It is a stern fact of history that no nation that rushed to the abyss ever turned back. No ever, in the long history of the world.
Taylor Caldwell, “Honoria” (1957); republished in The New American, Vol. 19, No. 20 (October 6, 2003).
On September 10, 1608, John Smith was elected council president of Jamestown, Virginia.
On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech about an “adversary that poses a serious threat to the United States of America.” Describing it as “one of the last bastions of central planning, governs by dictating five year plans,” and that “with brutal consistency it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas.”
The adversary? “The Pentagon bureaucracy — not the people, but the processes.” And he went on to state that the Pentagon could not account for more than $2.3 trillion.
And it’s not just a matter of increasing revenue. Remember that President Obama thought that increasing the capital gains rate was a good idea even if it decreased government revenue. Democrats are playing to a soak-the-rich sentiment among their base, even when the most important supporters are billionaires.
Take Mark Cuban. He’s a billionaire. And he supports Kamala Harris for president.
Weeks ago, the Democrat standard-bearer came out with a wild proposal to tax unrealized capital gains. And Cuban, for all his faults, is not an idiot; he knows just how incredibly corrosive that tax on capital would be.
“It would kill the stock market,” he points out.
In a chat with Fox Business, Cuban explained how he told Democratic insiders that taxing unrealized capital gains (as when stocks you hold gain value, but you haven’t sold them so you have no income from them), would become “the ultimate employment plan for private equity, because companies are not going to go public because you can get whipsawed, right?”
By this he means that a stock owner might have to borrow money to cover taxes, only to have the stocks go down later and enjoy neither rebate from the government nor any income from the investment to cover the debt.
Cuban insists that Democratic insiders are pragmatic and will not push this tax.
Yet, with both members (comrades?) of the presidential ticket spouting Marxist talking points, how do we know that they are stable (corrupt?) enough to save public capitalism from their malign agenda?
How can we be sure they’re just lying?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Note: Since unrealized capital gains aren’t income, I don’t know how taxing them could be constitutional. Perhaps someone can explain this to me.
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Propaganda must be total. The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means at his disposal — the press, radio, TV, movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing. Modern propaganda must utilize all of these media. There is no propaganda as long as one makes use, in sporadic fashion and at random, of a newspaper article here, a poster or a radio program there, organizes a few meetings and lectures, writes a few slogans on walls: that is not propaganda.
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1962).
On September 9, 1828, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born. Known most commonly in the English-speaking world as Leo Tolstoy, he became the celebrated author of the novels Anna Karenina and War and Peace, as well as the novellas and short stories such as “Family Happiness,” “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” and “The Kreutzer Sonata.”
His political and religious ideas heavily influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Tolstoy died in 1910.
Vice President Kamala Harris is a flip-flopper.
She changes her “policies” to fit . . . whatever the climate is.
It may be her most endearing trait.
Her latest? Plastic straws. She says they may remain legal.
Whoah.
But why?
Christian Britschgi explains at Reason.com: “People’s frustration with paper alternatives to plastic straws eventually saw support for straw bans subside. By 2020, the policy had become synonymous with liberal overreach. Conservatives and freedom-lovers rallied behind plastic straw use,” Mr. Britschgi wrote on Friday. “The Trump campaign even started selling Trump-branded plastic straws and singled out Harris’ support for straw bans in attack ads.”
So it’s no mystery why “Harris’ campaign handlers are reversing her past support for plastic straw bans.”
But isn’t this “a lot less consequential than Harris’ other policy switcheroos”? Britschgi thinks NO. “Harris’ history with plastic straw bans is a useful window into her evolution as a candidate.”
Paul Jacob has written about this sort of issue:
See also:
“How to Know” — January 5, 2019
I am fascinated by the idea that our civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.
Werner Herzog, Herzog on Herzog (2002).
On September 8, 1264, Boleslaus the Pious, Duke of Greater Poland, promulgated the Statute of Kalisz, guaranteeing Jews safety and personal liberties and giving battei din jurisdiction over Jewish matters.
On the same date in 1883, former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant drove in the final “golden spike” completing the Northern Pacific Railway in a ceremony at Gold Creek, Montana.
The political party that demands that every last street person, hobo, convict and illegal alien have it made easy to vote has also worked mightily, behind the scenes, to make sure that at least one candidate not appear on ballots. The maniest-many should vote, but not more than two should be voted for! “For months, Democratic National Committee-backed lawsuits were focused on preventing independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from appearing on ballots in multiple states,” begins Jeff Louderback’s Saturday article for The Epoch Times.
But the party’s tactics changed “on Aug. 23 when Kennedy announced he would suspend his campaign in battleground states and urge his supporters to vote for former President Donald Trump in those states.”
On August 26, in “RFKj+T,” Paul Jacob had explained why Kennedy had switched to backing Trump. Today Louderback explains the ramifications for the Democratic Party of that switch.
Kennedy’s idea of taking his name off the ballot in ten key, marginal states — voting populations that could go either way — has left the Democratic Party with a new stance: try to keep Kennedy on the ballots they had previously fought to keep him off of.
The new tactic has met with mixed success. “Wisconsin is currently the only state rejecting Kennedy’s withdrawal effort,” Louderback reports. “On Aug. 27, the Wisconsin Elections Commission voted 5-1 to keep Kennedy’s name on the state’s ballot. Kennedy filed a lawsuit challenging the ruling on Sept. 3.”
And so “democratic” politics goes on.
Right now we have a country with no president, and we’ve moved on. And what’s Taylor Swift doing?
Eric Weinstein speaking to Chris Williamson on the Modern Wisdom podcast, September 4, 2024.