24/7 Wall Street calls Minneapolis the 25th most dangerous city in the US, based on FBI stats:

Minneapolis landed on the 25th spot on the list, with a violent crime rate of 1,063 incidents per 100,000 residents. The website noted that robbery is especially common in Minneapolis, with 459 reported incidents per 100,000 residents – the 10th highest robbery rate in the nation.

The story – from WCCO – notes that despite the city’s nominally low unemployment, that…:

…the city has struggled with stark racial disparities, with people of color, particularly blacks, making less money, having lower home ownership rates and higher unemployment rates.

Right – fully a third of Minnesota’s murders, for the whole state, in the past year occurred on the North Side, which has a neighborhood murder rate of 100/100,000.  Which is, quite frankly, catastrophic.

But chalking up the murder rate to income, home ownership rates and unemployment is an evasion of responsibility; as PJ O’Rourke once said, “if you took away his bank account, it’s not like you’d find Thurgood Marshall selling crack at Union Station the next day”.

Is the crime rate in Minneapolis (the article painstakingly avoids mentioning the North Side) a result of poverty, or is the poverty a result of the crime and cultural breakdown?

…while ignoring what they actually do.

That’s what the Minnesota DFL would have people do on most “ethical” issues.

Government employees with cadillac health plans pushing Minnesotans onto MNSure?  No problem.

DFL legislators with guns in the house pushing anti-2nd-amendment legislation?  Par for the course.

Decry racism and preach “diversity” and “inclusion” out of one side of your mouth, but prey on the ignorant racism of too many DFLers out the other side and several other orifices? You expected what?

And now –  Minnesota DFL Caucus is sending out mailers promising to regulate “dark money” campaign spending…

…paid for with “dark money”.

So let’s let this sink in:  while jabbering at the ignorant about “dark money”, DFL-affilated groups have spent 3.3 million (not counting the half-million from the MN Chamber of Commerce, which is often falsely called pro-GOP; its policies have largely been moderate-DFL for the past six years) in “dark money” out of the over nine million they’ve spent so far.   The DFL-affiliated groups have spent over double in “dark money” what all of the GOP affilated PACs in the top ten have spent all together.

Pass the word to your less curious friends.  And your DFL-leaning friends.

But I repeat myself.

…group of actors – people who earn an intermittent living acting like people we’re not, who almost universally live in a place and culture, Hollywood, that has no bearing on the objective reality most Americans live in – who are mostly famous for playing roles in a series about a fictional, utopian, creepily big-brotherish universal government, playing to a fan base that has treated us and the franchise (of, let me repeat, fiction) in which we acted like a pseudo-religion, which has continued to keep many of us paid via two generations of fan fairs and other residuals, ask  you, the people of the real world, to take our political advice seriously“.

I guess there’s a reason I’m not in PR for the Screen Actors Guild.

Another baseball post-season is upon us.  And if you’re a Cubs fan – and they are my National League team – it’s another season to anticipate how epic this season’s choke is going to be.  Notwithstanding the fact that this season’s Cubs team is perhaps the best to ever take to Wrigley field, with the best record in baseball,  wondering what legendary exit the Cubs have planned.

It’s time to stop the “lovable losers” twaddle, says George Will:

So, all you purveyors of Cubs Gush, listen up. Referring to Wrigley Field as a “baseball cathedral” should be a flogging offense. It is just a nice little place on the North Side where men (calling major leaguers “boys of summer” should be punishable by keelhauling) work hard at a demanding and dangerous craft. And Cub fans, loyal through thin and thin, you must remember this: Your team at least won the Cold War. For years, it held spring training on Catalina Island near Los Angeles. So when a Des Moines radio sportscaster named “Dutch” Reagan went to report on them, he stopped in Hollywood for a screen test, and the Soviet Union was doomed. So there.

Fingers crossed.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s something Republicans have whispered hopefully to each other ever since I started watching Minnesota elections, 28 years ago; could Minnesota flip?

“Pshaw”, goes the conventional wisdom.

“Not so fast, and who the hell actually says ‘pshaw'”, say some polls:

Populism is at the heart of Mr. Trump’s economic and anti-establishment message. It’s also the significant enthusiasm gap between Mr. Trump’s very excited supporters and Mrs. Clinton’s very depressed voters that could result in a big upset, despite what the polls show ahead of the election. The state, which consistently boasts higher voter turnout than the national average, is also known for its more-than-average politically active citizenry and the strength of political movements could be exacerbated by it.

