Who Sounds Silly Lecturing Conservatives About 'Authoritarianism'?
The Left have been calling conservatives authoritarian for decades. It diverts attention from the fact that Leftism itself is intrinsicaly authoritarian. They want to change what other people think and do -- by force if need be. What could be more authoritarian than that?
On the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, President Joe Biden and the Democrats still operate as if this one terrible afternoon is the No. 1 issue of the 2024 campaign.
In a new campaign ad, Biden proclaims, "I've made the preservation of American democracy the central issue of my presidency." He says he and Vice President Kamala Harris have pushed for voting rights since Day One of the Biden administration, and "I ask every American to join me in this cause."
Democrats pose as the guardians of democracy and smear the Republicans as pushers of autocracy. No one expects the "independent fact-checkers" to look at this Biden-Harris ad and question how their alleged stand for democracy and voting rights stands next to Biden backers trying to rip Donald Trump off primary ballots and deny any Biden-challenging Democrats access to primary ballots.
Biden and his media enablers clearly think they can acquire the votes of people disgusted by Trump's stubborn refusal to concede defeat in 2020 (and his reluctance to stop rioting on Jan. 6) by just citing "democracy" as the all-encompassing issue that cancels all focus on their failures, from inflation to immigration. They're clearly unwilling to hear arguments that Democrats are the ones who are carrying around the seeds of authoritarianism in their policies. Here's a short list:
* COVID Authoritarianism. Democrats suggested Trump (and Ron DeSantis and Brian Kemp) were basically mass murderers because they resisted the Left's ardor to lock everything down in 2020, from businesses to schools to churches. Firing people who wouldn't accept a vaccine mandate wasn't autocracy. It didn't seem to matter that their lockdown "science" had holes, that somehow a Black Lives Matter protest couldn't be a "super-spreader event" because it was a just cause.
* Climate Authoritarianism. A global elite meets regularly to impose mandates that could dramatically affect everyday lives, starting with "ending fossil fuels." The COVID lockdowns inspired them to see how an oppressive lockdown on allegedly catastrophic carbon emissions could be their utopian (not dystopian) vision of the future.
* Student-Debt Authoritarianism. Journalists are pushing around Team Biden on how young voters think they "haven't done enough" to unilaterally erase billions of dollars of student loan debt unilaterally, ignoring any need for approval of spending by Congress or rulings from the judiciary branch. The supposedly fairness-obsessed Left never asks if this effort is unfair to the sizable minority of young people who do not go to college or don't incur thousands of dollars in college debt.
* Gender Authoritarianism. Leftist-run fiefdoms like New York City have imposed regulations suggesting that "misgendering" or "dead-naming" an individual who identifies as transgender or nonbinary is unlawful. Newsweek reported a poll by Redfield & Wilton Strategies that found 44% of those aged 25-34 think "referring to someone by the wrong gender pronoun (he/him, she/her) should be a criminal offense," and that's also supported by 38% of those aged 35-44. People must be forced to deny biological realities.
On the Left, they find it "authoritarian" to deny the right to abort a baby at any point in pregnancy, and so by their logic, killing an unborn person is less offensive than "misgendering" a person.
Anyone who thinks these notions are overwrought should be told that it's overwrought for Biden-Harris campaigners to imply that asking voters to present a picture ID is some kind of descent into dictatorship or Jim Crow. Requiring an ID isn't half as intrusive as mandating vaccinations. Democrats are not synonymous with democracy. Energetically arguing that they're the party of overweening statism is not an offense against democracy. It defines democracy.
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California Would Have Low-Cost Housing If Government Allowed It: The Mortenson Experiment
Chris Mortenson, a San Diego developer, hired an architect to find out what type of SRO (single-room-occupancy) building he could develop for very low-income people, many of them homeless, if unnecessary state and local regulations were ignored. SROs are basically apartment buildings that typically have rooms without kitchens and shared bathrooms at the end of hallways. SRO units are no-frills, but they are safer and cleaner than the streets.
Here’s what the architect came back with:
A four-story building
10-by-12-foot units (about half the size required by the existing building code)
Microwave in each unit
Sink in each unit
Toilet in each unit (partitioned, but not separated)
Communal showers at the end of each hall
Remarkably, San Diego waived its building code, and the building was built for less than $15,000 per unit, allowing people to rent each room for $50 per week. The building was immediately filled with grateful occupants.
Mortenson conducted his experiment in the late-1980s. Today, the inflation-adjusted costs would be about $34,000 per unit to build and $110 per week to rent ($440 per month), still a bargain. The cost to build one apartment unit to code in San Diego County ranges from $192,000 to $375,000, according to an analysis by Xpera Group. The average monthly rent in San Diego for a one-bedroom apartment is $1,808, according to RentJungle.com.
