“Don’t you think you’ve gotten more conservative?” HBO comedian Bill Maher says he has been asked.
“No, I haven’t,” he replies. “The left has gotten goofier.”
“Yes,” podcaster Joe Rogan agreed.
“It’s not me who has changed. I feel I’m the same guy,” Maher told Rogan. “But five years ago, we hadn’t spent six trillion dollars to stay home. Five years ago, no one was talking about abolishing the police. There was no talk about, you know, pregnant men.
“Looting was still illegal,” added Maher.
“If someone had said 20 years ago, I’m not sure looting is a bad thing,” he offered, “I would have opposed it then.”
While it’s great to see someone confront extremist nonsense when it rears its ugly head — notably, in his own tribe — it is worth noting that none of this came out of nowhere. The official, public debt of the federal government was just under $20 trillion right before the Trump era. Now it’s over $30T. Throwing money at problems was a standard Democratic mode of politicking for decades. (One embraced by Republicans, too.) And throwing money at everybody in the form of a “Universal Basic Income” was advocated for at length by Democratic candidate Andrew Yang on Maher’s own show — a mere four years ago.
Democrats also have long been accused of being “soft on criminals.” But “abolishing the police”? Sure, it’s nutty, especially as advocated by Marxists, but such notions have been percolating on campuses for 50 years.
Still, Maher sees what his fellow “liberals” cannot — that absurdity remains absurd, and funny,even when perpetrated by one’s own side. Derisive laughter usually directed at Republicans must be welcomed when aimed at the bozos in the Biden Administration — not least of whom is our befuddled Bozo-in-Chief.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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5 replies on “Looting Is a Bad Thing”
If you through in the unfunded government liabilities for both state and federal debt, the actual debt of the United States is somewhere north of $240 trillion. A little over three times all the money in all the economies in the world.
Which is why they really “have to” devalue the dollars.
I hate spell check
I agree. ESPECIALLY on spell check. And auto-correct.
“Universal Basic Income”
You probably know that there are pilot programs in CA to give a basic income of $1000 / month. 1000 people will be selected in Los Angeles & can receive these monies for 5 years.
More government dependency and planned inflation.
Many relatively liberal thinkers, such as Milton Friedman, have argued that UBI (universal basic income) would be a less corrosive transfer programme than those now in place. But, as Timothy Virkkala notes, if UBI is adopted, it will not replace those programmes, but join them.
The real-world purpose of transfer programmes is the buying of votes with resources confiscated from other people. (Some of these votes come from direct recipients of the transfers, some from family members of those recipients, and some from those who somehow feel virtuous because they cause other people to pay for things.) Programmes are expanded so long as the votes bought are expected to be more than the votes lost.