wondering if she’ll be guilty of a mortal sin for letting doctors kill her tumor with radiation.

So if abortion is just a medical procedure not substantially different from these procedures, why is it a difficult decision? If the thing that a woman is having removed from her body is just a clump of her own cells, less essential to her health than the tonsils or gall bladder she’s already had yanked out, what’s the big deal with removing some unwanted goo from her uterus?

Surely Hillary Clinton would find it silly if a woman broke down in tears telling her husband or pastor that she has an abscess molar and needs his help deciding whether it’s right for her to get it removed. So what makes abortion so different? Why is abortion a difficult decision?

It’s Difficult Because We Don’t Want to Kill People

The answer is obvious. Abortion is a difficult decision because this medical procedure results in a dead baby. Choosing to have an abortion is morally difficult because a woman has to weigh her desire not to give birth to a child with her desire not to kill the child that she’s already conceived. When a teenage girl is terrified of her parents’ anger and rejection, abortion is a heart-wrenching decision to consider because it promises to take away her fear, but only at the cost of ending the innocent life in her womb. When a young woman is filled with sorrow as she considers having to put her education or career on hold due to an unexpected pregnancy, abortion is a heavy thing to consider because, while it promises to give her back the life she wanted to make for herself, it also charges a price for that freedom that her conscience will never be able to pay off.

Defending the legality of abortion while acknowledging its moral indefensibility is ultimately an untenable position.

Quite simply, when Hillary Clinton labels abortion “difficult,” she concedes almost every argument of the pro-life movement—that life begins at conception, that abortion takes an innocent human life, that taking innocent human life is wrong, and that guilt is the natural result of sinning so greatly against our most vulnerable neighbor. The only pro-life argument Clinton refuses to concede, of course, is the conclusion—namely that, for the sake of both women and their unborn children, abortion should be illegal.

But as I’ve argued before, defending the legality of abortion while acknowledging its moral indefensibility is ultimately an untenable position, and those who are firmly committed to their respective sides in the abortion debate will not tolerate rhetoric that erodes their positions from the politicians who are supposed to be on their side, as evidenced by the response to Clinton’s original comments from many on the Left who recognize that there’s only so long you can concede that the unborn are persons before you can’t justify keeping it legal to tear their bodies apart in the womb.

Maybe Hillary Clinton Really Wants to Celebrate Abortion

So no matter where journalists stand on Roe v. Wade, it would benefit everyone for them to mine the words “abortion is a difficult decision,” that standard little phrase Clinton and others always use to justify abortion. The American people, after all, have the right to choose their next president, but we can only make an informed decision if journalists ask the questions we don’t have the opportunity to ask, and get the answers we desperately need.

We can only make an informed decision if journalists ask the questions we don’t have the opportunity to ask, and get the answers we desperately need.

So ask. “Why is abortion a difficult decision? Is it because abortion takes an innocent human life? Is that what you believe is happening?”

I’d be very interested in hearing Clinton’s response. Since she’s a longtime supporter of Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry, I’d imagine Clinton would initially hem and haw about these questions being above her pay grade before being told to adopt the more stable position that abortion is not something sad that we allow but something empowering that we celebrate, a position that would make it much easier for voters to understand her position on the issue and consider how well it represents their own.

But, then again, perhaps she’d surprise me. Perhaps if caught flat-footed on national television, perhaps if forced to see the implicit pro-life concessions in her phrasing without her handlers being able to whisper them away in her ear, Clinton could have the scales fall from her eyes and see that choosing to have an abortion is a difficult decision because the thing being aborted is a living, human child who deserves to be treated with dignity and love and doesn’t deserve to die simply for the crime of being inconvenient.

Perhaps in that moment, Clinton could see that the reason abortion fills women’s hearts with difficult emotions is because those women feel they have no option but to take a life that neither they nor God wants to see taken. Perhaps if asked to explain why abortion is morally problematic, Clinton’s devotion to scripted answers would give way to an overwhelming desire to be honest and she’d concede, “You know what, maybe I’ve been wrong. Maybe if abortion is such a difficult decision, it shouldn’t be completely unrestricted. Maybe, as I did with gay marriage, I need to reevaluate my position.”

Granted, I know that expecting a career politician to have an ideological conversion on live television is rather foolish. But, just like an unborn person who has no constitutionally protected right to life in Clinton’s eyes, I can always dream.

Minimum Wage Activist Interview

Interesting interview with a $15 minimum wage activist. This is a great example of how the minimum wage discussion is totally divorced from logic, economics, and value delivery. The activist does not recognize or care that she is imposing costs on owners and customers and that forcing owners to pay more in wages than workers deliver in productivity will result in layoffs or automation.  A small group will be better off, but a much larger group will be worse off in terms of higher prices, fewer profits to reinvest in the business, and lost jobs.  In economic terms, a 'dead weight loss' results, and total value created is reduced.

I wish Neil had asked her how they arrived at $15 as the proper minimum wage. I guarantee she would have answered that is 'fair' or would provide a 'living wage' - her answer would have nothing to do with business economics or her delivering $15 worth of productivity.   

It's disappointing that workers are being misled in this way. They are being told this will be a great catalyst, that their increased spending power will grow the economy and everyone will benefit. Clearly, that's not how wages work. If it worked that way, then $15 is way too low - it should be $100/hour or more. When workers are (over)paid more than they produce (including higher-paid workers), that inefficiency is a drag on growth and actually constrains resources that would otherwise be used to expand business and create more jobs. 

All that has been accomplished here is to make a lucky few low-skilled workers marginally better off at the expense of their counterparts who now will be fired, replaced, or unable to take advantage of opportunities that don't exist because resources were wasted overpaying the lucky few.

It's already happening.

No, Bernie Sanders, Scandinavia is not a socialist utopia

No, Bernie Sanders, Scandinavia is not a socialist utopia


By Jeff Jacoby Globe Columnist October 15, 2015

When Bernie Sanders was asked during CNN’s Democratic presidential debate how a self-proclaimed socialist could hope to be elected to the White House, he gave the answer he usually gives: Socialism has been wonderful for the countries of Scandinavia, and America should emulate their example.

“We should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people,” Sanders said. When the moderator turned to Hillary Clinton, she agreed that America has to “save capitalism from itself” and that, yes, Scandinavia is great. “I love Denmark,” declared Clinton. It was the only time in the debate a candidate uttered the verb “love.”

