Sunday, June 04, 2023


The latest Google censorship of this blog

They have deleted a post that appeared on May 5. It was under the heading "Defining "woke"", so one understands that sensitivities might have been trampled on. The post remains available in my backups. To read it go to

and scroll down to 5th

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I’m a ‘passport bro’: We want 'traditional' wives, not feminists

I can identify with this to some degree. I have twice gone overseas in to meet a prospective partner -- but with no success. I am also these days in a relationship with a woman from a more traditional culture -- but she sure is not submissive

“Passport bros” are looking for love, but not just any gal will get the entry stamp into their hearts.

Eligible bachelors in the US dubbed “passport bros” are flocking to foreign countries after ditching the American dating pool in search of love overseas — much to the disgust of women on the internet.

On TikTok, the tag #passportbros has scored more than 422 million views, featuring clips of men parading their far-flung lovers online while advertising the growing trend.

The draw of dating abroad, according to unsatisfied singletons in the US, is finding a “traditional” wife.

That is, women who are “raised to be good wives,” dress modestly and submit to their partners.

Austin Abeyta is just one of many in the brotherhood who flaunts his prowess online, fondly referring to his travels as “the adventure of a lifetime.”

Remote worker Abeyta has gone viral as the self-styled “Digital Bromad,” scoring more than 413,000 followers on TikTok, all while he travels to Colombia, Thailand, South Korea and the Philippines, allegedly in search of a blushing bride.

“A lot of women overseas are taught from a young age from their mothers and other members of their family how to treat a man and how to make their future husband happy,” the Colorado native, who is looking for a “kind” and “cooperative” partner with “a positive view on men,” told The Post.

“But in America, I think a lot of women were taught ‘Men aren’t s – – t’ or ‘I don’t need a man.’ “

In his videos, Abeyta gloats about the myriad of benefits that accompany dating overseas.

For one, men from the US are “exotic,” he claims in a TikTok post with 1.8 million views, adding that playing into the stereotype of a “rich” American will take single men far.

“The truth that a lot of people don’t want to admit is that dating overseas is absolutely different,” the digital analyst, 32, told The Post. “There are very few men that will tell you that dating outside of America isn’t [five times] better.”

The larger collective of passport bros, or those who hold similar beliefs, champion Abeyta in the comments section of his viral videos while denouncing the dating landscape and American women in one foul swoop.

“A lot of American women are bitter [because] they have a s – – tty attitude and don’t understand that most men believe in a Patriarchy [sic] relationship,” one user commented.

“The difference is that women from other countries actually APPRECIATE being treated well, unlike A LOT of women here in the USA,” another scoffed.

Wannabe hubbies can certainly find a “quality partner” in the US, Abeyta admitted, but dating overseas has been a “10/10” experience — “and the majority of men who have left will tell you that,” he added.

But the allure of a foreign fling isn’t just reserved for men: On the flipside, women are also heading overseas in an attempt to meet a match, escaping the “toxic” dating pool in the US, according to the New York Times.

Women explained how they didn’t feel “seen” by men until traveling abroad, and were swept off their feet in other countries.

Ceppe Tabibian, 35, fled Austin, Texas, for Madrid after growing tired of swiping on dating apps.

“I felt like every guy was the same guy,” she said. “I felt like if I stayed there, I’m probably going to be single forever.”

However, it appears that while American bachelorettes are searching for more “serious” suitors who will put in the “effort” to woo them, the self-proclaimed “passport bros” are sniffing out a housewife.

Online, fellow passport bros tout women abroad for their distinctive qualities, such as, according to one TikToker, cooking, cleaning and being “feminine,” “submissive,” “not argumentative” and giving “sexual access when you ask for it.”

The arguably misogynistic “movement” has also been met with online vitriol, with critics panning their online propaganda as “disgusting,” “predatory” or “just sex tourism with a less offensive name.”

