see links at the website
There’s a reason why Bill Ayers stopped making bombs to focus of shitting into kid’s heads and calling it education.
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“”””Silicon Valley is the new Vatican; and Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are the new gospels.”””
And these are now the four ‘synoptic’ gospels.
Changing?! I’d say “changed”.
This is not the country I grew up in, and it has a very bleak future.
Money was always a “construct.” Value is assigned by people based on trust.
In the 1990s I attended a round table Liberty Fund symposium with, perhaps, five or six leading Libertarian economists to discuss the book by Leland Yeager called “The Fluttering Veil” about a return to the gold standard.
Realize, these were people totally in favor of gold.
After three days not one of them could offer a system backed by anything that would even remotely work. They tried gold, platinum, market basket of goods, etc. Even today’s “bitcoin” is NOT working as intended, which was a medium of exchange, but instead is like a rare painting, simply a store of value. For how long? Only as long as people have faith in it.
VDH is not appreciating the phenomenal and radical transformation of the world economy caused by computers. Beginning in the 1990s, we went into a real deflation. This was hard to see because it was entirely based on computer value-added and slave-labor from China/Mexico driving real prices down, while values soared.
Recently I saw an article on entropyeconomics.com where the guy valued a 2020 iPhone based on what it would cost to make it in 1990. Between $51,000 and $51 million. I don’t doubt it. No one, anywhere, has come close to accurately valuing our tech.
Then there are the deficits. Well, are there? In the 1980s, economist Robert Eisner discovered that America’s stated debt undervalues the US assets by trillions because, by law, those assets are valued in the dollars of the YEAR PURCHASED. Our gold supply alone was worth several thousand percent more; American land was worth trillions more, none of it captured on the balance sheets.
Then there is this: Economist Robert Gordon in “Rise and Fall of American Growth” that the CPI and asset valuations of the late 1800s early 1900s were not just off, but WAY off because they took a static view of goods & services. A candle light was measured against a light bulb solely in cost. But when measuring QUALITY (lumins) and quality of life (massive decline in fires due to kerosene), the GDP was way off.
Love VDH but do not like the Never Trumper National Review.
For those like me, here’s Dr. Hanson’s ten points:
1) Money is a construct.
2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore.
3) Racialism is now acceptable.
4) The immigrant is mostly preferable to the citizen.
5) Most Americans should be treated as we would treat little children.
6) Hypocrisy is passé.
7) Ignoring or perpetuating homelessness is preferable to ending it.
8) McCarthyism is good.
9) Ignorance is preferable to knowledge.
10) Wokeness is the new religion, growing faster and larger than Christianity.
1) Democrats are free to cheat in elections
Nothing else matters after that
Never forget, a dictatorship can forgive any debts accumulated by any previous government and may nationalize all funds, personal wealth and companies under penalty of reeducation/erasure... Or, will China make all this paper due and payable in the very near future?
Either way, we can still decide our future, but not for much longer. The children no longer belong to us.
>>2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore.
Neither are “Non-disclosure agreements”
>>8) McCarthyism is good. Destroying lives and careers for incorrect thoughts saves more lives and careers. Cancel culture and the Twitter Reign of Terror provide needed deterrence.
>>Now that Americans know they are one wrong word, act, or look away from losing their livelihoods, they are more careful and will behave in a more enlightened fashion. The social-media guillotine is the humane, scientific tool of the woke.
The Left was NEVER against the tactic. They always stood WITH the Communists including Joseph Stalin and the KGB.
There won’t be any calling this Nanzism or Obamunism or somesuch. Textbooks will never discuss this period of our history as such. Historians instead will talk about a vile rise in white supremacy by the supporters of Donald Trump.
I THINK I get it; but that sentence does chase its tail a little bit.
Read later.