Biden Is A Dictator, Huh?

 I overslept this morning, so it was a sprint from bed into clothes and at the door when my ride to church showed up.

Back at 1 pm, I called CC to let her know I was back. She came by last night, I gave her money for a bed and we talked until too late. I was already very tired from working on "Love Stinks". 

Reading The Guardian since I came back, had me wondering about the state of America.

Let us consider Trump takes on ‘dictator’ Biden as his upside down show moves to New Hampshire as further proof that American education, if not its general intelligience, has decayed immensley.

But his ardent supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire, saw things differently – 180 degrees differently. In their view it is Joe Biden who acts like an autocrat and Trump who is the saviour of the constitutional republic.

***

Derek Levine, 52, a commercial airline pilot who served for 23 years in the air force, was wearing a “Trump: Save America again” cap. “Trump has already been a president once and he wasn’t a dictator then,” he said.

“We’re seeing a dictator right now with weaponizing the FBI against conservative people, calling parents in Virginia who are concerned about what their kids are being taught domestic terrorists. That’s a dictator; not what Trump did.”

Jenna Driquier, 31, a hairdresser, added: “We’re living in dictatorship right now. The high prices, trying to get to communism, it’s not what this country was founded on.”

Reading this I had questions:

1. Mr. Levine, is it weaponization when conservatives break the law and not when it is Democrats? 
2. Ms. Driquier, is it communism when private businesses raise prices to make a profit? What do you think the American government was founded on other than making a profit?
3. Did either of you have a civics class in high school?
4. Ms. Driquier have you ever taken economics?
5. If Biden is a dictator, then why is there going to be an election? 
6. Why are Trump and Marjorie Taylor Green not in prison?

Ms. Driquier should read ‘Angel or antichrist’: Russia grapples with Lenin’s legacy 100 years after death, to get an idea of what is communism:

“What attracted people to Leninism was basically his anti-imperialism – the Soviet Union for better or worse was the most solid starting point for any anti-imperialist movement at that time,” said Read. “That’s why so many intellectuals, certainly mistakenly, had the idea that somehow Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s was the great new civilisation.”

Lenin’s influence on modern politics may be most keenly felt in China, where his vision of the party-state led by an ideological vanguard has become a political reality. Xi Jinping, the head of the Chinese Communist party, studied Marxist theory and ideological education at Tsinghua University from the late 1990s when he was a senior official in Fujian province. When he assumed power in 2012, he soon gave a speech to party officials in which he called on them to “practise core socialist values”, including Marxism-Leninism.

I can't imagine anyone seeing Joe Biden as leading an ideological vanguard. I can see any real Marxists laughing their behinds off at the Biden-as-Bolshie idea.

As for rising prices, Fellow Republicans, it’s time to admit that the US economy isn’t bad reading would just confuse Ms. Driquier.

Last quarter’s gross domestic product showed growth of 5.2%. That’s a number that dwarfs all other pre-Covid recovery numbers in recent memory. Unemployment is at a record low. Each month the economy is adding hundreds of thousands of new jobs. There are millions of more open jobs available today compared with 2019.

Yes, prices are higher, but inflation is down from a 9% annual rate to about 3%, so whatever the Federal Reserve did to offset the treasury’s spending on fiscal programs seems to be working. The stock market is near all-time highs, as is household wealth. Credit card delinquency rates are lower than they’ve been for the past 30 years as are delinquencies on all loans across the banking system. Holiday retail sales were strong and online sales boomed. Plenty of capital is available for businesses that need it and corporations have more cash on hand than in any year before the pandemic.

I speak to dozens of industry associations each year and here’s what I’m hearing: just about everyone had a good 2023. The CEOs of our major banks reported strong earnings, after taking into consideration special assessments and one-time charges. Retailers and restaurants have recovered from the pandemic. Convention traffic in Vegas is back to normal. There are almost as many travelers through the airports as there were before Covid. Businesses in the service industries recorded their 12th consecutive month of growth.

Sure, there are struggles. Businesses in the real estate industry are challenged by high housing prices and a 13-year low in home sales. Manufacturing has been in contraction for the past 14 months. Media companies are flailing. Technology firms are struggling to find financing. The cost of capital is slowing down financing for small businesses. However, we live in a giant country. California’s economy is as large as that of the entire United Kingdom. North Carolina’s economy is bigger than Sweden’s. Texas’s is bigger than Canada’s. Not every business is going to be doing well in an economy this size. There will always be those that are struggling, be it because of their location, their industry, or the makeup of their customer and supplier base.

I suspect Trumpers will run away from Limitarianism: why we need to put a cap on the super-rich like rabbits seeing a hawk.

In practical terms, limitarianism calls for three kinds of action. First there is structural action. Our societies’ key social and economic institutions should give people genuinely equal opportunities, through affordable childcare, free high-quality education and a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy.

The more structural steps we take to reduce inequality, the less need there will be for the second strategy, fiscal action. If taxation were our only tool for achieving a limitarian society, the tax rate would need to be set at 100% for wealth and income beyond a certain point (spoiler alert: it is not the only tool). Still, there is a very strong case for imposing a cap on extreme wealth.

The third kind of action limitarianism calls for is ethical action: we all need to embrace a limitarian ethos.

One objection to this might be that limiting how much wealth a person can accrue would require us to give up private property or the market mechanism, and force us into USSR-style communism. Such an objection is nonsense, and it’s probably just another attempt to silence meaningful criticism of the status quo. Markets are a very powerful tool for securing material welfare; private property is a cornerstone of our security, autonomy and prosperity. The real question, which we must seek to answer, is rather which constraints on the market and private property we need if we are to achieve limitarianism. 

The threat is not from communism, it is from an unchecked, unlimited plutocracy.

I am done here. Including a trip to McClure's, this has sucked down about 2 hours of my life.

I have work to do.

I leave you with a blast from the past:

sch