Well said. Just like communism, leftists will say they will work “this time,” because they weren’t tried properly before. But the laws of economics are laws, not suggestions, for a reason: human nature doesn’t change. No one will design cars, loan money to build cars, buy a car factory, buy the equipment and parts to build cars, run a car company, or work for a car company, for free.
If only people understood fundamental basics of economics 101.
On one end of the "pricing is broken" spectrum is price control by too much government. On the other end is price control by too much corporate consolidation. The missing piece at both ends is competition on price.
I own a business that is attempting to launch a new brand and getting that product on retail shelf space is next to impossible as the entire supply chain is owned and controlled by a handful of big corporate operators.
Some wise person once remarked that price is the most efficient way of rationing.
After WWII Britain under the new Labour (Socialist) government kept food rationing in place for about 7 years. The Socialists just loved the idea of achieving "social justice" by regulating what everyone could eat by imposing the use of little government coupons as a requirement to buy food.
This didn't turn out well. Things got a lot better when the "Conservatives" (even when led by odious Churchill, Britain's failed Prime Minister)* regained power and put an end to rationing. At last, after 13 or so years of government control by food rationing, you could get enough to eat at the grocery store.
Common sense should tell any sensible person with a room temperature IQ that price controls are about as delusional as a scrambled mind can get.
When Washington's army was freezing at Valley Forge, what impact would it have had if General Washington had announced a policy of price controls in order to "solve" the problem of high prices for fire wood?
How would such a "progressive" policy have played out? Would the farmers in New Jersey who were cutting wood when it was unpleasant and painful to be out in the cold working away with your ax and saw and who hauled the wood to Valley Forge through the snow have gone on bringing firewood to the camp when required to do so at an artificially low level?
No. The wood would have disappeared and the soldiers would have gone from being cold to freezing to death.
Common sense tells you that.
But common sense isn't very common...especially nowadays in a universal suffrage democracy like the United States now "enjoys."
The voters are not able to grasp "complex" issues. They don't have sufficient education, time or intelligence to think through issues such as deindustrialization, taxes, the trade imbalance, the deficit, foreign policy in regard to Russia. Palestine and other countries.
These issues are simply beyond their "ken", to use a now somewhat obsolete word from Scottish dialect. The voters simply don't want to think about such issues....because they CAN'T think about them.
IMO this incapacity of the voters to handle important matters is the underlying explanation of the frenzy over matters like Monica Lewinsky and her providing oral sex to President Clinton.
Now THAT was an issue the voter could get his mind around!
Bubba could ask Jimmy while their clothes were in the washing machine at the laundromat, "Jimmy, do you think Monica Lewinsky gave oral sex to Bill Clinton?"
And Jimmy could grasp this issue! He could make an intelligent appraisal of it and reply, "You know, Bubba, I've given a lot of thought to this matter and I don't think she did."
Bubba could then enter into a discussion - a debate, so to speak - over the critical issue of whether or not Bill Clinton got a "b.j." (good manners require that I not write the blunt words).
"No, Jimmy. I think you are wrong. My opinion is that Bill Clinton did get a b.j."
To some extent we are experiencing government by Oprah Winfrey. Sex scandals are the issues that rule elections or qualifications for prominent positions.
That's how it worked out with the confirmation hearing on Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court.
What "our" elected representatives fixated on was not Kavanaugh's qualifications, not his positions on the law and there was a lot about Kavanaugh's ideas about what was lawful that would have been matters of concern to normal adult minds.
Instead, the issue became whether or not 36 years before the hearings when Kavanaugh was a 17 year old high school 11th grader and was drunk, he came onto a woman in a rude, clumsy way that offends our standards of decent male behavior.
The Republican Senators went to great lengths to prove that the woman making this claim was a liar....and they succeeded. She was lying.
But even if every single claim she made could have been irrefutably proved (by a video, for example), why would it matter?
Who wants to be judged at age 53 by what he did when he was a drunk 11th grader in high school?
Who wants his son to be judged by what he did when he was a drunk 11th grader in high school?
Hawkins, as usual, is right on the money about price controls.
What is the fundamental lesson, the broader lesson, to be learned from the fact that the majority of 2-legged mammals (i.e. "human beings", who believe something as stupid as the idea that economic problems can be solved by empowering a committee of leftwing coffee house "intellectuals" in D.C. who don't have the ability to run a plumbing company, a law practice or a dentist's office to control the economy through price controls?
The lesson is that universal suffrage democracy does not work. It isn't working now. It isn't going to work in the future. It is doomed to fail and collapse.
Kaiser Franz Josef, the Emperor of Austria Hungary whose nephew's assassination in 1914 triggered World War I, once observed:
"The problem with democracy is that it requires extraordinary things from ordinary people."
When I have heard this remark quoted, other Americans have oohed and aahed because they take the remark as a left-handed compliment.
"Oh, yes! Democracy requires extraordinary things from ordinary people! That's part of why it's so wonderful."
Kaiser Franz-Josef did not intend that remark to flatter and massage the egos of people who live in universal suffrage democracies.
He intended it to mean exactly what he said.
And he was right!
Sam Dickson
*I should refrain myself and not kick sand in the face of Winston Churchill whom I know John Hawkins and 99% of his followers admire and even revere. We will have to agree to disagree pleasantly about the subject of Churchill.
Please remember that contrary to the smear tactics of the SPLC and the System Media, my subscribing to Hawkins' substack means only that I am interested in what he has to say and that I am (largely) buying HIS ideas. It does not mean he buys MY (somewhat more radical) ideas.