“They really rebranded ‘mail order brides’ to sound even worse than it did before. This is not new,” one user said on the social media site Reddit.

“In terms of how it impacts women in the US: There is an expression of letting the trash take itself out,” wrote another, in part. “In terms of supply and demand — there is little demand for men who think and behave like this, and clearly an oversupply.”

But Abeyta, who is currently trawling for potential spouses in Tokyo, shrugs off judgment, saying it’s “disappointing” to see Americans bash people in other countries, and calling the haters “jealous.”

“People need to paint passport bros as these losers or predators because then they can ignore the state of the dating culture in America and how they contributed to it,” he said.

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Children's Choir Silenced By Capital Police While Singing the Star Spangled Banner

An elite children’s choir was abruptly silenced while singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” inside the U.S. Capitol due to concerns from Capitol police that the song could be interpreted as a “protest” and may offend someone.

On May 26, the Rushingbrook Children’s Choir, believed to be a Christian choir from South Carolina, visited Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol as part of a planned tour.

After receiving approval from several Republican congressional representatives, including Russell Fry, William Timmons, and Joe Wilson, the choir was also invited to perform a selection of patriotic songs in the hall.

However, as the choir approached the completion of the third verse of the national anthem, a guide interrupted the director, notifying him that the Capitol police had ordered an immediate halt to the singing.

A video capturing the incident was shared on social media, quickly gaining viral attention.

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How I exposed the DARK SIDE of Facebook: FRANCES HAUGEN was hired to police fake news at the social networking site but when she saw how their algorithms helped stir up anger, hatred and even genocide, she turned into a whistleblower

Facebook’s headquarters at 1 Hacker Way, on the shores of San Francisco Bay, once looked like Disney World’s Main Street USA. Stylised storefronts offered a cartoon-like assortment of charming services, many at no cost.

Within a five-minute stroll, you would pass an ice-cream shop, a bicycle mechanic, a Mexican kitchen, an old-fashioned barber’s shop and other mainstays of a typical American small town. But when the company outgrew that campus, it commissioned a monolithic building with security posts at every entrance. More a fortress than a village.

Somewhere between its birth as a website for rating the attractiveness of college girls and its ascent to become the internet for billions of people, Facebook faced a choice: tackle head-on the challenges that came with their new reality, or turn inward. Even on my first day on campus it was clear they had chosen the latter.

After more than two years of working for Facebook, in a bid to expose some of those emerging dangers, I decided to become a whistleblower. Even the role I stepped into was itself an admission of Facebook’s shortcomings. Despite drawing extensive media attention to their ‘independent fact-checking’ of fake news and blocking misinformation spread by ‘bad actors’, Facebook’s network of third-party journalists touched only two or three dozen countries and wrote at best thousands of fact-checks a month for Facebook’s three billion users around the world.

I was tasked with figuring out a way to reduce misinformation in places fact-checkers couldn’t reach — the rest of the world, in other words. Within days of my arrival, it was clear that my role was nothing more than a token, a sop. Facebook wanted to look as though it was tackling the problem in earnest, when in fact it had an active incentive to allow lies to spread unhindered.

As proof of what was really going on, I secretly copied 22,000 pages of documents which I filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to the U.S. Congress. I testified before more than ten congresses and parliaments around the world, including the UK and European Parliaments and U.S. Congress.

Hundreds of journalists spent months reporting the shocking truth Facebook had hidden for years. These findings have proved cataclysmic for the company. Its stock price, in the week before I went public in 2021, stood at $378. By November 2022 it had fallen to $90, a decline of more than 75 per cent.

Shortly after the congressional hearing, Facebook hastily rebranded themselves Meta, proclaiming the future of the company would be ‘in the Metaverse’. It appeared to be an admission that their brand had become too toxic to keep. I was unsurprised. During my two years there, we were told by corporate security that T-shirts, hats or backpacks bearing the Facebook logo made us targets for the public’s rage and we were safer if no one knew we worked there.