Mortenson showed that it is possible to build affordable, yet profitable, SROs if the government gets out of the way. Government is the root cause of unaffordable housing in California, and government impediments have dramatically increased since the late-1980s (for more on government barriers to housing development in addition to building codes, such as impact fees, permits, environmental reviews, zoning, and other land-use restrictions, see How to Restore the California Dream: Removing Obstacles to Fast and Affordable Housing Development).
The San Diego experiment was discussed in the book The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America by Philip K. Howard, who wrote that building codes “dictate minimum room dimensions, require that bathrooms and kitchens be separate from rooms for every other use, and mandate hundreds of other details. Good ideas and technological advances fill every page of the code book. Who can object to any of this? No one, provided society can afford it.” Low-income people, however, cannot afford it, resulting in more homelessness as building codes make it impossible to build inexpensive housing in California.
Building codes have eradicated low-cost housing for decades. Sold by politicians as “getting rid of substandard housing” and “improving the lives of poor people,” William Tucker explains in Housing America: Building Out of a Crisis, “buildings are condemned as ‘firetraps,’ for not having adequate ventilation, not providing kitchen or bathroom facilities, and for not offering people ‘a decent place to live.’” Too often, the streets become the next home for people forced out of low-cost housing by burdensome, idealized codes.
Politicians and bureaucrats argue that “it’s in the best interests of poor people” to have their apartments “upgraded to code” lest they live in “crowded unsanitary substandard deathtraps.” The problem, of course, is that every so-called “improvement” will price many people out of a home, pushing some to the street. Howard notes that “the virtual extinction of single-room-occupancy buildings illustrates the side effects of this drive toward mandated perfection.”
In addition to building codes, some cities have eliminated SROs using density limits, occupancy restrictions, or “urban renewal” projects that raze entire neighborhoods, often targeting minority communities. (Walter Thompson wrote an excellent historical series on the disgraceful Fillmore project in San Francisco: “How Urban Renewal Destroyed the Fillmore in Order to Save It” and “How Urban Renewal Tried to Rebuild the Fillmore.”)
Philip K. Howard reminds us that,
Real people tend to have their own way of doing things—a little borrowed, a little invented, and so forth. Law, trying to make sure nothing ever goes wrong, doesn’t respect the idiosyncrasy of human accomplishment. It sets forth the approved methods, in black and white, and that’s that. When law notices people doing it differently, its giant heel reflexively comes down.
Inexpensive housing would be built in California if government allowed it. Instead, streets teem with 151,000 homeless people, a human and moral tragedy caused, in part, by government barriers to housing development in California.
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Neither Left nor Right Understand Obamacare
Both parties are getting it wrong. And that’s surprising. Don’t these folks ever talk to the voters?
In the House of Representatives, the GOP’s “number-one priority for health care reform” is lowering health insurance premiums.
As for the White House, its response is all about protecting people with expensive health care problems. If Republicans had their way, 4.8 million Texans would lose protection for their preexisting conditions, according to the Biden administration.
Here is why both of these messages miss the mark.
To give Republicans their due, it is certainly true that premiums in the (Obamacare) exchanges are sky-high. In fact, if you add together the average premium and the average deductible for a family of four, a family without any subsidy must pay more than $25,000 before it gets any benefit from their plan. That’s the equivalent of buying a Volkswagen Jetta every year just to get health care.
However, the vast majority of folks who buy their own insurance are getting hefty subsidies. So much so, that 8 in 10 enrollees in the exchanges pay $10 a month or less. For a family with average income, the premium is usually zero.
Wake Up!
Wake up Republicans. If you begin by talking about high premiums, you are failing to reach 80% of the voters who buy their own insurance.
Meanwhile, the mistake Democrats are making is to believe their own talking points. “Preexisting conditions” was the main argument for Obamacare when it was enacted in 2010. But what is the situation more than a decade later? It’s awful.
Wake up, Democrats. The average annual out-of-pocket exposure for a family in 2024 is $18,900 in the federal marketplace exchanges. And if health care problems linger (which is the very definition of “chronic illness”), the family faces that expense every year. To make matters worse, medical centers of excellence around the country (which house specialists that some patients really need) won’t accept Obamacare insurance.
Here is the brutal truth. Families with the worst medical problems and the most expensive medical needs would in many cases be better off if Obamacare had never become law.