Liberals have had a crush on Scandinavia for decades. “It is a country whose very name has become a synonym for a materialist paradise,” observed Time magazine in a 1976 story on Sweden. “Its citizens enjoy one of the world’s highest living standards. . . . Neither ill health, unemployment nor old age pose the terror of financial hardship. [Sweden’s] cradle-to-grave benefits are unmatched in any other free society outside Scandinavia.” In 2010, a National Public Radio story marveled at the way “Denmark Thrives Despite High Taxes.” The small Nordic nation, said NPR, “seems to violate the laws of the economic universe,” improbably balancing low poverty and unemployment rates with stratospheric taxes that were among the world’s highest.

Such paeans may inspire Clinton’s love and Sanders’ faith in America’s socialist future. As with most urban legends, however, the reality of Scandinavia’s welfare-state utopia doesn’t match the hype.

To begin with, explains Swedish scholar Nima Sanandaji, the affluence and cultural norms upon which Scandinavia’s social-democratic policies rest are not the product of socialism. In “Scandinavian Unexceptionalism,” a penetrating new book published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, Sanandaji shows that the Nordic nations’ prosperity “developed during periods characterized by free-market policies, low or moderate taxes, and limited state involvement in the economy.”
For example, Sweden was a poor nation for most of the 19th century (which helps explain the great wave of Swedish emigration to the United States in the 1800s). That began to change as Stockholm, starting around 1870, turned to free-enterprise reforms. Robust capitalism replaced the formerly agrarian system, and Sweden grew rich. “Property rights, free markets, and the rule of law combined with large numbers of well-educated engineers and entrepreneurs,” Sanandaji writes. The result was an environment in which Swedes experienced “an unprecedented period of sustained and rapid economic development.” In fact, between 1870 and 1936, Sweden had the highest growth rate in the industrialized world.

Scandinavia’s hard-left turn didn’t come about until much later. It was in the late 1960s and early 1970s that taxes soared, welfare payments expanded, and entrepreneurship was discouraged.

But what emerged wasn’t heaven on earth.

That 1976 story in Time, for example, went on to report that Sweden found itself struggling with crime, drug addiction, welfare dependency, and a plague of red tape. Successful Swedes — most famously, Ingmar Bergman — were fleeing the country to avoid its killing taxes. “Growing numbers are plagued by a persistent, gnawing question: Is their Utopia going sour?”

Sweden’s world-beating growth rate dried up. In 1975, it had been the fourth-wealthiest nation on earth (as measured by GDP per capita); by 1993, it had dropped to 14th. By then, Swedes had begun to regard their experiment with socialism as, in Sanandaji’s phrase, “a colossal failure.”

Denmark has come to a similar conclusion. Its lavish subsidies are being rolled back amid sharp concerns about welfare abuse and an eroding work ethic. In the last general election, Danes replaced a left-leaning government with one tilted to the right. Loving Denmark doesn’t mean loving big-government welfarism.

The real key to Scandinavia’s unique successes isn’t socialism, it’s culture. Social trust and cohesion, a broad egalitarian ethic, a strong emphasis on work and responsibility, commitment to the rule of law — these are healthy attributes of a Nordic culture that was ingrained over centuries. In the region’s small and homogeneous countries (overwhelmingly white, Protestant, and native-born), those norms took deep root. The good outcomes and high living standards they produced antedated the socialist nostrums of the 1970s. Scandinavia’s quality of life didn’t spring from leftist policies. It survived them.

Sanandaji makes the acute observation that when Scandinavian emigrants left for the United States, those cultural attributes went with them and produced the same good effects. Scandinavian-Americans have higher incomes and lower poverty rates than the US average. Indeed, Danish-Americans economically outperform Danes still living in Denmark, as do Swedish-Americans compared with Swedes and Finnish-Americans compared with Finns. Scandinavian culture has been a blessing for native Scandinavians — and even more of one for their cousins across the ocean.

No, Scandinavia doesn’t “violate the laws of the economic universe.” It confirms them. With free markets and healthy values, almost any society will thrive. Socialism only makes things worse.Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jeff_jacoby.

North Carolina Fights Federal, Corporate Blackmail Over Trans Bathroom Law

Corporations are free to take their business to whomever they choose (how ironic - I thought they could be forced to provide a service on demand as a condition of them being 'open for business').  The government, however, is a different matter.  The President is using the threat of withholding federal money to enact policy over a state beyond his Constitutional reach.  That is a gross misuse of power.  The federal government does not have an 'open bathroom' policy as far as I'm aware, but the President feels it's appropriate to meddle in a state's decision on the matter.

North Carolina Fights Federal, Corporate Blackmail Over Trans Bathroom Law
President Obama and major corporations are threatening North Carolina with millions in lost funds for passing a law to ensure equal access to sex-specific bathrooms by both sexes.


By D.C. McAllister
April 4, 2016

North Carolina’s Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, which requires people to use the bathroom that matches their biological sex and not their preferred “gender identity,” has been maligned across the nation as “anti-LGBT,” but the law isn’t discriminatory at all.

The state legislature passed and the governor signed the Privacy and Security Act after the Charlotte City Council voted to require businesses to allow a man into a women’s restroom, shower, or locker room if the men want. According to governor’s office, “this ordinance would have eliminated the basic expectations of privacy people have when using the rest room by allowing people to use the restroom of their choice.”

The Charlotte ordinance, which had been soundly defeated in the past but was pushed through this year despite opposition from parents, businesses, and pro-women groups, brought up serious questions about privacy, as well as safety concerns that perverts posing as transgender people could take advantage of the law to harm others.

North Carolina’s action is not isolated. It is one of at least 37 states where cities and towns cannot pass regulations that exceed the authority given to them by the state. In passing the bathroom ordinance, Charlotte was exceeding its authority and setting rules that had ramifications beyond the city. According to the state, “the legislature acted to address privacy and safety concerns if this ordinance was allowed to go into effect on April 1.”

The backlash has been heated as the legislature has been accused of passing a bill that violates the rights of LGBT citizens. In response, Gov. Pat McCrory published a list of “Myths vs Facts” about this common-sense privacy law. He makes 18 very important points, including that the bill does not “limit or prohibit private sector companies from adopting their own nondiscrimination policies or practices,” “take away existing protections for individuals in North Carolina,” prevent businesses from allowing “transgender individuals to use the bathroom, locker room or other facilities of the gender they identify with, or provide other accommodations,” or “prohibit towns, cities or counties in North Carolina from setting their own nondiscrimination policies in employment.” In addition, “This law simply says people must use the bathroom of the sex listed on their birth certificate. Anyone who has undergone a sex change can change their sex on their birth certificate.”

