wes.whitman's blog

Trump has laid the foundation for conservative politicians to start talking about scrapping Social Security and Medicare. Billionaires were bailed out during the Bush and Obama eras, when government borrowed from Social Security to subsidize and bail out rich folks. Trump has permanently cut taxes on the wealthy so that his rich friends don't have to pay back the money they took from Social Security.

Ayn Rand sucked at life. Her books were garbage and no one loved her, not even Rothbard. Also, "If there's one thing that will not be tolerated here, it's imprecision of language."

Harvey Beardman (Atlas in the metaphor) is the businessman with the world on his shoulders, so he decides to shrug off moral obligations and pursue "the virtue of selfishness." Atlas shrugs, ignoring the ecological impact of his actions and engages in selfish profit-seeking at the expense of the environment and the community.

A reminder that unemployment numbers are meaningless when it comes to the state of the economy.

Vaccines don't cause autism and chiropractic is pseudo-science.

Even if vaccines cause autism (which they don't), a person can live a happy and fulfilling life with autism. You can't live a happy and fulfilling life if you're dead because you got a completely preventable illness. Also, the guy that did the "research" showing a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism faked the research because he happened to own the patent on an alternative vaccine—he was just a piece of shit trying to scare people away from the usual vaccine in order to sell them his own vaccine instead.

"The Republic" is also a mistranslation of the title of Plato's work. An accurate translation would be "The State." Plato was not a republican and neither was the form of government he advocated. He advocated a totalitarian quasi-communist monarchy. His politics was thoroughly fascist. Also, "scientific racism" played a central role in his political thought.

Robert Mercer, a man nigh infinitely more wealthy than Donald Trump, spent millions on Breitbart in order to spread Alt-Right anti-immigration propaganda. He also spent millions helping get Donald Trump elected. When Trump was elected, he appointed Robert Mercer's daughter (Rebekah Mercer) and Mercer's people (like Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway) to top positions within his Administration. Trump, propelled by the Alt-Right anti-immigrant agenda of Bannon, cracked down on illegal immigration and has been spreading anti-immigrant propaganda and lies.

Murray Rothbard and Russell Kirk were brilliant intellectuals of the right, but they were also highly problematic. They were both walking encyclopedias. Rothbard gave us the "non-aggression principle" as a libertarian axiom. Kirk warns against insurrection and revolution. They both defend the natural law tradition. Rothbard is the founder of modern American libertarianism. Kirk founded modern American conservatism. But they also bear some guilt for Trumpism and fascism.

This latest Trump admin attack on trans people is fascist, stupid, irresponsible, and anti-scientific. The proposed Trump admin policy would make "genetic testing" necessary to prove the sex of an individual if they wanted to change their gender from that assigned at birth. The policy proposal is a trans-erasure measure, meant to erase trans people and force them to out themselves on every occasion. No trans individual would ever be able to have their sex changed on any government document because it would be impossible for any of them to pass the required test.

What distinguishes my model of libertarian social democracy from conventional social democracy is that it is neither capitalist nor socialist but geo-distributist. It uses land value tax to fund a citizen's dividend (or basic income) that makes all people co-owners of land and natural resources.

"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."—Emma Goldman