Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "misesmedia" channel.

  1. "If there's no link between effort and reward, you get less effort."
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  2. "Senator, I never approved gain-of-function research. I had my minions re-define the term and specifically exclude what we were funding as plainly NOT gain-of-function." I guess it all depends on what "is" is.
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  3. Dairy district wants special favors for dairy. Coal district wants special favors for coal. They agree then that there should be special favors for coal and dairy. By the time ALL interests are represented, NO ONE'S interests are represented. You just have a bigger, more intrusive government, high taxes, and, since they discovered fiat currency, CRIPPLING DEBT. Everyone SHOULD operate in their own self-interest, but NOT with special advantage from government.
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  4. Lincoln did the most damage to federalism. Wilson's downstream of that, FDR's downstream of Wilson, and LBJ's downstream of FDR.
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  5. The French always have the best and the worst ideas.
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  6. Get the federals out of it. That fixes a lot. Let the individual states run their own experiments and learn from each other.
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  7. You 'n' me, both. "FBI's been politicized since J. Edgar Hoover still fit in a size 9 dress."
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  8. There's all the incentive to overspend and zero incentive to spend less.
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  9. "Wars are caused by the uncurbed ambitions of the aristocracy." This is more true, today, than it was a century or more in the past, when I think the participants were volunteers. Conscription is a relatively modern concept in the West.
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  10. Same experience as a math tutor. Maybe it's because I'm more polymath than math, even though I'm a 1%-er in math, with a PhD. I'd still consider myself in the bottom 10% of that 1%, though. But I always had better knowledge of other subjects, especially history and the true march of human progress. I was always a really good tutor and teacher, but not because I was a Math God, but because, like Michael, all my math chops were hard-won. My only genius was being able to ignore everything else and work on one thing 16 hours a day and weekends! "Wow! You're smart!" No. I've just put in 100,000 hours, so I have a big head-start on you. You're actually much more advanced than I was at your age, and you're laying a better foundation than I did." I'm starting to believe in a malevolence, but still think it's possible we're looking at the accumulation of many small sins and incompetencies over many years. There is a lot of that, I think, but there are some core moral differences between a classical liberal, like me, and what passes for a liberal, today. I got all the way to the heart of it arguing with a welfare-mom college student (Welfare is for middle-class white women. Great program. Move out of the house, get pregnant, and save your parents thousands of dollars, with free housing, food, and college. Just marry the state and become its lifetime advocate!). Anyway, I made the "slippery slope" argument. "What if you find that more and more women are getting pregnant for the extra cash every month? What about the 4th generation welfare mom with 8 kids? Is it OK to sterilize them?" "Yes." "So, a consequence of your utopia is government sterilization programs." "If it comes to that, but of course it won't." I thought I had won. I hadn't. She had no problem with government sterilization programs, if it came to that. Theres a core morality that simply isn't there in some people. People like that are already inclined towards acceptance of government oppression for the greater good. People like that LOVED lock-downs and HATED anyone who spoke against them. They always think their conformity ensures their survival and that dissidents deserve whatever punishment they get. "Well, he was asking for it." Again on the "evil" thing: Bret Weinstein said the COVID response wasn't fraught with errors and incompetence. The response was the INVERSE of what it should've been. They had to know what was right in order to get EVERYthing wrong, and it all led to the same weakening of the populace, to create the conditions needed for (essentially) a Bolshevik revolution. We're losing the middle class! Censorship of free speech. Exaggeration of the threat. Economy-wrecking policies that had enormous ill effects on the public health that we're STILL suffering. Masking of children. Isolation and other psychological abuse of elders. Suppression of early treatment regimens. Suppression of prophylactic measures. No mention of diet, minerals and vitamins. Reversing the moral hazard of vaccines. "You're not taking it for yourself. You're taking it for others." The myth of asymptomatic spread.
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  11. I've traced it back to FDR, and don't know that much about the history from the early 1900s to the early 1930s. You guys get it. Nobody ever talks about this.
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  12. In the Soviet Union, the black market was just how things got done. The government office wasn't gonna send you a plumber. But you knew the plumber down the street and traded labor with them, totally off the books. The laws made criminals of everyone, so they could throw anybody they wanted in jail, any time they chose. The tyranny actually resulted in tight-knit and caring communities. And deep, abiding, and very private religious faith.
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  13. That's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is the individual parts being more self-sufficient and self-governing. We don't want a revolution. We just want the centralized controls to atrophy over time. If all countries had mostly autonomous communities, and high levels of individual sovereignty, then national borders would become less and less relevant. Globalists want to control everything from the top down. But if we governed from the ground UP, we'd approach one global community, NATURALLY. Leftists want to FORCE the homogenization of one-world culture. Libertarians want to LET it happen (except for the libertarians who want to abolish national borders before the people on both sides of borders have freedom and prosperity).