Now, not including the expanded Minnesota subsample taken from the PPD U.S. Presidential Election Daily Tracking Poll, a Gravis Marketing Poll released on Monday finds the race tied at 42% and another recent SurveyUSA Poll finds a six-point lead for Mrs. Clinton.

It wouldn’t be a story about Minnesota politics without Larry Jacobs:

“Minnesota is in play,” Larry Jacobs of the University of Minnesota Humphrey Institute, told Patch. “Trump is only six or seven points behind and has not campaigned actively in Minnesota, whereas Democrats are counting on Minnesota and have actually put some money in. So, I think these are surprising results.”…Seven percent (7%) remain undecided, slightly higher than the national average.

For myself?  I think Clinton will win, for one reason and one only:  if Democrat internal polling showed Clinton losing Minnesota, a state with about 4 million voting age adults (of whom about 2/3 actually vote in presidential elections) going to Trump by a thoroughly hypothetical million vote margin, 1.17 million to 700,000, the Metro DFL machine would turn out four million votes for Hillary in Minneapolis,  Saint Paul and Duluth, and the Secretary of State would certify it, and the Star-Tribune would call anyone who called BS a “racist” and shut them up.

But it’s an interesting theory.

Assange’s Infodump On Hillary will be utterly devastating – to a regular citizen.  The media will bury it, developing a sudden and utterly transient interest in storm damage in Haiti.

Black Lives Matter will be a huge force in the 2020 election, as George Soros and other plutocrats with deep pockets continue to fund it with gusto.  Unless Hillary wins.  Then, it’ll disappear from the public eye, unfunded and unmentioned in the media, by February 2017.

The continued collapse of the state health exchanges will garner more and more media publicity leading up to Hillary Clinton’s inaugural address, which will prominently feature single-payer healthcare as a national priority on the order of the New Deal or defeating Naziism.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If you qualify to live in public housing because you are poor, then you can’t afford to go on vacation.  Unless you’re a Somali refugee, then the taxpayers will pay your rent while you’re gone.

Joe Doakes

I’m sure there’s a reason for this.

Not sure it’ll make any sense.

Opposition researchers are pretty much paid to be ugly, catty and anal-retentive.

The City Pages would have you believe that the oppo-research battle in the House race in Apple Valley is worse than most.  And in its way, it is – although not for the reasons the City Pages wants you to believe.

It’s a battle between two younger women – Republican Ali Jimenez-Hopper and DFLer Erin Maye-Quade – and the oppo researchers working with both of them.

Everybody’s Doing It:  Maye-Quade – who the City Pages’ Mike Mullen notes is a “biracial, married lesbian with impeccable credentials [although no details about the “credentials” are given – more on that in a moment] who worked to get Barack Obama elected and gun control passed”, although no gun controls have passed in this state in decades – was the first target.  Says Mullen:

Maye Quade’s persona became the subject of scrutiny last week when conservatives dragged out a number of posts meant to throw her qualifications into question. “Macy Gray wrote a love song to a vibrator,” Maye Quade tweeted last year, “shocking no woman who has ever used one.”

It’s a good line. But not the kind DFLers want to see parading across the screens of suburban voters.

Other posts show her pissed off (“today can blow me,” she once wrote) or turned on (actor Rob Lowe is “masturbate in public sexy,” according to a January 2013 tweet).

I can give Maye-Quade a break for that.  I’ve long lamented the idea that anyone who wants to get into politics basically needs to spend every waking moment of their lives from childhood on guarding against any hint of impolitic impropriety if they ever want to “serve” the public in elective office.

Of course, the name rang a bell with me – and it brought us back to this episode, in 2010, where Maye, then employed by “The Uptake”, giggled ““I’m Editing.  I feel important because I can make people say things they may not have said.  Muhahaha”   It gave her a kick that she now had the power to use her job editing news content to affect the political process.

Which reminded me that there are many, many better reasons not to vote for Erin Maye-Quade.

So Where’s The Bad Part? – The DFL responded by digging out this bit of “dirt” against Ms. Jimenez-Hopper:

On June 14, two days after 49 people were killed in a shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Jimenez-Hopper told her Facebook followers she’s armed and ready to defend herself. She’s not going to die “in a helpless blubbering heap on the floor begging for my life or my child’s life.” Hardly the requisite “thoughts and prayers for the victims’ families” that Republicans like to trot out.

