Author Archives: eehines

If It Moves, Tax It

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California Progressive-Democrat Congressman Ro Khanna has just clearly articulated his Party’s ideology regarding the valuables held by American citizens.

What I’ve said—and what Bernie Sanders [I, VT] said—is that we need a modest wealth tax on these billions of dollars that aren’t being taxed. They are just sitting there without ever paying income tax, and that funding could pay for the healthcare, childcare, and education of all Americans.

Contra Ronald Reagan, if it’s just sitting there, tax it, too. That money, that asset, that value—as Progressive-Democrats define it—belongs to a Progressive-Democratic Party-run government. That government will leave in us average Americans‘ hands what those men and women deem appropriate, and they’ll appropriate the rest.

Reducing Federal spending and reducing government’s overregulation of healthcare, childcare, and education would do far more for making those things, to coin a phrase, affordable for us average Americans than would raising taxes, confiscating ever more money from our pockets. And yes, those Evil Rich are Americans, also.

This is what we can expect from the reign of Progressive-Democrats.

Typically Progressive-Democrat Distortion

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Recall the brutal murder of Sheridan Gorman, a young college student of Loyola University, allegedly committed by Jose Medina, an illegal alien from Venezuela (whom the Chicago Tribune dishonestly called a “migrant”). Chicago Progressive-Democrat Alderman, Maria Hadden, representing Loyola’s neighborhood of Rogers Park, said this:

The big question from people is always the “why.” And this why seems to have just been a senseless wrong place, wrong time tragedy.

She was referring to Gorman, the victim, as having been in the wrong place, wrong time. This is an especially perfidious, cynically offered distortion. Gorman wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time; she was where she was at the time she was there. Full stop.

The person who was in the wrong place at the wrong time was Medina who, as an illegal alien (guilty of the crime or not), had no business being there or anywhere else in the United States at that time or at any other time.

Full stop.

Have They Really?

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The Liaison Committee on Medical Education is a major medical school accreditor and a serious DEI polluter of medical schools with its demands that

doctors-in-training “learn to recognize and appropriately address biases in themselves, in others and in the healthcare delivery process.”
Medical schools were told that their curriculum should include content about “the diverse manner in which people perceive health and illness” and the “basic principles of culturally competent healthcare.”

As the WSJ‘s editors noted, although not as bluntly, those demands are intrinsically racist and sexist, and when implemented in place of merit, medical student competence suffered badly.

Now the LCME has quietly removed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) protocols from its official guidance.

But has it? Or has LCME simply stopped talking overtly about pushing the schools it accredits to include DEI criteria in their teaching and student selection criteria while continuing the pressure behind the scenes? The same personnel who imposed that broad bigotry in the first place are still in place.

Punctuation

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OK, another letter wants a response. Or it’s been a slow day….

CEOs and billionaires don’t worry that people will think they’re stupid because of their poor composition. But the rest of us try-hards know that whether it is justified or not, many readers will judge writers’ intelligence and authoritativeness by their grammar and composition.

Not so much intelligence or authoritativeness, as much as their degree of care and accuracy regarding their writings on their subject matter. Carelessness does, and legitimately so, detract from the credibility of their musings on their subjects. Even if they’re credentialed as the last word on the subject.

ee cummings was the only writer who could get away with no punctuation or capitalizations as a matter of course. And his poetry was only middling.

On Some Letters

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Some letters in The Wall Street Journal‘s Monday Letters section want comment.

Even though they [Paul Ehrlich and his wife] included in the book the warning that “we can be sure that none of them will come true as stated,” the scenarios became tools of critics.

And justifiably so. The Ehrlichs correctly observed that the details of their warnings would vary with reality, but they were insisting that the thrust and core of their predicted scenarios must inevitably occur.

…it is hard to dispute that the earth has finite natural resources, limited human carrying capacity and that excessive growth has resulted in environmental destruction.

It’s true enough that the planet, being of finite size, must have finite resources. But those upper bounds are so far beyond the reach of “human carrying capacity,” as to be laughable as limits. And coring an entire planet is about the only limit demonstrable to human carrying capacity. Nor has there been any “excessive growth” leading to environmental destruction. It’s uncontrolled, irresponsible growth that has done that, and when controls are applied, while not limiting growth with them, prosperity has occurred and existing destruction repaired. See, for instance, the terrors of acid rain and the ozone hole.

Ehrlich wasn’t a prognosticator, a modern-day Nostradamus. He was writing—and I assume hoping to sell—a book. Catastrophe and fear of the unknown sell better than optimism and serendipity.

Gee, I write private detective novels and a few political philosophy books, all of which I hope to sell. Each of them contains a measure of catastrophe and fear, or predictions of catastrophe. Maybe I can be a population bomb or climate expert, too.

People who deal in hypotheticals and emotions are generally unswayed by facts. Likewise, those who deal in proven outcomes are unmoved by feelings and theoretical futures. Thus, we speak (or yell) past each other, using very different languages. I don’t know how this ends.

One way in which it ends is those hypotheticals and hysterical feelings are continually falsified by unrolling reality, facilitating an increasing ability simply to ignore the fear-mongers and leave them behind.