President Obama is currently considering whether he thinks the new law is a reason to axe North Carolina’s federal aid for schools, highways, and housing. Title IX funding is being threatened, even though a court has already ruled in Virginia that schools should not lose Title IX funding for not allowing transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice. According to this ruling, McCrory is right that NC won’t lose the funding. This decision, however, is being appealed.

No one is being denied use of a bathroom, and private businesses are free to do what they want.

Obama’s threat in the name of “civil rights” puts pressure on North Carolina to repeal the law. Experts say this is unlikely, but Obama’s review of the pro-privacy act puts North Carolina on notice, as has happened in other states. Such a threat would make sense if the law were actually discriminatory, but it isn’t since men and women are being treated equally—both have equal access to bathrooms according to their actual sex. No one is being denied use of a bathroom, and private businesses are free to do what they want.

Despite this fact, big companies, such as American Airlines, Lowe’s, Google, Apple, and the NBA have denounced the law. ESPN, which has been considering Charlotte Motor Speedway for its summer X Games, has said it embraces diversity and inclusion and will “evaluate all its options.”

Facebook, which has a data center in North Carolina, says it’s “disappointed by the recent events in North Carolina.” The NCAA, which has men’s basketball tournaments planned in North Carolina through 2018, has stated that it is “monitoring the situation.”

Obviously, there is a full-court press of intimidation being leveled at North Carolina for standing up for a common-sense privacy law. This hysteria over HB2 shows the power LGBT militants and their sycophants in Hollywood and big business exert over the minds of Americans, which results in nothing less than propagandized groupthink rooted in mass delusion.

Threatening a state that wants to protect those rights is a form of bullying that borders on fascism.

Forcing businesses to allow men into women’s bathrooms (and vice versa) and violating real privacy rights and then threatening a state that wants to protect those rights is a form of bullying that borders on fascism—a point Tammy Bruce made when LGBT activists made threats against owners of a pizza shop in Indianapolis.

“For us to put on to these small business owners this kind of totalitarian boot is clearly us becoming the monster we were fighting against,” she said. “This kind of bullying, this kind of fascism in the name of equality doesn’t make sense.”

Libertarian journalist John Stossel agrees, saying in an interview with Bill O’Reilly that the homosexual “movement has moved from tolerance to totalitarianism. It’s the totalitarianism of the Left.”

The Ultimate End: Expanding Government Power

When the governor of New York said he was going to ban travel of public employees to North Carolina because of the pro-privacy law, McCrory called him out for his ludicrous declaration.

If you stand with North Carolina, you stand for states’ rights, individual liberties, actual civil rights, and common sense.

“Is the type of democracy we’re going to have where you go to Cuba and then you tell citizens not to come to North Carolina?” McCrory asked. “First of all, a lot of New Yorkers already moved to North Carolina, have made North Carolina their permanent home. I’m sorry, Gov. Cuomo, but that’s a fact. Maybe it’s because we believe in just common-sense privacy laws, and by the way we also are against any types of discrimination, but that doesn’t mean we overturn basic common-sense expectations of privacy that men and women and children expect when they go to a locker room or a restroom or a shower facility. This is ridiculous.”

It is ridiculous. The Charlotte ordinance that started all this would have forced businesses and schools to open bathrooms to anyone according to their self-perceived gender identity, violating the safety and privacy of women and children. The state of North Carolina rightly stepped in, because this is a valid pubic safety issue, and restored the rights of North Carolinians as well as protecting women and children, something the gay mafia dismisses in the name of its militant agenda.

Now, the Obama administration is trying to exert authoritarian control over a sovereign state in the name of civil rights when no civil rights are being violated. This is really what’s at the heart of transgender laws—not equal protections of transgender people, but the growth and power of the state.

Anyone who supports this kind of totalitarian overreach or cheers the boycott of North Carolina has drunk the Kool-Aid of leftist bullies. If you stand with North Carolina, you stand for states’ rights, individual liberties, actual civil rights, and common sense. The NC governor needs to be supported, not attacked, and encouraged not to cave to the dictates of the gay mafia as other governors have done.

“The bottom line is that it will take real courage to stop the machine of government abuse of power, a machine the gay mafia has such a hand in promoting,” writes Senior Contributor to The Federalist Stella Morabito. “GOP governors who refuse to respect the will of the majority of the people of their states by caving to LGBT tactics of extortion may think they are protecting their state’s economy and reputation. They may even feel gratification when the mafia pats them on the back for cooperating, and congratulates them for ‘nothing happening’ to the nice state they got there. But that will prove to be nothing but a temporary illusion for those governors and their states. And as such things always go, the children will suffer the most.”

Trump + Function of Federal Government

Yet again proving that Trump is not a conservative, check out his answer to a question at CNN's town hall last night:

Q: "In your opinion, what are the top 3 functions of the United States Government"

A: (Paraphrase) National Security, Healthcare, Education

Does any conservative (or libertarian) believe the federal government should oversee healthcare and education? Nearly all Republicans believe healthcare and education would benefit from less federal government intrusion, not more.

I understand it's too late now, that the train has already left the station, but how is it this man is leading the Republican primary?  Add to the fact he never discusses the proper role of the federal government, its limitations, or the importance of the Constitution as a guiding framework.

So disappointing.  In fairness, at the 2:20 mark, right after he says the government should provide housing (?), when Anderson Cooper asks him if the power to oversee education should devolve to states, he says 'absolutely', then babels on about 'concept of the country'.  This continues to reinforce my belief that he doesn't value federalism and limited federal government - he sees all levels of government as a single force.  Either that, or he's making it up as he goes along. Either way, it's not good for those who support a restrained federal government that ensures freedom for all.

70 Tries After Seattle Raised Its Minimum Wage, I Still Can’t Find A Job

Only those unfamiliar with the laws of supply/demand are surprised by this story.


70 Tries After Seattle Raised Its Minimum Wage, I Still Can’t Find A Job
States nationwide are beginning to join the ‘Fight for $15.’ My job experience in Seattle, Washington helps illustrate why that’s a bad idea.

By Mitch Hall
March 29, 2016

Over the weekend, lawmakers and labor unions in California, the nation’s most populous state, reached a tentative agreement to gradually raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour over the course of the next several years.

Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown had opposed prior legislative proposals over the issue, but finally acquiesced after labor unions garnered enough support last week to qualify an initiative for the Nov. 8 ballot. The deal still has to go through the state legislature, but most anticipate legislators will approve it, thus avoiding the costly campaigning that would result from a squabble at the ballot box.

