GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

How hypocritical and low is the Left? This low

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Bakers refuse a pro-Trump 9-year-old’s cake request.

When it becomes a thing, The Washington Post reveals the kid’s name, his hometown and his mother’s name. Also known as doxxing.

To be clear: I believe in freedom of association. I think the bakers should be able to refuse. Just like Christian bakers should be able to refuse the wedding cakes of gay couples.

But the Left takes the opposite view: that bakers shouldn’t be able to refuse any of the public. Fine, except for one very big thing.

Lefties care ONLY about making Christian bakers serve gays. When it comes to making ordinary bakers serve a kid who likes the President, the Left is nowhere to be found; or even doxxes the poor kid. Disgraceful!

Wednesday feel-good movies

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They’re short, I promise. 😉 Here’s President Trump saying recently, “In America, we don’t worship government; we worship God”. (If you’re an atheist or agnostic, focus on the first part: “We don’t worship government”.)

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ7MXj0ZHTg[/youtube]

Today’s world is a titanic struggle between those who worship government and those who don’t. I’ll never forget the 2012 Democrat convention, where delegates cheered and defended the neo-fascist slogan, “Government is the only thing we all belong to.” What’s above is the opposite.

A couple more. [Read more…]

Why socialism always puts bad people in charge

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In Monday night’s Venezuela post, our wise commenters said:

socialism doesn’t work because it is an unjust economic system. the people in power take things from people that work…

The wrong people will ALWAYS be in charge, because for socialism to work you have to have completely altruistic people in charge…

Yes. Except, it’s even worse than that 😉 The biggest problems with socialism are:

  1. It wrecks the Price Mechanism. Even if you had truly altruistic people in charge, such an economy still can’t function.
  2. Only bad-or-stupid people want a wrecked price mechanism. Thus, only bad-or-stupid people advocate socialism. And the bad people know how to shepherd the stupid people; thus, the bad people always end up in charge.

By Price Mechanism, I mean free markets discovering and signalling the prices of things. To review how that works:

  • All goods and services must be rationed, by one means or another.
    • because human needs are infinite
    • whereas human time (used to produce goods and services) is not
  • Markets ration things by having people pay a market price for the available supply.
    • If something is in short supply, those who have the highest “score” in terms of being both able and willing to pay, will get it.
    • “Willing” as in, free will / the person’s choice.
  • The market price moves up and down, accomplishing two big things as it does so.
    1. It coordinates people’s consumption activities. (Those who are unwilling or unable to pay for a thing at its current price, look for substitutes.)
    2. It coordinates people’s production activities. (As a thing’s price moves higher, it induces people to produce more of it.)
  • The coordination is spontaneous and responsive to changing conditions, because it is voluntary.
  • If you interfere with the price mechanism, you interfere with (or even block) that coordination.

OK, so the price mechanism is objectively great. It induces voluntary coordination among vast numbers of people – thus enabling the Division of Labor. Who would want to mess with that?

The answer is: People who gain by interactions that are not voluntary. People such as moochers, thieves, thugs, politicians and bureaucrats. People who lack the ability or willingness to produce. People who hope to live by altering or preventing market outcomes. People who think they can plan and control others better than those others can. People who are willing to gain by keeping others down.

In short: People who gain by dictatorship. Arrogant people who enjoy using force on others to prevent the peaceful activities and outcomes that people would otherwise create on their own.

That’s the nature of socialism. It’s not a noble ideal. It’s a curse, an evil. Like the Mafia, it’s always led by bad people because it *is* bad, in its nature. It can never be desired by people who are both good-hearted and knowledgeable. Therefore, it can never be led by them. And, even if it were somehow, it still wouldn’t function – because of the wrecked price mechanism.

This feeds into how the term “socialism” is defined.

  • An old, strict definition is: public ownership of the means of production.
  • But people today use the word with a much broader meaning: Any system where a governing authority intervenes in markets, preventing the market price mechanism from operating.

The socialist planners always proclaim their good intentions. And they always make things worse. And it’s not an accident or a failure to apply socialism; it’s inherent in socialism.

Wrecking the price mechanism kills spontaneous, voluntary coordination; and that’s the point of the thing. It’s why stupid-or-bad people love socialism. They WANT to control others and prevent market outcomes. It’s not a proverbial “unforeseen consequence”; it’s the point.

