Pandemic rules empower petty tyrants

Recently, a group of friends and I visited a local grocery store to stock up on emergency supplies. While walking around the rather large and open warehouse, a store employee approached us, lecturing us about wearing our masks properly. Her eyes filled with this gleeful sense of authority. It was almost as if she looked forward to the encounter.

Unwilling to budge until we complied, I put on a mask, only for it to break. Already prepared, the employee pulled out a new mask for me to wear. I put that on only for it to also break. The now irritated drill sergeant then pulled out her PA radio and called another employee to request a face shield. She would have been any store manager's dream, but people like this are a nightmare in the midst of this pandemic.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and desperate people sometimes fall into one of two camps — childlike and seeking comfort and entertainment, and authoritative tyrants who embrace paternalism, rules, and regulations to maintain power. The latter is what I've encountered quite frequently. As a man who loves Liberty and practices it liberally, I am the very threat that these tyrants look forward to each day. Liberty-loving people are target practice to these "Masketeers."

The people who have a tendency to become tyrants are typically without power themselves. But once bestowed with a new role — be it through new workplace rules or because the TV said so — these individuals feel empowered by a false sense of control. All of this is in response to perceived fear. In this case, the China Virus (and its low rate of death for most populations) has fueled the paranoia that created every tyrant standing in front of businesses ordering people to put on their masks. From receptionists to restaurant workers, now everyday people can feel like they've done their part — for society's sake, they claim.

It doesn't just stop at deathly glares and accusations of killing Grandma. Videos are going viral in which noncompliant people are being pursued and followed by Masketeers. Angry masked drivers roll down their windows to shout expletives at random people who are enjoying their God-given fresh air.

Another incident that comes to mind was my one trip to a music store. Maskless, I entered the shop, browsing the merchandise and making selections. Eventually I was tracked down by a manager who confronted me and ordered me to comply with the mask mandate. I chose not to cower to her demands, resulting in the police being called. By this point, all of the customers were ordered out of the store, even as they were checking out. Soon the police officer arrived, and when the manager shared what happened, the officer rolled his eyes and saw us off.

The situation left me thinking this: What did the manager hope would happen to me? Did she expect for me to serve jail time over her misappropriated fear of a virus? Did she enjoy the idea of a fellow citizen being handcuffed and carried away? Would seeing that grant her the satisfaction she needed to feel like everything is under control?

What America is witnessing is canon to the Marxist playbook. This notion that gives power to the people comes packaged with a police state enforced by the very people it oppressed. Desperate for life to return to normal, these tyrants will do anything to offer atonement to the state, including putting down their fellow countrymen. This terrifying notion is growing like a cancer. It's an infection that has made America very ill. The diagnosis is the deprivation of freedom from within. The cure? A return to the one who is truly in control of our health and well-being: God Himself.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/77060-power-to-the-people-in-the-pandemic-2021-01-16

House Democrats’ Tax Agenda for ‘Equity’ Would Hurt (Not Help) Economic Opportunity

House Ways and Means Committee Democrats recently released their framework to “make our nation a more just and equitable place.”

The goal of lifting more “people onto career ladders” and providing more robust economic opportunities for American families is admirable. But the committee’s framework simply expands tax programs that have for decades failed to meet those goals.

Instead of a long list of complicated new and expanded federal programs, American workers would benefit more from an agenda that keeps taxes low, constrains spending, and removes regulatory barriers to work and employment.

Federal Development Subsidies Fail to Lift People Up

As part of a strategy to invest in underserved communities, the framework proposes expanding two federal programs with a long history of poor results. Similar federal development initiatives have left people worse off.

Wide-ranging surveys of past attempts at community development find that the initiatives produce few positive results for the intended recipients. Historically, residents of targeted communities don’t see increased wages following the aid, but they do experience rising rental costs.

Higher living costs without higher wages resulted in a lower standard of living for the communities the politicians were trying to help.

Specifically, the framework highlights the New Markets Tax Credit, which is ineffective at meeting its goals of increasing community investment and development. A study of the program found that the incentives primarily relocated existing projects, rather than spurring new community investment.

Similarly, the proposed expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit is another well-intentioned policy that fails by every metric. Designed to subsidize up to 70% of the cost of new low-income housing, the program is rife with corruption and artificially inflates the cost of new projects by about 20%.

One study estimates that as much as three-quarters of the subsidy’s cost is captured by developers, investors, lawyers, and accountants, instead of the intended renters.