California’s compromise comes as part of a growing national movement to hike up minimum wages across the county. Indeed, over the past two years, a whole host of states and cities have rapidly pushed through legislation to raise their base pay, likely in response to President Obama’s repeated calls for higher wages.

Twenty-nine states have minimum wages that exceed the federally mandated $7.25 per hour. Heading into the 2016 election, the issue remains hotly contested and politically potent, with Republican presidential candidates in fierce opposition to, and Democratic candidates in strong support of, a dramatic increase in the federal minimum wage.

While many cities have forced local employers to pay artificially higher wages, the issue remains far from settled. Just last month, for instance, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley signed a bill prohibiting Alabama towns from increasing their wages above the state’s, a move that came in response to the Birmingham City Council voting to raise their city’s base pay to $10.10 an hour.

In stark contrast to the reaction from California, many have since decried Alabama’s bill (Hillary Clinton’s campaign even characterized it as “disturbing“). Yet while opposition to wage hikes may be politically unpopular, more states should consider adopting laws like Bentley’s before it’s too late. As California’s deal demonstrates, the “fight for $15” is moving beyond just cities and towns. It now has the power to influence policy at the state level.

Jobless in Seattle

My opposition to minimum wage increases comes as a direct result of my own experience searching for jobs as a new resident of Seattle, Washington, a city that currently has one of the highest minimum wages in the nation. In June 2014, the Seattle City Council, composed of just nine members, unanimously voted to increase the city’s base pay to a whopping $15 an hour, to be gradually implemented over the course of several years.

I’ve spent the majority of the last two months stalking online job sites and entire days traversing the various neighborhoods of Seattle.

On January 1, 2016, the newly mandated minimum wage rose to $13 for larger companies (those that have more than 500 employees in the United States), and $10.50 for smaller employers (those with fewer than 500 employees in the United States). On top of this, Washington state law now requires businesses to adhere to this minimum even for tipped workers, a rule that only six other states have on the books.

In December, I found myself needing a break from college, for a variety of reasons. So at the close of last semester, I decided (rather impulsively, as young people are wont to do) to take my spring semester off from the College of William and Mary and move out west to try my luck in Seattle, a place I had only visited once before.

My parents, although grateful to have one less semester of ridiculously high out-of-state tuition to pay for, let me know that I’d need to fund the venture myself. I had secured an internship in the Seattle area, but it was unpaid, so I knew I’d have to find additional part-time work very quickly.

Having a combined two years of serving experience and close to five years of total experience in the customer and food services industries (which is literally as much as you can ask for from a 20-year-old college student), I assumed I’d be able to find a restaurant gig in no time. So, after reassuring my parents all would be well in the financial department, I boarded a plane in Philly a few weeks later and made the move.

Yet seven weeks and more than 70 job applications later, I still have yet to land a part-time, minimum wage job. I’ve spent the majority of the last two months stalking online job sites and entire days traversing the various neighborhoods of Seattle, filling out applications and inquiring about job opportunities at any restaurant, coffee shop, retail store, or other service-oriented establishment I can find.

Having squandered all of the money I had saved to get myself through what I thought would be a brief job-hunting period, I now find myself faced with the reality that if I don’t find work very, very soon, I’ll have to cut my break short and move back to the East Coast.

Higher Wages Mean Higher Stakes

At first, I was utterly dumbfounded by my lack of success, and figured only bad luck was to blame. After all, I had been hired at every single one of my past serving jobs within only a day or two of searching and applying. I’d have to find something in Seattle eventually, I thought; I’m young, competent, and college-educated, and serving is by no means a highly skilled occupation that requires degrees or extensive training. I know how to make a good impression with prospective employers, and I already have years of experience in the food services industry. What more could these people want?

Employers, especially in the restaurant and food services industries, are far less willing to take chances on who they hire with so much money on the line.

But soon enough it became clear, through talking with potential employers and local college students also trying to find work, that my failure to land a job was likely due, at least in large part, to Seattle’s absurdly high minimum wage.

Employers, especially in the restaurant and food services industries, are far less willing to take chances on who they hire with so much money on the line. I was shocked to learn that some restaurants—comparable in quality to the ones that hired me with little or no experience on the East Coast—here required a minimum of three to five years of restaurant experience, even for support staff positions like hosts and bussers. I had multiple managers glance at my resume, see that my past jobs were seasonal or temporary, and tell me upfront that unless I could commit to at least a year of labor, they simply wouldn’t hire me, despite my qualifications.

Contrast this with my past experience working in Pennsylvania and Virginia, states that have a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour for non-tipped workers and a base pay of $2.13 per hour for positions that do receive tips. To the uninformed observer, this situation looks a lot worse than the progressive system Washington has put in place, and admittedly, after taxes most of my paychecks came out to little more than $0.

But in reality this wasn’t an issue, because the tips easily made up for the hourly wage I was missing. Working 30 hours a week, I was able to bring home around $500 per week, which translates to about $17 per hour and $26,000 a year. According to the Foundation for Economic Education, this is just about enough to keep a family of four above the poverty line. That’s only part-time work. A full-time server in your average successful restaurant would be able to make even more than that.

Working 30 hours a week, I was able to bring home around $500 per week, which translates to about $17 per hour and $26,000 a year.

Restaurateurs in states with the $2.13 per hour minimum wage requirement have much more opportunity for variety in their hiring practices, for the cost to train someone is little, and the tip-based salary incentivizes individual employees to improve on their own while allowing the business to keep most of its profits. They can usually hire year-round, and can afford to choose from a much more diverse applicant pool. This is likely why I was able to secure my first restaurant job, when I was 18 years old and had no prior serving experience, as a summer employee in a busy Mexican restaurant.

Even for other industries dominated by minimum-wage jobs, such as retail, maintenance, construction, and transportation, a $7.25 hourly rate allows for similar hiring diversity, and also enables a company to take on twice the amount of employees as it would be able to in a $15 minimum-wage state. It should surprise no one, for instance, that nearly all of the states with the most minimum-wage employees are in the South, an area where only two states—Florida ($8.05 per hour) and Arkansas ($8.50 per hour)—have minimum wages above the federally mandated $7.25.

Given this, it makes sense that Seattle employers forced to pay the new minimum wage even to tipped employees only feel comfortable hiring highly qualified prospects who can prove on paper they’ll be a safe long-term investment. These restaurateurs and store managers don’t want to risk hiring a relatively inexperienced young adult they’ll have to spend precious time and money training, and who may easily grow complacent in the job once he realizes he’ll get paid $13 an hour no matter the extent of his stay or the quality of his job performance.