[Read more…]

For Ayn Rand fans: a ghost

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Perhaps you know Ayn Rand’s first novel, We The Living. It’s a story of two lovers, Kira and Leo, who try to survive together in the early Soviet Union. They fail, because of the myriad ways that communism (or dictatorship in general) degrades everyone and destroys their humanity.

You may also know that Rand based the character of Leo on a real person, a fellow anti-Soviet student in early 1920s Petrograd for whom she had an unrequited love. At the time, she was called Alissa Rosenbaum.

During her lifetime she wouldn’t give out Leo’s real name, but at some point after Rand’s death in 1982, her biographers/archivists figured it out. His name was Lev Bekkerman, and I recently web-surfed to this picture of him:

handsome photo of Lev Bekkerman

He is said to have been a tall, intelligent, self-confident womanizer, who had once hid some anti-Soviet students in his home. One reads that, sadly, Bekkerman was murdered in one of the Soviet political purges of the 1930s. By which time Rand had traveled to the U.S., married an American, and written and published We The Living (in English).

Life works strangely: if Bekkerman had returned her love, then Rand probably would have stayed in Soviet Russia – and been destroyed, much like Bekkerman and much like Kira and Leo in her novel. Instead, she came to America and became a great thinker and writer.

If anyone can read and translate the writing on the photo, please let us know what it says (in the comments).

Brexit: Marine Le Pen vs. the Clueless Elites

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Two contrasting items today, in the Establishment press.

In Foreign Policy magazine, James Traub says “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses”. Yes, that is the title of his article.

It’s a trashy piece, packed with elitist cliches and the occasional jaw-dropper (for example, when he refers to Washington’s infamous “K Street” lobbyists with approval). Yet it’s a tortured attempt to begin to face reality:

The issue, at bottom, is globalization. Brexit, Trump, the National Front, and so on show that political elites have misjudged the depth of the anger at global forces…

Actually no, Mr. Traub. Globalization, in itself, is not the problem. -Dictatorial- globalization wherein the political elites wrongly seek to enslave people, is the problem. But kudos to you, for beginning to tell the said elites that maybe there could be some sort of systemic problem.

A good contrast: In The New York Times, Marine Le Pen says “After Brexit, the People’s Spring Is Inevitable”.

British voters understood that… only one question, at once simple and fundamental, was being asked: Do we want an undemocratic authority ruling our lives, or would we rather regain control over our destiny?
[…]
More and more, the destiny of the European Union resembles the destiny of the Soviet Union, which died from its own contradictions.

There’s much more. As the saying goes, “Read the whole thing.”

UPDATE: Over at The Guardian, it’s even worse than the James Traub piece above. David Van Reybrouck’s article is titled “Why Elections Are Bad For Democracy” (yes, for real).

Starting from a blind premise that Brexit is obviously awful, he says “Voting is the problem” and suggests, in all seriousness, that citizen referenda should be replaced by focus groups (called “sortition” to make it sound nice and historical) which will be guided by the elite’s approved experts. (Via ZH.)

Brexit: passed by the working classes?

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It seems so.

As Britain voted to leave the European Union last week, the leader of the UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage said, “The election was won in my view in the Midlands and the North and it was the old Labour vote that came to us…” This morning, Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid puts some numbers on it:

In terms of socio-economic groups, 57% of ABs (upper/middle class – professional/managers etc) voted remain, 49% of C1s (lower middle class – supervisory/clerical or junior management/administrative), 36% of C2s (skilled working class) and 36% of DEs (Ds – semi & unskilled manual workers; Es – casual/lowest grade worker or state pensioner).

By implication, the ones who didn’t vote for Remain, voted for Leave. In other words, over 60% of rank-and-file British workers voted for the Leave campaign. (Note: ZH provides no link to the original. If you have a link to the original, please post it in the comments.)

We could take this interesting tidbit, if it’s true, in any number of directions.

  • Among workers, is this a rise of protectionism? Or is it a rise of appropriate national pride and common sense?
  • Is the recent day or two of market turmoil really just the ruling classes throwing a temper tantrum?
  • What should be made of all these leftists saying that Brexit passed because of old people, conservatives and racists? Are left-wingers name-calling their own base? The Party apparatchiks are mad at their base? Is the spat temporary, or something deeper?

UPDATE: Can there be any doubt that the EU hates democratic accountability? (Being accountable to the People it presumes to govern) One of its various Presidents, Martin Schultz, has now said:

“The British have violated the rules. It is not the EU philosophy that the crowd can decide its fate”.

