Unholy Alliances – Christian Pastors Who Endorse Trump

The bizarre spectacle of First Baptist Church of Dallas Pastor Robert Jeffress endorsing and speaking on behalf of Donald Trump and the enduring support of Evangelical Christians in general of Trump will prove to be one of the starkest examples in American history of a group of people trading their professed values and voting against their own interests for some ill-defined and hopeless expedient gains. It defies all logic, reason, and anything that could be described as remotely pertaining to the things of God, and the only conclusion I can draw from it is that such leaders are complete charlatans who do not actually possess the faith that they profess or that they are falling prey to a Faustian bargain in the hope of some temporal and secular gains and in the process are in great danger of drawing their followers in a wayward direction. Or even worse, they no doubt heap scorn upon Christianity amongst those that are not converts. Thinking about the situation in which evangelicals turn off their minds and close their eyes and ears to what is so blatantly obvious to those that have eyes to see and ears to hear, I am reminded of a quip from C.S. Lewis that, “Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”

Since Donald Trump takes to bashing opponents in churlish fashion on Twitter and other media outlets, I must have missed where the Apostle James said, “If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless. Except of course in cases when an opponent in a political race needs to be bashed and destroyed with juvenile taunts. Then it is justified.” (The first section is real and from James 1:26. The second italicized portion is obviously contrived). Donald Trump once wrote in his book, “The Art of the Comeback” that, “If I told the real stories of my experiences with women, often seemingly very happily married and important women, this book would be a guaranteed best-seller.” I must have missed all of the verses in the Bible about it being completely acceptable to have a complete lack of regard for fidelity to marriage and to openly brag about it and display a total lack of repentance. Jesus summed up his entire ministry when he stated that, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment.  And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22: 34-40). On the whole loving your neighbor part, I wonder why Jesus missed the memo on providing a caveat that, “except in cases in which they are foreign immigrants from Mexico, then by all means, heap scorn on them, oppress them, and deport them so that they can’t take your jobs and welfare.” I am certain he must have meant to include that. If I was a playwright, I think a perfect plot for a parody of the situation would be a script in which the disciples tire of the love, kindness, and suffering of Jesus and decide to throw in their lot with wicked King Herod, who only has one definable political platform: a promise that he will throw all the Samaritan bums out of Jerusalem and build a wall blocking them off with a promise that this will increase their fisherman’s wages.   

“Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.” – C.S. Lewis

Churches and church leaders often decry moral relativeness and a culture that continues to descend into coarseness, lack of decency, and lack of human kindness. The endorsing of a candidate who is the embodiment of all of those things reeks of abject hypocrisy, which begs the question of if a church pastor is not going to stand against such a candidate’s rise and be a voice crying out in the wilderness for Christian faith and true Christian values, then what really is the point of that church? Leaders so aligned with dark forces critically undermine and wound their church’s entire reason for existence and ring the death knell of their organizations. After all, there are only relatively few avenues for seeking out true Christian faith and doctrinal and worship experiences within a common body of believers. The competition for a collection of the angry and hateful spewing vitriol and concerned with temporal interests and “winning” against one’s rivals is rather abundant, so what is the point of mixing those short-sighted and secular goals with seeking the will of an everlasting deity?

I can only imagine that in some small measure, this mob mentality and co-opting of the Christian church by a demagogue must have been how Diettrich Bonhoeffer felt when so many Lutheran pastors and laymen were co-opted by Hitler with his promises to rid Germany of the shame of the Treaty of Versailles and the ineptitude of the Weimar Republic. Bonhoeffer no doubt had this in mind when he wrote in his great book, The Cost of Discipleship, that, “Now what is it that so easily triggers the opposition of Christians against the authorities? It is the fact that is the they take offense at the mistakes and the injustice perpetrated by the authorities. But with considerations like these, Christians are already in grave danger of paying attention to something other than the will of God, which alone they are called to fulfill. They themselves ought to strive for the good in all things, and to practice it in the way God commands them….not because the way this world is ordered is so good, but because its good or bad qualities are irrelevant compared to the one thing that is truly important, namely, that the the church-community submit and live according to God’s will.” In other words, getting wrapped up and invested too heavily in political affairs was not at all Jesus’s concern for the church or the believer. Bonhoeffer wrote this as an exegesis of Paul’s writings that Christians should not be concerned with political authority as much as their mission on earth. This line of attack from the author of the vast majority of the New Testament makes it all the more inexplicable when a church pastor wraps himself in the cloak of such a vile person seeking political rule as Donald Trump.