Subsidies from Washington can leave communities poorer than when they started because they fail to address the underlying barriers to opportunity, such as lack of educational choice, limitations on worker freedoms, and regressive regulatory restrictions.

Tax Subsidies Don’t Promote Work

Government programs are not effective at improving work opportunities for disadvantaged workers.

Programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Work Opportunity Tax Credit often garner bipartisan support as seemingly easy solutions to poverty, but they have a shaky record when it comes to improving work outcomes.

The Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the government’s largest means-tested cash benefits and functions as a wage subsidy for parents with children. The framework proposes expanding the tax credit’s benefits for non-parent workers and would lower the eligibility age.

Two recent experiments with increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit to childless workers in New York City and Atlanta showed very small or no impact on employment, no increases in earnings, and the larger benefits did not impact other crucial indicators of well-being.

Similarly, a recent reexamination of the employment impacts of the program found the tax incentive “has not had any clear effects on labor supply.”

The Work Opportunity Tax Credit, which is intended to encourage hiring of disadvantaged workers, is poorly targeted and also has been shown repeatedly to have no sustained effect on wages or employment.

In a survey of 60 businesses that claim the credit, just one said the tax credit affected hiring decisions.

The welfare state already costs the taxpayer $1.1 trillion a year. Instead of expanding it, policymakers should start by targeting assistance to the most disadvantaged and require the able-bodied to work for benefits.

Pro-growth policies that keep taxes low and allow businesses to expand are essential to support sustainable job creation and wage growth as Americans experienced before the current coronavirus-induced economic crisis.

No Mention of How to Pay for It

Nowhere in the framework does the committee outline a key campaign pledge of the Democrats; namely, to increase taxes. Nor is there a mention of how they plan to cover the hundreds of billions of dollars in new tax and spending proposals.

This framework and other proposals in Congress make it unlikely that the free-spending consensus in Washington will come to an end anytime soon.

In the absence of spending cuts—the opposite of what is being proposed—taxes will have to increase. And not just tax increases on the “rich.” Across Europe, funding big government means high taxes on everyone.

In fact, it is mathematically impossible to pay for significantly larger government with only tax increases on high-income earners. That’s why a lower-income European earning $40,000 pays $6,000 more in taxes—an extra 15% of their income—than they would in America.

Proven Solutions for Economic Opportunity

Before the pandemic and following historic tax reform and regulatory restraint, American workers experienced the largest wage gains ever recorded.

In 2019, real household income reached an all-time high by growing $4,400 (a 6.8% one-year increase). The income gains were largest for minorities and lower-income earners, and as a result, income inequality declined.

If Congress wants to help more Americans find jobs and economic opportunity, they should focus on keeping taxes low and continue to remove regulatory barriers to increase worker freedom, investment, and employment.

The committee’s tax framework instead relies on programs that have failed for decades and obscures the fiscal reality that its agenda will require taxes that increase costs and decrease wages for all Americans.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/01/15/house-democrats-deja-vu-tax-agenda-for-equity-would-hurt-not-help-economic-opportunity

Some Realtors Fear Association’s ‘Hate Speech’ Ban Is Built on a Slippery Slope

In what some consider one of the most far-reaching social-policy moves in the corporate world, the National Association of Realtors—called the nation’s largest trade organization—has revised its professional ethics code to ban “hate speech and harassing speech” by its 1.4 million members.

Under the new policy, real estate agents who insult, threaten, or harass people based on race, sex, or other legally protected characteristics can be investigated, fined, or expelled. Its online training sessions offer a glimpse at how difficult the rules can be to enforce.

The sweeping prohibition applies to association members 24/7, covering all communication, private and professional, written and spoken, online and off. Punishment could top out at a maximum fine of $15,000 and expulsion from the organization.

Mary Wagner, a Buffalo, N.Y., real estate agent who is white and lesbian, says the move, announced in November, fits her vision for creating a fairer society. She predicts thousands of complaints this year, given the Realtor association’s enormous size and the overheated climate of social media.

“I was thrilled to hear it,” Wagner said in a phone interview. “I think it’s long overdue.”

Does Vagueness Risks Censorship?

The National Association of Realtors’ decision, allowing any member of the public to file a complaint, has alarmed other real estate agents, and also some legal and ethics experts, who say the hate-speech ban’s vagueness is an invitation to censor controversial political opinions, especially on race and gender.