Who Makes the Minimum Wage?

Higher minimum wages favor people who have already made a career out of these jobs—or, in other words, the very people minimum wage jobs are not intended for.

Political pundits and proponents of minimum wage increases predicate their arguments on the false notion that the majority of minimum wage-workers are poor breadwinners who depend exclusively on their jobs for survival. Indeed, to garner support for reform, the Left often cites the fact that a family of three or four cannot live on the $15,080 annual income a full-time employee theoretically makes with the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

The typical minimum wage worker is someone like me: a young adult who’s working part-time to make money supplemental to an existing (family) income.

Democrats frequently tout this point and deploy their new favorite term “living wage” to purposefully obscure the reality that most minimum wage workers do not, in fact, rely on their entry-level jobs to fully support themselves or their families.

The most recent statistics by the Pew Research Center support this assertion. According to the 2014 research, 50.4 percent of all minimum-wage workers are ages 16 to 24, 64 percent work only part-time, and 55 percent are employed in the leisure and hospitality industry (including food preparation and other service-related jobs). The majority are white (77 percent), and well over half (62 percent) are women. In other words, the typical minimum wage worker is someone like me: a young adult who’s working part-time to make money supplemental to an existing (family) income.

The overall share of hourly paid workers earning minimum wage or less has also significantly decreased over the past few decades: in 1979, they represented 7.9 percent of all wage and salary workers, whereas today they represent only 2.6 percent of that demographic. With such a small percentage of the working population earning base pay or below, it’s unlikely that increasing the federal minimum wage by 50 percent or 100 percent would do much at all to improve the overall poverty rate.

Minimum Wage Hikes Hurt Those They’re Intended to Help

Basic economic logic lends credit to arguments against minimum wage hikes. If employers now have to pay their employees twice the amount they used to, they have two options: reduce the number of their employees, or raise the prices of their products—a move that drives down business and thus leads to job elimination anyway.

If employers now have to pay their employees twice the amount they used to, they have two options: reduce the number of their employees, or raise the prices of their products.

In Seattle, this is exactly what’s been happening. As research from the widely respected American Enterprise Institute explains, early evidence from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) suggests that “since last April when the first minimum wage hike took effect: a) the city’s employment has fallen by more than 11,000, b) the number of unemployed workers has risen by nearly 5,000, and c) the city’s jobless rate has increased by more than 1 percentage point.”

Thanks to the growing cost of labor, fast food prices are currently on the rise in Seattle, and restaurants here and in other cities are now considering getting rid of tipping altogether, proposing they instead increase their prices by 20 percent. While this might help restaurateurs pay their employees the new mandatory minimum, I can say from my own experience it would also likely dis-incentivize servers and diminish the quality of service.

Wage hikes not only force more people to compete for fewer positions, but they also pit people like me against older, more seasoned, and perhaps more qualified individuals who look a lot more attractive to Seattle employers.

I’m a young, educated, white male who comes from an upper-middle-class background. In other words, I’m exactly the type of person that society supposedly favors over all the rest. If it’s this difficult for me to land an entry-level, minimum-wage position, then what must it be like for more disadvantaged individuals, the very people compassionate liberals likely have in mind when they advocate for a spike in the minimum wage? Surely the poor inner-city teenager lacking education and job experience, or the struggling single mother who needs to work much more than just part-time to support her children, will lose out to other applicants even faster than I did.

The fact that cities like Seattle, and now states like California, can freely experiment with economic policy demonstrates the virtues of our nation’s federalist system. However, our local laboratories of democracy aren’t always foolproof. Sometimes, they get it wrong.

And I’ll bet my non-existent income that in time, the recent minimum wage hikes in cities and states throughout the country will provide further proof of this reality. Alas, in the meantime, my job search continues.

Healthcare costs rising faster than incomes

Remember when the President promised his healthcare law would save $2,500 per family?

Apparently that was about as true as when he said "If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan".

On Obamacare’s sixth anniversary, report finds premiums up 28 percent in five years

BY: Ali Meyer
March 23, 2016 2:20 pm

Health insurance premiums have increased faster than wages and inflation in recent years, rising an average of 28 percent from 2009 to 2014 despite the enactment of Obamacare, according to a report from Freedom Partners.

President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law on March 23, 2010, and Wednesday is the law’s sixth anniversary.

The Obama administration expressed concern in 2009 about skyrocketing health care premiums in a report entitled, “The Burden of Health Insurance Premium Increases on American Families.” They were concerned that premiums had increased by 5.5 percent from 2008 to 2009.

However, from 2010 to 2011 in the first year after Obamacare was enacted, premiums increased by 9.4 percent.

“In 2009, when the [Executive Office of the President] issued its report, states had seen premiums increase on average by 30 percent between 2004 and 2009,” states the Freedom Partners report. “But since 2009, health insurance premiums have continued to grow faster than wages in nearly every state, averaging a 28 percent increase from 2009 to 2014, resulting in a greater amount of disposable income being consumed by rising premiums.”

According to the report, while premiums increased by 28 percent from 2009 to 2014, wages increased by only 7.8 percent. From 2004 to 2009 when premiums increased by 30 percent, wages increased by only 12.2 percent.

The data also finds that health care costs have exceeded the rate of inflation. “The average annual cost of a family’s employer-sponsored health insurance policy was $17,545 in 2015, which marks a 4.2 percent increase from the 2014 average of $16,834, while the inflation rate remained low at 0.1 percent,” states the report. “With health care costs still rising faster than inflation six years after passage of the Affordable Care Act, it is clear that the law is not helping lower the burden of health care expenses for American families.”

Americans can expect their health care costs to rise again in 2017. According to Stephen Parente, a scholar at the University of Minnesota, each type of health care plan on the exchanges can expect to see an average premium increase of 7.3 percent for families and 11 percent for individuals.

“The Administration claimed the ACA would bend the cost curve, but our report shows it bent in the wrong direction—premiums didn’t slow down under the Affordable Care Act, they sped up,” said Nathan Nascimento, senior policy adviser at Freedom Partners. “No wonder the White House is trying to change the national conversation away from health care costs. By their own standards, the Affordable Care Act has failed.”

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

Government: Is it Ever Big Enough?

Garry Kasparov: Hey, Bernie, Don’t Lecture Me About Socialism. I Lived Through It.

