“Socialism typically seeks to transfer wealth to the poor, as in the case of Marx’s formulation; but socialism does not do so by definition. The definition of socialism is collective, communal ownership of the means of production and administration for the collective benefit. Depending upon how the collective benefit is imagined, socialists may be quite willing to throw the needy under the bus, in pursuit of some aggregate good.”
–DKM
And then she makes a claim that increasing numbers of astute observers make: “That’s only the tip of the iceberg.” She goes on to suggest that Medicare, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and “many other welfare programs” constitute a huge hunk of fraud.
The solution? “If we want less fraud,” she argues, “we need less government.”
Fraud and big government seem to go hand in hand. At least this kind of big government, which resembles the biggest kind of government imaginable. For taking wealth from many productive American citizens and giving it to a small but growing population of refugees from distant lands, that’s not necessarily fraud, I suppose, but it is something close to socialism.
We see in Venezuela just how devastating rule by thieving socialists can be. (Hugo Chavez nationalized oil industry infrastructure and then ran it into the ground.) In Minnesota and in other states of the union, we see a similar ethic. When done on a limited basis, we could call it “helping the poor,” the folks who just cannot produce what they need. That’s how transfer socialism was sold to us.
And they could say, truthfully, that’s not full socialism.
But extending the beneficiary class from our most needy friends and neighbors to the less-and-less needy, and then to waves of refugees from other countries, that’s a recipe for disaster. Like socialism when “full.”
How far should Americans go to help “others”? To our own ruin?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The welfare State is a lie and the idea that the State generates wealth is also a lie. The State generates nothing; the State only destroys wealth and all it does is steal it from others to distribute it among friends.
President Javier Milei, “Tucker Carlson asks Argentina’s new president what advice he’d give to Trump, and his answer is applause-worthy,” The Rubin Report (November 22, 2023).
January 12, 1967, Dr. James Bedford became the first person to be cryonically preserved with intent of future resuscitation.
Cryogenic preservation for future revival of brain and somatic function has been a concept often used in science fiction, such as in the 1966 grade B horror film The Frozen Dead and the 1976 novel A World Out of Time — the latter in which author Larry Niven dubs the recipients of such treatment “corpsicles.”
As of September, Scott Lincicome and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon write, “more than half of all US imports (by value) were subject to one or more special tariff measures (i.e., classified in Chapter 99 of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States) and to the associated bureaucracy.”
Though there has been legal action against Donald Trump’s diktat-approach to tariff policy, the Cato authors don’t put much hope in these challenges. “Regardless of what the Supreme Court does with Trump’s ‘emergency’ tariffs, moreover, US tariff red tape will likely grow more this year, burdening US companies and the economy in the process.”
And growing red tape is a drag on economic growth. It is a prime strangler of growth.
But there is more than one challenge to Trump’s tariff mania. They’re not all equally feckless, are they?
The Supreme Court’s forthcoming decision in the Learning Resources Inc. et al. v. Trump case could significantly reduce the complexity of the US tariff system if the Court invalidates the Trump administration’s IEEPA tariffs. Such reprieve, however, would likely be temporary because the Trump administration has pledged to replicate the IEEPA regime through other executive tariff authorities, including through both Sections 232 and 301 measures, and previously unused statutes such as Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1934 and Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930. (Though, such authorities arguably have more built-in procedural and/or substantive checks than IEEPA does.) This system, in fact, might be even more complex than what we have right now.
It will therefore remain the case that a true reduction in tariff red tape will only be accomplished through congressional action to revise various US trade laws and reclaim the legislative branch’s constitutional authority over tariffs.
This needless complexity all comes back to Congress, which could fix it, but chooses not to. A familiar problem.
Also all-too-familiar is fundamental confusion about tariffs. For some reason, Americans don’t think of tariffs as taxes. But tariffs are just another form of taxation, of course, no matter what is popularly believed. And can anything show how far from the Reagan Revolution the Trumpian movement is than seeing Republicans rally around an enthusiastic taxer?
Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute. Liberty alone demands for its realisation the limitation of the public authority, for liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition.
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli, “Nationality,” in Home and Foreign Review (July 1862); republished in The History of Freedom and Other Essays (1907), p. 288.
On January 11, 1571, the freedom of religion was granted to Austrian nobility.
Two years earlier, the first recorded lottery in England was held.
In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the eleventh day of the first month of 1759, the first American life insurance company was incorporated.
On January 11, 1935, Amelia Earhart became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California.
On this date in 2003, Illinois Governor George Ryan commuted the death sentences of 167 prisoners on Illinois’s death row based on the Jon Burge torture/duress scandal.
Is it the worst initialism ever? “Operation Parris — Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening — will focus first on Minnesota’s 5,600 refugees who have not yet been given lawful status,” explains The Epoch Times in a Friday article.
“The operation will conduct thorough background checks, reinterview applicants for green cards, and explore merit reviews of the current refugee claims,” the article by Savannah Hulsey Pointer continues.
What’s at stake are billions in fraud. “Last month, a federal prosecutor suggested that more than half of the roughly $18 billion in federal funds supporting 14 programs in Minnesota since 2018 may have been stolen.”
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is expanding the scope of investigation into subsidies to individuals and families, saying “on Jan. 6 that California would be the next target.… The president alleged on social media that the Golden State could have more fraud than Minnesota.”
And in Congress, at Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on the subject, Rep. Brandon Gill (R‑TX) grilled Democrats’ witness Brendan Ballou, former Special Counsel at the DOJ, beginning with the ideologically based challenge, “does large-scale Somali immigration make Minnesota stronger or weaker?” The answer was “yes,” but further questions and answers didn’t make Mr. Ballou look so good. It’s mainly been shared for yucks.
New research finds that left-wing authoritarians — people that support socialist dictators … people that support censorship … [who] think there should be a committee to decide what you should be allowed to say — that it’s almost identical with narcissism. And you can sort of see why, which is that you have a strong sense of entitlement. I see this on the censorship stuff all the time. “Of course we — we the good people — should decide what you’re allowed to say and hear on social media platforms.” That’s a sense of entitlement; a sense of grandiosity; and then there’s a kind of psychopathy, or anti-social part of it, which is that they don’t even care or even think about the impact on other people.… They say they do. But really it’s about feeling powerful and domineering. So, lo and behold, the ideology that claims to be more caring and compassionate for the vulnerable actually ends up caring the least about them.
Michael Shellenberger on the Winston Marshall podcast, #009, “Worst Medical Scandal in History.” 1:57 mark or thereabouts.
On January 10, 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense.
You can read this classic on this site’s library.