I marvelled at the cognitive dissonance required to consider such a way of living to be acceptable.

I didn’t set out to become a whistleblower. I’ve never wanted to be the centre of attention — in my whole adult life, I’ve had just two birthday parties and, when I married my first husband, we eloped to a beach in Zanzibar to avoid the spotlight.

Originally, I had zero intention of revealing my identity. My goals were simple: I wanted to be able to sleep at night, free of the burden of carrying secrets I believed risked millions of lives in some of the most vulnerable places in the world. I feared Facebook’s path would lead to crises that would be far more horrific than the first two major Facebook-fanned ethnic cleansings in Myanmar and Ethiopia.

Coming forward was the solution to a dilemma that had plagued me and many of my co-workers who wrestled with their troubled consciences. I wasn’t an outlier — far from it. But it felt as though we all faced three options, every one of them bad:

Option 1: Ignore the truth and its consequences. Switch jobs inside the company. Write a note, documenting what you’ve found, and tell yourself it’s someone else’s problem now. Give yourself a pass because you raised the issue with your manager and they said it wasn’t a priority.

Option 2: Quit, and live knowing the outcomes you uncovered were still going on, invisible to the public.

Option 3: Do your best to solve the problems, despite knowing the Facebook corporation lacks the genuine will to fix anything.

Until I became a whistleblower, I had been subscribing to Option 3. I felt like I was making progress, it just didn’t feel like it was enough.

When Facebook approached me in 2018, I had been working in the tech industry for more than a decade — part of a select group of experience designers that create user experiences out of algorithms. With a degree from Harvard Business School, I’d worked at Google, Pinterest and Yelp.

But my first encounter with the dark underbelly of Facebook was not a professional one. It came via my assistant, Jonah.

I met him in March 2015 when he was living with my brother in a rented room in Silicon Valley with about a dozen male housemates, all trying to make it in tech. Their home was a converted industrial garage full of bunk beds and desks, with a bathroom and a kitchen tacked on.

My first marriage had ended and I was recovering from a serious illness that had left me sometimes unable to get around without a walker. So I offered Jonah a trade. In exchange for 20 hours a week as my assistant, he could use my apartment as an office while I was at work. Jonah was smart, empathetic, and a dedicated gym-goer. But, as the 2016 U.S. election loomed, I began to notice alarming changes in his personality. He had been an enthusiastic supporter of Left-winger Bernie Sanders and took it badly when Hillary Clinton emerged as the Democrat candidate instead.

His nugget of grievance grew as he lost himself online in social media. This anger was fuelled by the algorithms, the software that directed his attention to stories, news items and people who only served to exacerbate his sense of injustice. As America prepared to vote, Jonah was bombarding me with long emails detailing tortuous conspiracy theories. I tried to reason with him but he was slipping beyond my reach.

Watching our realities drift farther apart made me acutely aware of the misinformation I saw whenever I logged into Facebook. A glance was enough to warn me that too few people were holding back this tide of lies, propaganda and malicious false narratives. When Jonah read one rant about how Sanders was robbed of the Democratic nomination, Facebook found more just like it and served them up to him. When he followed one delusional activist, others were recommended to him. He had been sucked into an echo chamber, where every screaming voice was saying the same thing.

Two weeks after the election, Jonah moved out — packing up to live with some people he’d met on the internet. The echo chamber had become his real world.

So when a Facebook recruiter approached me in late 2018, I wasn’t excited. The company already suffered from a bad reputation, and everyone in Silicon Valley above a certain seniority level was getting peppered with emails from the company’s headhunters.

This was the era immediately after Facebook had been outed by a whistleblower, Christopher Wylie. He revealed they had let Cambridge Analytica steal the personal information of 87 million users. It was my impression that taking a gig at Facebook wouldn’t add value to my resumĂ©. If anything, it would leave a dent.

I told the recruiter I would only be interested in a role that dealt with combating fake news. An invitation quickly came back, to apply for an open position as a ‘civic misinformation product manager’.

