The biggest news coming out of the midterm elections is the failure of the Republican Party to win a more decisive victory. They had predicted a “red wave” since well back into 2021 (an immediate reason to be skeptical) but will at best have a modest advantage in the House and a razor thin majority in the Senate.
Not only were the Republicans denied a resounding victory, but the Democrats did better in a first term midterm election than either party has while holding the White House in decades. There is no denying this was a good night for the Democrats.
This has many scratching their heads. This election was supposed to be, at least in large part, a referendum on the massive damage done to the American economy and society in general by Covid tyranny imposed by Democrats. “Never forget what they did to you” said many a meme on social media in the days before the election, especially after Emily Oster’s infamous plea for amnesty.
There is only one problem with that narrative. Covid lockdowns and other mandates were, with a few notable exceptions, largely bipartisan.
Where resistance won
Where it was possible for Covid lockdowns to be put on the ballot, they were. Governor Kristi Noem, who never locked down her state a single day in 2020, improved upon her three-point victory in 2018 with a thirty-point trouncing of her Democratic rival on Tuesday.
During her victory speech, she said, “Here in South Dakota, we protected your constitutional rights. I trusted in you to use personal responsibility and take care of each other.” The vote totals speak for themselves.
The less libertarian but more well-known Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida also won in a landslide in traditionally purple Florida. Desantis was elected by a razor thin margin in 2018. As governor, he famously convened a panel of non-government epidemiologists in September 2020 and dropped all Covid restrictions based on their televised recommendations.
Governors Gregg Abbot of Texas and Kim Reynolds of Iowa, both of whom dropped Covid restrictions in early 2021, were re-elected by comfortable margins. Senator Rand Paul, who grilled Fauci during multiple congressional appearances, also won easily.
By contrast, Republican Lee Zeldin, whom some polling indicated had a real chance to defeat incumbent Democrat Kathy Hochul in deep blue New York, didn’t really compete on Tuesday. He was forced to campaign mostly on traditional Republican tough-on-crime talking points because that’s all he could do. He certainly couldn’t run a strident anti-lockdown campaign after failing to question lockdowns at all during 2020.
Congratulations to Elon Musk. He’s managed to get both the left and right furious with him over the course of a single week. He took a victory lap himself over this on Thursday, tweeting, “Being attacked by both right & left simultaneously is a good sign.”
Ironically, left, right, and Elon Musk himself are wrong about content moderation on Twitter being “a free speech issue.” Twitter is and always has been private property, even when it was publicly traded. It is not “the new public square.” This is commie talk.
Now, many would argue that the people previously running Twitter were communists themselves. There is good evidence this is true, including the admission by one of Twitter’s employees to a Project Veritas undercover journalist that the Twitter workforce is “commie as f—.” But the personal views of the employees, executive or otherwise, is not at issue. The company was and is privately owned by its shareholders.
That the platform is widely popular has given rise to the notion, especially among those aggrieved by being censored or banned, that one has a right to be on the platform and express one’s views, based on a right to free speech. Musk says he bought the platform to protect free speech on this supposedly “public forum.”
Let’s take a moment to consider what is a Twitter account. A Twitter account is a bundle of code, residing on a physical server, created and maintained by Twitter employees. It interacts with various applications that combine to make up the Twitter platform, all also created and maintained by Twitter employees or vendors.
In other words, the Twitter platform, each individual Twitter account, and all the other software and hardware that combine to make Twitter run are the products of the labor of other people. Ultimately, all this labor is paid for by private owners just like the labor in a clothing factory or a supermarket. And no one can have a “right” to the labor of other people.
By way of preemption, please spare me the “but it uses tax funded infrastructure to operate!” I shouldn’t have to point out that if one applies that standard across the board to all businesses the commies win. I’m all for abolishing publicly funded infrastructure and making every business provide their own, but until that happens, I want as much private property and capitalism as possible.
Every argument against government healthcare or the welfare state in general rests upon the principle that no person can have a right to the labor of another. There is no ambiguity here. You don’t have a right to a Twitter account. Period.
Corporatism vs. Captialism
When I make this argument, I’m often told by midwits I don’t understand the difference between corporatism and capitalism. The thrust of this argument is that the existence of the regulatory state, particularly the FCC and other federal agencies, create a government-controlled market that gives advantages to preferred corporations over others. I am very aware of this argument and agree wholeheartedly. I’ve written extensively about the damage FDR’s New Deal continues to do to the American business environment.
