• Tag Archives Socialism

  • Joe Biden Supports 2 Regulations That Would Destroy Entire Industries

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Right now, the attention of most Americans is, understandably, captured by the latest developments of the COVID-19 pandemic and the national debate over criminal justice. But the 2020 presidential election continues to trod along in the background, and Wall Street is starting to worry about the outcome.

    The New York Times reports that investors are growing alarmed over Joe Biden’s rise in the polls. Some worry that his promised massive tax hikes and sweeping regulations could spell doom for the stock market and hurt business more broadly. However, it’s not just stockbrokers on Wall Street and 401k holders relying on the market for retirement who should be worried.

    Joe Biden’s regulatory platform would eliminate entire industries and therefore millions of jobs—including my own. Supposedly, the appeal of Biden’s presidential campaign is a return to stability. Yet his platform includes endorsements of radical regulations that would undermine the economy as we know it.

    Consider Biden’s stated support for California’s AB 5, a crushing regulation that has killed too many jobs to count in the Golden State. The former vice president has endorsed similar regulation on the federal level.

    The California bill was supposedly introduced to help the state’s roughly one million independent contractors by severely limiting the amount of work freelancers can do in an attempt to compel employers to add them onto payroll as full-time employees. The rule was supposed to stop “exploitation.” In reality, it stripped flexibility from thousands of Californians who didn’t want to be full-time employees while prompting companies to let contractors go, not hire them on.

    From artists to musicians to freelance journalists to Uber drivers, thousands of California workers saw their livelihoods snuffed out by this bill. Even the original sponsor of the law, state Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, admitted she was “wrong” in response to angry freelancers who lost work.

    Under social media trends like #AB5Stories and in direct replies to Biden, countless Twitter users have spoken out—many of them left-leaning California residents—against the candidate’s position:

    In the absence of any response from the presumptive Democratic nominee, we can only assume that Biden still supports this proposal, which would erase millions of American jobs, from Uber drivers to journalists, with the stroke of a pen.

    This would affect me personally—making my current income and livelihood illegal.

    After completing a one-year journalism fellowship in June, I entered the job market at perhaps the worst possible time due to the peak of COVID-19 and a looming recession. Frankly, I struggled to find full-time work. But I was soon able to cobble together a full-time income through regular freelance writing gigs with several outlets. Now, I get to wake up every morning and do the kind of writing I love, with near-complete flexibility in my schedule and a solid income.

    Yet I could not do this under AB 5, which arbitrarily limits freelancers to 35 articles for any given publication per year. This bill would make even writing a weekly column for one publication as a freelancer illegal. A full-time freelance journalism career under this regulatory regime would, in most cases, be impossible.

    These job-killing regulations would take livelihoods away from millions of Americans. But it’s not just us: The former senator also supports a regulatory change that would destroy social media and the technology sector.

    Biden has backed repealing Section 230, the provision which gives social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook liability protections for the content that users post. It has been dubbed the law that “created the internet,” and only by holding users, not companies, liable for their posts can platforms even exist. Just imagine how much potentially defamatory content gets posted to social media every day, and you’ll quickly realize why repealing Section 230 would immediately put Silicon Valley out of business—and put hundreds of thousands of Americans out of a job.

    Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and more would all disappear in short order. Or, at the very least, they would radically transform, and be forced to delay user posts until they can undergo a vetting process that, given the number of posts each day, would quickly grow backlogged and overwhelmed. Yet the US technology sector couldn’t exist for long with these kinds of burdens thrust upon it by the long arm of the federal government, and its collapse would likely be inevitable.

    Biden’s support for job-killing regulations extends beyond independent contracting and the tech industry to many other walks of American life. The candidate’s wrong-headed agenda reminds us of a stubborn lesson big government advocates rarely seem to learn: Unintended consequences will always plague sweeping mandates put together by politicians and bureaucrats huddled together in the nation’s capital hundreds of miles away from the on-the-ground realities of the jobs they’re regulating.