I equivocated for months. Ultimately, what decided for me was thinking back on the experience of having watched Jonah lose his connection to reality. If an emotionally intelligent, intellectually curious young man could disengage from reality because of lies the internet fed to him, what chance did people with far fewer advantages have?

On my first day at Facebook in June 2019, I began a two-week primer course on how to be effective at Facebook. Three days later, my manager told me to abandon the training and start work on my team plan for the next six months.That was my first red flag that something was profoundly wrong. They told us plainly at the start of the bootcamp that these two weeks were set aside to get us up to speed, because few product managers figured out how to be successful at Facebook by just jumping in feet first on their own.

But here we were regardless. An entirely new team. My engineering manager had joined six weeks earlier, and our data scientist was a similarly fresh recruit. We didn’t know much, if anything at all, about how Facebook’s algorithms worked or what the causes of misinformation were.

Six of us made up the civic misinformation team. Confusingly, we were not what you probably think of when you think of Facebook fighting misinformation. That was the separate, main, misinformation team with 40 staff. Their job was to commission freelance journalists to fact-check a small number of ‘hyper-viral stories’ — that is, news reports spreading like wildfire that might or might not be true. Facebook’s top executives did not want the platform to be an arbiter of truth. They delegated that role to journalists who would provide judgments about which stories should be removed from (or demoted within) the newsfeed.

In January 2020 a Facebook statement proudly declared it was working with more than 50 fact-checking partners in 40 languages worldwide. Simple maths told me that this was like trying to mop up a dam burst with a handful of tissues. Most of the partners were able to check a monthly maximum of 200 stories. But suppose that’s an underestimate, and all 50 were somehow able to track down the truth on 1,000 fake news items each month.

That’s 50,000 posts at most, for the entire world of three billion Facebook users.

In reality, seven of the 50 partners in 2020 were focusing on the U.S., leaving most other countries, if they had a fact-checker at all, with only one. It seemed obvious to me that an unstable country in Asia, Africa or South America, teetering toward ethnic violence, must have an even greater need for fact-checking budgets — but Facebook is a U.S. corporation and it doesn’t allocate safety resources by need. Rather, it allocates based on fear of regulation in the United States.

The policy makers in Washington DC have the power, after all, to limit Facebook’s activities. Governments in the developing world certainly do not. Since the main misinformation team was concentrating on fake news largely in the U.S. and Europe, it fell to my unit of six to figure out how to cover the rest of the world without using fact-checkers. If that was not farcical enough, we realised that at Facebook, there was no such thing as misinformation unless it had been specifically researched and denounced by a third-party fact-checker.

By definition, given the focus of our team, nothing investigated by the civic misinformation team could be misinformation in Facebook’s eyes.

It was now that I began to understand how truly dangerous the Facebook strategy was of giving away its service for free.

To ensure nothing short of dominance, Mark Zuckerberg had adopted a strategy of making his platform available in even the most impoverished nations, to make it difficult (even impossible) for competitors to emerge.

By 2022 the programme, termed Free Basics, served 300 million people in countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Pakistan. Across the developing world, most data comes at a price. Free Basics opened the door to the internet for some of the world’s poorest people. In countries where the average earnings are a dollar a day, that makes Facebook the natural choice.

I began to understand how truly dangerous the Facebook strategy was of giving away its service for free
It also makes the operation highly unprofitable. In the fourth quarter of 2022, the company made $58.77 (£47.20) annually from each American user, and $17.27 (£13.87) per European user. But in Pacific Asia, that sum fell to $4.61 (£3.70), and in the rest of the world an average user was worth just $3.52 (£2.83) a year to Facebook.

As a consequence, Facebook decided it didn’t have the budget to prevent misinformation or build equivalent safety systems for a wide range of dangers in loss-leader countries. Most people reading this article don’t realise how much cleaner and brighter their experience of Facebook is in English. A minimum level of user safety is only available to a choice few.