Quote of the Week – cherishing causes but hating the consequences

“God laughs at men who complain of the consequences while cherishing the causes.” – Jacques-Benigne Bossuet

With the ongoing American Presidential election drama proceeding apace, I can’t help but connect to the quote uttered by a 17th Century French theologian to those that support Donald Trump. Their mistaken views that this self-declared outsider (that really is just the ultimate insider masquerading as an outsider, as Kim Strassel puts so well in a recent WSJ op-ed) will buck the establishment will end in a certain epic let-down.

Trump supporters naively support this outsider campaign as some form of, “sticking it to the man.” This is their cause celebre, their “cherishing of the causes.” There is no doubt a certain amount of glee in watching the party “establishment” watch helplessly as Trump continues to go from victory to victory. Meanwhile, their support is of someone who has no scruples in the way that he conducts his life, business, language, treatment of others, or marital affairs, nor does he have any specific guiding philosophy other than doing whatever it takes to serve his own interests. Thus, there are millions of well-meaning people being duped out of some mistaken sense that somebody needs to go in there and clean house in the henhouse. What they fail to see is that they are not sending in a fox to do the job, they are sending in a strutting rooster that will do nothing more than add more fights, feces, and more chickens into the coop. They are enjoying the ride and the vicarious voicing of their fears through the adult version of a bully while thinking very little of the ultimate consequences. If Trump happens to make it all the way to the White House, it seems to me to be an easy prediction that his followers will fall into one of two future camps. Either they finally see Trump for what he is: a grubby and self-serving cult of personality-inducing fraud that has absolutely zero concern for their needs, or they will continue to bury their heads into blind support of someone who clearly does whatever serves his own ego and ambitions and nothing more. What is certain is the consequences of their support will not be vindication and support of their own causes. What is certain is that the consequences will be the certain loss of any civic probity or decency in our affairs of state.

The Donald Trump “Bread and Circuses” Experience

Around 100 AD, the Roman satirist Juvenal wrote that, “The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things – bread and circuses!”

The simplified quip of “bread and circuses” has since been used to decry and satirize mob mentality coupled with the loss of civic virtue and education and the ability of demagogues to capture the hearts and minds of the uneducated rabble through nothing more than food and entertainment. I dare say little has changed in 2,000 years, and this same satirical critique could be leveled at society that supports the man whose recent victory speech included the statement, “I love the poorly educated…” A part of me wants to be in shock. A part of me wants to believe that the elevation of such crassness is not possible in this country. On the other hand, I think of the general coarseness of our society that devotes much more time to keeping up with the Kardashians and the 20th season of The Bachelor than keeping up with the level of education and morality required to uphold a democratic republic and I can’t help but draw the conclusion that perhaps this is the government that we deserve.

What the Ancient Greeks can teach us about democracy and freedom

The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, written in the 400s BC, has lasted the test of time due to the remarkable clarity in which he reported the historical facts as well as the philosophy that is woven into the account of the internecine war between Sparta and Athens. This philosophy is most gripping when it comes in the form of a recorded speech from one of the statesmen involved in the war. I wrote about one such account from the Spartan  King Archidamus II  in a previous blog post. Today, I turn my attention to a speech from a leading man of Athens, the General Pericles.