GARRY KASPAROV

Why my rant against the Democratic candidate’s prescription for America went viral.

2016 seems like a strange time to be arguing the merits of socialism in an American presidential campaign. But it’s also strange for the prospective leaders of the free world to be talking about the KKK and their appendages, so clearly this year is not like any other. While the latter topics are, thankfully, beyond my purview, I have a great deal of interest in socialism.

Last week I expressed some of these thoughts on Facebook after hearing a clip of “democratic socialist” candidate Senator Bernie Sanders on Super Tuesday. This was already a rarity, considering how little time the networks have left after their blanket coverage of Donald Trump’s latest outrages. My post on the nature of socialism was 113 words long, a quick response to critics of a cartoon I had posted of Bernie Sanders wearing a baseball cap reading “Make America Greece Again.”

My goal was to remind people that Americans talking about socialism in the 21st century was a luxury paid for by the successes of capitalism in the 20th. And that while inequality is a huge problem, the best way to increase everyone’s share of pie is to make the pie bigger, not to dismantle the bakery. Much to my surprise, my little rant went viral, as the saying goes. Instead of the usual few hundred Facebook shares, this paragraph quickly reached tens of thousands. By the next morning it had reached several million people, more than any of the day’s political posts by the leading candidates. A week later and it has over 3,000 comments, 57,000 shares, and a 9.3 million reach that is in the category usually reserved for photos of pop stars and kitten videos.

My conclusion that “the idea that the solution [to inequality] is more government, more regulation, more debt, and less risk is dangerously absurd” apparently had great resonance, and I think I know why. There is a growing consensus that America has deep troubles, and no one can agree on solutions. Everyone agrees that Washington should change, and some want the government to do much more while others want it to do much less. Many of the traditional economic numbers say that America is doing fine, and yet polls say that Americans—especially Sanders supporters—are angry about the present and fearful about the future.

I often talk about the need to restore a vision of America as a positive force in the world, a force for liberty and peace. The essential complement to this is having big positive dreams at home as well, of restoring America’s belief in ambition and risk, of innovation and exploration, of free markets and free people. America transformed the 20th century in its image with its unparalleled success. American technology created the modern world while American culture infused it and American values inspired it.

In recent decades that storyline has flipped. The tireless work ethic and spirit of risk-taking and sacrifice have slowly eroded. This complacency was accelerated by the end of the Cold War and it has proved very difficult to overcome in the absence of an existential enemy to compete with. The booming innovation engine of job creation has fallen behind the accelerating pace of technology that replaces workers. The result has been slower growth, stagnant wages, and the steady shift of wealth from labor to capital. In such situations many people turn to the government for help and the siren song of socialism grows louder.

I respect and even like Bernie Sanders. He’s a charismatic speaker and a passionate believer in his cause. He believes deeply in what he is saying, which is more than what can be said about nearly every other 2016 candidate, or about politicians in general. I say this while disagreeing vehemently with nearly everything he says about policy. The “revolution” rhetoric of Senator Sanders has struck a chord with many Americans, especially the young voters who are realizing that their own lives are unlikely to match the opportunities and wealth of their parents and grandparents. They are being left behind in a rapidly changing world. It is a helpless, hopeless feeling.

The problem is with the proposed solutions. A society that relies too heavily on redistributing wealth eventually runs out of wealth to redistribute. The historical record is clear. It’s capitalism that brought billions of people out of poverty in the 20th century. It’s socialism that enslaved them and impoverished them. Of course Senator Sanders does not want to turn America into a totalitarian state like the one I grew up in. But it’s a valuable example of the inevitable failure of a state-run economy and distribution system. (Check in on Venezuela for a more recent example.) Once you give power to the government it is nearly impossible to get it back, and it will be used in ways you cannot expect.

The USSR collapsed because it couldn’t compete over time, despite its massive resources and devout ideology. The Soviets put a man in space before America but couldn’t keep up the pace against an innovating, free-market competitor. My Facebook post went around the world on technology created in America. The networks, the satellites, the software, nearly every ingredient in every mobile device and desktop computer, was invented in the USA. It is not a coincidence that the most capitalist country in the world created all these things. Innovation requires freedom of thought, freedom of capital, and people who believe in changing the world.

Yes, the free market can be cruel and it is by definition unequal. It has winners and losers. It also sparks the spirit of creativity that humanity desperately needs to flourish in our ever-increasing billions. Failure is an essential part of innovation and the free market. Of every 10 new companies, perhaps nine will fail in brutal Darwinian competition. A centrally-planned economy cannot imitate this engine of creative destruction because you cannot plan for failure. You cannot predestine which two college dropouts in a garage will produce the next Apple.

A popular rebuttal is to invoke the socialist leanings of several European countries with high living standards, especially in Scandinavia. Why can’t America be more like happy Denmark, with its high taxes and giant public sector, or at least more like France? Even the more pro-free-market United Kingdom has national health care, after all. First off, comparing relatively small, homogeneous populations to the churning, ocean-spanning American giant is rarely useful. And even the most socialist of the European countries only became wealthy enough to embrace redistribution after free-market success made them rich. Still, why cannot America follow this path if that is what the people want? What is the problem if American voters are willing to accept higher taxes in exchange for greater security in the embrace of the government?

The answer takes us back to all those inventions America has produced decade after decade. As long as Europe had America taking risks, investing ambitiously, attracting the world’s dreamers and entrepreneurs, and yes, being unequal, it could benefit from the results without making the same sacrifices. Add to that the incalculable windfall of not having to spend on national defense thanks to America’s massive investment in a global security umbrella. America doesn’t have the same luxury of coasting on the ambition and sacrifice of another country.

Who will be America’s America? What other nation could attract the brightest students, the biggest investors, the most ambitious entrepreneurs in the same way? Germany? Russia? Japan? China? India? Each may take over leadership in some areas if America continues to falter, but none is equipped to lead the world in innovation the way the United States has since Thomas Edison’s day. None possesses the combination of political and economic freedoms and the human and natural resources required.

The government does have a role in addressing rising inequality. I turn not to Denmark or Venezuela or, god forbid, to the Soviet Union. Instead let us look to the last great battle between labor and capital in America, between public and private power. Just over 100 years ago, President Teddy Roosevelt spoke loudly and used his big stick against some of the world’s largest corporations when they were abusing their monopoly power. His successor, fellow Republican William Taft, continued the antitrust mission, at least initially.