The problem is that argument doesn’t apply to this situation. Nothing stopped me from joining MeWe, Parler, Gab, Gettr, or even former President Trump’s own platform, Truth Social. If the 74 million people who voted for Trump did likewise, then every one of those platforms would have more U.S. users than Twitter, which has 70 million.
Instead, these same people cry out for the government to regulate Twitter like a public utility – most of which are terrible precisely because they’re regulated like public utilities – rather than simply availing themselves of the costless opportunity to create accounts on competing platforms.
They also have the prerogative of deleting their accounts on Twitter, Facebook, or any other platform whose policies offend them. If they could all coordinate their activities to vote for Donald Trump on the same day, they could certainly coordinate their activities to delete their Facebook accounts on the same day. This would deal a devastating blow to the platform without an iota of government intervention, which would do no good and much harm anyway.
The Public Accommodation Concept
The idea that private companies which sell products to the public or “accommodate” the public on their premises are subject to government regulation of their policies has its roots, at least in this country, in the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century. And as almost everyone conveniently forgets, that civil rights movement was dominated by socialists and communists.
That’s not to say there wasn’t a problem that needed to be addressed, but the communists, following the advice of Marcuse and other critical theorists, made sure they dominated the movement as a front in the war to abolish capitalism. That is why it is not surprising that the idea of “public accommodation” was central to the solution they came up with.
If you can’t abolish private property – the communists’ ultimate goal – the next best thing is to water it down. And that’s just what the public accommodation concept did. It made private property not entirely private anymore since the owner could no longer dispose of it as he or she saw fit. It was now at least partially owned by the public, since the public could override the owners’ decisions about who was allowed on the property.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act works just fine without Titles II and VII. The market certainly would solve the problem of discrimination on private property. In fact, it had already begun to do so, even in the Deep South, as evidenced by the existence of Jim Crow laws prohibiting integration. Had some restaurants and other hospitality businesses not tried to integrate, there would have been no need of passing those laws in the first place.
Both partisan censorship and racial discrimination on private property are odious. The latter was arguably much worse, since as long as I tweet or post like a good little commie, Twitter and Facebook will let me remain on their platforms. But a black man in 1960 Alabama wasn’t staying at a restricted hotel no matter what he said or did, even if his only other choice was to sleep in a morgue with the stiffs.
Regardless, it is a property owner’s unqualified right to exclude anyone he or she wants. Once you begin making exceptions, you are working with the communists, intentionally or not, to dilute private ownership itself.
A Colossal Strategic Error
The Civil Rights Act didn’t stop with racial discrimination. Once the boundaries of private property had been breached, the government charged in to start making all sorts of other rules. The public accommodation concept underlies the Americans with Disabilities Act, which required every business at the time to make physical changes to their properties to accommodate people with disabilities, whether they could afford to or not. Those that couldn’t went out of business.
Everything people despise about the modern office environment, with its ludicrous rules purporting to prevent sexual harassment, racial discrimination, age discrimination, or any number of other supposed offenses, all spring from the idea that the owners of businesses that serve the public don’t have all the rights of other property owners.
It also underpins the Christian baker being forced to bake the gay wedding cake. It’s all the same principle.
One could argue social media is already even worse, and that its stifling environment is the result of government coercion. I don’t agree for two reasons.
First, speech on social media platforms is still far freer than it is in any corporate office. I have facetiously lamented many times that I had never been suspended or even warned by a single platform during my illustrious, anti-government career (I recently erased this black mark from my record). In the corporate world, I would have been called into HR and/or fired for hundreds of the things I’ve said on Twitter and Facebook this year alone.
Second, I don’t believe the executives at Facebook or Twitter feel coerced by the government. Libertarians would like to believe they do, but an honest evaluation of Mark Zuckerberg’s comments about being contacted by the FBI before banning the Hunter Biden laptop story can only conclude he welcomes the FBI partnership. Note that they didn’t have to tell him what specific content to ban. Zuck wasn’t intimidated at all. It was more like, “Thanks for the heads up, we’re on it!”
The argument that there is anything to be done about social media censorship is an argument that unregulated markets don’t work. Anarcho-capitalists especially should agree with this. Does anyone think that in a society without government censorship wouldn’t exist? Of course it would. The same impulses that motivate governments to censor and people to support governments censoring would motivate people in anarchatopia. There would be only one solution there: the market.
