Paradocracy

Those who protest in favor of the so-called "living wage" have no perspective on the economic situation or the natural state of affairs on planet earth.  In their haste to complain, they haven’t remotely appreciated just how arduous a task it would be to sustain oneself, let alone one’s family, of his own might with the resources he personally possesses outside of the advantages of the market.  The common protester confuses the luxury of the market as an entitlement , ignoring the fact that the market purely facilitates mutual advantage between producers with interests in lower- and higher-order goods and services that sustain and improve their standards of living; despite appearances, the market does not exist for any ends beyond the mutual satisfaction of wants between producers offering desirable goods and services. While these goods and services may at times appear to align with those which are popularly identified as needs , the exchange of those "needs"...

Much fanfare has surrounded the purported origins of the Republican Party over the past several generations.  While operating from a measure of truth, the history of the Republican Party has been largely repurposed for political palatability.  Notwithstanding the popular misconception that the party was the pure manifestation of good over evil, the abolitionist party dead set against slavery, the Republican Party was actually born out of far less inspiring motives held by the Whigs, the mercantilistic wing that served to promote the Hamiltonian “American system” of unbridled nationalism.  In contrast to their glossy abolitionist veneer, the Republicans even proposed the regrettable Corwin Amendment, what would have become the Thirteenth Amendment, to actually preserve the “domestic institution” of slavery in perpetuity.  Lincoln and the Republican Party’s progenitors, chiefly Henry Clay, actually supported the deportation of blacks from the United States thr...

In a recent news release from CNBC, Quicken Loans CEO Jay Farner projects that the most recent quarter "will be the largest quarter in the company’s history."  Farner anticipates the company’s best month yet: "I think June will be the biggest month we’ve ever had, and it’s both on the purchase side and the refinance side."  According to CNBC, Quicken Loans, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, "has been posting record numbers for months."  Data from the Mortgage Bankers Association indicate that mortgage applications jumped twenty-seven percent from the prior week, while volume shows a 41-percent increase over last year; this is after Quicken Loans "closed almost half a trillion dollars worth of mortgages across the country between 2013 and 2018." While all of this might sound like cause for excitement, this is not a positive indicator for future home values  ⁠—  let alone economic investment  ⁠—  which will require unprecedented meas...

When faced with the opportunity to have his likeness appear on American coinage, President George Washington rejected the proposal on the basis that every tyrannical government did just that with their tyrants. Indeed, from then onward, no American president ever appeared on any American coin. That was until 1909, when Abraham Lincoln first appeared on the one-cent coin, marking Lincoln’s one-hundredth birthday and the continued construction of Father Abraham, the myth that survived the man.   In keeping with the new American religion, the deification of Lincoln has appeared in various forms and across every imaginable medium. Steven Spielberg’s "Lincoln" is no exception, a film better described as theater or mythology than as history. Over time, the storytelling improves, more compelling with the graphics and the advents of technology, but the facts remain just as elusive.  Not only does Spielberg’s film glorify Lincoln's motives for delivering the so-called "Em...

Over the course of the latest generation, a great many political, sociological and linguistic metamorphoses have coalesced to rally young and impressionable minds around bold ideas that elude examination and understanding by the mainstream and those who loyally wave their banners and line the streets.  Before they even remotely comprehend what they have read, witnessed or encountered, or more appropriately what they have been told to think, they are suddenly involved in an uncompromising movement predicated upon words and statements as bold as their ideas.  Unfortunately, while the words may appear bold and compelling, the ideas behind them are just about as flimsy as the paper that bears their message.  Ironically, in the heat of passion  —  or fit of boredom  —  which impels the protest, the participants seem to forget that it is that very freedom of speech which enables the protests against it in the first place.  However, for the ave...

Government tends to embrace immigration for the spoils.  During the War Between the States , the Union fielded hundreds of thousands of immigrants, and sons of immigrants, to slaughter Southerners in the deadliest war in American history.  In fact, the foreign-born represented at least twenty-five percent of the entire Union Army during the war, while an additional eighteen percent of the soldiery were men with at least one foreign-born parent. Meanwhile, more than two million Union solders were under the age of twenty-one, more than one million were under the age of eighteen, and fully one hundred thousand were under the age of fifteen.  In total, immigrants and the sons of immigrants constituted roughly forty-three percent of the Union forces.  In one particular pamphlet, Confederate writer and diplomat Edwin De Leon informed French readers that the Puritan North had built its army "in large part of foreign mercenaries" composed of "the refuse of the old ...

Much of the "freedom" sold today is realistically a twisted form of political freedom — or, alternatively, political conspiracy — that has much more to do with political process than absolute freedom.  Through this political conspiracy, a veritable form of mob rule, voters collaborate with legislators and government actors to pursue mutually-beneficial outcomes and special interests at the expense of freedom and the minority inhabitant.  The tireless efforts of politically-motivated campaigns and participants alike combine to conflate political participation — or, more precisely, democratic process — with something inappropriately yet fashionably labeled political freedom .  Genuine freedom refers to the individual's capacity to pursue his ends of his own might or negotiation, without imposed hinderance or restraint.  In this sense, pure  political freedom equates to the individual's freedom from government , where government has least occasion to int...