The setting for the speech of Pericles is a funeral oration at the conclusion of the end of the first battles of the war. It was a ritual in Athens for a leading citizen to deliver an encomium in honor of the dead. What I am struck by when reading this particular speech is the relatability to today when Pericles praises the Athenian way of government, individual life, and draws the connection that it is all worth fighting for. The society of Athens outline by Pericles has important parallels for the modern Western society member to consider. Aside from that, the speech is full of tremendous quotes. One of my favorites is when Pericles indicates that it is impossible for the audience to truly venerate the dead appropriately given that, “Praise of other people is tolerable up to a certain point, the point where one still believes that one could do oneself some of the things one is hearing about. Once you get beyond this point, you will find people becoming jealous and incredulous.”

Pericles description of the Athenian government and society should be strikingly familiar to Americans, or at least, it should be what we strive for but seem to fail to achieve these days:

“Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. Our government does not copy our neighbors’, but is an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained in our private business, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for the authorities and for the laws, having a particular regard to those which are ordained for the protection of the injured as well as those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment.”

I think there is much that we have lost in America that I wish we could get back – merit based public service, laws that demand respect because they are wisely crafted by wise people and were thus respected in turn by citizens, the ability to live our own lives as we see fit without interference by the long arm of the government, etc.

Pericles lauds the openness of Athenian society as well with the statement that:

“We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality; trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens; while in education, where our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger.”

Pericles describes an open society that benefitted from eager foreigners that wanted to come in and contribute to Athenian society and a state willingness to let them do so, even if sometimes it caused Athens harm. On the whole, Athenian life benefited from immigrants and the whole of Athens would not cower in fear over the relative few that harmed society. I think the current fear-mongering environment in American politics could learn from this ancient approach.

Pericles is careful to carve out the importance of individual responsibilities and individual ethics, balance, and well-roundedness as critical in preserving such a democratic and open society:

“Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft. We regard wealth as something to be properly used, rather than as something to boast about. As for poverty, no one need be ashamed to admit it: the real shame is in not taking practical measures to escape from it.”

Wealth is properly an instrument for good, not a tool for hedonism or boasting. Poverty is not something to be ashamed of or judged, but also not to be something that one hopelessly stays mired in.

A free society is undergirded by courageous people willing to preserve it. The courage of man is not defined by rashness, but careful considerations of the consequences and still choosing to act:

“The worst thing is to rush into action before the consequences have been properly debated…. But the man who can most truly be accounted brave is he who best knows the meaning of what is sweet in life and of what is terrible, and then goes out undeterred to meet what is to come.”

As a corollary to this, Pericles indicates throughout the speech that only those who have stake in society should make its most important decisions, even admonishing citizens to have more children since, “it is impossible for a man to put forward fair and honest views about our affairs if he has not, like everyone else, children whose lives may be at stake.” . This gets at the heart of the Pericles speech and the importance of individual responsibilities in upholding a democratic society. I personally view some of these quotes as a bit of a classical liberal/libertarian manifesto:

“Each single one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of life, is able to show himself the rightful lord and owner of his own person, and do this, moreover, with exceptional grace and exceptional versatility… Make up your minds that happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.”

And finally, Pericles includes an honor to the fallen that theirs was a sacrifice not entirely in vain, for one’s honor is preserved for time immemorial:

“One’s sense of honor is the only thing that does not grow old, and the last pleasure, when one is worn out with age, is not, as the poet said, making money, but having the respect of one’s fellow men.”

 

Venezuela is a basket case and big government is to blame

A great post here from Economist Dan Mitchell at the International Liberty blog.

In particular, I appreciate the Theorem he includes in the blog:

The best quote of the article is the conclusion after Mitchel chronicles the Venezuelan malaise:

The entire story is filled with heartbreaking stories of suffering families and maddening anecdotes about how unconstrained government has wrecked a potentially rich nation.

Which gives me a good reason to make the most important point of this article.

All the bad policies in Venezuela were imposed because politicians supposedly “cared” about ordinary people. That was the rationale for higher welfare payments, minimum wages, price controls, subsidies, and all sorts of other “compassionate” policies.