And I’m sorry, it is not good enough to rant against social media censorship as a free speech issue and mumble under one’s breath or in the fine print that one does not want government intervention against it. Libertarians should know full well that 95% of the people listening will assume they do.
Neither are the arguments that social media companies “aren’t really private companies” helpful to our cause. Let’s be honest. These are just rationalizations for infringing their property rights. And our enemies already have plenty of those. They don’t need our help.
All arguing the free speech or “public square” angle does is help build the consensus the commies will use for the next great incursion into private property. There is nothing to gain by making these arguments and plenty to lose.
Hampered as it is, the market still provides ample opportunity for people to fight social media censorship without infringing the property rights of those perpetrating it. Anyone making this a free speech issue is both mistaken in principle and playing right into the hands of the communists. If you believe in private property and freedom, this is an opportunity to champion it in the face of adversity. Waffling now will be disastrous.
It is one week until the U.S. mid-term elections and some members of the Regime seem worried that, for once, elections might actually have consequences. The smart money still says that if there is a “red wave” on November 8, Republicans will enter Congress next January and do precisely nothing about what has happened to the American people over the past 32 months. Criticism of the Ukraine War is as likely to be of the “Biden is not tough enough on Putin” variety as it is cutting off the Ukraine Gravy Train to Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
Still, there are some signs insiders are worried something different may be afoot, as demonstrated by the plea for “amnesty” in The Atlantic by Covid Regime propagandist Emily Oster. According to this alternative reality take, “We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”
No, “we” need do no such thing. The lies, tyranny, and aggression all ran one way during the pandemic – towards those who, it turns out, were never “in the dark.” Whether those mandating lockdowns, masks, and later vaccines were honestly mistaken – “mistaken” seems wholly inadequate here – or acting in bad faith and with malice aforethought should be the subject of a formal investigation.
We have been subjected to six straight years of investigations into hoaxes and hobgoblins, from the nonexistent “Russa collusion” to the inconsequential Ukrainian “quid quo pro” to the farcical “insurrection.” It is past time for an investigation into the real crimes against humanity perpetrated against the American people under the pretense of fighting Covid-19.
Such an investigation would include sworn testimony as to the origins of the virus itself, whether or not data supporting lockdowns and vaccine mandates were knowingly corrupted and/or whether data contraindicating same were knowingly suppressed.
The existence of alternative treatments for Covid would have legally prohibited the issuance of any Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the Covid vaccines, developed in record time under the government program known as “Operation Warp Speed.” Were alternative treatments prohibited and their proponents deplatformed to ensure these EUAs could be issued? Did people die who otherwise could have been successfully treated had these alternative treatments been made available?
These questions need to be answered. Both Anthony Fauci and his co-conspirators along with deplatformed experts like Robert Malone, M.D. and Peter MCullough, M.D. must be put under oath and questioned, preferably on live television so the American public can judge for themselves who is telling the truth and who is not.
Throughout 2021, Rep. Thomas Massie publicly asked the CDC to change information on its website indicating the Pfizer mRNA vaccine was effective for those previously infected with Covid-19 because the FDA’s review of Pfizer’s clinical trial data clearly showed it wasn’t (pg. 30). To this writer’s knowledge CDC website was never corrected. The Pfizer vaccine was among those later mandated by President Biden for large swaths of the U.S. workforce.
Massie, those he spoke with at the CDC, and the person(s) responsible for refusing to correct the false claims must be put under oath and questioned. If fraud was committed, charges should follow.
These are just a few of the egregious lies, distortions, and obfuscations perpetrated against the public in support of the Covid Regime. Studies in support of the government mandates were intentionally flawed. Even the integrity of the data has been called into question. Both freedom and the future of science itself depend upon these issues being settled once and for all via an adversarial process with penalties for lying.
The government response to Covid-19 was the most egregious assault on liberty in modern history. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed forever. The U.S. economy is approximately 5 million jobs short of the number that would have been created to employ its growing population had the lockdowns never occurred.
An as yet unknown number of people died as a direct result of lockdowns and vaccine mandates. That number must be established and those responsible for the deaths held accountable if the investigation shows they acted in bad faith.
We are constantly regaled with the vapid, “we must ensure this never happens again” after a mass shooting or other tragedy, always in support of new government power that will punish the innocent and do nothing to achieve the stated goal.