Both men dealt with critics from industry and Wall Street who called their use of government power against them “socialism” and both answered eloquently. In his 1908 State of the Union address, Roosevelt spoke about “the huge wealth that has been accumulated by a few individuals of recent years” being possible “only by the improper use of the modern corporation,” and that these corporations “lend themselves to fraud and oppression than any device yet evolved in the human brain.” He also warned against the accrual of unaccountable political power in the hands of “men who work in secret, whose very names are unknown to the common people.” You can easily imagine Teddy in the bully pulpit today calling for the breakup of the big banks and ending their cozy relationship with Washington.

To give credit, Senator Sanders supports breaking up the giant banking institutions that dominate American finance and politics in a way that would evoke jealousy from John Pierpont Morgan himself. However, Sanders’s socialist policies would replace banks that are too big to fail with a government that is too big to succeed.

Taft warned about exactly this in his 1911 State of the Union. Busting the trusts was to free the market, not to insert the government into it. It was necessary to break up Standard Oil and American Tobacco in order to preserve capitalism, not to institute socialism. Taft said, “The anti-trust act is the expression of the effort of a freedom-loving people to preserve equality of opportunity. It is the result of the confident determination of such a people to maintain their future growth by preserving uncontrolled and unrestricted the enterprise of the individual, his industry, his ingenuity, his intelligence, and his independent courage.”

Bravo! Beautiful words and an even more beautiful sentiment that is deserving of its own Facebook meme! Unfortunately, today’s progressive solution would instead be to raise Standard Oil’s taxes and those of its wealthiest shareholders in order to pay for more services, like free college and health care. It would have been an acceptable choice for many, but the American 20th century would never have happened.


Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation and the author of Winter is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped.

Bernie Sanders' Free Trade Mythology

Bernie Sanders' Free Trade Mythology

By Steve Chapman
March 10, 2016

Bernie Sanders' upset victory in Michigan came just two days after he stood on the debate stage in the perennially beleaguered city of Flint, Michigan, and decried the economic condition of the surrounding area. He put the blame where he, like Donald Trump, often puts it: on free trade.

"Do you know that in 1960, Detroit, Michigan, was one of the wealthiest cities in America?" he demanded. "Flint, Michigan, was a prosperous city. But then what happened is corporate America said, 'Why do I want to pay somebody in Michigan a living wage when I could pay slave wages in Mexico or China?'"

A pre-debate tweet from Sanders featured bleak photos of abandoned buildings and said, "The people of Detroit know the real cost of Hillary Clinton's free trade policies."

Michigan has seen more than its share of economic trouble, but the senator from Vermont is not the guy to explain it. The decline he lamented and the causes he cited didn't come close to coinciding. Many vacant buildings in the Motor City were vacant when Clinton was practicing law in Little Rock.

Michael Moore's documentary film "Roger & Me," about the calamitous shutdown of General Motors plants in Flint, came out in 1989 -- more than four years before the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect and long before China exported much of anything. Detroit lost more than a third of its population between 1960 and 1990.
Article Continues BelowA generation ago, the auto industry was competing not with companies in Mexico or China but with those in Japan. Toyota, Honda and other Japanese companies took sales away from the Big Three, particularly after the energy crisis of the 1970s, by offering cars that were more reliable and fuel-efficient.

They won over American consumers at a time when trade was far from free. President Ronald Reagan protected U.S. automakers by forcing "voluntary" limits on Japanese auto sales. Japanese trucks faced a 25 percent import duty -- which is still in effect.

The other changes that hurt the Michigan auto industry were not the product of trade agreements. One was the migration of production to other states, particularly those with right-to-work laws that impeded the powerful United Auto Workers union. Today most U.S. factories operated by Ford and General Motors are located outside of Michigan -- as is every plant operated by foreign automakers.

The other change came in the form of automation. Many of the jobs that have vanished in American car factories haven't moved abroad; they've gone to robots and other labor-saving machinery. Since 2000, when domestic auto employment peaked, the number of workers required to produce a given number of vehicles has fallen by more than one-third.

Breaking down trade barriers would actually help the American auto industry and those on the assembly lines. One major attraction of building cars in Mexico is that it has free trade agreements with 45 countries -- while the U.S. has free trade deals with just 20. Exporting to most of the world is easier there than here.

Bernard Swiecki, an analyst at the Michigan-based Center for Automotive Research, told Business Alabama why Audi recently decided to put a factory in Mexico instead of the U.S.: "If they export it, they save $4,500 per vehicle in tariffs they don't have to pay."

Sanders said Sunday that American workers shouldn't have to compete with "people in Mexico making 25 cents an hour." He's greatly exaggerating. U.S. automakers there pay $8 to $10 an hour.

That's a lot less than American autoworkers earn, but the wage gap doesn't matter as much as you might think. U.S. plants still roll out three times as many cars and trucks as their Mexican counterparts.

Sanders falls in a long tradition of trying to wall our economy off from the world. The AFL-CIO opposed the 1987 free trade agreement with Canada. The Vermont socialist would deny American consumers the better products and lower prices that such accords provide.

Those benefits are especially important to people of limited means, who spend a disproportionate share of their income on necessities. Yet many of these people have cast their ballots for Sanders and Trump.

If Michiganders went to Wal-Mart or Home Depot tomorrow and found the shelves stripped of everything made abroad, they would quickly grasp the upside of free trade. If either of the people they chose for president gets to the White House, that realization may come, but too late.

"Fair Share" of Taxes

Similar to prior years, the 'rich aren't paying their fair share' argument becomes more difficult when facts are introduced: 

• Top .1% of earners contribute 20% of all federal income taxes
• Top 1% of earners contribute 44% of all federal income taxes
• Top 20% of earners contribute 87% of all federal incomes taxes
• Previous articles also note that the % of income taxes paid by these groups also exceed their portion of total income (Top 1% take in x% of all income but pay more than x% of all taxes)
• 45% of all households pay $0 in federal income taxes

A few follow up questions:

• Given the data above, how do Democrats justify the 'Fair Share' argument?
• When will they be defining 'fair share'?  At the moment, it seems indistinguishable from 'more'
• When will republicans fight back against this ridiculous statement?  If anything, 'fairness' would call for increased contributions from less wealthy Americans...

45 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax







Many Americans don’t have to worry about giving Uncle Sam part of their hard-earned cash for their income taxes this year.

An estimated 45.3 percent of American households — roughly 77.5 million — will pay no federal individual income tax, according to data for the 2015 tax year from the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan Washington-based research group. (Note that this does not necessarily mean they won’t owe their states income tax.)