It is true that before the passage of the Affordable Care Act, people entering the individual market could be denied coverage if they had an expensive-to-treat medical condition. Although Democrats talk as though this was an everyday event, in fact it rarely happened.
When it did happen, in most states people could join a risk pool, where there was a higher premium, but with out-of-pocket exposure well below Obamacare plans today. Further, risk pool plans were typically garden-variety Blue Cross plans—with access to just about any doctor or medical facility.
The Reality
Here is the reality that both parties are missing:
If you have to buy your own insurance, have average income and are healthy, your options have never been better. But if you have a chronic illness and high medical costs, your options have never been worse.
The healthy family not only is paying little or no premium, but the only health care they need is preventive care, which must be made available at no charge. For this family, health care and health insurance are free.
By contrast, if you are sick, the out-of-pocket costs can be crushing; and even then, narrow networks may not include the specialty care you need. Further, in almost all cases, if a patient goes out of the network, the insurance plan pays nothing. In that case, getting the care you need is just as expensive as if you were completely uninsured!
Another disastrous feature of the Obamacare exchanges is the very high implicit marginal tax rates imposed on average-income families with high medical expenses.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Beverly Gossage and I gave the example of a Dallas family of four, earning $60,000 a year, with two children who have expensive-to-treat medical conditions. Fortunately, the two children qualify for Medicaid. The two parents are healthy; and since they pay zero premium for their health insurance, health care for this family is essentially free.
Suppose the family earns $10,000 more dollars of income, however. The two children no longer qualify for Medicaid and must be included in an exchange plan. Although the plan has a zero premium, the family’s out-of-pocket costs are now as high as $18,200. That’s a 182 percent marginal tax rate!
Politicians Ignore the Problems, But Voters Shouldn’t
When Democrats in Congress had a chance to pass an Obamacare reform, they did nothing about the outrageous out-of-pocket costs or the draconian marginal tax rates for the sick. Instead, they chose to spend $64 billion a year to lower premiums for high-income healthy families.
All the while, not a peep of complaint came from Republicans—who still wrongly think premiums are too high for most people. It is not the premiums; it is the sky-high out-of-pocket exposure.
While politicians ignore these problems, all voters should care about them. Even if you are completely healthy and are enrolled in a conventional employer plan with very generous coverage, remember: we all can get sick, and the individual market is only one layoff away.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14784&omhide=true&trk=rm
*******************************************Hamas Terrorism isn’t 'Self-Defense' Against 'Occupiers'
Council on American Islamic Relations Los Angeles executive director Hussam Ayloush recently defended Hamas’s barbaric slaughter of 1,200 Jewish, Thai, Filipino, Bedouin, and other men, women, and children. He claimed Israel is “an occupier” that “does not have the right to defend itself.” Only Palestinians have “a right of self-defense,” he said and condemned Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza.
His assertions reflect language in the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Hamas Charters. Israel is “imperialist, colonialist, racist, anti-human,” even “fascist,” “colonizers,” they declare. The “Zionist entity” “occupies” Palestinian lands and denies Palestinians their “right to return” to their homes. The charters call for the “liberation of Palestine” through “resistance,” “armed struggle,” and “self-defense.”
Mobs of students, faculty, and fellow travelers flaunt their ignorance of historic and modern reality by echoing these claims, justifying the October 7 massacres, calling for a “global intifada” (uprising), and demanding the eradication of Israel and its non-Muslim inhabitants “from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.
You have to wonder: How does a group of people achieve permanent “refugee” or “colonized victim” status with a “right of return” that no others have had? What constitutes a “legitimate right” of “resistance” or “self-defense”?
Particularly across the Europe-Asia-Middle-East mega-continent, human history has been a saga of settlement, invasion, victory or defeat, continuation or disintegration, expansion or dispersion. Those who lost wars were annihilated, lost title to their land, accepted subservient status (dhimmi in Muslim countries), emigrated, melded into the victorious civilization, or otherwise adjusted.
Over their six-thousand-year history, including since arriving in “the Promised Land” that is now Israel over 3,600 years ago, Jews have played all these roles. They defeated the Amorites, Canaanites, Philistines, and Jebusites, created the Kingdom of Israel, fell to Assyrians and Babylonians, lived under Persian and Greek rule, established the Hasmonean dynasty, and were slaughtered, enslaved, and dispersed by the Romans in 70-133 AD (CE).
However, they did not entirely disappear from the Promised Land. Indeed, Muhammed’s Muslim empire hired Jews as administrators after the Arab army arrived in 636. Jewish fortunes ebbed and flowed under Christian, Mongol, and 500-year Ottoman Turkish rule.