Yet the news reports show that it’s regular people who are now suffering the most because excessive government is causing an economic collapse.

Which is why this chart comparing Venezuela, Argentina, and Chile is so powerful. Ordinary people did the best in the nation with a government that did the least.

Advice and Consent of Senate on Supreme Court Nominees

Ding Ding Ding! The Coyote Blog sums up my feelings on the matter of the Scalia replacement. I am particularly fond of this statement:

“….the very fact a Supreme Court nomination is so politically radioactive is a sign of a basic governmental failure in and of itself.  The libertarian argument is that by giving the government so much power to intervene in so many ways that creates winners and losers by legislative diktat, we have raised the stakes of minutes points of law to previously unimaginable levels.  In a world where the government is not empowered to micro-manage our lives, a Supreme Court nomination would be as interesting as naming the postmaster general.”

Source: Advice and Consent

 

 

 

 

 

In praise of Scalia

The announcement of Scalia’s death at a West Texas ranch had scarcely reached the collective ear before ugly politics reared its head. Both sides of the political spectrum are guilty of rushing to their respective barricades without scarcely taking a moment to honor and venerate the dead. Republicans immediately jumped to the tactic of admonishing Obama not to nominate a successor while many on the left seemed to relish in the death of a longtime adversary without taking the cue of his longtime friend Ruth Bader Ginsburg to mourn the loss of someone who had convictions and consistency that at the very least could be understood, if not loved from a progressive worldview. Indeed,  the view of Scalia that I anecdotally see from more than a few social media pronouncements is one of puerile hatred. According to these views, Scalia was everything wrong in America to those with a progressive worldview – bigoted, intolerant, and rooted in a backwards and and anachronistic Originalist Constitutionalism view of jurisprudence that held this nation back from decades of societal progress and harmony.

The ultimate question is whether we desire our jurists in the judicial system to adhere consistently to our original government charter or whether judges should be expected and allowed to enter their own value and moral judgments into the equation. If you personally believe the latter, then what you desire the judicial branch to be is really nothing more than an extension of the legislative branch that is results driven and with one gigantic problem: in most cases and certainly in the case of the Supreme Court they are completely unaccountable to the popular electorate. The framers of our Constitution never intended the judicial branch to make value decisions arbitrarily, rather the judicial branch was wisely crafted with a purpose of adjudication of disputes and conflicts in interpreting the law and with striking down laws that are blatant abuses of the Constitution. On value and moral arguments, the Constitution is largely silent, leaving it firmly within the legislative branch to craft laws that are signs of the times and the will of the people in a democratic process.

Thus, my veneration and respect for Scalia as a jurist rests primarily on the consistent and principled way in which he performed his function as a Supreme Court judge, which was rooted in a predictable and formulaic approach to the laws and historic context as written in the legal codes. If Scalia’s career on the Supreme Court could be summarized into a couple of easy sentences it would be this: ‘Americans, if you want better or different laws, write your local Congressman or vote for someone else. Don’t take the easy way out by putting your hopes in the Supreme Court. Moving the moral current of society is not the Court’s responsibility and vesting that power in the Court is a grave danger to and severely undermines democracy.’ Indeed, the major downside of reliance on the judicial branch to make sweeping decisions: it fails to quell the dissent of the opposition in the same way that resounding defeat at the hands of the electorate driving the legislative process would. Defeat at the hands of the judge is analogous to a referee throwing the game. That leaves the opposition far more bitter and recalcitrant than if they had simply been trounced by a better team. Scalia adhered to the view that the Constitution and the law should determine judicial decisions and that a judge should not artfully construct law to fit their value judgments so as to promulgate de facto legislation from the judicial bench. As such, it is of my opinion that he was a critical bulwark against the judicial branch possessing more power than it was intended in America’s carefully crafted separation of powers. It was not really Scalia’s, or any other Supreme Court Justice’s call to make on bending legislative actions into what they believed was just or unjust. The results of such a process are completely unprincipled and chaotic. In Scalia’s view, it was the legislature that was supposed to handle the crafting of law. Critically, this is the government branch vested with these powers in the U.S. Constitution and concomitantly is the branch directly elected by the people to represent their interests.