Anyone who doesn’t agree that one is better fighting back against violence than being a passive victim is beyond moral help.

And have you noticed the gotcha – Republicans who ask “thoughts and prayers for the victims’ families” are condemned for not supporting the right response, while those who don’t get hit for…well, not?

By the way, Ms. Jimenez-Hopper?  Don’t change a thing.

Another post seemed distinctly anti-feminist. Jimenez-Hopper shared a meme that stated women “weren’t created to do everything a man can do.” The candidate added: “Men and women are not equal… what we are is equally different.”

The horror.

I love that last bit.  Democrats – most of whom haven’t taken a hard science since high school at the latest – jabber about their respect for empiricism, and snark down their sleeves about the evolution-denying “young earth creationists” they think all Christian Republicans are.

And yet faced with the ineluctible fact that evolution has equipped men and women differently, for remorselessly empirical reasons, suddenly they go all faith-based – in this case, out of faith that the left’s social dogma is the one real truth?

I endorse Ms. Jimenez-Hopper, by the way.  Hopefully the good people of Apple Valley can smell the difference between reason and dogma.

You, the DFL voter, wanted a government-managed healthcare market?  You got it!

And we’re all paying for it!

Health insurers are hiking premiums and limiting enrollment in Minnesota’s individual market next year, with regulators saying the emergency measures were needed to avert a market collapse.

The moves are a clear sign that the market for some 250,000 people who buy coverage for themselves is dysfunctional and needs reform, said Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman during a Friday news conference.

While rate increases of more than 50 percent aren’t fair to consumers, Rothman said, things could have been worse. He described a period this summer when all health insurers in the state seemed prepared to abandon that segment of the market.

Elections have consequences; as former New York mayor Ed Koch put it, “the voters have spoken, and now they must accept the consequences”.

It’d be nice if those consequences didn’t botch up everyone else’s life.

Sometimes it seems like Americans are the most culturally illiterate and oblivious people in the world.

So this story is to remind you there’s always one more level to sink.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This guy was sitting in the car reading a book, Tasered four times, then shot.

 Or he got out of the car with a gun and threatened the officers.

 Depends on who you believe.

 On the one hand, a certain group of people Whose Lives Matter have a history of making up facts to support their story.  The “Hands Up” thing comes to mind.

 On the other hand, a certain group of people Who Are Above The Law have a history of making up facts to support their story, too.  The cop who dropped the Taser next to his shooting victim comes to mind.

 I honestly can’t decide which group is less trustworthy and that terrifies me.  It means the main source of social cohesion is failing.  Every time that’s happened throughout history, it’s been a pre-cursor to societal upheaval, often leading to collapse, chaos, anarchy, dictatorship, riot, plague and death.

 It doesn’t matter who we elect as President, if there’s no nation to govern. 

 Joe Doakes

This is the elephant in the room; if we can’t trust our government and our fellow citizen, then freedom is really just a slogan.

Jon Heyer is running for Minnesota House in District 66A.  Here’s his website; please try to give him a hand.

And of course, ♫  today’s music playlist

One of the features that originally put this blog on the map was “The DFL Dictionary” – a list of the Democrat party’s perversions of the English Language.

It occurs to me – the feature hasn’t been updated in close to eight years.

So today I’m going to start working on an update

New Terms:  Here are some of the new terms I’d like to try to define:

• Rape Culture
• Safe Space
• Trigger
• Systemic Racism
• Black Vulnerabilty
• cultural normalcy
• Vagenda of Manocide
• Mansplaining

  Patriarchy
• Voter Suppression
• Wage Gap
• Consent Text
• Privilege
• Cisgender
• Shaming
• Police Brutatily / Police Overreach
• Race based
• Hands Up Don’t Shoot
• “Justice” (saka “Racial Justice”)
• “Oppressor”
• Social Justice Warrior
• Privilege
• Appropriation
• Supremacy
• Xenophobic
• Misogynistic

I’m open for new definitions of these terms (and I have a few myself, but most of you are smarter than me).   If you’ve got a definition or two, throw ’em in down in the comment section.

And then…:

What Have I Missed?:  I know I’ve missed some terms.  Throw ’em in down in the comment section!

