Category: Capitalism v Socialism
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I Pledge Pledge Allegiance To Alexandria Ocasio Cortez…
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: I get it now. I understand. It’s hard to change a lifetime of thinking one way, the wrong way, but I get it now. I hope my children do worse than I. I hope their prospects are dimmer, their fortunes poorer, their deaths early. You see, I once believed…
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The Rush To Mediocrity
The likes of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and most of the MInnesota DFL genuflect toward the Europeans for their economic advice. Inconvenient fact: all of Europe’s economies would fit tidily within the bottom third of US states: Most European countries (including Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Belgium) if they joined the US, would rank among the…
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Behind The Fashion Curve
Poke a needle in a Minnesota liberal, and they’ll likely bleed some combination of Danish and Swedish “social democracy”. At Reason, Johan Norberg points out that they – and most Americans, really – could learn a lot from the Swedes. Just not much of it goes along with the left’s dogma: Norberg’s grand tour of his…
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The Road To Hell’s Kitchen Is Paved With Good Intentions
A few years ago, when the city of Minneapolis jumped on the “raise the minimum wage to $15 and mandatory benefits“ bandwagon, the owners of popular downtown eatery “Hell’s Kitchen” led the way in virtue-signaling how very OK they were with it. And they stuck to their guns (their owners would not be OK with…
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Gör Sverige Bra Igen
Conservatives make major strides in… …Sweden? Sweden’s elections on Sunday carry the same lesson we should have already learned with Brexit and Donald Trump’s 2016 victory: Those whom political elites view as “deplorables” are going to have their say. The question now is whether elites will continue to ignore them and the lessons they bring.…
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Submitted For Approval
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: I propose a new Berg’s Law. “Socialists are frustrated people who believe that after the revolution, their worth will finally be recognized and they’ll triumphantly assume command, they won’t be purged with the rest of the kulaks, saboteurs and wreckers. About this, they are uniformly mistaken.” Joe: Your proposal…
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Of Pikers And Pimps
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: St. Paul and Minneapolis are considering raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour. There are no studies on the effect of a $15 per hour minimum wage because it’s never been that high. The studies of effects of prior minimum wage increases go both ways, depending on who…
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Square Pegs
I’ve been pondering how to address this for a while – what it’s liek to be an actual conservative in the Trump era. John Hawkins takes a run at it with the five werdest things about being a conservative Trump non-fan. Here’s one that some of my liberal friends have a hard time wrapping their…
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Math Isn’t Their Strong Suit
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: They pay burger flippers nearly $12 per hour now. The workers went union for a fair wage. Bad news, people. The fair wage for someone whose only marketable skill is flipping burgers is $10. They were overpaying to keep the union out. Now they’ll agree to raise wages but…
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The Resistance
Silicon Valley has turned in to a de facto surveillance state, and is using its power to try to quash Conservative thought on the Internet. The “#meToo” movement has harnessed the power of the Progressive Herd to co-opt what started as a good message (don’t abuse women!) into a policy bludgeon and a wedge used to…
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Events Of A Feather
Six years ago, Venezuela banned private firearms ownership, via a piece of legislation that had to have sent a tingle down Linda Slocum, Erin Maye Quade, Jamie Becker-Finn and Dave Pinto’s spines. It was done to consolidate and reinforce the control of a government that, one might suspect in concept had to have sent a tingle down…
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Why Are Liberals Always Talking About Kansas?
To take the focus off of Maine.
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In The Money!
SCENE: Mitch BERG steps out onto his porch to bring in his mail – and is startled to see Avery LIBRELLE looking over the envelopes. BERG: Um, Avery? What the… LIBRELLE: Merg! Venezuela is raising its minimum wage! If they can do it, why can’t we? BERG: The “increase” is meaningless. Just like the ones…
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Sign O The Times?
Big Left seems to thrive on misery. They seem to love to cling to the notion that things have never been worse, in the nation or the world (or at least they do when there’s no Democrat in the White House). For example – ask a typical liberal, and they’ll say that “gun violence” is…
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When Liberals Ask “What’s The Matter With Kansas?”…
…it’s because they want you to focus on the one big “conservative” failure of state governance in recent years [1] – and ignore stories like North Carolina, whose economy is booming under conservative leadership and policies. Or North Dakota, which weathered the deflation of the oil boom in style (the unemployment rate has never gotten…
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Ebenezer, You Dickens
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: If the pre-ghost Ebenezer Scrooge were alive today, he’d be a Liberal. The post-ghost Scrooge would be a Conservative. Pre-ghost Scrooge was asked to contribute to a fund for the poor, because Christmas is a time when want is keenly felt and abundance rejoices. Scrooge declines, citing the Poor…
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Rationed
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Which is the most efficient way to bring down prices: government dictate, or free market? Warren Buffet seems to be saying government is a more efficient way to bring down prices, therefore America should embrace the single-payer model of health care used in Britain, Canada, Cuba, the Veteran’s Administration,…
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Lather, Rinse, Poison, Repeat
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Some experts believe the policies that led to the 2008 real estate collapse are still in place leaving us as vulnerable to a real estate bubble as before. They are mistaken. We’re worse off than before because now we have newer and even stupider ideas to help preferred minorities…
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Not The Dumbest Idea They’ve Had
Venezuela responds to US moves to deal with the unraveling of Venezuelan economic life: “The ‘contact group’ you’re proposing is completely useless and unnecessary,” Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez fumed at a meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Cancun, Mexico. “The only way you could impose it would be to send in…
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“It’s Not True Socia…Well, You Know…”
The media are barely covering the political and human catastrophe unfolding in Venezuela: Out of approximately 50,000 total evening news stories on ABC, CBS and NBC combined in the last four years, just 25 have covered the ongoing crisis in socialist Venezuela, according to a Media Research Center study published Tuesday…. …and they certainly aren’t slopping the blame…
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Only In Minnesota…
…can a company have a legal monopoly on a product people are willing to pay huge money, risk fail, and kill to cover their black market turf over… …and still get regulated out of business.
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For The Millennial In Your Life
Animal Farm, a Brit animated feature from the fifties, looks like a Disney feature – but it’s a pretty faithful re-telling of Orwell’s classic tale of the inevitable results of socialism. It’s actually easy enough to find links to the film – most of which link back to sketchy download sites. This version – Arabic…
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Life Imitates Blog
Ten years or so ago, during the heyday of the political blog, some of us – conservatives with fond memories of the punk era in music – quipped “conservatism is the new punk”. In places like Minneapolis and Saint Paul, it’s still pretty true; conservatives and conservatism are the counterculture, the disruption, the sound of the gleeful…
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That Which Can’t Be Sustained, Won’t Be
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Every year for the last 40 years, the United States has run short of money in the budget. To fill the shortfall, the General Fund borrowed from the Social Security fund, but that still wasn’t enough. To make ends meet, we borrowed even more. The total accumulated debt is…
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For The Miseducated Liberal In Your Life
We’re in the opening stages of a mayoral race in Saint Paul. Now, the various stakeholders and activists are doing what they do – thinking big talks, dreaming big dreams via the political system. As to what I think this city actually needs from a new mayor? It’s irrelevant. We can want whatever we…