Obama Tells Argentinian Youths There’s Little Difference Between Socialism, Marxism and Capitalism

(Hat tip: KimR) - Barack Obama told an audience of Argentinian youth that the differences between socialism and capitalism make interesting conversation but just pick whatever works. The ideological-left US president suddenly doesn't have an affinity for ideology. Read more at Gateway Pundit Read More......

Climate scam: Golden key to bring down capitalism

On Saturday, President Barack Obama hailed the acceptance of a final draft of an ambitious, global climate-change agreement in Paris, calling it the “best chance” to save the planet.  “We came together around a strong agreement the world needed,” said Obama, speaking from the White House...

Read more at World Net Daily
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

“Capitalism” Is the Wrong Word

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could simply invent new terms to replace the words that seem to cause more heat than light? For example, I have written before of my qualms about using the word capitalism to describe the free-market economy. The word was coined by capitalism’s enemies to describe the system that they rejected.

Read more at the Foundation for Economic Freedom
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Bill Whittle: How to Stop the Civilizational Collapse

Bill Whittle, a warrior for conservatism, explains how the tide can be turned at the Freedom Center's Restoration Weekend (Videos). --(Snip)-- There is no question that the wheels are coming off of Western civilization. And the problem is that the wheels have come off of every civilization, and they've come off of every civilization in exactly the same way throughout history, starting with the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. Same pattern every time, every time we see it. And I didn't understand it until very recently. --But just to make the case...

Read more at Frontpage Mag
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Sanders and Clinton vs. Capitalism

On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, along with other Democratic presidential candidates, were in Las Vegas, a city that does not believe in stifling commercialism, at the Wynn hotel, where suites go for as much as $900 per night. They came to deplore the evils of capitalism. The senator from Vermont identifies himself as a "democratic socialist," and he's no pretender. In 1985, as mayor of Burlington, he traveled to Nicaragua to celebrate the sixth anniversary of what he called the "heroic revolution" of the Marxist Sandinistas.

Read more at Townhall
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

The New Left: Envy, Resentment and Hate

Bernie Sanders is angry. Who is he angry at? Rich people. Why rich people? That’s not clear.
At Liberty University, Sanders complained about a small number of people who have “huge yachts, and jet planes and tens of billions” while others “are struggling to feed their families.” In Madison Wisconsin, Sanders called for a “political revolution against greed.” --So what’s the connection between people who have “tens of billions” and people who are “struggling to feed their families”? For the most part it’s a positive one.

Read more at Townhall.com
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Chart of the greatest and most remarkable achievement in human history, and one you probably never heard about

AEI: Everybody’s featuring their “graphs and charts of the year,” like The Atlantic and the Washington Post (be sure to see Vice-President Joe Biden’s “Graph of the Year” on Amtrak ridership). Well, the chart below could perhaps qualify as the “chart of the century” because it illustrates one of the most remarkable achievements in human history: the 80% reduction in world poverty in only 36 years, from 26.8% of the world’s population living on $1 or less (in 1987 dollars) in 1970 to only 5.4% in 2006. (Source: The 2009 NBER working paper “Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income,” by economists Maxim Pinkovskiy (MIT) and Xavier Sala-i-Martin (Columbia University).

What accounts for this great achievement that you never hear about?

AEI president Arthur Brooks explains in the video below, summarized here:

It turns out that between 1970 and 2010 the worst poverty in the world – people who live on one dollar a day or less – has decreased by 80 percent (see chart above). You never hear about that.

It’s the greatest achievement in human history, and you never hear about it.

80 percent of the world’s worst poverty has been eradicated in less than 40 years. That has never, ever happened before.

So what did that? What accounts for that? United Nations? US foreign aid? The International Monetary Fund? Central planning? No.

It was globalization, free trade, the boom in international entrepreneurship. In short, it was the free enterprise system, American style, which is our gift to the world.

I will state, assert and defend the statement that if you love the poor, if you are a good Samaritan, you must stand for the free enterprise system, and you must defend it, not just for ourselves but for people around the world. It is the best anti-poverty measure ever invented.

Source: American Enterprise Institute
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

WATCH: Conservatives Deliver Answer to Obama’s Class Warfare Rhetoric

Monica Crowley, "Make the moral case for free-market capitalism."

Young America’s Foundation, along with the award-winning director Stephen K. Bannon, will be releasing a new film titled The Conservatives to present a positive alternative to campus leftism. Today, Young America’s Foundation launched the trailer for the movie. ✧ Mark Levin, Michelle Malkin, Jonah Goldberg, Monica Crowley, Ph.D., Dr. Walter Williams, Stephen Moore, and Peter Schweizer—some of the brightest stars in the Conservative Movement—appear in the movie to offer an inspiring “call to action” for young conservative leaders. Read more at Fox Nation... Read More......

Enemies of the American Dream

Republished from earlier posting on 3/15/2007

CapMag.com via News Wire , February 26, 2007 - Irvine, CA--America has long been known as the country in which individuals, no matter where they begin in life, have the freedom necessary to achieve great success--to live the American Dream. Yet the critics of "income inequality," complaining about high CEO pay, endless "dead-end jobs," and allegedly low "social mobility," say that the American Dream has become a fiction--and that the government must come to the rescue with new welfare spending.

In fact, said Alex Epstein, "Today's America, thanks to its legacy of economic freedom, offers unprecedented economic opportunity to all of us.

"Thanks to the ingenuity of individuals under generations of American capitalism, today we have available to us literally thousands of types of well-paying jobs, and myriad resources from which to acquire new skills and knowledge--this, even in spite of our horrible system of public education. Immigrants who come here speaking no English, but who work hard and have a commitment to self-improvement, routinely achieve great success--while their children fill America's top universities."

