Tag: Essay

Waving our Hands and Saying “Make it Free!” Doesn’t Make It Free

When politicians decide to make something “free”, what that really means is they pass the typical cost on to others who don’t directly benefit from the goods or services being provided. Those folks in turn make adjustments to make up for their loss by alleviating this cost via something else – their customers, their charities, their investments. When people are made to pay, repeatedly and significantly, for something from which they did not benefit, the ripple effect of passing the buck continues until it gets back to the people to whom the benefit was originally given. Have you spotted the problem?

And when the patient, in this case, finds themselves in harder circumstances than before, they request more government assistance again. If the government agrees, they push the additional costs to a group of people who again gain no benefit, and the cycle continues. This is why everything “socialized”, from medicine to groceries to electricity, continues to rise in price until no one can afford the basics, and the government must step in and actively set price and wage controls on everything. And that’s when the real havoc begins. See Venezuela and South Africa for the latest in a long line examples of this. Regardless of the motivation, whether it’s compensation for perceived past injustices, or a simple moral impulse to make something “free”, when government intervenes too far into individuals’ freedom to transact for goods and services with a provider of their own choice, without coercion, really bad things start to happen.

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As Students Stop Learning History, They Stop Recognizing Tyranny

As David Horowitz has said, the Left itself is a totalitarian movement. At first we didn’t understand specifically what he meant by that. Most leftists (i.e. “liberals”, “progressives”, the politically correct) we knew or knew of didn’t appear in any way to be totalitarians themselves. And many leftist organizations I’ve known over the years were mostly democratic in their operation. But over time we’ve learned more fully what Horowitz was getting at, and in stating this observation he was echoing the same viewpoint Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek had expressed in the mid-20th century: “Socialism can be put into practice only by methods of which most socialists disapprove”.

A similar way to phrase the idea is, Leftist movements tend over time towards totalitarian governing models. Hayek arrived at this realization from an economic perspective in early 20th century Central Europe. Horowitz arrived at the same conclusion through his activism as a political leftist in 1960s and ’70s America. The concept has been clear to some for many decades. For others it’s becoming clearer by the week in these more turbulent times of western politics and culture, namely: that leftist organizations, as if by some irresistible gravitational force, slowly but steadily repudiate the basic principles of free society, with Freedom of Speech being the usual first casualty.

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The U.S. Presidency has too much power – no matter who’s in the White House

Has anyone noticed how much “governing” Presidents Trump and Obama have done via Executive Orders instead of the proper way, via legislation initiated and approved by Congress? The scope of executive orders, unilateral presidential decrees over which Congress has no say, has been steadily growing the last two decades. Many people love it when their guy is in office and simply bypasses Congress by issuing an executive order when he can’t get them to do what he wants. But is that really the way a democratic republic works? Sounds more like rule by the whim of one man.

Such orders are only operative while the president who issued them is in office. They can sometimes be stopped or delayed by court actions, but that’s about where any arguments that favor them end. Not only are these proclamations the unfettered rule of a single man over a supposedly democratic nation, they can have a massive effect on the economic, cultural, military, educational, and legal landscape. And they can be completely reversed by the next president. All this makes for potentially rapid, unpredictable change for the entire country and uncertainty about the longevity of policy.

NBC news ran a worthwhile editorial early this year arguing that while executive orders by Our Guy feel good, they are a tool of tyranny.  Quartz wrote a similarly insightful article last year, identifying the danger as “the use of these orders as a work-around in policy areas where the president wants to do something, but only Congress has the authority to act”. What one might ask now is: with a president in office today who is less popular with his Congress than possibly all other recent presidents, why doesn’t Congress take advantage of this situation to strip or at least limit the presidency with regard to this gross abuse of executive power? Brandon Weichert explains how the founding fathers attempted in the constitution to diffuse power across multiple people, bodies, and branches for the very purpose of preventing the rule of the One Man.

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NFL Repeatedly Getting Sacked in Its Own Endzone

Okay the NFL’s not finished, not by a long shot. But this is a great image by artist Tom Stigligh that well captures the emotional frustration many lifelong pro football fans (including yours truly) feel about the controversial, divisive, and entirely unnecessary intrusion of empty political symbolism into your formerly relaxing Sunday afternoon.

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We Need Not Only to Pause Muslim Immigration but Return Those Who are Here to Kill Us

Like frogs, who are incapable of detecting the smooth, slow approach of a snake because their eyes are only adapted to see the quick movements of flies, western nations seem unable to see the infiltration of their homelands by an insidious ideology whose sworn goal is to destabilize, out-populate, overwhelm, and conquer them.

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American Infrasound Surpasses 500 Subscribers (Thanks to You!)

A special thank you to all my readers for pushing American Infrasound over the 500-subscriber mark recently. We’ve been publishing for a little over a year now, and it’s great to see so much interest in the three critically important issues in today’s world that we focus on: Freedom of Speech, Islamic Supremacism, and the Collapsing of Western Civilization.

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