The real-world consequences of these language gaps could be seen in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. In 2014, the country had fewer than half a million Facebook users. But two years later, powered by Free Basics subsidised data, it had more users than any other South East Asian country. Usage had risen at an exponential rate — and so had lethal misinformation.

Myanmar is predominantly Buddhist with a Muslim minority, the Rohingya. In 2017, the Myanmar government unleashed its security forces on a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Facebook served as an echo chamber of anti-Rohingya content. Propagandist trolls with ties to the Myanmar military and to radical Buddhist nationalist groups inundated Facebook with anti-Muslim content, falsely promoting the notion that Muslims were planning a takeover. Posts relentlessly expressed comparisons between Muslims and animals, calling for the ‘removal’ of the ‘whole race’, turning on a fire hose of inflammatory lies.

Investigators estimated as many as 24,000 Rohingya were massacred and more than a million were forced to flee their homes. The misinformation spread on social media played a very significant role in this slaughter.

Most people in the U.S. were only vaguely aware of it, if at all — in part because the news stories that flowed through their Facebook news feeds rarely highlighted the plight of the Rohingya. It wasn’t in the algorithm.

The same is true today. We cannot see into the vast tangle of algorithms — even if they exact a crushing, incalculable cost, such as unfairly influencing national elections, toppling governments, fomenting genocide or causing a teenage girl’s self-esteem to plummet, leading to another death by suicide. Facebook has been getting away with so much because it runs on closed software in isolated data centres beyond the reach of the public.

Senior executives realised early on that, because its software was closed, the company could control the narrative around whatever problems it created.

In myriad ways Facebook has repeatedly failed to warn the public about issues as diverse and dire as national and international security threats, political propaganda and fake news.

It didn’t matter if activists reported Facebook was enabling child exploitation, terrorist recruitment, a neo-Nazi movement, or unleashing algorithms that created eating disorders and provoked suicides. Facebook had an infallibly disingenuous defence: ‘What you are seeing is anecdotal, an anomaly. The problem you found is not representative of what Facebook is.’

I began to understand that I had access to documents, thousands of them, that could prove what Facebook really is. I just didn’t know yet what to do with them.

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Severe Legal Penalties for Physicians Providing Gender-Affirming Care are Justified

Young mothers and fathers ask me how any doctor can prescribe life altering hormones and remove the normal breasts in a young girl with gender dysphoria and confusion around the time of puberty? The published data demonstrate “gender affirming” care does not cure gender dysphoria and it is sterilizing in ~80%. Commonly kids with autism are targeted.

Sadly, these procedures increase the rates of homicide, suicide and death from all causes. Because the medical profession is not policing itself, states are stepping in with severe consequences for doctors who prescribe gender changing hormones to perform disfiguring surgery.

Mallory et al., published this sobering report for doctors in transgender medicine: “The policy landscape on gender-affirming care has significantly changed within the past decade, with high variability in access to care between states. By 2022, approximately half of US states had implemented protective state-level health policies related to gender-affirming care coverage in private and public insurance"

However, despite consensus between professional medical associations regarding gender-affirming standards of care, bans on this care, particularly for minors, have gained legislative traction within the past 5 years.

Proposed bills related to bans on gender-affirming care for minors increased from 4 in 2018 to 43 in 2022, with a total of 4 states (Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona and Texas) enacting laws or policies banning access during this period. In the ongoing 2023 legislative session, 118 bills have been proposed across 31 states related to restricting access to gender-affirming care.2 By April 2023, 11 of these bills had been passed into law (in Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia) and 1 administrative rule was enacted in Florida.

Thus, in total, 15 states have laws and policies that ban gender-affirming care for minors. Within the stipulations of state bans, physicians who continue care face 4 major direct penalties: (1) medical license disciplinary action; (2) a private right of legal action against physicians, which can include extensions on malpractice statutes of limitations; (3) civil legal action the state can take against physicians; and (4) felony provisions that enable criminal penalties against physicians.

