April 30, 2021

A Human Wrecking-Ball In The White House

April 30, 2021/ Francis Menton

Maybe you didn’t believe me earlier this month when I issued a warning that the U.S. was “getting ready to go full Venezuela” on economic policy. After Biden’s speech a couple of nights ago, are you starting to get the picture?
All constraints are now lifted. All limits no longer apply. The federal government is now fully unleashed to solve all human problems and bring about perfect fairness and equity in human affairs. And to do so immediately if not sooner. All through the magic of a few trillion additional dollars (per year!) of federal spending.
And while we’re at it, we’ll also solve the “climate emergency.” That will cost just another few incremental annual trillion. In the context of our new superpowers, that’s a rounding error.

April 26, 2021

They Shouldn’t Have Died; That Doesn’t Make Them Innocent

April 26, 2021/ Jane Menton

Two weeks ago, Daunte Wright’s death sparked another round of protests and calls to defund/abolish the police. A week later, Derek Chauvin’s trial resulting in a guilty verdict has given the U.S. a reprieve from another round of violent riots.
Both of these outcomes could have been anticipated: every time a black civilian dies in an encounter with the police, the conversation immediately becomes about police brutality and police reform.
While excessive policing is a problem, there are two other aspects to the BLM conversation that are ignored by the mainstream: we will always need some policing and law enforcement to protect civilians from criminal behavior, and many of the recent victims who have been held up as martyrs of the BLM movement had been engaged in criminal behavior.

April 24, 2021

April 24, 2021/ Francis Menton

It never ceases to amaze me how the very mention of the word “climate” causes people to lose all touch with their rational faculties. And of course I’m not talking here just about the ordinary man on the street, but also, indeed especially, about our elected leaders and government functionaries.
The latest example is President Biden’s pledge, issued at his “World Climate Summit” on April 22, to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 50 - 52% from the levels of 2005, and to do so by 2030.
In my last post a couple of days ago, I remarked that “Biden himself has absolutely no idea how this might be accomplished. And indeed it will not be accomplished.” Those things are certainly true, but also fail to do full justice to the extent to which our President and his handlers have now left the real world and gone off into total fantasy.

April 22, 2021

April 22, 2021/ Francis Menton

Once again, it’s Earth Day. The first such day was 51 years ago, April 22, 1970.
Since that first one, Earth Day has served as an annual opportunity for sanctimonious socialist-minded apocalypticists to issue prophesies of imminent environmental doom. Here from the Competitive Enterprise Institute is a great list of some 50 or so such predictions uttered since the late 1960s, all of which have since been proven wrong. Interestingly, the ones from the time of the first Earth Day mostly concerned overpopulation, famine, and global cooling. Today, those things seem ever so quaint.
Somewhere along the line, the prophesy of a coming ice age faded away, and global warming surged forth as the much more fashionable doomsday prediction. Today, fealty to the global warming apocalypse orthodoxy is a prerequisite for admission to polite society. Our President goes around repeating the mantra that climate change is an “existential threat,” even as he signs Executive Orders and re-directs half the energies of the vast federal government to fight it.
And what better opportunity than the annual return of Earth Day for our great leaders to demonstrate their deep climate change sincerity?

April 19, 2021

April 19, 2021/ Francis Menton

Last summer a woman named Bari Weiss had a very public separation from the New York Times, where she had been briefly employed as a high-ranking opinion writer and editor. Weiss describes her political identity as “centrist.” Clearly, that’s not where Pravda is today; and in her writings she had a way of not going along with the radical wokist groupthink that has taken hold there these days.
Around the beginning of 2021, Weiss launched her own newsletter at the Substack site.
In her letter of resignation from the Times, Weiss described the treatment that she received as a non-conforming thinker in those precincts.
Since getting started at Substack, Weiss has quickly developed a specialty in exposing the extraordinary penetration into academia of the toxic neo-racist ideology that goes by the Orwellian name of “antiracism.” Indeed, in one of her first pieces at her new site, on January 22, after first revealing that she had voted for Biden, she asked a series of question to the new President, focusing specifically on how he would deal with Critical Race Theory. . . .

April 16, 2021

April 16, 2021/ Francis Menton

Many people of a libertarian bent, such as myself, often express frustration with Republican politicians for their lack of dedication to small-government principles. But then, the alternative is Democrats, who have somehow turned into the party that believes there are no longer any limits on government spending and taxes.
If you think there isn’t a whole lot of difference between how the two parties govern when in power, you might want to compare what’s going on these days in Florida versus New York. In Florida, both state legislative chambers, and the governorship, are controlled by Republicans; in New York, it’s Democrats.
April is the time of year that the states tend to finalize their budgets for the coming fiscal year. In New York, the state Constitution sets an April 1 deadline for enacting a budget for the upcoming July 1 to June 30 fiscal year. The deadline is often missed, sometimes by a lot, but this year the process has just concluded.
Florida also has a July 1 to June 30 fiscal year, but the process of enacting the budget can extend into June. Nevertheless, by this time there are good indications where it will end up.