Paradocracy

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Death by Socialism

“Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better". That is the title of an article from the World Economic Forum in November of 2016. The title is basically socialism in a nutshell: no private property, no self-ownership, and no privacy, but somehow, they contend, life will be better. This is the budding trend in America, away from freedom and capitalism in favor of government and socialism; and the data bear this out. Decades after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and dismemberment of the Soviet Union, socialism has reemerged as ungracefully as bellbottom jeans in the classroom and public conscience. According to a 2015 Reason-Rupe survey, 53 percent of Americans under 30 have a favorable view of socialism. Likewise, Gallup has found that an astounding 69 percent of millennials say they’d be willing to vote for a “socialist” candidate for president. Among their parents’ generation, only a third would do so. In 2016, national and exit polls revealed

Perspective Matters

Ignorance rears its head in subtle ways. A recent video from automotive YouTube channel VINwiki lends insight into just one such example of this truth. On this particular episode of VINwiki, a man's son chronicles his father's early years when his own father bought him a brand new Lamborghini Miura P400 at the age of sixteen. He would later sell the Lamborghini Miura P400 for a new Lamborghini Miura S, and then another Miura S. In 1972, he would travel from Massachusetts to the Big Apple to attend the New York City Auto Show, one of the most prestigious auto shows in the country at the time. As he wandered around the show floor, he would eventually see a black 1972 Lamborghini Miura SV on display. According to the video, "It wasn't just any Miura SV." It had a number of special features and a unique interior tailored specifically for the auto show. As it turns out, the young nineteen-year-old Lamborghini owner refused to leave the auto show without having purc

Marxism: The Intellectual's Slavery

In his book Intellectuals and Society , economist Thomas Sowell writes, "There has probably never been an era in history when intellectuals have played a larger role in society than the era in which we live." For most of history, mankind has worked under autocratic governments, at the behest of kings and emperors, where public opinion was of precious little consequence. With the democratization of political systems, those societies have simultaneously witnessed the (albeit limited) democratization of information, power and influence; however, this is not to suggest that information, power and influence are equally sought after among the people who comprise those civilizations. On the contrary, just as most workers in the developed world have become specialists in their own respective fields, so too have they sought out guidance from so-called specialists and intellectuals to advise them and mold their understanding of public affairs and political issues. Despite their convi

The Economic Value of Man

Much fanfare surrounds the long-held lies and mystic mythologies which have hypnotized the public conscience: those of equality , the minimum wage , and the so-called "living" wage are but a few examples of the fashionable notions which have blatantly betrayed better judgment for their expedience on the political battlefield, where the casualties invariably number as high in human lives as they do in inconvenient truths. Just as with every history ever officially reported, the economic value of man has been broadly politicized and thoroughly distorted, buried under emotional feelings and preconceived notions that prevent the public from ever truly grasping the gravity and implications of their convictions. In the heat of the moment, the parade proceeds inexorably without caution, with the confidence that righteousness measures in the strength of their numbers and the intensity of their voices. Meanwhile, the truth lurks quietly out of sight and out of mind, conveniently rel

America's Foreclosure on Freedom

An American author once wrote, “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.” It’s just too bad that so few Americans today even have the vaguest idea of what it means, and what it has meant, to be an American, let alone what it has cost to defend their country and preserve that precious bounty for those who have inherited it. Of course, that precious bounty is a form of freedom, a disposition on rights, which is uniquely American. It’s incredible, really, just how indifferent most Americans today are toward freedom, such that many of them casually invoke European examples of statism as an endorsement of its institution in the United States. Remarkably, these people seem unaware of the fact that the United States was founded and framed around the institutions of limited government, maximal liberty and state and personal sovereignty. The case of the United States has indeed been the case for a form of freedom unknown to the rest of civilization: a form

Reparations: Slavery by Another Name

It is the mission of the Left to condition its constituency to believe that all success has been unmerited and all wealth ill-gotten, that they can remedy this problem by insisting that every last misfortune is corrected and every minority is made successful and wealthy on the basis of one’s minority status alone. This means that, assuming that people’s respective stations in life have been the consequence of privilege not merit, the Left intends to remedy the problem by insisting that their stations are merited not by their performance but by their respective ethnicities and relative misfortunes — or presumably those of ancestors whom they've never even met. Of course, this isn’t merit at all, but rather a specific type of political privilege which indiscriminately, and without due process, wrongs those who’ve committed no wrongs themselves in order to offset the purported wrongs of those who were never tried in a court of law. Who then will offer reparations to those wrongfull