I saw that coming.

A new day for Britain

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Congratulations to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Nothern Ireland for voting to leave the European Union. It seems real because it has prompted Cameron to resign.

The EU began in 1957 as the European Economic Community, originally a free-trade zone for western Europe. And that’s a good thing. Unfortunately, over the decades (and especially after it became the European Union in 1993), the EU devolved into an intensively oppressive bureaucracy that imposes endless, krazy regulations on its member states and, for practical purposes, voids democracy in them.

Britain should gain a brighter economic future from the separation. The “Remain” campaign, of course, tried to claim the opposite. Britain does massive trade with the rest of the EU, and the “Remain” campaign tried to scare voters that the trade will be lost. Which is ridiculous; the EU itself needs its British trade, and the example of Switzerland (not to mention China or the U.S.) proves that independent countries can do massive trade with the EU.

But it’s not just the economics: Separating from the EU (if that is now put into practice) should mean that Britain has regained an important part of its sovereignty and its democracy.

On a personal note: This event is a pleasant surprise for me. Despite the “Leave” campaign’s leading in many British polls, I was sure that the British-EU elites would manipulate the election so that “Remain” had to win. (Manipulate the voters and/or the voting, the counting, etc.)

In other words, I was sure that British democracy was already dead. Today’s news reminds me, in a happy way, that I don’t know everything. Just to put sprinkles on the ice cream, it’s also a well-deserved slap in President Obama’s face.

UPDATE:

UP-UPDATE: Cyril’s comment inspired me to adorn the post thusly:

keep calm and f--k socialism, on a Union Jack background

Irwin Schiff, R.I.P.

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This past week, we had news that Irwin Schiff passed away on October 16. Schiff was a U.S. veteran, author, heroic income-tax protestor and, sadly, a U.S. political prisoner.

photo of Irwin Schiff
Irwin Schiff, 1928-2015

Big Government advocates will sometimes claim that the U.S. tax system is voluntary. They say it because they want to deny the obvious: that government is force (by its nature, it operates by forcing people against their will) – and that, as advocates of Big Government, they do basically want a dictatorial, regimented society.

I’ve seen lefties making the “voluntary” claim in GP comments. But as a stronger example, here is Democrat leader Harry Reid saying, “Our system of government is a voluntary tax system…We have a voluntary system.” Because, says Reid, if you don’t pay taxes in the U.S., “You don’t go to jail.”

That “voluntary” claim is nonsense, in practice. Some people, such as Eric Garner in 2014, are hounded by the police for selling untaxed cigarettes and then fatally assaulted by the police. Others like Gilbert Hyatt may be hounded by State authorities for decades, although they paid all taxes in full. Others like perceived Tea Party groups may be blocked (silenced) by the IRS for their political beliefs, before they could even have a chance to file tax reports.

And those who refuse to pay income taxes due to their outspoken moral and constitutional principles, such as Irwin Schiff, are jailed – and then forced to die in jail from untreated cancer. So much for the U.S. system being “voluntary”. You can be a conscientious objector to the draft! But not to the federal income tax.

I could try to tell more of Irwin Schiff’s story, but Peter Schiff does it best in his article, Death of a Patriot. Read the whole thing.

And consider downloading and reading Irwin Schiff’s last book, The Federal Mafia: How the Government Illegally Imposes and Unlawfully Collects Income Taxes. It’s free.

It’s free because, during Schiff’s lifetime, the government enjoined him from selling it. That makes it a banned book; indeed, it’s supposed to be the only book banned in the U.S. in the last 50 years (other than libel cases).

The book also claims that the U.S. income tax system is voluntary. I must suggest that Mr. Schiff’s own experience shows that, as a practical matter, he was mistaken about that. But he covers the history of the income tax in the U.S. and the IRS’ own use of the word “voluntary”. As such, Schiff may well have been right about the underlying Constitutional principle, or what *should theoretically* be true under the U.S. Constitution (which today’s U.S. government flouts in many ways).

Anyway, the book’s unusual ban, and Schiff’s cruel death in federal prison, should tell you something about our government’s true priorities. Hint: It’s much more to do with protecting the government’s power and jobs, than protecting or serving you.

On the Difficulty of Being a Patriot (when your citizenry sux)

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Hi folks! (Jeff/ILC) I haven’t posted here for several months. Where have I been?