For once, that hackneyed appeal is appropriate. What must never happen again is the dystopian nightmare visited upon Americans by their federal, state, and local governments over the past two years. The only way to ensure that is to hold those responsible for it accountable. It is time for due process, not amnesty.
Back in the 1990s, there was this new phenomenon called “the internet.” It grew exponentially. Entrepreneurs saw the business potential for reaching more customers than they had ever dreamed they could reach through conventional methods. Consumers had more choices of every conceivable product – including information – than they ever had in history.
Like all technological advances, it produced big winners and big losers. Vast fortunes were made by those who built businesses that worked better on the internet. Vast fortunes were lost not only by those internet commerce replaced, but also by those who went long on businesses that didn’t work on the internet – Pets.com being the most infamous example.
The internet revolution was much like the industrial revolution in this respect. It advanced human flourishing in general exponentially but was decried by all those it damaged economically. Many brick and mortar retailers were put out of business, just as the automobile put blacksmiths out of business.
Legacy media faced annihilation. They were no longer the gatekeepers of information. The new generation of internet users had access to information from all over the world at the click of a mouse, including information previously filtered, spun, or suppressed by legacy media. There was a point at which those who had long decried its information gatekeeping and establishment propaganda gleefully counted down the days until the New York Times went bankrupt.
Governments didn’t like the internet much, either. Untaxable interstate commerce was replacing taxable brick and mortar commerce. Republican Congressmen lamented the internet was so new they didn’t know who to regulated it. And, of course, no government has ever liked the free flow of information. That’s why a First Amendment was necessary over two hundred years ago.
The current war on the free flow of information over the internet is led by the political left, but it didn’t start there. Long before conservatives were being deplatformed for opposing wokism, the political right was after internet publishers for criticizing the war on terror. Julian Assange is only the highest profile example. Online porn has also been targeted by the right since the internet’s earliest days.
As with laissez faire capitalism, it seemed like those who stood to lose had two choices: adapt or die. But there was a third choice: call in the government. And that’s just what all those who stood to lose did.
The decades-long destruction of America’s laissez faire free market was accomplished in much the same way.
A month ago, Europe was facing a prospective humanitarian disaster. Having no substantial natural energy resources of its own and having virtually eliminated its nuclear power capabilities, its loss of Russian energy imports threatened to leave hundreds of millions in the freezing cold.
The good news is Europe does have a plan to muddle through this winter. They have stockpiled enough reserves to avoid disaster this year, as long as it is not abnormally cold, and Russia doesn’t cut off what gas it is still exporting to Europe before the weather breaks.
The bad news is Europe has a plan to muddle through this winter. That they will be able to avoid catastrophe means there is no reason the war can’t continue through next summer. Even war cheerleader CNN admits there may be a much bigger problem next winter, but for now Ukrainians and Russians will continue to die before their time.
And while Europe won’t have an historic calamity on its hands, things will still be bad there, especially for the most vulnerable. Just as with Covid lockdowns, the laptop and latte class will repeat vapid slogans like “We’re all in this together” while people on the margins struggle with choices the former can’t even fathom, like between energy and food, or medicine.
So, in addition to the deaths on the battlefield and collateral civilian deaths, many will die of cold in Europe this winter who wouldn’t have otherwise.
The Biden administration continues to support Ukrainian President Zelensky’s position to fight the Russians until they relinquish all former Ukrainian territory, including Crimea. Western media continues to bolster this departure from reality. Last week, Newsweek described Biden’s statement that Putin “could just flat leave, and still probably hold his position together in Russia,” as “an off-ramp” for Putin, but one he probably would not take.
The last part is true. Putin isn’t going anywhere. Neither is the Russian army suffering major losses of territory. As Colonel Douglas Macgregor said during his appearance on Tom Mullen Talks Freedom, Russia controls a “banana-shaped” band of territory from the Luhansk Oblast (roughly “province”) to Kherson, north of Crimea, and down to the sea along that line. 95 percent of Ukraine’s GDP is produced in this Russian-controlled territory.
“We’re a rich country, we can afford to…,” says your average liberal. Complete the sentence however you wish. “Guarantee every American healthcare.” “Guarantee every American a college education.” “Provide a home for an unlimited number of immigrants who require food, clothing, and shelter the moment they cross our borders.”