Anyone who claims that in America today it is nearly impossible to improve your economic situation is lying to you. Indeed, the biggest obstacle many Americans face is that very lie--the determinist philosophy that your success or failure is pre-ordained by economic circumstances. Those who accept this philosophy of failure will not be willing to exert the effort, self-discipline, and commitment to self-improvement that success requires. They will be ripe targets for anti-capitalist politicians who sell them on the latest welfare scheme by telling them that their problems are not of their own making, but rather of an overly capitalist system that permits such income inequality."

Americans must reject the present public outcry against income inequality, and recognize that the American Dream can become a reality for each of us--as long as we embrace a philosophy of responsibility and success, not determinism and failure." Read More......

VC: The Moral Hazard Effects of Current Economic Policy

Cassandra at VILLAINOUS COMPANY, 1/23/2012 - Robert Samuelson [Why the Fed Slept] explains how economic policies aimed at smoothing out the business cycle make the economy less stable in the long run:

Since the 1960s, the thrust of economic policy-making has been to smooth business cycles. Democracies crave prolonged prosperity, and economists have posed as technocrats with the tools to cure the boom-and-bust cycles of pre-World War II capitalism. It turns out that they exaggerated what they knew and could do.

There's a paradox to economic policy. The more it succeeds at prolonging short-term prosperity, the more it inspires long-run destabilizing behavior by businesses, banks, consumers, investors and government. If they think basic stability is assured, they will assume greater risks -- loosen credit standards, borrow more, engage in more speculation, relax wage and price behavior -- that ultimately make the economy less stable. Read more at Villanous Company...

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Economist Walter E. Williams loves greed

What human motivation gets the most wonderful things done? It's really a silly question, because the answer is so simple. It turns out that it's human greed that gets the most wonderful things done. When I say greed, I am not talking about fraud, theft, dishonesty, lobbying for special privileges from government or other forms of despicable behavior. I'm talking about people trying to get as much as they can for themselves. Let's look at it. Read more at Townhall.com... Read More......

Aetna's CEO Compensation

FUTURE OF CAPITALISM, 2/17/2010 - "Aetna is a well-managed company and I am confident that your shareholders are going to do well," President Obama said to Aetna CEO Ronald Williams at the White House before a nationwide television audience back in June. The Seton Hall University Law School Health Reform Watch blog reports that Mr. Williams's 2008 total compensation was $24,300,112. Not bad for a year in which Aetna's share price plummetted to $28.46 from $56.47, losing about half of its value. The Seton Hall blog says that by comparison, WellPoint CEO Angela Braly is underpaid. She earned $9,844,212 in 2008. To Mr. Obama, the bankers are fat cat suicide bombers earning obscene bonuses (or they were, at least until he changed his tune). But the health insurance companies, whose executives earn as much or more than the bankers, are "well managed." Or at least Aetna is. Mr. Obama wasn't criticizing the insurance companies, because they pretty much backed his plan to force Americans to become their customers and use tax dollars to subsidize their premiums. We're generally of the view that free markets should set compensation. But there aren't too many other businesses around where you can earn a free-market salary while using the force of government to corral customers and the taxing power of government to subsidize your premiums. And Mr. Obama says a health care overhaul failed because he didn't do a good enough job of explaining it? Read More......

Deja vous

"A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about." --Woodrow Wilson - 1911

(Hat tip: Stella Guenther via Restore America)
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Deja vous

"A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about." --Woodrow Wilson - 1911

(Hat tip: Stella Guenther via Restore America)
Read More......

Imprimis: Future Prospects for Economic Liberty

IMPRIMIS, 9/2009 - From a speech by Walter Williams, Professor of Economics, George Mason University - Excerpt (on the expansion of government at the cost of contracting liberty):

"Ironically, the free market system is threatened today not because of its failure, but because of its success. Capitalism has done so well in eliminating the traditional problems of mankind—disease, pestilence, gross hunger, and poverty—that other human problems seem to us unacceptable. So in the name of equalizing income, achieving sex and race balance, guaranteeing housing and medical care, protecting consumers, and conserving energy—just to name a few prominent causes of liberal government these days—individual liberty has become of secondary or tertiary concern."

Read more at Imprimis...

“Reprinted [in part] by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.”
Adapted from a lecture delivered on August 2, 2009, during a Hillsdale College cruise from Venice to Athens aboard the Crystal Serenity. Read More......

Francisco d'Anconia

Ah, my heart nearly gallops as Francisco reveals the true nature of capitalism in his argument that money is the root of all good, particularly with socialism so in vogue these past some odd decades. Imagine, The Trial of Hank Rearden from Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged' on the required reading list for students across America. I can dream, can't I?

Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, "Don't let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil — and he's the typical product of money." Rearden did not think that Francisco could have heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile.

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor — your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions — and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made — before it can be looted or mooched — made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except by the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss — the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery — that you must offer them values, not wounds — that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of GOODS. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best your money can find. And when men live by trade — with reason, not force, as their final arbiter — it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability — and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality — the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth — the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve that mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Money is your means of survival. The verdict which you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is the loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money — and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it."

"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another — their only substitute, demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride, or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich — will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt — and of his life, as he deserves.

"Then you will see the rise of the double standard — the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money — the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law — men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims — then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion — when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing — when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors — when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you — when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice — you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are.

"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while your damning its life-blood — money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves — slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers — as industrialists.

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money — and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being — the self-made man — the American industrialist.

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose — because it contains all the others — the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity — to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide — as, I think, he will.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns — or dollars. Take your choice — there is no other — and your time is running out."

h/t: Wit Nit Read More......