Paradocracy

The median household in Oakland, California, grosses $52,000 annually, pays roughly $18,000 in income, FICA, fuel, sales and property taxes, for a net take-home of $34,000. 

After the monthly mortgage payment, private mortgage insurance and home insurance, totaling no less than $30,000 per annum, that median household is then left with roughly $300 per month, while the median renter is alternatively left with nearly $900, to cover every other imaginable cost of living, from food and utilities to transportation, clothing and insurance. 

This is precisely why so many Bay-Area residents take advantage of food stamps, why a household grossing $52,000 per year is considered "low income." 

If not for the $18,000 tax liability, that median household could certainly afford to pay for its own food and much more; it could save, invest and plan for retirement, but instead the median household joins the ranks of welfare recipients who, incidentally, politically justify the programs and the…

The man who saves has demonstrated an economic value-add in excess of what he requires in the interim. 

This surplus, however, doesn’t constitute waste or deadweight, as some economists and politicians contend. 

Instead, the man who saves anticipates putting this surplus to use in the form of investment or future consumption, perhaps in retirement. 

Indeed, investment of all kinds must first find a source of savings somewhere; this is the lifeblood of all investment, which is patently impossible without it. 

In the case of savings for purposes of future consumption, or similarly the case of retirement, the man produces in excess of his need today precisely in order to prepare for a future time when he may be unable, or less unable, to do so. 

Over the course of life, man degrades in his cognitive and physical powers, and he who saves positions himself to continue enjoying life despite his diminished productivity. 

What’s more, the capacity to work toward such a future, one of leisure, adven…

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" demonstrat…

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 through the American Colonization …

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 measures, amidst unpre…

Steven Spielberg’s "Lincoln" is more mythology than history. 



Not only does the film glorify Lincoln's motives for delivering the so-called "Emancipation Proclamation," but it brazenly ignores the fact the Lincoln was neither an abolitionist nor a proponent of civil rights or "equality" between the races.

In his famous debate with Senator Stephen Douglas (D - IL) on September 18, 1858, Lincoln described his views with uncompromising specificity in a lesser-celebrated proclamation that prompted Douglas to declare that he had "at last succeeded in getting an answer out of him" after he had "been trying to bring him to the point ever since the canvass commenced."

Lincoln announced:

"While I was at the hotel today, an elderly gentleman called upon me to know whether I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the negroes and white people. While I had not proposed to myself on this occasion to say much on that subject…