Climate lockdowns still sound like crazytown, but the urge to curtail individual freedom is visible in countless government, media and think-tank blueprints for a controlled future. Saner minds should prevail—the Climate Emergency Act of 2021 evidently died in committee—but we need constant diligence to stand guard against the climate-excuse assaults on our liberties. To show how adolescent this has become, last year Swiss Environmental Minister Simonetta Sommaruga suggested that residents “shower together” to save energy. OK, now we’re getting somewhere.
Juliette Sellgren talks with my GMU Econ colleague Larry White about the possibility of better money.
George Leef applauds Miguel Faria’s book that shows the depredations of socialism in Cuba. A slice:
What about living conditions in Cuba?
Americans who have read that they’re quite good (the Cuban regime still gets mostly favorable press) will be dismayed to read that living conditions are in fact bad and getting worse. Malnutrition is rampant, as evidenced by the presence of beriberi, a disease that leads to blindness. Another depressing indication of hunger is the sight of cattle without tails. Tourists thought that was some strange mutation when they saw the animals, but the truth was that peasants had cut off the tails of the poor animals to get a bit of meat. Food is scarce, unless you’re among the governing elite. That’s another typical feature of socialist countries.
Freedom of thought and expression also had to go. In September 2022, the online news outlet Confidencial reported that Mr. Ortega had “closed 54 national and local media in 13 departments, there are 11 media workers in jail, and more than 140 journalists in exile.” Mr. Ortega has closed or seized at least 26 private universities, according to an Aug. 17 report from CBS News in Miami.
Bob Graboyes warns of the dangers that wokism poses to your medical care.
Historian David Beito, writing at National Review, explains how the New Deal harmed black Americans. Two slices:
A new exhibit at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, N.Y., “Black Americans, Civil Rights, and the Roosevelts, 1932–1962,” provides new evidence that the New Deal was often a raw deal for black Americans. For example, FDR’s housing policy reinforced neighborhood segregation; he refused to support anti-lynching legislation introduced in both the House and the Senate, and, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture now freely admits, his “New Deal was for the most part a bad deal for black farmers,” forcing thousands off their land.
The exhibit leaves out one of the most egregious illustrations of FDR’s dismal record on the Bill of Rights, however: the “policing” of a prominent African-American political leader, Republican J. B. Martin, and the brutal quashing of free speech in Memphis, Tenn., even as President Roosevelt was proclaiming his “four Freedoms” — the freedom of speech and expression, the freedom to worship God in one’s own way, “the freedom from want,” and the freedom from fear.
…..
The treatment of J. B. Martin provides another illustration of FDR’s abysmal record on the Bill of Rights. It also foreshadowed the extraordinary civil-rights violation yet to come: the February 1942 executive order that led to the mass confinement of Japanese Americans in what FDR himself called “concentration camps.”
“Every American willing to work hard” should be able “to raise their kids on a good paycheck and keep their roots where they grew up,” Biden declared in June. “That’s Bidenomics.” As an example, he cited new semiconductor fabs where workers without college degrees could make six figures.
But those fabs are not being built in the poorest parts of America. Nearly half of the $80 billion in place-based funding is targeted at semiconductor plants as authorized by the CHIPS and Science Act. Many of the companies that will receive the money announced the construction of new plants months before Biden signed that law in August 2022, and they are locating their facilities in places that make sense for their businesses.
In September 2021, for example, Intel said it was building two new fabs in Chandler, Arizona. The following January, the company unveiled plans for another two fabs in New Albany, Ohio. The median household income is $91,000 in Chandler and $206,000 in New Albany. The median household income in the U.S. stands just shy of $71,000, while the poverty threshold is just under $28,000 for a family of four.
Jay Bhattacharya reports on still-existing Covid Derangement Syndrome at the University of Michigan:
At the @UMich, students testing covid positive must leave their dorms for 5 days & live in the community. A hotel room or a relative’s house is ok.
This cruel policy is designed to spread covid from the university into the wild. It won’t stop covid from spreading @umich.