Many of these states’ laws deem the practice of providing gender-affirming care for minors as “unprofessional conduct.” The laws in Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia hold that physicians are subject to discipline by the appropriate review board. The enacted laws in Kentucky, Mississippi and South Dakota further state that physicians who violate these laws will have their license to practice medicine revoked by the state medical board.

Laws in 8 states (Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee and Utah) provide a private right of legal action, allowing citizens to bring lawsuits against physicians for providing gender-affirming care. In addition, these states extend medical malpractice statutes of limitations for claims related to providing gender-affirming care for minors. Some states allow malpractice action against a physician until the patient is 25 years old (South Dakota and Utah) and other states allow lawsuits to be filed from 10 to 30 years after the patient reaches 18 years of age (Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee).

In addition to creating a private right of action, laws in 5 states (Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, and Tennessee) provide that the state may take legal action against physicians who provide gender-affirming care to minors. For example, Tennessee allows the attorney general to bring action against a physician for providing gender-affirming care for a minor within 20 years of the violation, with a civil penalty of $25?000 per violation.

Last, 3 states have criminalized the provision of gender-affirming care. Both Alabama and Idaho made it a felony for physicians to provide gender-affirming treatments for patients aged 18 years and younger, punishable by up to 10 years in prison or a fine of $5000 to $15?000. In Texas, a governor’s directive issued in February 2022 defined certain gender-affirming services for youth as “child abuse” and stated that health care professionals facilitating access to these services are subject to criminal penalties, as are all licensed professionals with mandatory reporting duties for “failure to report such child abuse.”3

In summary, the writing is on the wall for transgender medicine. As quickly as academic and community hospitals opened up gender change clinics, they better shut them down and issue parents and children an apology. Harming children with hormones and mutilating surgery is not good clinical practice nor is it welcome in the house of medicine.

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Moving to France Showed Me True Cost of ‘Free’ European Health Care, Child Care, and Retirement

An oft-repeated phrase among those favoring taxpayer-funded health care, day care, and pensions is that such programs are “free.” However, I recently moved to France, and paying my social charges and taxes proves these services are anything but.

I expected taxes to be higher, but I was unprepared for the limitations that France’s system places on individual choice.

In reality, France’s “free” social programs cost more than higher taxes. There’s a non-financial cost when it comes to access and control. Health care and child care are extremely personal choices, and Americans may not realize the degree to which Europeans sacrifice control to government bureaucrats.

Let’s begin with the financial cost of France’s “free” health care, child care, and retirement. These programs are funded by France’s “social charges” taken from everyone’s paychecks. Social charges, separate from taxes, pay for “free” day care, maternity leave, unemployment, retirement, and health care.

Keep in mind that the French pay taxes in addition to social charges. By way of example, I pay roughly 1,300 euros (nearly $1,500) per month in mandatory social charges (which does not include my husband’s social charges), and we still pay taxes, too.

France’s taxpayer-funded health care system indeed covers wellness checkups and serious medical issues like chronic illness almost in full. One may not receive a large bill after these services, but calling it “free” ignores the facts and insults the millions of French residents paying social charges.

France’s social charges also fund day care, or “creche,” and each neighborhood has a day care center. This may seem idyllic, especially to working parents, but day care quality levels vary. Contrary to picturesque TikTok videos, some day care centers are poorly run, have mediocre food, and few enriching children’s activities. Furthermore, even if your day care is good, your child is not guaranteed a spot in the day care for which you pay social charges, as day care spots are largely income-based.

If you live in an area rife with housing projects (France requires that cities allot 25% of residencies to public housing), your child may not get into the day care center because low-income families get priority. If that’s the case, you must find another day care center or pay out of pocket for child care, even though you paid social charges.

Everyone pays, but only some get access. In other words, the government takes 20% or more of your monthly paycheck and then determines if you are worthy of receiving the services it forces you to pay for.

