Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "John Stossel"
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Real Actual News He's pretty socialist. He offers some improvements for how they ADMINISTER socialism, but it still comes down to Peter robbing Paul to take care of Mary. Peter doesn't care about spending Paul's money wisely, and he doesn't really care if Mary gets back on her feet. He has nothing at stake.
I think Universal Basic Income makes sense if it's a J. Peter Grace "negative income tax" kind of deal. Grace Commission proposed negative income tax when Reagan was president. The idea was to bring everyone up to the poverty line and leave the rest up to them. Eliminate HHS and all federal programs and just pay you the difference between what you earn and a basic subsistence level. It would reduce the federal bureaucracy SIGNIFICANTLY.
But I don't think that's what Yang's proposing. He just wants to give away $1,000 per month, so teenagers and 20-somethings can live like college students without owning anything. Just get 3 or 4 people who want to share a house and sing kum-bye-ah until you retire. Very attractive to young people, who want to hang out and party. Maybe work on their guitar or basket-weaving skills...
I put Yang in sort of a Tulsi Gabbard category. He says things neither establishment party wants to hear. It's just not a good enough reason to vote for him.
He also has a serious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. He bought the MSM characterization of Trump, without giving him credit for the things Trump was right about, like immigration, regulatory capture, reducing our military footprint abroad, getting politics out of the classroom, making cities pay their own way by curtailing MASSIVE state-and-local-tax writeoffs for big-spending cities, shifting the tax burden from big-spending blue city governments to flyover country, getting government out of the way of working stiffs and small businesses.
Of course, everything good Trump did with regard to the last two got wiped out by COVID.
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GihKaL : The humanities are pushing a lot of nonsense. Unfortunately, the nature of that nonsense is such that they believe they can impose their will and their dogma on all disciplines. And in a lot of places, they CAN, because the math and science teachers are just as immersed in the culture as the humanities professors. But really, the humanities professors are the ones who should know better.
But it's so appealing, because it's wrapped in peer-reviewed respectability, just like the one source of Russiagate was spun into several, because one guy spread the story to multiple media outlets, whose reports were then used by the FBI to say to the FISA court "See? Everybody knows something's going on," just like "Everybody knows Donald Trump is a racist," but nobody has any evidence. It's grade-school stuff, where one big-mouthed kid starts saying Susie has cooties. Such a thing can get traction and cause a kid problems for the rest of their lives.
The more I reflect on the last 4 years, it just looks like a bunch of crooks using accusations against others to stay out in front of devastating evidence against THEM that was percolating out in the cloud. Most of what Hillary did wrong was petty and corrupt, but what exposed the underbelly of government was what all her cronies did to cover for her. And then the brazen, false accusations against Trump, whom a SMART media could've made mincemeat of, in the real world, but This Is ClownWorld.
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Electric Vehicles are pretty practical to anyone living in their own house, who don't need to commute an hour to and from work every day or whose job doesn't entail driving hundreds of miles every day. I think it can and SHOULD be a growth market, without ANY government intervention.
There will never be enough batteries in the near future to replace internal combustion engines. But for SOME people, it will make a lot of sense and even be cheaper than fossil fuels. My sister has an e-bike, and she loves it.
If you re-think how big and heavy you need to make a car, there could be a light, 4-wheeled vehicle that looks like something between a bike and a conventional car or truck, could be good for people who don't need to travel long distances every day. There's a limit to how much of that can be done to replace fossil-fueled engines. Let price and availability in a free market determine what and how much we go in that direction.
But I think the conventional gas-powered vehicle is - and should be - for years to come. People are generally mindful of the environment. It's not that gasoline engines are bad, but too MUCH of it is a bad thing. Lots of ways to KEEP them and at the same time reduce our environmental impact. Don't situate your home an hour away from work. Work remotely, if you have a skill conducive to remote work. Not everybody has to do everything to put us on a trend to better balance with Nature. Freedom's how we get there. Not governmental intervention, which ALWAYS back-fires.
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This has been going on for a long time, only it was easier to prevent establishment ideas from ever being before the Internet. It's been that way since at least FDR. Informal systems of control amounted to officials making a few phone calls to a very small number of big news operations, like WaPost, NYTimes, ABC, CBS and NBC. Then of course, there's AP and UPI. It was for the war effort during FDR and WWII, but those cozy relationships didn't go away after Victory in the Pacific. Neither did things like injecting cattle with antibiotics, and a plethora of other "emergency" measures that remained in place for decades after the war.
Before Obama, it was more subtle. You had to be very well-informed by other means than establishment education and news to even know there was a bias, because the bias was in the story selection rather than in how it was reported. Since Obama, the bias is right out in the open in the reporting, itself. There was at least some attempt to give more than one viewpoint on what news that was allowed to be reported in any kind of big way, before Obama.
But NOW, there are independent media with millions of viewers who point out the bias, bad facts, and most of all, stories that were EASILY memory-holed, when media were more of a monolith (from the Great Depression to Obama).
The Internet changed things. Most of all, so-called "liberals" becoming the establishment changed things. They're MUCH more censorious than their more conservative (classical liberal) predecessors.
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Spotted Owl, Polar Bears, Snail-Darters, ... All for propaganda purposes. All to justify use of force to save them.
The thing I hate about this is the one side goes too far, gets demonized, and people go on thinking it's just a bunch of scare-mongering, and that the world would be fine if they'd just shut up. We do need to do better wrt the environment, but government action is not how we get to a better place.