    From accidentally worsening a city’s cobra infestation to car environmental regulations leading to a spike in taxi use and hence more pollution, history abounds with examples of well-intentioned regulators making things worse by overlooking the unintended consequences of their actions.

    Here’s how FEE’s Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan summed up this key lesson:

    Lawmakers should be keenly aware that every human action has both intended and unintended consequences. Human beings react to every rule, regulation, and order governments impose, and their reactions result in outcomes that can be quite different than the outcomes lawmakers intended. So while there is a place for legislation, that place should be one defined by both great caution and tremendous humility. Sadly, these are character traits not often found in those who become legislators.

    The lesson is clear: pure intentions do not necessarily result in positive outcomes.

    “It’s not enough… to endorse legislation that has a nice title and promises to do something good,” economist Robert P. Murphy also wrote for FEE. “People need to think through the full consequences of a policy, because often it will lead to a cure worse than the disease.”

    And elections are no exception. If the American people let Joe Biden have his way with our economy, there will be unintended consequences—that could cost you your job.

    Brad Polumbo


    Brad Polumbo

    Brad Polumbo is a libertarian-conservative journalist and the Eugene S. Thorpe Writing Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • AOC’s Baseless Accusation That the US Is a “Brutal, Barbarian Society”

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    According to democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the COVID-19 pandemic is proving that the United States “is a brutal, barbarian society for the vast majority of working-class Americans.” As evidence of this, she claims that “40% of us couldn’t even afford a $400 emergency” before this crisis, and COVID-19 “is more than a $400 emergency.”

    However, her “40%–$400” statistic is false, and the facts that broadly inform this issue reveal that:

    • government social programs, which AOC seeks to enlarge, depress workers’ savings, causing the very outcomes that she decries.
    • the people of the US lead the world in charity.
    • middle- and low-income Americans are more financially capable of handling Covid-19 than the bulk of people in most developed countries, including those who live in more socialistic nations that AOC says the US should emulate.

    In a recent video, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–NY) declared:

    This is supposed to be the richest society in the world, and I think what this crisis is showing us is that this is only a rich society for a very small amount of people, and it is a brutal, barbarian society for the vast majority of working-class Americans because 40% of us couldn’t even afford a $400 emergency before this thing started. This is more than a $400 emergency, and we’re really going to have to step up and completely change our approach to our public systems.

    The statistic cited by AOC stems from an annual Federal Reserve study of people’s “self-reported ability to handle unexpected expenses.” Contrary to her claim that “40% of us couldn’t even afford a $400 emergency,” the survey actually finds that 12 percent of US residents fall into that category. Furthermore, the facts surrounding this 12 percent figure reveal that it overstates the portion of people who can’t afford such an expense.

    Per the Federal Reserve’s report on this issue, “if faced with an unexpected expense of $400”:

    • 61% “of adults say they would cover it with cash, savings, or a credit card paid off at the next statement.”
    • 27% say they “would borrow or sell something to pay for the expense.”
    • 12% say “would not be able to cover the expense at all.”

    Hence, AOC’s figure of “40%” includes people who would place the expense on a credit card and not pay it off right away. This is materially different from her claim that they “couldn’t even afford” it.

    Moreover, the same report notes that another survey found 76 percent “of households had $400 in liquid assets (even after taking monthly expenses into account).” In other words, it’s not that they “couldn’t” immediately pay for an unexpected $400 expense; they just preferred not to do so. Given that 40 percent of US residents carry a credit card balance “most or all of the time,” the “$40%–$400” statistic says little beyond that.

    With regard to the 12 percent who claim they “would not be able to cover the expense at all,” consumer data shows that the lowest-spending ten percent of US households spend an average of $1,369 per year on entertainment and $208 per year on alcohol. That’s enough to handle about four $400 emergencies every year. Furthermore, these figures are based on household surveys, and the US Bureau of Economic Analysis explains that they “are subject to deliberate underreporting of certain items.”

