Eat The Rich: Democratic Candidates Plunge Party Into Class Warfare Politics

taxJonathan Turley – “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.”  Philosopher Rousseau said those words about the French Revolution more than 200 years ago, but they could well have been a talking point in the Democratic debates this week. The candidates brushed aside repeated questions about raising taxes to pay the trillions promised for free college, universal health care, reparations and new homes for African Americans, free health care for the undocumented, massive investment in traditionally black colleges, and other “big ideas” that various candidates pledged.

What they all agreed on was that the “rich” would pay for much of it. The loudest in this declaration of class warfare was New York Mayor Bill De Blasio, who promised that “we will tax the hell out of the wealthy.” The growing Rousseauian chant to “tax the rich” is, of course, hardly new in politics. However, the current age of rage makes this call more menacing. Suddenly, the wealthiest citizens are being portrayed as virtual predators of the poor. Continue reading

When and Why Golden Geese Take Wing

tax ratesClarice Feldman – My friend Lynn Chu has boiled down the basis for a just, prosperous society:

“It is very easy to spend other people’s money, thus eliminating all of the vital discrimination about the devils in the details which are knowable only at the level of the individual. This is the main justification for the protection of individual liberty against autocracy other than the clarity of the moral imperative of human rights as the privileges and immunities of the individual in society.”

When Great Britain turned over Hong Kong at the expiration of its lease, the Chinese government promised to leave its democratic institutions and law alone. Bit by bit, that promise has been eroded until  recently China pressured the local authorities to agree to an extradition treaty that would allow them to extradite from the former colony and try in China anyone, even someone merely transiting through its airport. Continue reading

Two Little Problems with “Taxing the Rich” to Pay for “Free Everything”

exerciseCharles Hugh Smith – The 2020 election cycle has begun, and a popular campaign promise is “free everything” paid for by new taxes on the super-wealthy. Who doesn’t like free stuff? Who will vote for whomever offers them free stuff? No wonder it’s a popular campaign promise.

As even the most self-absorbed American voter has a latent street-savvy awareness that nothing is truly free, the other popular campaign promise is to “tax the rich” to pay for the proposed “free” programs. Proposals to “Tax the rich” feed off the growing awareness that the financial wealth created since 2000 has largely flowed to the very top of the wealth-power pyramid, and so it’s payback time: tax those who have pocketed the lion’s share of income and wealth gains. Continue reading

Democrat Policies that Must Die for America to Survive

taxElad Hakim – In 1838, Abraham Lincoln spoke before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois.  There, Lincoln observed that “America will never be destroyed from the outside.  If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

While Lincoln was talking about the dangers of slavery, his message also applies today.  More particularly, congressional Democrats are so obsessed with defeating the president that they have lost touch with reality.  Some of the proposed policies by those on the far left will serve to destroy the country from within by leaving the country more porous, more vulnerable, and in dire financial shape.  For this reason, these far-left policies must be rejected.

Immigration

Almost three weeks ago, President Trump announced a three-week temporary end to the partial government shutdown that did not include funding for a border wall.  In doing so, he put country over politics and put the onus on the Democrats to negotiate in good faith and to put partisan politics aside on the issue of border security.  The three-week period ends today.

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The Criminalization of Financial Independence

tax donkeysCharles Hugh Smith –  Just as the “war on drugs” criminalized and destroyed large swaths of African-American and Latino communities, the “war on cash” will further criminalize the few remaining avenues to financial independence and freedom. The introduction of “entitlement” welfare in the 1960s generated a toxic dependency on the state that institutionalized worklessness, a one-two punch that undermined marriage and family in America’s working class of all ethnicities.

The “war on drugs” launched in the 1970s turned millions of American males into felons with severely restricted rights and opportunities in mainstream America.

Now we see the same destructive pattern repeating with “disability” being the new “welfare” and “legal” synthetic heroin (oxycotin etc.) being the new street-smack that lays waste to entire communities. Once you’re dependent on the state for disability and synthetic smack, you are owned by the government, lock, stock and barrel.

When the temptation to sell your $3 Medicaid prescription for synthetic smack for a quick $1000 becomes too much to resist, bang, you’ve got a one-way ticket into the Hell of America’s criminal “justice” system. Do you see the pattern? Offer the blandishments of “free money” and nearly free synthetic smack, and the vulnerable populace is quickly reduced to a dependent state of worklessness and addiction.

Needless to say, an addicted, ill, workless populace that is herded into the grinder of the criminal justice system isn’t going to create any political resistance. They have their hands full just trying to stay alive and avoid being sucked into the voracious maw of the criminalization meat grinder.

This is the context for the upcoming “war on cash” and the criminalization of financial independence. Every conventional means of remaining financially independent of the state-cartel-banking system is being restricted and criminalized, the better to herd everyone into centrally controlled institutions.

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