Anti-Semitism and pogroms brought Western European and Russian Jews to their ancestral land in the late 1800s. Theodore Herzl’s Zionism increased the purchase of agricultural and other land. Turkey’s loss to the Allies in WWI transferred ownership and control of the area from the Ottoman Turks to Britain.
The Roman term Palestine had applied to the region for two millennia, but there was never a Palestinian state or empire. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and other Middle Eastern countries emerged as independent nations from British-French-Russian rule over the Ottoman Empire before, during, and after WWII – but no Palestinian nation. Palestinian ancestors were always citizens or subjects of ruling empires.
Jewish immigration and land purchases from local and absentee Arab landlords increased significantly between the world wars. The Holocaust and the end of World War II brought surging Jewish immigration ... and more conflicts. Land ownership in the pre-1947 British Mandate area that is now Israel was roughly 15% Arab, 9% Jewish, and 76% public/Mandate land.
1948, despite Arab states’ opposition, the United Nations made Israel's nationhood a reality. Local Arabs and five Arab countries declared war on the fledgling state. Some 700,000 Arabs fled, emigrated, or were persuaded to leave Israel “temporarily” under hollow promises of victory over the Zionists. After the ’48 war, some 850,000 Jews were displaced, banned, or banished (Hamas charter language) from Muslim countries across North Africa to the Middle East and Afghanistan; most of them settled in Israel.
The 1967 and 1973 wars between Arab countries and Israel also ended in Israeli victory and expansion. Two intifadas (1987-1993 and 2000-2005) brought many deaths on both sides but no gains for Palestinians. The war in Gaza has been far more destructive.
Wars have consequences – now and throughout history. Assertions in charters or speeches do not change that, nor do they convey an “inalienable right” of return, even under some imagined “basic principles of human rights and international law” (Hamas Charter, Article 12). If a new Palestinian nation is created and recognized, there will be a right of return to that new nation – but not to Israel.
Imagine former German-speaking inhabitants asserting a right of return to lands that are now France, Poland, and Russia. Hindus and Muslims returning to their prior homes in India and Pakistan. Berbers and other conquered peoples reclaimed their villages and pastures across the Maghreb in North Africa. Spain regained Gibraltar from Britain. Turkey is regaining Greece, Spain, or its other Ottoman territories. China surrendered control over Tibet and Russia over Crimea.
Imagine descendants of Celts and other ancient peoples across Britain and Europe demanding redress because their ancestors were subjugated by the ancestors of today’s British, French, Italian, Hungarian, Balkan, and other nations. Descendants of the Mongols demanding the return of eastern Europe. Or Israelis demanding the return of Jewish Banu Qurayza lands near Medina.
The history of colonizers and colonized nations is long, complicated, and ill-suited for assertions in self-serving charters. Perhaps Hamas’s elimination as a military and political power in Gaza will clarify that. Perhaps it will finally resolve the matter of Palestinians still being “refugees” 75 years after the ’48 war.
Columbia University defines “colonization” as “a system of oppression based on invasion and control that results in institutionalized inequality between the colonizer and the colonized.” That certainly describes the fate of countless nations and peoples, including those subjugated by Muhammed and his caliphs, European countries, Lenin and Stalin, and Islamists today in Nigeria and Sudan. It does not apply to Gaza.
But Hamas and its allies assert that “armed struggle” is required to “liberate Palestine” from Israeli occupiers (PLO Charter, Art. 9) ... families, schools and mosques have a “national duty” to raise individual Palestinians “in an Arab revolutionary manner” (PLO Art. 7) ... and Palestinians have “a legitimate right” to use “all means and methods” to “resist the occupation” and meet the “demands of self-defense” (PLO Art. 18; Hamas Arts. 25 and 39).
For decades, Hamas terrorized Israelis by firing thousands of rockets at civilian targets, bombing buses, cafes and bar mitzvahs, and shooting or stabbing parents and children. To claim this was “resistance” or “self-defense” is patently absurd. The calculated, barbaric October 7 massacres crossed the line of what any nation can permit.
Hamas terrorists gunned down hundreds of unarmed concertgoers; gang-raped and mutilated scores of women; soaked people in gasoline and burned them alive; beheaded babies or roasted them alive in ovens; cut a pregnant woman open, murdered her baby and butchered her; wiped out entire families as they begged for mercy; kidnapped 240 more – and then hid behind, among and under Gazan citizens.
Gaza has smart, capable people and miles of gorgeous Mediterranean coastline. It could be as magnificent and prosperous as the United Arab Emirates. Its people just need to reject Hamas, tear up the PLO and Hamas charters, install a proper government, and build a genuine future for their children.
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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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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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