In the past, we’ve spent some time beating up the group “Minnesota Gun Rights” – a group based in Iowa, affiliated with the National Association of Gun Rights.  NAGR’s affiliates nationwide have a fairly cohesive strategy:

1. Lead with a lot of no-compromise rhetoric – often on non-issues – on cheap social media.
2. Use that rhetoric to raise a lot of money.
3. Claim credit for other groups’ work to raise more money.

We see this yet again this cycle.

MGR is flogging this ad on social media:

With this caption:

Senator Rod Skoe voted ⛔AGAINST⛔ pro-gun Constitutional Carry legislation! Add your name to those demanding he apologize for betraying gun owners!

APOLOGIZE, Sen. Skoe!

Now, Rod Skoe is a DFLer – but he’s about as outstate a DFLer as you can get.  He’s been solidly pro-2nd-Amendment.  He’s one of the linchpins of the gun movement’s bipartisanship (outside the 494-694 ring) in this state.  He’s one of the good guys, and always has been. 

Oh, yeah – and there never has been a vote on “Constitutional Carry” (which would make the 2nd Amendment your carry permit) on the floor of the Minnesota Senate.   Or, to the best of my recollection, the House.  A quixotic Constitutional Carry bill from Brandon Peterson died in committee, I think, last session – but that was it.

If Minnesota Gun Rights says it, its probably false.

Did Chelsea Clinton take a private jet to a “clean energy” conference that was a mere five hour drive (or one-hour commercial flight) away?

Oh, what do you think?

The Clinton campaign promised during the Democratic primary that their entire operation would be “carbon neutral” and had some friendly reporters write stories about how even campaign manager John Podesta took the bus.

The campaign doesn’t talk about that pledge much anymore, given the how much the Clintons love flying on private jets, presumably out of class envy.

Here’s the problem; after 15 years of writing a blog, I’m running out of synonyms and other ways to write “some animals are more equal than others”.  One can only quote Solzhenitsyn so many times, if only because one only rarely spells Solzhenitsyn correctly.

You don’t screw with shooters. 

Even if you’re Smith and Wesson 

President Obama unveils an unseemly snobbery:

On Sunday’s season premiere of Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown,” the president discussed food and foreign policy over noodles with the celebrity chef in Vietnam…“Is ketchup on a hot dog ever acceptable?” Bourdain asked the leader of the free world in an episode taped in May.

“No,” the president quickly responded. “I mean that … that’s one of those things like, well, let me put it this way, it’s not acceptable past the age of 8.”

Bam. Obama out.

Mr. President; you’re eating a hot dog.   Pretension is misplaced.

On her Twitter page, Minneapolis city Council woman Alandra Cano refers to herself as a “Third World feminist” – or did, before she blocked me for questioning her thuggish ways last winter, when she published personal addresses, emails and phone numbers of her critics who had written her on the city of Minneapolis website.

I couldn’t speak to the “feminist” part, but Cano certainly has the basics of banana republic tactics down; her response to the ethics charges that came out of the episode last winter (on which My coverage led the entire Twin Cities media) is a big game of “I know you are, but what am I, and if you say anything I’m going to her you twice as hard and quote.
No my coverage led the entire Twin Cities media) is a big game of “I know you are, but what am I, and if you say anything I’m going to her you twice as hard and quote.

No, really:

“I disagree with the findings and have kept screenshots of the ways other Council Members, including CM Frey (Ward 3), Bender (Ward 10), Glidden (Ward 8), Abdi (Warsame, Ward 6) and others have used city property for ‘political purposes.’” She goes on, threatening to “speak out against the vote and circulate a press release to the media about the issue with the screenshots I’ve gathered since January of 2016” if the Council moves forward with approving the Ethics findings.

John Edwards of Wedge Live responds:

Cano responded to the stories about her email on Facebook, saying: “When a person of color speaks up, it should not be misconstrued as a “threat” to society, it should be respected as their truth.” Whatever Cano’s intent, the reason people interpreted her email as a threat, is because she constructed it that way: if you vote against me, I’ll put out a press release with incriminating screenshots. This is not to say Cano can’t make an argument that she’s being singled out unfairly, or that she can’t produce evidence to support her defense. But if she was trying to make that argument, she obscured it by writing an email that looked like blackmail.
Alondra Cano really has been the target of vicious racist attacks because of her support for BLM. Separate from those vile attacks, Council President Barb Johnson and some of Cano’s other colleagues really have gone out of their way, to a sometimes comical degree, to trash her in the local media. But it’s also true that Cano picks too many unnecessary battles, irritating her colleagues in a way that transcends race and ideology.