While that’s not the association’s stated intention, the skeptics say their fears are justified by the hyperactive “cancel culture” online that has jettisoned hapless workers for posting “all lives matter” and objecting to gay marriage.

“The dam has broken, and other organizations will look at this,” predicted Robert Foehl, a professor of business ethics and business law at Ohio University.

“If this is good for real estate agents, why not attorneys? Why not doctors?” Foehl said. “They’re going to be pressured to do what NAR has done. And that pressure is going to be very real, because what organization wants to argue they should allow ‘hate speech’ by their members?”

A week after the association approved the ban, its president, Charlie Oppler, profusely apologized for NAR’s historic role in housing discrimination and redlining, the former practice of denying loans to buyers in certain neighborhoods based on their race, during an online fair-housing summit.

The National Association of Realtors is still a predominantly white organization, where African Americans account for just 6% of members.

The association’s hate-speech policy is noteworthy, because it sweeps up 1.4 million people under an ethics standard that explicitly places limits on private speech, to be adjudicated through formal procedures. The organization’s new policy provides an avenue for the association to investigate, fine—and potentially expel—real estate agents who insult, threaten, or harass people or social groups based on race, sex, gender, or other legally protected characteristics.

“It is taking something that’s been happening on a kind-of informal and occasional basis—indeed, people do sometimes end up losing jobs because of their political expression—and shifting it to something that’s institutionalized, that’s bureaucratized, and that’s being enforced through quasi-legal tribunals,” said Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor who specializes in the First Amendment.

Volokh said such policies pose significant risks for abuse and should be assessed not for their good intentions, but for their potential to misfire.

‘A New Blacklist’

“What we’re talking about is a new blacklist,” he said. “One of the things that’s troubling about the National Association of Realtors’ position is that it is trying to deploy the organized economic power of this group in order to suppress dissenting political views among members.”

In the current climate of “cancel culture” and vigilante justice on Twitter, where a single misdeed can become amplified into the defining act of one’s life, some real estate agents fear the new speech code will be used to censor agents who express disapproval of affirmative action, gay marriage, transgender pronouns, Black Lives Matter, undocumented immigrants, or other politicized issues.

Such concerns were validated last month by a federal judge who struck down an anti-discrimination speech code imposed on Pennsylvania lawyers, saying that the ban’s vagueness amounted to open season on politically unpopular opinions.

The National Association of Realtors’ speech code has sowed such confusion and anxiety among the rank and file that the association plans to issue “case interpretations” this year to reassure its members and offer guidance on what is and isn’t allowed.

Among those caught up in the uncertainty are real estate agents who are Christian preachers or Sunday school teachers, or anyone who expresses traditional religious views on gender and sexuality that are out of vogue in some circles today.

“We’re getting a lot of people asking about whether or not they can say that they are against gay marriage,” National Association of Realtors staffer Diane Mosley said during an online training session on Nov. 30. “Specifically, if they can back it up with Scriptures, or say it in a sermon.”

The association’s speech code is still being hashed out, and in a very public way, thanks to Zoom. While the initial debate and votes by its Professional Standards Committee and board of directors were conducted in secret, the National Association of Realtors’ subsequent monthly online training sessions offer a glimpse at how such rules come into being, how difficult they can be to interpret and to enforce—and what other corporations and organizations can expect if they follow the association’s example.

“Are we worried about losing members? We may, but I’m certainly not losing sleep over that,” said Matt Difanis, the Champaign, Ill., broker who chairs the National Association of Realtors’ Professional Standards Committee, in a Dec. 16 training session.

“We want being a Realtor to mean something,” Difanis stated, “and if somebody says, ‘I feel so strongly about continuing to have access to hate speech on demand that I don’t want to be a Realtor anymore’—OK.”

The association did not make Difanis, who is white and serves as its point man on the new speech code, available for an interview. All his comments in this article were taken from two hourlong training sessions and one eight-minute explanatory video available online.

In those recordings, Difanis makes an impassioned plea to the nation’s Realtors, citing the moral debt he says the real estate industry has incurred as a leading participant in the perpetuation of racism in the 20th century.