But how did the United States become so rich? No one ever asks politicians that one, simple question. Forcing them to answer it would be illuminating. The likely first answers would be vague references to “democracy,” but that doesn’t jibe with reality. If anything, America became rich in spite of democracy, not because of it. Most of the Constitution is devoted to checking democracy at every turn.
Eventually, politicians might get around to the “land of opportunity” narrative. And it is true that the United States offered native-born and immigrant Americans opportunity unavailable anywhere else.
Opportunity to do what?
It’s as if no one even wants to say it anymore. The opportunity offered was to pursue one’s individual self-interest, unmolested by and mostly free of the larceny of any king, commissar, or legislature. America became rich operating under Adam Smith’s principle of the invisible hand of the market, which says that people pursuing their narrow selfish interests in an environment where property rights are protected will do more good for society than people attempting to advance some “common good.”
It worked. It still works, to the extent it’s allowed. When people have the opportunity to keep the money they earn and dispose of it as they see fit, they produce more goods for others to consume. What they don’t spend on consumption becomes capital used to expand productive capacity and produce even more goods for others to consume.
This is what made America rich and built the modern, technological world we have the privilege of living in today. In 1888, at the peak of libertarian American society, the government collected about 3 percent of GDP in taxes and ran a 50 percent surplus. President Grover Cleveland fought a decade-long war during his nonconsecutive terms to reduce tariffs, saying government surpluses invited “mischief.”
Before the Progressive Era, Americans kept almost everything they earned and employed it in the pursuit of their own happiness, not some politician’s five-year plan. They invested in or entered new industries without licenses, unencumbered by regulatory agencies, free to innovate as they saw fit. Figuring out a way to provide more for your fellow Americans at a lower cost made you rich. Simply working hard and saving responsibly made you comfortable.
In a word, what made America the richest country in the world wasn’t free speech, freedom of religion, or the right to vote. It was capitalism, as laissez faire as it has ever existed anywhere, before, or since. The protection of property rights and relatively free markets resulted in an accumulation of capital we’re still benefiting from today. It didn’t fall from the sky. It was saved and invested by people pursuing their individual interests. That’s what works.
The culture war has been front and center for over a decade. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was as much a reaction to it as it was about any of his policies. And the Biden administration’s war on MAGA is much more a war on its culture than against any credible threat posed by “white supremacists.”
Please.
There is no sense in fighting a war if one doesn’t know what one is fighting for and against. The right and left have different motivations and goals. At least the thought leaders on either side do. For much of the rank and file, it is purely a tribal conflict, with each side defending its banners and shibboleths.
It is important to understand that the left’s war on traditional culture is economically motivated. Breaking down cultural norms is a means, not an end. The entire school of critical theory was founded based on the realization there was not going to be a proletariat revolution due to economic conditions.
There was a very simple reason for this: the industrial revolution had made the proletariat much better off. Their real wages had risen and standard of living skyrocketed. It’s hard to generate the kind of anger necessary for a revolution among people who are doing better than they or any of their ancestors had ever done.
The founders of the Frankfurt School did not admit this to themselves. They were convinced socialism was a superior socio-economic philosophy and since empirical economic data contradicted this view, there needed to be a “more accurate” lens through which to view societal conditions.
Thus, critical theory was born as history’s most elaborate rationalization for denying reality. Objective reality was necessarily one of the prime targets of critical theory because it could tell only one story: capitalism was a vastly superior economic system not only to socialism but to any other economic system yet discovered. So, objective reality had to be challenged.
This eventually led the critical theorists to focus on minority victim groups and how capitalism was oppressing them, even if it was yielding vastly better economic results in the aggregate.
Of course, this was no truer than Marx’s economic theories about capitalism. What has vastly improved the lives of “people of color,” women, and other “marginalized groups” in poor countries over the past several decades has been less socialism and more capitalism.
China and India did not go from destitution to explosive economic growth because of diversity or democracy. Their transformation is due entirely to becoming more capitalist. Are they laissez faire? No, but they’re far more capitalist and far less socialist than they used to be. The same can be said for dozens of other countries.
A billion people were lifted out of extreme poverty over the past three decades and all the gains came in countries that became more capitalist and less socialist. There are zero outliers.
One can see why objective reality is such a problem for Marxists. This is why they fight on the cultural front, using all means possible to distort objective reality and persuade their target victim groups that capitalism is oppressing them. To achieve their ends, history must be erased, established customs declared racist, misogynist, or homophobic, and even the meaning of words changed to, in many cases, their antithesis.