It bears mentioning that some wealthy neighborhoods pay a fine instead of creating social housing. In doing so, those neighborhoods avoid public housing, thereby reducing the number of needy families in their communities and allowing their children to go to the best day care centers.

The closest comparison in America is the wealthy who oppose school choice, while sending their own children to expensive private schools.

There are better ways to give families access to child care than government-mandated programs that create financial and social burdens.

Speaking of one-size-fits-all, that brings us to France’s pension system.

France’s pension system dates back to 1945 and is organized into categories, such as train operators, opera singers, dentists, and teachers, each with different retirement ages and requirements. All workers, salaried employees, and freelancers pay into their respective categories.

Somewhat like America’s Social Security, those working now fund the retirements of the elderly. In that regard, it’s not dissimilar from a Ponzi scheme, the investment scam that landed Bernard Madoff in prison.

France’s pensions, like American Social Security, are government-controlled. Government officials determine when and how much money you receive upon retirement. Imagine paying into a system your entire life, only to have French President Emmanuel Macron issue the French equivalent of an executive order and delay your retirement age—which happened recently with France’s pension reforms.

So, why don’t the French invest in private retirement accounts?

France’s crippling progressive income tax and social charges leave little money to invest. Moreover, high investment taxes make investing less advantageous for those with modest to middle-class incomes. It’s a progressive tax code, so the more you make, the more the government takes.

Moreover, French salaries are roughly half those in the United States. This, coupled with taxes and social charges, leaves little money left to invest, let alone spend on food, clothing, or life’s little luxuries. By the way, all goods are subject to a 20% value-added tax.

Some argue, “But at least in Europe, you get something for your taxes.” The United States spends 46% of its federal budget on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. In the U.S., someone gets something, but that person may not be you. Imagine not getting something, but with half your income and double your taxes; that’s France.

Americans also idealize European labor protections, but those laws, too, come with downsides.

Most French workers are entitled to generous benefits, including unemployment, maternity leave, and vacation days. To be clear, everyone deserves access to gainful, dignified employment free of exploitation. France seeks to achieve that through government-mandated worker benefits and strict government control. Like most government policies, that negatively impacts the most vulnerable and creates a thriving black market.

France’s onerous labor laws and employment taxes push workers into “off the books” employment, and consumers tend to gravitate toward cheap labor. That’s especially common in industries where people pay other people directly, like for domestic work.

Imagine Marianne, a housekeeper. If Marianne does so as a “full employee,” the family employing her pays 28-40 euros ($30-$43) per hour, of which she keeps roughly 12-15 euros. ($13-$16). If Marianne is “off the books,” however, she charges what she wants and keeps every cent. As such, some workers, especially immigrants and refugees, work “off the books.”

Studies show that off-the-books labor represents more than 10.8% of France’s gross domestic product. Given the nature of off-the-books labor, it’s difficult to know exactly how many workers are paid off the books in any country. But in general, the higher the tax and regulatory burdens of employment, the greater the incentive to evade them.

Workers, especially those who are vulnerable or economically disadvantaged, ought keep as much of their paychecks as possible. But France’s bloated government is more interested in protecting people from themselves and, in the process, limits flexibility and freedom for those who need it most.

There’s no simple answer to providing the best services to the greatest number of people. But France shows that government one-size-fits-all policies are not the answer, nor are they “free.”

Americans on the right and left call for “free” services like health care. President Joe Biden’s 2021 American Families Plan boasted “free” education, including universal preschool. The conservative CEO of Americans United for Life called for making childbirth “free,” but I hope she is prepared to spend the money needed to make it “free” and is aware of the effect that government funding can have on access to resources, individual choice, and quality of care.

From across the Atlantic, I see America moving toward a European model, in which services are government-controlled. But for America to live up to its promise of being conceived in liberty, we must put responsibility in the hands of individuals and families.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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