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  14. Reminds me of 2020, with the parties reversed.
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  15. Excellent speech. Yes. The more damage they did to the U.S. Constitution, the more people fawn on them. At least Wilson has dropped off the "greatest presidents" list. These are strange times, when the common wisdom is that the failures we see around us are from "runaway capitalism," when the true culprit is runaway government.
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  16. Progressives just romanticize the unions and the wars with union-busting robber barons, to illustrate how awful capitalism is. They do the same thing now with police shootings. Magnify the one and miss the rising TIDE that made more people better off in less time than at any point in world history. Before the industrial revolution, subsistence-level farming - or worse, slaving away in somebody ELSE's field - with at best a horse-drawn plow, was where most of us were at. Those union fights were big news precisely because they were rare, and they exposed the industrialists who were breaking those strikes. Only government could cushion the fallout from such behavior. They come in, they pass a few laws, make a few stern speeches, and make sure their buddies come out ahead on the deal, behind the scenes or just in the fine print. Make compliance too difficult for the smaller outfits to comply with, and squeeze them out. That's why I'd prefer to see Alphabet go BROKE, because people get so disgusted with them. If the government steps in and regulates them, then it'll be OK to keep using those platforms, and another (regulatory) barrier is in place to fend off their would-be competition.
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  17. The reason it's such a beast is we continue making advances in spite of the beast. The beast then points to our progress and claims it as its own. Our freedom and prosperity are why we can afford the big government. The big government didn't cause the prosperity, which, in spite of everything the government does, continues. I don't think the presence or absence of non-profit medical services necessarily means things are out of whack. I totally agree with Mises that it's not the federal government's business. But I can totally see how a small town might be functionally socialist, with community pride in the local hospitals, with the townspeople chipping in for 4 more beds, or that MRI machine for the town. A town with spirit and pride can make THEIR hospitals the best. A few raffles. Some annual concerts. Everybody volunteers their time. They all throw a party to help others. All proceeds to the hospital? You'd be surprised how much can be raised. You can throw good parties if your town grows its own weed and distills its own spirits. No town is complete without a distillery. I'm in Colorado, USA, where marijuana's legal, btw. I was just thinking about parties. Nephew got married the other day. A good time was had by all. But seriously, the local hospitals should be a point of pride for communities. The feds just muck things up.
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  18. Economics is part mathematics, part psychology. Keynesians are more right than they have a right to be, because the value of currency has momentum. There's a "Stone Soup" aspect to any medium of exchange. Participate in the fiction and it becomes reality. A Coke cost $0.10 for a long time and then it was $0.25 for a long time. The dollar devalued the entire time, but you got the same product for the same price for significant spans of time. So the REAL inflation lags the amount of theft that's taken place.
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  19. As long as the state runs education, health, and dominates and censors the media, it doesn't matter how good any of those candidates are. We're always going to be one election away from ruin. It may be too late. We're already close to ruin, with financial and industrial collapse of apocalyptic proportions. Next stage is the Strong Man. Biden sees himself as that guy, but no. He's the one to finish creating the conditions for one.
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  20. I have no idea of what you speak.
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  21.  @KnardDog  : This is about the only place where I've seen anybody mention this. People look at the problems in our system and ignore the fact that the U.S. government is the single biggest player in the industry. Ask a hospital what they would do if all procedures were priced at the medicare/medicaid level, and they'll say "We would have to close our doors."
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  22. The thing about money is it's based on faith. Even if they print too much (they do), it's like the Stone Soup Fable. If the people believe there's something to it, there's something to it. Inflation always lags behind the true value decline, because (for one thing) it takes time to change all the prices in the store, there are contracts based on the value of money when the deal was signed, but most of all, the PERCEPTION of what $5 means lags behind the devaluation.
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  23. Look at entertainment. "Criminal Minds," CSI, ... People love crime shows and FBI's always portrayed in a positive light.
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  24. All institutions are subject to rot and hijacking. Just look at the Libertarian Party. Ayn Rand's fiction? Meh. Her "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal?" Formulates the creeping corruption from the earliest days of the U.S. Government. Would that she truly were prescient in her fiction. Then perhaps we with real life skills will find our way around the state apparat with a shrug.
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  25. Yes. And what do you do if one coercive state is misbehaving?