That an elected member of a party with sole control of a major city thinks she can complain about others’ “privilege” is a laugh riot.

And while she may or may not be a “third world feminist”, she’s certainly got the Chicago tinhorn ward-heeler thing down.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Before 6,000 Somali Muslims were imported to St. Cloud, a town of 60,000 souls, nobody with a knife attacking shoppers while quizzing them on their religion or talking about Allah.

 One might be tempted to think that the first thing led to the second, but that would be an example of the logical fallacy post hoc ergo prompter hoc.  Fortunately, the media and political leadership wisely avoids drawing any such conclusions.  The attacker’s motive may never be known.  

 Even if this does turn out to be an act of Muslim terrorism as the Muslim terrorist group ISIL claims, the terrorist probably was simply another member of Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves so nothing to worry about, St. Cloud has the capacity to absorb more terrorist attacks.

Joe Doakes

Isn’t it amazing how tolerant the media and political class get about peoples’ motives, when there’s a whiff of ethnic/religious terrorism involved?

Writing at Vulture.com, Caryn Rose ranks all 314 Bruce Springsteen songs ¹ from worst to first.

First things first:  Rose found a break on one of the primary laws of Springsteen-fandom; there actually is a song worse than “Mary, Queen Of Arkansas” (from 1973’s Greetings From Asbury Park).  I won’t ruin the surprise.

But otherwise, it was a herculean job.  And by the time you get to the top 100, it had to be hard to rank ’em.  But she did a decent job.

I said “decent”. Not perfect.   There is no way “41 Shots” (#22) outscores “She’s the One (#24), among many other examples.

I’m here for the perfect.  I’ll do the real top 10.

1. Born to Run
2. Darkness on the Edge of Town
3. This Hard Land
4. Racing In The Street
5. Thunder Road
6. The Promised Land
7. Rosalita
8. The River
9. Night
10. Atlantic City

Still, a noble – and needed – effort.

¹ That is to say, songs written by Springsteen that appeared on commercial releases.   Sorry, Seeger Sessions and forty years of “Steel Mill” bootlegs.

I can not conceal my joy at the death of Gawker, the website that did more than any other to make the internet useless.

Hulk Hogan – who pulled off the nearly-impossible by winning a defamation case against Denton while still a public figure – is reveling in the spoils of his victory.  And while I’ve never given a rat’s damn about professional wrestling, I say “good on him”.

In the meantime, Denton’s media buddies are circling the wagons, funding (after a fashion) a fellowship to report on Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley innovator and billionaire who helped fund Hogan’s suit.

Or maybe you think that the public could benefit from better understanding of Thiel’s bold, nuanced vision of free speech.

“I want to help the CPJ defend the rights of online journalists,” Thiel has previously stated, announcing his substantial support for the Committee for the Protection of Journalists. That support overlapped with the time PayPal famously froze WikiLeak’s account at the request of lawmakers, and before he was revealed to have secretly bankrolled a series of lawsuits to bankrupt the independent publisher Gawker, an act he called “one of my greater philanthropic things that I’ve done.”

Dear mainstream media; “free speech has consequences, if it’s defamation” isn’t “nuanced”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Post makes a discovery.  About 20 years behind the rest of the nation, but yeah, lunch is expensive.  How is this possible, since there’s no inflation under the Obama administration?  The article doesn’t say.

The correlation between price and the decline in visits is a revelation to the Post but glaringly obvious to me.  Prices have shot way up.  Three years ago, the Golden Arches offered several value meals for under $5.00.  Now there aren’t any, most are in the $7.00 range.  A 40% price increase is noticeable to guys like Joe Shlabotnik, whose disposable income has not kept pace.  So he packs a lunch from home, which pointy-headed economists call “substitution” but which everybody else calls “the new normal.”

 More proof of the utter disconnect between coastal elites and fly-over country hicks.  We knew about this years ago; they’re just now figuring it out.  So who are the real dummies?

 Joe Doakes

Rhetorical question, right, Joe?

National Public Radio spent the weekend essentially on wall-to-wall coverage of the Smithsonian’s African-American History Museum over this past weekend.

And other than the spectacle of the President of the United States trying affect an Alabama accent, the event – and the museum – sounded interesting, and very much worth a stop the next time I’m in DC.  Whenever that might be.