Scalia is most reviled these days for his vote and dissent on the issue of gay marriage. I will not carry on about that specific issue here since out of my more libertarian principles I hardly think the state should have been involved in determining what marriage was in the first place. I don’t need a government license to sanctify my marriage nor to deem it appropriate in the eyes of the state, nor by extension do I believe it should it have meddled in anyone else’s private relationships.  Government has its role here in adjudicating the inevitable conflicts that will arise in suits and settlements (divorce, separation and division of assets), but I firmly believe that these issues could be handled much like any other contractual issue and in the judicial rather than the legislative branch of government. The real reason for such heavy-handed government involvement is  enacting social policy and through tax codes manipulated in vain attempts to spur on marriage that induced all of this mess in the first place. That is all I will say on the matter in this post, but in turning to the hatred spewed out on Scalia for his dissent on this case, I think people got tremendously confused between someone with legal principles and bigotry. One only need to turn to his written dissent on the  to understand his motivations, which is essentially that American democracy keeps getting unlawfully sidestepped by 9 Supreme Court Justices. As a result, one can clearly see that the dissent was completely in line with his typical approach to jurisprudence and a preservation of the democratic and legislative process. I have copied the gist of his dissent below below, but in my opinion, the full dissent is worth a read:

“The substance of today’s decree is not of immense personal importance to me. The law can recognize as marriage whatever sexual attachments and living arrangements it wishes, and can accord them favorable civil consequences, from tax treatment to rights of inheritance.

Those civil consequences—and the public approval that conferring the name of marriage evidences—can perhaps have adverse social effects, but no more adverse than the effects of many other controversial laws. So it is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact— and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.

Until the courts put a stop to it, public debate over same-sex marriage displayed American democracy at its best. Individuals on both sides of the issue passionately, but respectfully, attempted to persuade their fellow citizens to accept their views. Americans considered the arguments and put the question to a vote. The electorates of 11 States, either directly or through their representatives, chose to expand the traditional definition of marriage. Many more decided not to.1 Win or lose, advocates for both sides continued pressing their cases, secure in the knowledge that an electoral loss can be negated by a later electoral win. That is exactly how our system of government is supposed to work.”

Quote of the week – Friedman on Freedom

“So long as freedom is maintained, it prevents positions of privilege from becoming institutionalized. Freedom means diversity, but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today’s disadvantaged to become tomorrow’s privileged and, in the process enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a fuller and richer life.” – Milton Friedman.

A socialist society advocated by Sanders becomes an ossified one. The free market is not perfect and not advertised to be, but is still the only way known to man to provide equality of opportunity and the most effective way to ensure that people can escape poverty.

Do the Chinese have an unfair advantage?

According to Donald Trump, the United States loses to China, Mexico, Japan, and just about everyone else in the world. The redress he proposes is a 45% tariff on Chinese goods that he would likely expand to others he lumps in as having unfair advantages over us and a border wall. Has any nation ever made itself great (or great again) through isolation from immigrants and trade wars? Before we jump off into the chasm of a 45% tariff on the Chinese (and others) perhaps we should think about the actual impact of an increase on our goods, particularly the low-cost goods that benefit the poor. As Daniel Henninger lays out in a recent Wall Street Journal Editorial, the tariff is one of Trump’s few actual policy proposals. Henninger elaborates powerfully on the perils of Trump’s proposal in what I have copied below:

At the core of the Trump campaign is one policy idea: imposing a 45% tariff on goods imported from China. In his shouted, red-faced victory speech Tuesday, he extended the trade offensive to Japan and Mexico.

Some detail: Combining the value of goods we sell to them and they to us, China, Mexico and Japan are the U.S’s Nos. 1, 3 and 4 trading partners (Canada is No. 2). They are 35% of the U.S.’s trade activity with the world. The total annual value of what U.S. producers—and of course the workers they employ—sell to those three countries is $415 billion.