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  26. It's not just the taking. It's the destruction of free-market mechanisms that make SURE there's food on the shelves and electricity in the homes, because there's a profit motive in it for those who provide such things.
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  27.  @1voluntaryist  : From early on, the government's been the best friend of the robber barons, who wouldn't EXIST were it not for someone in government tilting the playing field for them. From city council on up to ALL of the 3-letter agencies created to regulate the economy and "stick it to the fat cats," all's they did was make them fat cats PURR, baby! Swindlers were first in line for those rights-of-way for the transcontinental railroad, back in the 19th Century. Give me a minute and I'll find something local, state or federal before that, because it's always been the way, and it's not capitalism. Capitalism is how MOST of us get along with one another and prosper. But the guy who bribes the mayor to see to it that you NEVER get a permit to dig that ditch isn't a capitalist. He's a fascist, working WITH government to make himself and one or two corrupt members of government very wealthy at everyone else's expense. In a capitalist system, that's fraud, which falls under the most basic common law, from centuries ago. In a limited-government system, there're fewer opportunities for us all to get played like that at the same time. But the higher up you go, the more people are harmed, which is why the feds should defend our borders and otherwise STFU, unless some local's violating the constitution.
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  28. You misspelled "Demublican."
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  29. FBI = Cossacks.
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  30. All the biggest cases of "runaway capitalism" were because of rich men buying off a few politicians, who then abused their office to grant favors or WORSE crafted the law to make awarding their pals concessions LEGAL, even seem VIRTUOUS, if you also bought good PR in the local press. Regulatory capture took place before we even had much in the way of regulatory agencies! Heh
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  31. The crook who hurt the most people gets a blanket pardon. This man destroyed the reputations and finances of MILLIONS, and I'm not in a forgiving mood. If he wants forgiveness, he needs to have a come-to-Jesus moment, confess his crimes, and perform acts of contrition. On the bright side, Trump canceled Fauci's taxpayer-paid security team.
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  32. "Capitalism: An Unknown Ideal" was the only work of Ayn Rand's I could sit still long enough to get through. Rail barons, steel barons, the dust bowl (iirc). Those 3-letter agencies laid out the red carpet for big business and took a giant dump on the little guys. Laid it all out, nicely, with copious endnotes to keep a man busy for years. I was too sophisticated of a reader to get through "Atlas Shrugged." It just wasn't that engaging, even though I embraced its themes. There were always far too many other riveting works in science fiction and fantasy, making John Galt seem too much like a homework assignment.
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  33. Does free trade mean buying from totalitarian producers because they treat their workers poorly, and enslave their populations?
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  34. They're not talking about government-imposed HOAs. Trouble with HOAs is the trouble with any government, though, because assholes and busybodies use it as an excuse to harass their neighbors. That's why I'd never live under an HOA. Petty tyrants.
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  35. Uni-Party Rules! We are doomed!
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  36.  @ctrlaltdebug  Protectionist tariffs. Yes.
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  37. The way I look at it, socialism isn't innately corrupt. It just creates a foundation and an instrument for confiscation. Then it instantly gets corrupted, because of the power over so much and so many in so few hands. But socialists didn't invent corruption. The same abuses of power for profit by robber barons took place before Marx got any traction. Socialists just give the robber barons a patina of legitimacy, because they're only complying with the government (that they subvert and that subverts them).
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  38. FIRST! DOH!
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  39. I can't sit thru 'em all, right now, but they are correct about how the anarcho state should and would run, but the question is how to get there. Maybe we should go back to the borough idea, with each town more or less an autonomous unit. The hospitals would be as good as the communities were willing to make them. If it were all up to each borough to handle that, I bet you there'd be all kinds of charitable support for the hospital, and towns would consider it a mark of pride. "Oh yeah. We can do CAT scans, MRI, ultrasound, you name it. We had quite a few elderly in town, and no cardiologist, so we held concerts every Friday and Saturday night in the park, all summer long, and the TOWN hired a cardiologist, and gave him the equipment he asked for. We're all up-to-date, now." A good town can do that sort of thing as an organism, with or without a mayor making speeches.
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  40. The FBI wants to be the KGB.
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  41. We hate going to the doctor as a culture. I'm trying to get on a preventive plan, rather than just turn to doctors when things go catastrophically wrong.
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  42. "Access media." If you have inside access, you can't be trusted.
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  43. And yet, people will vote for it! It's definitely democratic. That's why the USA put so many checks and balances in its constitution. The people will tend to vote for economic security and give up freedoms to get it. Pure democracies are just waiting for one economic crisis for the big government takeover that doesn't feed any more people. It just silences those who complain about it.
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