    The fourth-lowest ten percent of households—who are also included in AOC’s 40% figure—spend an average of $2,830 per year on entertainment and $320 on alcohol. This is enough to cover about eight $400 emergencies, which means the issue is not about a lack of money but how it is spent.

    In spite of these facts, media outlets have published headlines like these:

    Also, the survey includes all “noninstitutionalized, civilian” adults who live in the US, not just “working-class Americans” as AOC asserts. Thus, it also includes non-working Americans and millions of unauthorized immigrants who are not legally allowed to earn income in the United States. Since these individuals often work off the books and don’t disclose the money, this potentially skews the results of such surveys.

    Also belying AOC’s rhetoric about the inability of Americans to weather a COVID-19 crisis is the fact that taxpayers already pay for most of the living expenses of low-income households, including the vast bulk of their medical costs. Roughly 22 percent of the US population is on Medicaid, and as the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services explains:

    Beneficiary cost sharing, such as deductibles or co-payments, and beneficiary premiums are very limited in Medicaid and do not represent a significant share of the total cost of health care goods and services for Medicaid enrollees.

    Beyond medical care, federal, state, and local governments provide a wide range of other benefits to low-income households. In 2015, the US Government Accountability Office identified 82 federal means-tested welfare programs. When all of these benefits and other sources of income are included, US households that are officially “in poverty” consume an average of more than $50,000 per year in goods and services. This amounts to 5.2 times the income they report to the Census Bureau.

    Governments also shift the costs of some welfare policies to the private sector. A prime example is the federal law that requires most hospitals with emergency departments to provide an “examination” and “stabilizing treatment” for anyone who comes to such a facility and requests care for an emergency medical condition or childbirth—regardless of their ability to pay and immigration status.

    In 2018, federal, state, and local governments provided an average of $23,050 in social benefits to every household in the United States. The federal government defines these as “payments from social insurance funds, such as social security and Medicare, and payments providing other income support, such as Medicaid and food stamp benefits.” These alone are on par with the total average household income of Eastern Europe, including both private earnings and government benefits.

    In addition, the federal government has recently enacted enough Covid-19-related legislation to nearly double its regular $2.6 trillion annual spending on social benefits. This includes but is not limited to $192 billion for the Families First Coronavirus Response Act and an estimated $2.2 trillion for the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act.

    Such levels of government social spending, which AOC wants to increase, are the main reason why many workers don’t save more of their income. As detailed in 2016 working paper published by the European Central Bank:

    • “As the state organizes and offers more public insurance, there is less need for relatively poor households to hold precautionary savings, and more income might be used for consumption purposes.”
    • “social services provided by the state are substitutes for private wealth accumulation.”
    • “an increase in welfare state spending goes along with an increase—rather than a decrease—of observed wealth inequality.”

    Furthermore, Americans must ultimately fund these programs, which hinders their ability to save. The $23,050 per household in social benefits that governments paid out in 2018 ultimately came from American households. Although high-income households bear a greater share of these costs than others, middle-income workers lose about 15.3 percent of their paychecks to social insurance taxes.

    If, in contrast, these workers could have saved and invested a fifth of these taxes during their careers, each retired middle-income worker would have an additional $199,000 to $764,000 in savings today.

    Long before governments began providing appreciable amounts of social benefits, the US led the world in charity, and it continues to do so.

    In notes that Thomas Jefferson wrote in the 1780s, he described how Americans cared for the sick and poor with striking contrast to modern, government-run welfare programs:

    • Churches collected money and appointed modest, quiet people to deliver these resources and personally look after each person in need.
    • For the poor who had “neither property, friends, nor strength to labour,” farmers took them in, and churches paid these caretakers an annual sum to do this.
    • For the poor who were “able to help themselves a little,” churches supplemented their income so they could “live comfortably in their own houses, or in the houses of their friends.”
    • “Vagabonds without visible property or vocation, are placed in work houses, where they are well clothed, fed, lodged, and made to labor. Nearly the same method of providing for the poor prevails through all our states; and from Savannah [Georgia] to Portsmouth [New Hampshire] you will seldom meet a beggar.”