Wal-Mart has 1.4 million U.S. employees in stores filled with foreign-made consumer goods. With a 45% price increase, many won’t be working for long.

Mr. Trump says the threat alone of a tariff will cause China to cave. Someone should ask: What happens if they don’t cave? Incidentally, unlike Mexico, China has between 200 and 300 nuclear warheads and 2.4 million active-duty forces. Irrelevant?

As with anything Trump does, the tariff proposal is a naked calculation to rile up the easy to excite masses that are befuddled by economics. His supporters may not recognize this, but all of this is really in the same vein of support as those that support Sanders.  People with pitchforks want to believe that all of their wage stagnation must be the result of some faceless enemy in a foreign land or a Mister Burns character at J.P. Morgan. They will inevitably fall into the trap of rallying behind either Sander’s envy and class warfare or Trump’s foreigner warfare. On the latter, these same individuals will grab their pitchforks once again and demand price controls once their prices down at Wal-Mart also increase 45%. They will fail to see the increase as the predictable result of their own actions. It is a vicious cycle to find succor and assistance from government men with no scruples and who possess the knowledge that true arbitrary power is created on the backs of those ignorant souls willing to make deals with dark power for fleeting and ephemeral gains. This information and knowledge asymmetry is how individual liberties are willingly ceded by voters to those who make pandering promises who know what power they can gain.

I want to turn to the canard that the Chinese have an unfair advantage in trade with Americans. I have always been puzzled by a complaint that if the Chinese manipulate their currency to an unnatural low point that we should in turn punish them. If the Chinese do manipulate their currency (and it is highly debatable whether they do), then the logical conclusion is that in doing so what the Chinese government is actually doing is using Chinese taxpayers to subsidize American consumption. In other words, currency manipulation would necessarily mean Chinese citizen oppression by the Chinese government to support our low prices and consumption habits here. One might disdain this from a sense of humanitarianism and fellow feeling for the Chinese, but what it shouldn’t be is a cry of unfair advantage for the Chinese. We should be thankful for the good fortune that Chinese government ineptitude provides us with cheaper goods! Cafe Hayek states this much more effectively than I just did, so I copy the comments from a recent blog post in the form of a letter to a former student:

Dear Mr. Hester:

Thanks for your reply.

You say that I am “naïve to forget about” the “unfairly low prices which the Chinese ruling elite impose on us.”

Please.  Low prices in America – especially if they are made artificially low at the expense of non-Americans – are no imposition on Americans; they are a blessing to Americans.  (Do you think that we earthlings would be made richer if our rulers adopt policies that require us to start paying more for the light and heat that we have until now imported from the sun at the low price of $0?  If not, why do you think that we Americans would be made richer if our rulers adopt policies that require us to start paying more for the goods that we have until now imported from China at low prices?)

Also, Chinese low wages are largely the consequence of the Chinese people being enslaved, tyrannized, and impoverished for decades by an unspeakably cruel Maoist regime.  Do you honestly believe that this terrible history gives the Chinese people today an unfair economic advantage over Americans?  If so, you must regret that we Americans were denied the advantage-rich experience of being forced to live in a collectivized, starvation-ridden society ruled by murderous despots.  My gosh!  If we, too, could today boast the horrifying recent history of China, then we, too, might be as poor as the Chinese and, hence, we, too, would enjoy – as do today’s Chinese – all the splendid “advantages” bestowed by such an impoverishing history!

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

 

The substantial middle class taxes coming with #feelthebern

The Sanders path to unicorns and rainbows can’t possibly be financed through taxes on Wall Street. In fact, that will barely make a dent in the trillions of dollars needed for single payer healthcare alone. The only way to get all of this “free” stuff is to heavily tax the middle class. So the question is, are you ready for this political revolution of 50% personal income taxes?

Economist Dan Mitchell has more details…

Source: Accelerating on the Path to Greece with Bernie Sanders