Monday, July 24, 2017

Flip Your View on Foreign Affairs and Environmentalism

Herein lies the key to understanding why I believe government can never be the answer.
Here is the lesson in all of this: since the New Deal, progressives have told us that if the government gains control of an industry, it will be made equal so that there are no winners and losers. But, instead, there are still winners and losers—the only thing that changes is who chooses them. And if we have learned anything from the past several years, it’s that the government is never neutral.”
Please take just 2 minutes to think about world affairs from a non-US perspective.  I am not saying take the interests of other countries – just consider them so as to understand strategy.  It makes perfect sense for Kim Jong Un to want nukes and to act crazy.  It is the only thing that has prevented the US from taking him out and/or declaring war on North Korea like we did with Saddam in Iraq and Gadhafi in Libya amongst 5 or so other similar countries.  The quote below is written as if from the perspective of Kim Jong Un…
“The advantage of the guy who makes others think he is crazy is that he alters their expectations. Had I not seemed insane, just like my father, the great Kim Jong-il, the evil bourgeois Westerners would have launched a devastating surgical attack on my nascent nuclear program. But my nuttiness served as a deterrent. What they believed to be dementia was nothing more than my ‘Juche’ ideology, a nationalist self-confidence, my grandfather Kim Il-sung’s glorious contribution to socialism, which makes us indecipherable to foreigners.”

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Take the time to read this – it is critically important.

“It has been thought a considerable advance towards establishing the principles of Freedom, to say, that government is a compact between those who govern and those that are governed: but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with. The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.”

– Thomas Paine


Civil asset forfeiture is the most barbaric part of our government.  A very slippery slope …
“It really is the perfect way to steal. No need to go to Congress and seek a tax increase. Just stop people traveling on the highways and take whatever cash they happen to be traveling with.

And that’s the way asset-forfeiture or, more accurately, asset-stealing works — by simply taking money from people against their will, like with robbery.”

A better solution, Stossel points out, lies in legalizing the ownership of these protected animals, treating them as private property, aligning the incentives of the sellers with the animals themselves.  This is similar to those criticizing the cutting down trees in the rainforest not realizing the best thing they can do for this is to use more paper – not less.  People fail to understand markets at even the most basic level. 
Stossel sums it up brilliantly:

 “Market-hating environmentalists will love endangered animals to death.

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