Roughly half pay no federal income tax because they have no taxable income, and the other roughly half get enough tax breaks to erase their tax liability, explains Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center.

Despite the fact that rich people paying little in the way of income taxes makes plenty of headlines, this is the exception to the rule: The top 1 percent of taxpayers pay a higher effective income tax rate than any other group (around 23 percent, according to a report released by the Tax Policy Center in 2014) — nearly seven times higher than those in the bottom 50 percent.

On average, those in the bottom 40 percent of the income spectrum end up getting money from the government. Meanwhile, the richest 20 percent of Americans, by far, pay the most in income taxes, forking over nearly 87 percent of all the income tax collected by Uncle Sam.

The top 1 percent of Americans, who have an average income of more than $2.1 million, pay 43.6 percent of all the federal individual income tax in the US; the top 0.1 percent — just 115,000 households, whose average income is more than $9.4 million — pay more than 20 percent of it.

When it comes to all federal taxes — individual income, payroll, excise, corporate income and estate taxes — the distributions of who pays what is more spread out. This is partially because nearly everyone pays excise taxes, which include taxes on gasoline, alcohol and cigarettes.

Capitalism Is Freedom

Capitalism Is Freedom; Socialism Is Slavery
John Hawkins | Feb 16, 2016


  "The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both." -- Milton Friedman

“If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying, ‘I'm from the government and I'm here to help.’” – Jonah Goldberg

In a time where consumers have almost unlimited choices of music, movies, websites and every product you can imagine in the supermarket, socialism is an outdated economic system that no longer fits with the world we live in. Socialism requires the intervention and control of the marketplace by an overwhelmingly powerful centralized government. It penalizes high achievers, rewards laziness and stifles choice.

Socialism is a government regulation that stops you from creating a successful business. It’s the Bureau of Land Management or the EPA making arbitrary decisions about what you can do with your own land. It’s the IRS taking the money you busted your butt to earn and giving it to people who didn’t work as hard as you did.

Almost every socialist policy requires taking resources from someone who’s earned them and giving them to someone who hasn’t. Even programs that are supposed to be self-funding rarely are because the juice is never quite worth the squeeze. The real reason we’re so deeply in debt is because if the middle class was forced to choose between paying for what our government is spending or dramatically cutting back, our government would already be much smaller than it is – and no wonder.

What does our government do well anymore? Do you trust the IRS? FEMA? Are our borders secure? How does the customer service of the post office or DMV compare to, let’s say Apple or Amazon? Who wants to live in government housing? Who wants a minimum wage job? Who wants to answer to bureaucrats, jump through their hoops and do as he’s told by people who see him as a nameless, faceless slob dependent upon them for his livelihood?

This is what socialism offers.

Socialism will take something from someone else who earned it and give it to you and in return, you will do what socialists want you to do. If you’re irresponsible, lazy, have a habit of making poor decisions or just need a master, this can seem like a good deal. You can work a menial job and get paid more than you’re worth! You can go to college and you don’t have to pay for it! Someone else will give you a place to live, food stamps, welfare and health care! In return, you just have to give up on your pride, your dreams and control of your own life.

People who can take care of themselves don’t need socialism and most of those who have difficulty taking care of themselves would still be better off under a more capitalistic system. The more capitalistic an economy is, the faster it grows. The faster an economy grows, the more jobs and wealth are created.

Eighty percent of humanity lives on less than $10 a day. Meanwhile, 96% of the poor in America have televisions, 93% have microwaves and 81% have cell phones. Ultimately, it’s the economic growth produced by capitalistic policies that has allowed America’s poor to do so well compared to the poor in more socialistic nations. Paradoxically, the more we move towards socialism in the name of “helping” the poor, the less poor Americans will ultimately have. That’s because the more regulations, the more taxes and the more GOVERNMENT a country has, the slower its economy grows.

Socialism requires a gargantuan government so it can confiscate property, control behavior and manage an always growing list of programs to achieve “fairness.” Unfortunately, “fairness” is a will-o’-the-wisp that can never be caught because human beings have different levels of talent, skill and effort.

The factory worker who spent 30 years working his way through the ranks to become regional sales manager should make more than the new guy who just started yesterday. The man who spent 10 years building his own successful business should make more money than his employees. The man who invested every extra dime he had and does well should make more money than the fellow who used all his extra money to buy a bigger car and nicer furniture for his house. Socialists say, “Not so fast. Maybe those guys should make more money, but they’re making too much money. We should control how much they make. We should decide how much of their money they get to keep. We should control how much of their money is given away and to whom.”

On the other hand, capitalism is freedom. Capitalism says you should do what you want to do with your own time and either suffer the consequences or reap the rewards. Sure, we might all cooperate to create a military and a police force along with building sewage systems, roads, street lights and stop signs and a few other necessities, but beyond that, let everyone rise and fall as he deserves.

If you want to get a four year degree in women’s studies at an Ivy League university? Great, pay for it yourself. You want to live cheaply and work a second job so you can save up money? You should be able to do that and someone else shouldn’t get the benefits from your hard work. If you want to spend your twenties as a beach bum, surfing all day and sleeping in a tent at night, you can do that, but no one else should be asked to help pay for your lifestyle.

Having real freedom means you get to make real choices and when that happens, some of those choices will work out better than others. The only way to change that is to build a massive government apparatus that makes everyone poorer in return for reducing the amount of natural inequality that will happen when people are allowed to pursue their wildly differing hopes and dreams.

Capitalism is not perfect, but it won’t bankrupt the country, it doesn’t reward failure and it can’t control you like socialism. To the contrary, in a capitalist system, businesses benefit from voluntary transactions. Do you want to get rich in a capitalist system? Find a way to give people what they want. If you’re just okay at it, you can make a decent salary. If you’re as good at it as Henry Ford or Bill Gates, you can become rich beyond imagination.

Do you want to get rich in a socialist system? Be well connected. Make friends or just pay off people who can give you government contracts. Make contributions to politicians so they’ll change the laws to help you and hurt your competitors. Get the government to take money from other people and give it to you as part of a bailout.

Which sounds more admirable? Which sounds healthier for our country? When you give the government unlimited power to create “equality,” you also give it the power to tilt the playing field towards corrupt businesses that have every incentive to try to take advantage of it.

At the end of the day, socialism is for slaves who are willing to give up their freedom for promises that they’ll be given some minimal level of support no matter what. On the other hand, capitalism is for people who want the freedom to rise or fall based on their own effort. If you know which type of person you are, then you know whether you should be a capitalist or a socialist.