    Sick people were “visited by all the neighbors,” who brought them food and took turns watching over them at night. Regarding this charity, Jefferson wrote:

    • It “is without comparison better than in a general hospital, where the sick, the dying and the dead, are crammed together, in the same rooms, and often in the same beds.”
    • Being in a home and under the care of a local community has advantages that outweigh the “regularities of medicine and regimen” in a hospital.
    • “Nature and kind nursing save a much greater proportion in our plain way, at a smaller expense, and with less abuse.”

    In the 1830s, a French historian and political scientist named Alexis de Tocqueville visited the US and wrote a famous work entitled Democracy in America. In it, he stated that what “I most admire in America” is how people were personally engaged in advancing the welfare of society:

    In the United States the interests of the country are everywhere kept in view; they are an object of solicitude [concern] to the people of the whole Union, and every citizen is as warmly attached to them as if they were his own.

    When a private individual meditates an undertaking, however directly connected it may be with the welfare of society, he never thinks of soliciting the cooperation of the Government; but he publishes his plan, offers to execute it himself, courts the assistance of other individuals, and struggles manfully against all obstacles. Undoubtedly he is often less successful than the State might have been in his position; but in the end, the sum of these private undertakings far exceeds all that the Government could have done.

    Although federal, state, and local governments consume about 33.5 percent of the US economy—at an average cost of $54,000 per year to every household in the nation—US citizens still donate about $50 billion each year to charities that provide “direct services to people in need.” That equals an average of $1,316 for every person who is reportedly below the poverty line.

    US citizens also donate $38 billion per year to health charities, along with $59 billion to education charities, and $127 billion to religious groups, many of which serve the poor.

    A 2016 study of 24 nations by the Charities Aid Foundation found that the people of the United States are most generous and donate 1.44 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product to charities. The next closest nation, New Zealand, donates 0.79 percent, or 45 percent less than the USA. Nations such as Finland (0.13 percent) and France (0.11 percent) donate less than one-tenth of the USA.

    The most comprehensive mass measure of people’s financial condition is their consumption of goods and services. This is the World Bank’s “preferred” indicator of material well-being due to “practical reasons of reliability and because consumption is thought to better capture long-run welfare levels than current income.”

    The latest available data show that middle-income Americans and even the poorest 20 percent of Americans consume more goods and services than the national averages for all people in most affluent countries. This includes the majority of nations in the prestigious Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, including more socialistic nations that AOC says the US should emulate:

    An important strength of this data is that it is adjusted for purchasing power to measure tangible realities like square feet of living area, foods, smartphones, etc. This removes the confounding effects of factors like inflation and exchange rates. Thus, an apple in one nation is counted the same as an apple in another.

    Contrary to AOC’s portrayal of the USA as “a brutal, barbarian society for the vast majority of working-class Americans,” the key facts that inform this matter show that:

    • the lone statistic she used to support this allegation is false.
    • personal savings—the subject of her statistic—are depressed by government social programs that she champions and seeks to expand.
    • when it comes to charity, the people of the US are the most generous in the world.
    • middle- and even low-income Americans have more material resources to weather COVID-19 than the majority of people in most developed nations.

    James D. Agresti


    James D. Agresti

    James D. Agresti is the president and cofounder of Just Facts, a think tank dedicated to publishing rigorously documented facts about public policy issues.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • The Soviet Union Began as a Democratic Experiment in Socialism

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    When Bernie Sanders made his debut on the national stage in 2016, most Americans had never heard of democratic socialism (the idea that the government controls the means of production but we all get to vote). But in the four years following his loss to Hilary Clinton, it’s become a major topic for American politics. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) party has seen an explosion in membership and openly socialist politicians like Bernie and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are occupying some of the highest positions in our government.