“Colleagues, remember: We quite literally drew the color lines. Our fingerprints as Realtors are all over the redlining maps, which decades—52 years—after Fair Housing became the law of the land, those Fair Housing maps still scar our landscape by continuing to define color lines in our residential housing patterns,” he said.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/01/08/some-realtors-fear-associations-hate-speech-ban-is-built-on-a-slippery-slope

British media regulator wants to No Platform trans-sceptics

Speaking before parliament’s digital, culture, media and sports committee in December, Melanie Dawes, chief executive of broadcast regulator Ofcom, said it was ‘extremely inappropriate’ for broadcasters to seek to ‘balance’ the views of transgender people by also giving airtime to the views of ‘anti-trans pressure groups’.

Ofcom has now followed through on Dawes’ comments by expanding its definition of hate speech to include intolerance of transgender issues and ‘political or any other opinion’. As a result we can now expect many critics of trans ideas, from feminists to gay-rights campaigners, to be denied airtime.

In doing this, it seems that Ofcom is now using the long-standing campus tactic of No Platform for the mainstream media.

This is extremely worrying. No Platform is a National Union of Students policy that dates back to 1974. It involves the banning – or No Platforming – of certain figures and their viewpoints from public meetings on campus. Originally targeted at the far right, No Platform attempted to soften accusations of censorship by using the language of harm prevention. So racist individuals, the NUS argued, were not merely expressing reactionary opinions; they were potentially encouraging those listening to harm ethnic minorities. Depriving such figures of a platform therefore reduced the potential for harm against certain individuals and groups.

Today, the NUS does not just apply the logic of No Platform to the far right. It also applies it to many others with whom it disagrees, including critics of transgender ideas. And this position, in which critics of transgenderism are unfairly grouped together with racists, now appears to be the position of Ofcom, too.

No matter how it is presented, No Platform is still a form of censorship. Not only does it prevent certain people from speaking, it also prevents audiences from hearing certain views and making up their own minds about them. No Platform advocates justify this tactic on the grounds that depriving certain people of a platform prevents their views from being considered normal or acceptable by the public. Such an argument reveals No Platform supporters’ predictably dim view of members of the general public, who they believe will fall prey to certain ideas as soon as they are exposed to them.

It is true open debate is unlikely to persuade many racists, fascists or Islamists out of their poisonous worldviews. An Islamist, for example, is unlikely to be convinced of the wisdom of secularism during a public argument. But the point of public debate is not to win over the opposing speaker — it is to win over the audience. That, after all, is the only way to defeat ideas you oppose – by winning over the hearts and minds of the public.

That is why No Platform-style censorship is never able to defeat the ideas it seeks to ban. Because while it silences such ideas, it does not discredit them in the court of public opinion. And it is only when ideas are publicly discredited that their influence in society starts to wither.

Take the claims of anti-vaxxers, for example. Silencing them neither has created nor does create a pro-science or pro-vaccination outlook among the public. That can only be generated by taking on and debunking the claims of anti-vaxxers, not hiding them from view.

Oddly, despite many No Platfomers calling on the authorities to censor political opponents, they will still insist they are not demanding state censorship. They point out that when university debating societies or students’ unions restrict public platforms, they are only doing so as private bodies exercising their right to freedom of association. This is disingenuous. They are still attempting to restrict an audience’s access to competing ideas and beliefs in a public forum. And they are still making a judgement on behalf of others as to what ideas they are allowed access to.

By attempting to stop critics of trans ideology from appearing on television debates, Ofcom is taking No Platform censorship to a different level. It is effectively denying the viewing public access to competing arguments over what are still highly contentious views on gender. And, in doing so, Ofcom is preventing citizens from coming to any clear consensus on the issues at stake.

Moreover, the categorisation of criticism of trans ideas as hate speech demonises entirely reasonable viewpoints. After all, many of those critical of trans ideas are feminist activists defending women’s rights, rather than, as Ofcom suggests, people promoting violent hatred.

In its attempt to No Platform trans-scepticism, Ofcom is demonstrating its contempt for the public. It assumes that people, merely having heard, for example, feminists questioning trans ideas, will want to attack trans women. And, more broadly, it assumes that audiences cannot be won over to one side or another without the silencing of opposing opinions. This demonstrates a lack of belief in the strength of one’s own arguments.

What Ofcom does not understand is that No Platforming views trans activists disagree with is a self-defeating strategy. It may be successful in censoring ideas that the activists oppose, but it won’t necessarily win deeper support in society for certain trans ideas. For it is only through open debate that people can develop a clear view on what they support and what they do not.

So, if we really want to develop a moral or political consensus on certain issues, or win support for certain ideas, we need to say no to No Platforming.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/06/ofcom-wants-to-no-platform-trans-sceptics/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)

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

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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