We get to a better place by free and prosperous people ascending Maslow's Ladder. From higher rungs of that ladder, they have the means to indulge their higher moral values.
We're already to the point that the average shopper, given a choice between a company that spews pollution to make their products and a company that's environmentally more responsible, will choose the more responsible company's product.
Solutions are going to be many. We're foolish to let the government decide which one or two "solutions" are the best. When the government does the deciding, the same people always cash in, and things don't get better. Oh, you can point to one metric that improves, but you have to sweep all the other metrics that got worse in the improvement of the one.
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@thomasandersen5822 : It's an interesting fight. Entire generations have been indoctrinated by largely ineffective public schools. The thing to watch is the red-pill conversion rate by new generations, much like the '60s generation, that got out into the real world and say "Our teachers are full of shit," and rebelled against the regressive establishment.
America has a brand-new regressive establishment, consisting largely of a generation of leaders who rebelled against the traditional order, which was good, and replaced it with drek, which is bad. Now they defend it the same way the McCarthyists of the '50s defended THEIR "world order." They were at the peak of their power right before The Fall in the '60s and '70s.
The young people, NOW, see those '60s "revolutionaries" as failed prophets. They did their thing, and they're leaving THEIR children with a mountain of debt and an oppressive system of Cultural Marxism infecting education, media and government. The government can turn its Eye of Sauron on any individual it chooses, and RUIN them. It's always been this way, but the hippies, it turns out, are no different than those who came, before, once in power.
The wheel just keeps turning. Some progress gets made, some lost. Everybody's pretty much tolerant of gays, women have achieved equal pay for equal work, and so forth. I don't think that ground will be lost, although it needs a f minor/major correction, as LGBTQ and feminism have taken on some toxic aspects that need checking. Intersectionalism needs be seen for the incoherent opinions making their way into academia as canon, and give way to SCIENCE and REASON and FACTS.
That will happen. It's so EASY to spoof those guys, because all their stuff is made-up. Sokal, 20 years ago, and more recently, Bogossian and a pair of (pretty brilliant) postdocs. Names are on the tip of my tongue...
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This is a bit disingenuous. Rockefellers and Vanderbilts weren't above unfair trade practices, using their size to sell locally at a loss to wipe out local competition in any region they pleased, more or less systematically, then jack up prices, later, when they had the market cornered. That doesn't mean it was the government's job to fix. I think the CULTURE fixes those things better and with fewer side-effects. Word gets out that you're a cheat, and people will go out of their way not to do business with you. The biggest side-effect is the way the regulatory agency ends up giving future unfair practices a government seal of approval and a government shield.
They were also robber barons in the sense that they were in no great hurry to share their largesse with their workers.
I agree that people of today don't appreciate that for most of the workers, the alternatives in the countryside were all worse.
Nevertheless, I agree with the claim that OSHA isn't what "reformed" the workplace. Things were already trending that way under unregulated capitalism. As Henry Ford realized, if his workers couldn't afford to buy his cars, there was only so much profit to be made catering to the rich. He needed a middle class to keep his markets expanding. That meant paying his workers better. Also, by improving safety conditions, "robber barons" found it easier to hire and retain better workers, and get some loyalty in return.
EPA isn't what's making things cleaner. USDA and FDA aren't maximizing the food value or the safety of medicines for consumers. Transparency and tough competition is what make and keep companies moral. Government agencies give companies a blueprint for how to cheat without getting on the wrong side of the law or the regulators. As long as you check all THEIR boxes, everything's supposedly good, even though we KNOW that most of the food we eat is grown by "chemical farming" and GMO. Nutritional value is shrinking and toxins in the food are increasing (They call it "pest resistance" but they're basically getting the crops to create pesticides, abortifacts, sterilization vectors and pest repellants into the crops, themselves. "Totally organic. Didn't spray ANY pesticide. We've engineered it to secrete Roundup from its leaves! Isn't that wonderful?"
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Trump isn't erratic. He's a salesman and a negotiator. You always extoll the virtues of what you're selling, and in negotiations, you never ask for what you WANT. You ask for the MOON and hope to get something CLOSE to what you want.
My main problem with Trump was he didn't do his homework on who his closest advisors, cabinet members and generals should be, and he didn't have the right guy advising him in that area of weakness. I think his instincts were generally good, but there were (and are) just too many forces arrayed against him in the "business-as-usual" departments and federal agencies that live in an ecosystem that prospers at the expense of everyone else's (not just at home but abroad).
If the feds are offering subsidies to electric car manufacturers, you KNOW it's about their buddies who make or want to make electric cars, but it's NOT to save the environment. It's to funnel resources to the one thing that's profitable politically for people in government and profitable for the pals who are mining Lithium (a nasty business). They'll get around to paying the guys who will ine up for subsidies to pay for the massive cleanup of all those Lithium batteries, later. Everything in its time. People won't realize what it's doing to the environment until it's so bad, it can be considered a crisis for the guys who caused it to get paid solving for us.
People can always see the good things they can do with power, and the harm caused is always secondary, because "Look at the good we do." They just waste resources and store up more trouble for the future. Instead, the focus should be on laying the foundation for LETTING good things happen, and the main thing to do there is to do NOTHING. Just do the best you can where you are and share your successes and failures with the world. That's how the Internet is supposed to work. It's the only centralized thing we need, and its purpose is so we can talk to each other! Period!
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