But the end goal is economic. Every assault on societal norms must be viewed as a strategy to achieve socialism – because it is. No, the shrieking, purple-haired, nose-ringed, “trans man” may not realize this him/herself, but the people who created that unfortunate soul do.
It is not an exaggeration to say Americans were terrorized by their federal, state, and municipal governments during the Covid pandemic. Never before had society been locked down so brutally and for so long as during 2020-21. Not during the Spanish flu, where business closures in my hometown lasted three weeks. Not during the 1968 flu pandemic, which killed a significantly larger percentage of the population of the time.
Every step of the way, from “two weeks to flatten the curve” to “you better hold off on Christmas” to “maybe a small gathering on July 4 (2021), if you’re vaccinated,” the media stood in lockstep with the totalitarian state, uncritically repeating its lies and endorsing its edicts.
The media lied about every aspect of the Covid pandemic, including the virus itself, the government’s mitigation measures, and the vaccines. They continue to lie every day for as long as each lie can maintain the faintest plausibility, after which it is quietly surrendered, waiting for resurrection after the amnesiac public forgets.
Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear has seen the transition from “Covid emergency” to “climate emergency” coming from a mile and two years away. And unlike Covid, the climate emergency won’t end.
This carries far graver implications than merely which septuagenarian Boomer occupies the White House. These lies are being used to manufacture acquiescence to an attack on civilization itself. Anyone who participates in such a scheme to subjugate the people en masse can only be described with one word: “enemy.” Touché, Donald Trump. You were right about that.
Thus, it is understandable to want to alert people to the fact the media is not their friend. Many, even “good libertarians,” have taken to calling the media “the corporate press.” This isn’t just unhelpful to the public. It’s counterproductive to freedom.
First, let’s consider what information is conveyed to the public when the word “corporate” is added to “press.” Regardless of intention, the overwhelming majority of people hear: “privately owned and operating for profit.” The problem with the media is they are for profit enterprises that are not owned or at least more heavily regulated by the government.
This is an anti-capitalist message the public is unfortunately too ready to embrace. But it’s neither true nor particularly helpful to encourage their belief that seeking profits is fundamentally at odds with the good of society. It’s just one more confirmation to those already so inclined that seeking profits in any undertaking is fundamentally problematic.
Libertarians may say that is not their intention, but what exactly is their intention? Do they really know? When asked, many will reply that “corporations are creatures of the state.” True enough. But they’re not referring to the guy who fixes their sink as “the corporate plumber” or the place they buy their groceries the “corporate grocer.” Yet both are almost certainly incorporated in the states wherein they operate.
Businesses aren’t incorporated for the same reasons they were hundreds of years ago. At one time, corporate status and its privileges – often a government-enforced monopoly – was granted because of a supposed “public benefit” derived from allowing the company to incorporate.
Today, companies incorporate mainly to limit liability and protect the owners from runaway juries in government-run courts. Creditors of today’s corporations enter relationships with the firms in full knowledge the shareholders’ personal assets are protected from liability. And while it is true third parties who never agreed to such release can be harmed and may have a natural right to seek compensation from the shareholders, they would never get the awards from corporations they get in government courts in any conceivable private court system.
Regardless, the media’s corporate status is no more relevant to their malfeasance over the past several years than malfeasance in any other business.
Another common excuse for the “corporate press” moniker is to point to the business relationships between the media and other corporations and call them “bought off” or words to that effect. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, spends billions on national TV advertising. Critics point to this and say it affected the way media reported on the Covid vaccines. “That’s why I call them the corporate press,” they say.
This is just another argument for why the free market doesn’t work. Certainly, in an anarcho-capitalist society, there would be no restrictions at all on this type of relationship and there wouldn’t be much more, if any, in a laissez faire minarchist society. This has nothing to do with the media being “corporate” and the antidote is not them being something else. The antidote is competition.
If the problem is a lack of competition, that also has nothing to do with the press being “corporate” and everything to do with the New Deal regulatory state, which decides which media is allowed to broadcast and which isn’t. Calling the media “the corporate press” distracts the public’s attention away from the government and misdirects the blame towards the private sector.
