Tag Archives: Socialism

Baby Boom to Baby Bust–The Crisis in Socialism, by Martin Armstrong

Posted on March 10, 2019 | Leave a comment

Socialism being essentially a Ponzi scheme, it will run out of suckers–the productive young who are expected to pick up the tab for the unproductive and the old. That day is arriving sooner than you might think, thanks to declining birth rates. From Martin Armstrong at armstrongeconomics.com:

There is a real crisis in the fertility rate which has fallen to such a low level that all the socialism going forward will simply collapse. What used to be the Baby Boom is now being called the “Baby Bust,” which means that in all first-world countries there is a real crisis for they have insufficient children to maintain their population size. This has been one excuse for allowing the refugees into Europe. As the population dwindles, all the social programs are collapsing for they were NEVER designed properly from the outset. They are based on a Ponzi scheme where they rely on taxing a growing younger population to service the benefits of the older generation. This was the entire scheme behind Obamacare. Force the youth to buy insurance they do not need to reduce the cost for the elderly.

These findings were a huge surprise to those in government. They did not think it was even possible. The joke is that we will have more grandparents than grandchildren. A study published in the Lancet followed trends in every country from 1950 to 2017. During 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime. The fertility rate all but halved to 2.4 children per woman by last year. They compared countries in Africa, such as Niger, where the fertility rate was 7:1 compared to countries like Cyprus where couples had just one child meaning that would be a 50% decline in population.

Even in Britain, the fertility rate has dropped to 1.7, which is similar to most Western European countries. Anything below 2 children per couple means a net population decline. This data clearly warns that the Ponzi scheme set up first in the New Deal of the Great Depression is no longer sustainable. The cost of childcare has skyrocketed and the rise in taxation has forced women to work, making childcare mandatory, but not affordable for 2 or more children. This creates an unsustainable future for taxation.

 

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Doug Casey on Class Warfare

Posted on February 25, 2019 | 1 comment

After you dine on the rich, from where does your next meal come? From Doug Casey at caseyresearch.com:

Justin’s note: Are billionaires bad?

Many Americans on the left are asking themselves this question. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – the Democrats’ new rising star – is certainly no exception. Just look at what AOC said in a recent interview.

It’s not to say someone like Bill Gates, for example, or Warren Buffett are immoral people. I do not believe that.

I do think a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong.

AOC, of course, isn’t alone. Two weeks ago, The Huffington Post published a piece titled “Should Billionaires Even Exist?” The New York Times followed up a few days later when it ran a similar piece titled “Abolish Billionaires.”

In short, class warfare is no longer just a radical leftist idea. It’s gone mainstream.

To figure out what’s behind this, I got Doug Casey on the phone. Below is a transcript of that conversation.

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Posted in Business, Capitalism, Civil Liberties, Economy, Government, History, Horseshit

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Venezuela was my home, and socialism destroyed it. Slowly, it will destroy America, too. By Daniel Di Martino

Posted on February 22, 2019 | 6 comments

There’s little doubt that the US government’s regime change effort in Venezuela will come a cropper. There’s no doubt that socialism of the Venezuelan or any other variety has a long history of failure and imposes stagnation, misery, and death.  Socialism is evil. From someone who has lived through Venezuela’s, Daniel di Martino at usatoday.com:

While neither ‘Medicare for All’ nor a wealth tax will turn America into Venezuela overnight, all it would take is a series of catastrophic policies.

The first time I couldn’t buy food at the grocery store, I was 15 years old. It was 2014 in Caracas, Venezuela, and I had spent more than an hour in line waiting. When I got to the register, I noticed I had forgotten my ID that day. Without the ID, the government rationing system would not let the supermarket sell my family the full quota of food we needed. It was four days until the government allowed me to buy more.

This was fairly normal for me. All my life, I lived under socialism in Venezuela until I left and came to the United States as a student in 2016. Because the regime in charge imposed price controls and nationalized the most important private industries, production plummeted. No wonder I had to wait hours in lines to buy simple products such as toothpaste or flour.

And the shortages went far beyond the supermarket.

My family and I suffered from blackouts and lack of water. The regime nationalized electricity in 2007 in an effort to make electricity “free.” Unsurprisingly, this resulted in underinvestment in the electrical grid. By 2016, my home lost power roughly once a week.

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The Left Looks Backward (Again), by Thomas DiLorenzo

Posted on February 17, 2019 | Leave a comment

The Green New Deal wouldn’t work any better than the original New Deal. From Thomas DiLorenzo at lewrockwell.com:

The so-called Green New Deal that was recently posted as a congressional Resolution and endorsed by many high-profile Democrats is essentially a twenty-first century version of the 1888 utopian novel, Looking Backward, by the Marxist-inspired writer Edward Bellamy.  The main character of the novel, one Julian West, falls asleep for 113 years and awakes in the year 2000 delighting in the fact that America had been turned into a socialist utopia.  A major theme of the novel is that all the evils of society can be eradicated by more-or-less totalitarian government controls, mandates, and regulations.  That is also the theme of the Green New Deal.