As a rule, I dislike negative people; I like problem-solvers and try to be one. But sometimes, even a problem-solver can get negative because problem-solving starts with acknowledging reality, and the reality may be very negative.

This is the situation I’m in, with regard to the United States of America. By my guess, Americans today fall into roughly four categories:

  • 25% good people. (Constructive people who see clearly and value liberty.)
  • 25% confused people. (Semi-good people who have been mis-educated with anti-freedom ideas. Some of these may live off the public trough, although they know they shouldn’t.)
  • 25% parasites. (People who expect to live off the public trough, claiming it’s right and they deserve it.)
  • 25% fascists. (People, usually leftists though not always, who actively want government to control more and more of everyone’s lives. Even speech, for example with speech codes.)

When I was a kid, things were not much better; but they may have been a little bit better. The proportions seemed to be more like 30, 30, 20, 20. So the balance was a little more in favor of the good people.

I believe that, by now in 2015, the balance has tipped against the nation’s remaining good people. As a result:

  • We get “leader” after “leader” who is either pathetic and confused (Donald Trump, any of the Bushes), or pathetic and malevolent (Barack Obama, any of the Clintons or Kennedys).
  • We get government officials that continually lie – for example, saying that unemployment is 5.1% when it is 11% or more – and a media that couldn’t care less, as long as Planned Parenthood or its other favorite causes will be funded.
  • Add your own. (Libya? Syria? Talk about illegal wars! Given that ISIS and the disgusting, U.S.-backed “Syrian rebels” are much the same people, shouldn’t we be asking if ISIS may be an incredibly-stupid U.S. covert op?)

I gotta be honest: It’s depressing. As I survey this post-modern, corrupt, neo-socialist wreck of a nation that had once proudly taught the world about human freedom and productivity, I feel disgust and disappointment. I’ve been absent from the blog because I hit a point where I simply did not want to pay any attention to current events. And because I (still) feel uncomfortable writing at a blog with the word “patriot” in the title when, in Obama’s America, there is increasingly less that is worth defending.

I love and support the America that its Founders had intended: a beacon of liberty. I do not love or support (except by paying a ton of taxes, in cash) the America that we have in the year 2015: a deceit-filled, national-socialist travesty whose eventual crash (and/or takeover by China) can no longer be prevented.

That’s at the political level. On a personal level: I have to admit that it took me a couple decades to “get it” – that is, to understand real economics, psychology and morality and how they should interact to make a free society. It took me awhile, because I was mis-educated originally (was told a lot of the standard lies), and because my general desire to love people and give them credit made it hard to disbelieve the lies. It took me a long time; so why not be patient with the many people today who “don’t get it”?

Here’s why not. Yes, it took me a long time; but I did “get it”, because of my lifelong commitment to figuring out what’s real and what isn’t real, what works and what doesn’t work. I don’t see most people making even half of such an effort. I see a majority of people lying to themselves and others, spouting crap, not caring that they’re spouting crap, and treating their families like crap – as they indulge themselves with daily marijuana, coke, alcohol, iPorn, affairs/hookups, all-day gaming or other destruction. Which they rationalize.

Anyway…your thoughts?

America is number…12? 16? 49?

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The U.S.A., once number one for economic freedom, has sunk to number 12 per the Heritage Foundation. (Top seven: Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, Chile.)

Somewhere, some leftist is going “Yeah cool! Because economic freedom sux!” Well then. The U.S.A., once number one as a place to be born, has sunk to number 16 in The Economist magazine’s more Europe-friendly rankings. (Compare to 1988 ranking, here.)

What about political-social freedoms, like freedom of the press? The U.S.A., once number one for that, has sunk to number 49. Behind South Africa, Slovenia, even Germany.

As Reporters Without Borders puts it:

In the United States, 2014 was marked by judicial harassment of New York Times investigative reporter James Risen in connection with the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer charged under the Espionage Act with giving him classified information. US journalists are still not protected by a federal shield law that would guarantee their right not to name their sources or reveal other confidential information about their work. Meanwhile, at least 15 journalists were arbitrarily arrested during clashes between police and demonstrators protesting against black teenager Michael Brown’s fatal shooting…

And where would RPB rank us, if they could consider that our tax authority specially targets our domestic political dissidents (Tea Party conservatives)?

“Thanks, Obama!”