In stark contrast stands the Minnesota African-American museum, which, notwithstanding three million dollars in various kinds of financing, grants and gifts, has been auctioned off to satisfy creditors:

The latest chapter in a complicated, seven-year tangle of funding struggles and work disputes took less than two minutes in an auction held Tuesday at a counter in the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office. Attorneys for the construction, plumbing and electrical companies that had previously won a court judgment for unpaid work at the museum joined together to purchase the property for $1.3 million: the total amount a judge found that they are owed. The group was the sole bidder at the public auction.

Supporters of the museum are now trying to strike a deal with Minneapolis Community and Technical College to display some items and exhibits, but the museum is without a permanent home — and some financial backers are out thousands of dollars in investments.

Leaders of the museum have not spoken publicly about their plans. The museum’s president, Nekima Levy-Pounds, declined to comment and its last executive director, Lissa Jones, could not be reached for comment. Other prominent supporters, including founder Roxanne Givens and state Sens. Bobby Joe Champion and Jeff Hayden either declined to discuss the museum’s sale or could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

It might be possible to look at the facts of this episode and not conclude that the whole thing was a means of transferring wealth from taxpayers and non-profits to favored members of the political class.

I’m not sure how you get there, but it’s possible.

…at about this time last year there was exactly one pundit, anywhere in the US or elsewhere, that predicted Donald Trump would win the GOP nomination; heck, I know of only one who predicted Trump would make it past Christmas.

He also happens to be one of America’s painfully-few business writers who are worth reading; Scott Adams, cartoonist and creator of Dilbert.

He was also pretty much alone, last spring, in predicting Trump would win the presidency.  And like all predictions, that one is still very much a long shot.

But Adams has switched his endorsement – comical as it is – from Hillary to Trump.

And as little as I’ve personally ever cared for Trump’s public persona, Adams explains something about The Donald that I do get, and that most of our media and chattering classes are too myopic to understand:

5. Pacing and Leading: Trump always takes the extreme position on matters of safety and security for the country, even if those positions are unconstitutional, impractical, evil, or something that the military would refuse to do. Normal people see this as a dangerous situation. Trained persuaders like me see this as something called pacing and leading. Trump “paces” the public – meaning he matches them in their emotional state, and then some. He does that with his extreme responses on immigration, fighting ISIS, stop-and-frisk, etc. Once Trump has established himself as the biggest bad-ass on the topic, he is free to “lead,” which we see him do by softening his deportation stand, limiting his stop-and-frisk comment to Chicago, reversing his first answer on penalties for abortion, and so on. If you are not trained in persuasion, Trump look scary. If you understand pacing and leading, you might see him as the safest candidate who has ever gotten this close to the presidency. That’s how I see him.

So when Clinton supporters ask me how I could support a “fascist,” the answer is that he isn’t one. Clinton’s team, with the help of Godzilla, have effectively persuaded the public to see Trump as scary. The persuasion works because Trump’s “pacing” system is not obvious to the public. They see his “first offers” as evidence of evil. They are not. They are technique.

Most pundits have never had to negotiate anything beyond their salary – and that rarely works out well, these days, either.  In any case, too many of our chattering class believe that what Obama, Clinton and Kerry did in Iran, North Korea and Ukraine was “negotation”.  It was – in the same sense that Rodney King’s interaction with the police was.

I’m still not a fan of Trump’s public persona.  I still think his election is a long shot.

But then, like all of the A-through-Y-list pundits above me, I’ve been wrong about everything else, this cycle.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberals think 2% inflation is a good thing, it keeps the economy growing.

That’s insane.

The definition of “money” is “a store of value.”  The whole point of using a monetary system instead of a barter system is to maintain the

value of money.  Inflation erodes the value of money.

If there’s 2% inflation and you get no cost-of-living adjustment in your wages, then at the end of the year you can buy 2% less stuff because the

money you earn isn’t enough to buy the same amount of stuff at the new, higher prices.  Everybody knows this but they accept it because we’re

conditioned to accept it.

Suppose instead there was 0% inflation, but your employer cut your wages 2% each year.  End result would be the same – the smaller amount money

you earn isn’t enough to buy the same amount of stuff.  But would people shit a brick?  Damned right.  They’re working just as long, just as

hard, but they’re losing ground.

To me, it’s so obvious I want to scream.  How can Liberals not see this?

Joe Doakes

“Liberal economist” is another word for “economic phrenologist”.