In Bellamy’s utopia private property is abolished and all industry is nationalized.  Government guarantees “jobs for everyone,” as does the Green New Deal.  Education is “free” (another Green New Deal promise) and everyone is paid the same by the government, the sole employer.  Special efforts are made to assure that men and women are all paid the same.  This is another key point of the Green New Deal.  Everyone retired at age 45 with a good taxpayer-funded pension.

Numerous Edward Bellamy Societies sprung up, established by socialist intellectuals of the day such as John Dewey, who founded the Edward Bellamy Society of New York. Looking Backward also spawned numerous small socialist communes, all of which collapsed in failure – a warning sign of what would become of twentieth-century socialism everywhere.

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Are the Democrats Bent on Suicide? by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on February 12, 2019 | Leave a comment

The Democrats are trying to Make Socialism Great. There is no Again because it’s never come up great the many times it has been tried. From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:

After reading an especially radical platform agreed upon by the British Labor Party, one Tory wag described it as “the longest suicide note in history.”

The phrase comes to mind on reading of the resolution calling for a Green New Deal, advanced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and endorsed by at least five of the major Democratic candidates for president.

The Green New Deal is designed to recall the halcyon days of the 1930s, when, so the story goes, FDR came to Washington to enact the historic reforms that rescued America from the Great Depression.

Only that story is more than a small myth.

The unemployment rate when FDR took the oath in 1933 was 25 percent. It never fell below 14 percent through the 1930s. In June 1938, despite huge Democratic majorities in Congress, FDR was presiding over a nation where unemployment was back up to 19 percent.

World War II and the conscription of 16 million young men gave us “full employment.” And the war’s end and demobilization saw the return of real prosperity in 1946, after FDR was dead.

Yet this Green New Deal is nothing if not ambitious.

To cope with climate change, the GND calls for a 10-year plan to meet “100 percent of the power demand of the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.”

This appears to require a phase-out by 2030 of all carbon-emitting power plants fueled by coal and oil and their replacement by power plants fueled by wind and solar.

Will natural gas be permitted? Will nuclear power? There are 60 commercially operating nuclear power plants with 98 nuclear reactors in 30 states. Will they be shut down? Will the Greens agree to dam up more U.S. rivers to produce renewable hydroelectric power?

Air travel consumes huge quantities of carbon-producing jet fuel. What will replace it? Perhaps progressive Democratic candidates will set an example by not flying, and then by voting to end production of private aircraft and to ground all corporate jets. Let the elites sail to Davos.

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Venezuela – A Case Of Socialist-Organized Theft, by Daniel Lacalle

Posted on January 29, 2019 | Leave a comment

Setting aside the issue of whether or not the US should be trying to force regime change in Venezuela, the economy there is a disaster and would be even in the absence of economic sanctions from the US. From Daniel Lacalle at dlacalle.com:

Much has been written about the economic disaster perpetrated by the Maduro-Chavez regime in Venezuela. The magnitude of it is simply difficult to match. A sad global example of how to destroy a rich country.

The mistake that many make is to think that this wreck has been caused by a combination of incompetence and folly. And they are wrong. The Venezuelan socialist regime has carried out the largest organized robbery in history and has done so with a perfectly designed plan.

The plan was always to expropriate the wealth of the whole country for the benefit of a few political leaders through plundering, destruction of currency and decapitalizacón of the state oil company

What has happened to Venezuela is not a disaster or a coincidence, it is socialism.

It is important to start by debunking the lies of the regime propaganda:

The nonexistent blockade. The United States is one of Venezuela’s largest trading partners. Trade between the United States and Venezuela in 2018 grew by more than 9%. Venezuela has bilateral trade agreements with more than 70 countries. Chavismo, like the Castro regime in Cuba, manipulates its followers by calling the sanctions against members of the regime and the fraudulent use of the country’s funds a “blockade”. The only blockade suffered by Venezuela is that of Chavismo against its citizens.

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Posted in Business, Debt, Economy, Energy, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Taxes, Trade

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Get Ready– they’re coming for your money, by Simon Black

Posted on January 22, 2019 | Leave a comment

Whatever money you’ve got, they want. From Simon Black at sovereignman.com:

Every so often throughout history, the peasants grab their pitchforks and come for the elite. It happens when the wealth gap grows too extreme… when people feel like they are getting left behind, with no opportunity to advance.

Central banks around the world have printed trillions of dollars over last decade, and pushed interest rates to zero, and sometimes below. And all of that stimulus went directly into the pockets of the wealthy.

Since 2009, the world’s billionaires more than DOUBLED their combined wealth. All the billionaires in the world had $3.4 trillion in 2009. By 2017, they amassed $8.9 trillion.

Mark Zuckerberg multiplied his wealth almost 20 times over, from $3 billion in 2009, to over $58 billion in 2019.

$8.9 trillion is a massive, almost incomprehensible amount of wealth.

But it really shouldn’t be that surprising if you think about it… these people are wealthy for a reason. Typically, they are pretty good at making money. And with the snowball effect, if you give them more time, they will probably make even more.

For the last ten years, we’ve seen a huge asset price inflation in everything from the stock market, to bonds and real estate, and even fine art and wine.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Economy, Government, Philosophy, Politics

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