Well said. Just like communism, leftists will say they will work “this time,” because they weren’t tried properly before. But the laws of economics are laws, not suggestions, for a reason: human nature doesn’t change. No one will design cars, loan money to build cars, buy a car factory, buy the equipment and parts to build cars, run a car company, or work for a car company, for free.
If only people understood fundamental basics of economics 101.
On one end of the "pricing is broken" spectrum is price control by too much government. On the other end is price control by too much corporate consolidation. The missing piece at both ends is competition on price.
I own a business that is attempting to launch a new brand and getting that product on retail shelf space is next to impossible as the entire supply chain is owned and controlled by a handful of big corporate operators.
Some wise person once remarked that price is the most efficient way of rationing.
After WWII Britain under the new Labour (Socialist) government kept food rationing in place for about 7 years. The Socialists just loved the idea of achieving "social justice" by regulating what everyone could eat by imposing the use of little government coupons as a requirement to buy food.
This didn't turn out well. Things got a lot better when the "Conservatives" (even when led by odious Churchill, Britain's failed Prime Minister)* regained power and put an end to rationing. At last, after 13 or so years of government control by food rationing, you could get enough to eat at the grocery store.
Common sense should tell any sensible person with a room temperature IQ that price controls are about as delusional as a scrambled mind can get.
When Washington's army was freezing at Valley Forge, what impact would it have had if General Washington had announced a policy of price controls in order to "solve" the problem of high prices for fire wood?
How would such a "progressive" policy have played out? Would the farmers in New Jersey who were cutting wood when it was unpleasant and painful to be out in the cold working away with your ax and saw and who hauled the wood to Valley Forge through the snow have gone on bringing firewood to the camp when required to do so at an artificially low level?
No. The wood would have disappeared and the soldiers would have gone from being cold to freezing to death.
Common sense tells you that.
But common sense isn't very common...especially nowadays in a universal suffrage democracy like the United States now "enjoys."
The voters are not able to grasp "complex" issues. They don't have sufficient education, time or intelligence to think through issues such as deindustrialization, taxes, the trade imbalance, the deficit, foreign policy in regard to Russia. Palestine and other countries.
These issues are simply beyond their "ken", to use a now somewhat obsolete word from Scottish dialect. The voters simply don't want to think about such issues....because they CAN'T think about them.
IMO this incapacity of the voters to handle important matters is the underlying explanation of the frenzy over matters like Monica Lewinsky and her providing oral sex to President Clinton.
Now THAT was an issue the voter could get his mind around!
Bubba could ask Jimmy while their clothes were in the washing machine at the laundromat, "Jimmy, do you think Monica Lewinsky gave oral sex to Bill Clinton?"
And Jimmy could grasp this issue! He could make an intelligent appraisal of it and reply, "You know, Bubba, I've given a lot of thought to this matter and I don't think she did."
Bubba could then enter into a discussion - a debate, so to speak - over the critical issue of whether or not Bill Clinton got a "b.j." (good manners require that I not write the blunt words).
"No, Jimmy. I think you are wrong. My opinion is that Bill Clinton did get a b.j."
To some extent we are experiencing government by Oprah Winfrey. Sex scandals are the issues that rule elections or qualifications for prominent positions.
That's how it worked out with the confirmation hearing on Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court.
What "our" elected representatives fixated on was not Kavanaugh's qualifications, not his positions on the law and there was a lot about Kavanaugh's ideas about what was lawful that would have been matters of concern to normal adult minds.
Instead, the issue became whether or not 36 years before the hearings when Kavanaugh was a 17 year old high school 11th grader and was drunk, he came onto a woman in a rude, clumsy way that offends our standards of decent male behavior.
The Republican Senators went to great lengths to prove that the woman making this claim was a liar....and they succeeded. She was lying.
But even if every single claim she made could have been irrefutably proved (by a video, for example), why would it matter?
Who wants to be judged at age 53 by what he did when he was a drunk 11th grader in high school?
Who wants his son to be judged by what he did when he was a drunk 11th grader in high school?
Hawkins, as usual, is right on the money about price controls.
What is the fundamental lesson, the broader lesson, to be learned from the fact that the majority of 2-legged mammals (i.e. "human beings", who believe something as stupid as the idea that economic problems can be solved by empowering a committee of leftwing coffee house "intellectuals" in D.C. who don't have the ability to run a plumbing company, a law practice or a dentist's office to control the economy through price controls?
The lesson is that universal suffrage democracy does not work. It isn't working now. It isn't going to work in the future. It is doomed to fail and collapse.
Kaiser Franz Josef, the Emperor of Austria Hungary whose nephew's assassination in 1914 triggered World War I, once observed:
"The problem with democracy is that it requires extraordinary things from ordinary people."
When I have heard this remark quoted, other Americans have oohed and aahed because they take the remark as a left-handed compliment.
"Oh, yes! Democracy requires extraordinary things from ordinary people! That's part of why it's so wonderful."
Kaiser Franz-Josef did not intend that remark to flatter and massage the egos of people who live in universal suffrage democracies.
He intended it to mean exactly what he said.
And he was right!
Sam Dickson
*I should refrain myself and not kick sand in the face of Winston Churchill whom I know John Hawkins and 99% of his followers admire and even revere. We will have to agree to disagree pleasantly about the subject of Churchill.
Please remember that contrary to the smear tactics of the SPLC and the System Media, my subscribing to Hawkins' substack means only that I am interested in what he has to say and that I am (largely) buying HIS ideas. It does not mean he buys MY (somewhat more radical) ideas.