    The democratic socialism these politicians promote are radical ideas by traditional American standards, but they are far from new. They have been theories that were put into practice a century ago on the other side of the world in the now defunct Soviet Union.

    In Russian, Soviet means “council.” In theory this system was going to create a voice for every member of the proletariat (working class) to be heard and guide their destiny by voting for their own representatives from their local areas to make their voices and choices recognized by the larger government.

    Factories and small villages were their own soviet group at the lowest and most local level. They chose and voted for representatives to serve in the larger town soviet. The town soviet would elect representatives from their group to serve in the regional soviet which then elected members for the provincial soviet. From there, members would be elected to the Soviet of Constituent Republic, which was the soviet in charge of the specific member country within the Soviet Union. That group would then send representatives to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

    In the 1940s there was an estimated one million USSR citizens participating in the Soviet System. In theory, anyone could rise through the soviet system to one day be in the Supreme Soviet. On paper this was the ultimate system of representative government serving its citizens. The small local soviets would make a list of what they wanted from the larger government and that list would move up the food chain. And if the soviet didn’t think their representative was doing a good job, they had the power to recall him and send someone else.

    Soviets practically had complete autonomy over their jurisdictions, in theory. They could utilize any resources from the larger government to their own liking. They could also govern themselves at a local level. The only catch was that their choices could not conflict with the interests of the nation.

    While this system of government sounds very nice, the truth was that the Supreme Soviet would rarely meet and when they were not in session they abdicated their power to the Presidium of the Soviet Union. This body was like all three branches of the US government rolled into one. The Soviet Union was a state with only one legal political party, the Communists.

    At the head of the party from the early 1920s through the 1950s the top man in that party was Joseph Stalin (1878-1953). During his first years in the office, he consolidated his power, outmaneuvered rivals, and eventually became arguably the most repressive dictator of the 20th century. As head of the party, Stalin’s interests were the national interests. As such, anyone who went against him was, in a sense, going against the national interest—which meant they could expect to find themselves, and perhaps their families, tortured and shot.

    The enforcers of the national interest was the NKVD, better known as the secret police. These were spy plants in the society keeping an eye out for anyone who could be a remote threat to the will of the party’s leader. You know, like anyone with relatives living abroad or the ability to speak more than one language. And to keep everyone in line even further there were mandatory purges at all levels of government and society with quotas. Citizens were executed, punished, and exiled not because they committed crimes but instead because the upper leadership wanted 20,000 “anti-revolutionaries” punished in a random city and to please the national bosses the regional bosses would give them 25,000.

    Life under Stalin in the great Democratic Communist USSR was pure terror. When we look back on the 20th century we tend to think of Adolf Hitler as the most-evil man of his day. An estimated 14 million people were killed by his direct actions. Stalin has him beat with an estimated 20 million.

    If any members of the Democratic Socialists Party of America have read any of this article, then they’re most likely going to instantly dismiss it as a hit job on their cause. They’ll protest that communism is not the same as socialism. While that’s technically true, the differences between the two are not apples and oranges; they’re Cortland and Winesap apples.

    Socialism is when the community controls the means of production. Communism is when the community controls the means of production and consumption. But command control of production cannot co-exist with market control of consumption without the result being shortages. The inevitable result, as seen in many other countries where this system is tried, will be that “the community” will take control of consumption.

    And unfortunately, no one person or group is smart enough, wise enough, or capable to micromanage a society. Some theories sound great but when put into practice they get proven to be wrong. With so many historic examples documenting the failures of communism and socialism it’s baffling that so many people in America seem to want to give it a try.

    In our modern age of information it’s very easy for us—and very important—to examine the past mistakes of others so that we don’t repeat them.


    Daniel Kowalski

    Daniel Kowalski is an American businessman with interests in the USA and developing markets of Africa.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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