But honestly, there is plenty of competition, all the establishment’s attempts at “deplatforming” notwithstanding. The public holds the ultimate power here in simply refusing to consume – or fund – the establishment media. Everyone who objects to the content offered on cable television is free to cancel their cable subscription. Likewise their newspaper or other media subscriptions. Imposing this market discipline in lieu of complaining will do far more to change behavior.
In case you haven’t noticed, the one, common characteristic of the enviro-nazi, medical totalitarianism, and anti-western culture movements is their anti-capitalism. By some strange “coincidence,” the only solution to the supposed problems each of these seeks to solve is less capitalism. And regardless of any pedantic arguments to justify the expression, when people hear “corporate press” they hear “capitalist press,” period.
Referring to the media as “the corporate press” encourages all the bad instincts in the public that inspire them to go along with every incursion into our freedom. Let’s come up with a better pejorative.
German police yesterday arrested demonstrators protesting their country’s energy policies. No, they weren’t protesting the German government’s support for sanctions on Russia that have resulted in the latter cutting off natural gas supplies Germany depends upon to maintain modern civilization. They were protesting the German government’s decision to deregulate (viz. “allow”) the use of coal as an energy source in a desperate attempt to replace the natural gas imports no longer forthcoming from Russia.
Who can blame the protestors? Most likely have believed the fairy tale told by green energy proponents for at least a decade that wind power and other “renewables” are cheaper than natural gas. By 2018, U.S. Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman had declared there were no longer any technological or economic obstacles to total decarbonization of the U.S. economy. All that was needed was the political will.
It is curious that Germany is falling back on coal in particular because as late as 2019, we were told that, “This April, for the first time ever, renewable energy supplied more power to America’s grid than coal—the clearest sign yet that solar and wind can now go head-to-head with fossil fuels.” The point of that Bloomberg article was that not only were solar and wind a viable alternative to coal, but that they were outcompeting coal in the free market without government intervention.
So, why can’t Germany at least use renewables for that portion of the lost Russian energy they plan to replace with coal? Wouldn’t it be cheaper?
We all know the answer to that question. The story politicians and the media told the public about renewables was a fairy tale. No, the factoids above weren’t technically false; they’re just cherry picked information with misleading parameters.
For example, the U.S. Energy Information Administration always picks April to compare the percentage of electricity provided by renewables to coal because “overall electricity consumption is often lowest in the spring and fall months because temperatures are more moderate and electricity demand for heating and air conditioning is relatively low.” The information they provide also indicates the total electricity from renewables and coal combined has fallen from 2005-2019 from about 210 million megawatthours (MWh) to about 130 million MWh.
So, either the larger population in 2019 was consuming far less electricity or some other source besides renewables and coal was making up the difference. That other source would be “not renewables.”
Indeed, a study by industry group Renewables Now indicated that between 2009 and 2019, the percentage of total energy consumption supplied by fossil fuels “barely changed,” going from 80.3% to 80.2%.
There has been no significant increase in renewables share of the energy market in the past decade. None. Politicians and media who have said there has are either lying or engaging in willful ignorance. But politicians lying isn’t dangerous in and of itself. It only becomes dangerous when the public believes them and allows them to act upon the assumption their lies are the truth. Germany has done so and it is going to cost lives, potentially a disastrous number of them.
Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 based on his “America First” platform. It’s three main planks were cracking down on illegal immigration, ceasing “endless wars” overseas, and economic nationalism. That last plank posited that “terrible trade deals” like NAFTA (1994) and allowing China into the WTO (2000) had hollowed out America’s manufacturing base, outsourcing the output and the high-paying manufacturing jobs to China and other lower-cost labor markets.
This assertion has no basis in reality, as the two charts below clearly show, but it was a big part of his appeal to Middle Americans. Trump promised to withdraw from the trade deals and use tariffs to bring manufacturing and manufacturing jobs back within American shores.
Industrial Production – 100 Year Historical Chart
The most curious aspect of this now-hoary populist canard was that it was sold as being pro-American worker. Tariffs weren’t going to simply make America as a whole more autarkic, or benefit business owners who otherwise could not compete with foreign manufacturers. They were going to benefit the so-called “working class” by bringing back higher paying jobs.
This is ironic because tariffs have historically been considered a transfer of wealth from the working class to big business. The original argument for an income tax was precisely to remove the burden of higher prices for consumer goods from the working class and shift some of the tax burden to big business. This was the case for the first peacetime federal income tax passed (and later found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court), the Wilson–Gorman Tariff Act.
