As I’m sure you all know, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump. Among those applauding this move, the idea seems to be that perhaps Trump will appoint Kennedy to some role in his administration in which Kennedy might have a positive impact on the health of the US childhood population. But this is a leap of faith as far as I have seen. And it’s not like Trump kept his campaign promises to “drain the swamp”, etc., during his first term in office.
Meanwhile, with the Democratic establishment no longer able to pretend as though Joe Biden’s cognitive decline is a mere figment of Republicans’ imagination, given his embarrassing debate performance with Trump in June, Democrats are rallying around their party’s replacement candidate; and suddenly we are supposed to perceive Vice President Kamala Harris as an inspirational embodiment of American ideals and values, a shining beacon of wisdom and righteousness, and, weirdly, a source of “joy”.
Why “joy” was chosen as part of Harris’s public relations campaign is a mystery to me, beyond the obvious reason that “hope” and “change” had already been used by previous candidates in ways that would risk their mindless repetition being much more widely recognized as meaningless rhetoric by sensible Americans who do not have selective amnesia about the empty campaign slogans of the past.
But what is particularly informative about it is how the media have adopted the word “joy” in their coverage of Harris’s campaign and passed it off as though we were all too stupid to recognize it as a talking point of an organized propaganda campaign. (And, well, sadly, many Americans do seem incapable of catching on to how they are being manipulated by the thought-controlling news media all reading off the same script.)
As an example of the mindless slavish devotion to the political establishment, a recent New York Times opinion piece credits Harris with envisioning “a more holistic and entirely new story about how the economy works and the aims it should serve.”
So, suddenly, Kamala Harris is an expert on the economy!
Never mind how she has blamed the problem of price inflation on businesses engaging in “price gouging”, thus deflecting from its true primary cause, which was the trillions of dollars that the Federal Reserve created out of thin air in order to rob us all of our purchasing power in service to the state, by monetizing the debt incurred as a result of the government’s insane and criminal policy of deliberately shutting down the economy in response to the COVID‑19 pandemic, with the endgame of that policy from the start having been coerced mass vaccination.
Harris is economically illiterate, but here she is being characterized as some kind of visionary who is going to educate us all about how the economy really functions, and we are supposed to believe that her proposed policies are really in our own best interests. Never mind that it’s not actually very clear what those policies might be—it’s all so very vague.
The insult to any thinking person’s intelligence is just too much to bear. The most specific the Times article gets is to say she proposes “using trillions of dollars in public investment to simulate private dollars”, including with the aim of building three million new homes.
But “public investment” is just the usual code phrase for the forcible expropriation of our wealth for redistribution according to the whims of clueless politicians.
It’s the usual code for saying that Harris aims to continue increasing the public debt, which the Fed will monetize since Americans would never agree to any of this if they were directly taxed to pay for it all; and which debt monetization will effect the continued upward transfer of wealth from all of us peons to the ruling class of politically connected financial elites, while concurrently causing even further malinvestment and distortions of the market, resulting in unsustainable booms followed by the inevitable busts that are the necessary market corrections; and which corrections the Fed, as always, will try to prevent by doing even more of what caused the problems in the first place only on an ever greater scale.
It was the government and its partner in crime, the Federal Reserve, that caused the housing affordability crisis. Therefore, even more government interference in the housing market cannot possibly be the solution. The obvious solution is rather to get the government out of the housing market—and out of interfering harmfully in every other aspect of our lives, too, for that matter.
The key lesson neither Harris nor the Times will tell you, because they are too indoctrinated into the state religion to be able to comprehend its simplicity, is that the government cannot legislate away the law of supply and demand. Price fixing, including the Fed’s manipulation of interest rates, is the cause of so many problems and never the cure. Any government interference in our lives that results in an absence of true market prices is always and ever accompanied by harmful consequences that may be unintended but are hardly unforeseeable.
The key lesson the politicians and pundits will never explain to you is that government bureaucrats making decisions at best arbitrarily, assuming only benevolent intent and an absence of corruption (which is a dubious assumption, indeed), do not know better than the market with its pricing system how to efficiently allocate scarce resources towards productive ends as determined by the will of consumers, which is to say, by all of us. There is no more perfect manifestation of the democratic principle than the free market. We do not need the government to take care of us and to tell us what to do. Incessant government interference in our lives is neither necessary nor desirable!
The author of the Times article ludicrously argues that “markets, left on their own, often tend to concentrate power”, resulting in “fewer options, worse service, higher prices, lower pay, less innovation and generally less control of our economic lives”.
But that is exactly backwards. All of those harmful outcomes are precisely the outcome of government interventionism and our consequent inability to engage in voluntary exchange for mutual benefit absent harmful government interference. People think they live in “the land of the free”, but a free society is logically impossible when you have a government that will not allow any aspect of our lives remain un-interfered with.
This goes back to that point about how Kamala Harris is somehow going to enlighten us with her economic vision while blaming price inflation on corporate greed instead of properly informing Americans how the inflation, including the insanity in the housing market, was the natural and inevitable result of the COVID‑19 lockdown madness and the Fed’s response of dutifully monetizing the debt resulting from the government’s efforts to paper over the harmful economic consequences of that insane exercise in authoritarian governance.
The corporate greed we really need to be concerned about is that which leads corporations to try to circumvent market forces and instead utilize government force to achieve their financial aims, like the pharmaceutical industry. The problem is not that there is “corporate capture” of government agencies like the FDA and CDC but that such government agencies exist to be captured and utilized to advance the agenda of a few at the expense of everyone else.
But you don’t see Kamala Harris talking about that type of corporate greed, for the obvious reason. Who do you think she really aims to serve? Hmm? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not us. She’s all about serving the special interests that keep clueless politicians like her in power.
And to come back to Trump for a moment, let’s not forget how the lockdowns were implemented during his term in office; how he bragged about being responsible for “Operation Warp Speed” and the consequent treatment of the entire population as subjects of a mass uncontrolled experiment without informed consent; how his administration rolled out “stimulus” packages to try to paper over the harmful consequences of deliberately shutting down the economy, dramatically increasing the government debt and predictably resulting in a massive theft of our purchasing power (not “transitory” price inflation, mind you); how he treated Russia as an enemy despite campaign promises to pursue friendlier relations, pursued extreme Zionist policies in his support for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, and otherwise continued a basically neo-con foreign policy agenda; how he promised to “drain the swamp” but then kept people like Dr. Anthony Fauci in positions of power such as, in Fauci’s case, the president’s chief medical adviser; etc.
And while Trump and other Republicans eventually came around to opposition, Democrats, of course, were even more insanely pro-lockdown, and they remain unapologetic to the extraordinary harm caused by this authoritarianism, so it should come as no surprise to anyone that instead of acknowledging the real problem and cause of the housing affordability crisis, all we get from Harris’s admirers is the usual gibberish about how she will fix the problems caused by too much freedom in the marketplace with “public investment”, i.e., forcibly expropriating the fruits of your labor for redistribution according to her whims because you, dear peasant, are too stupid to know how to spend your own money and therefore need Kamala Harris and her ilk to decide how to spend it for you.
Then there is the matter of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has been supported by the Biden/Harris administration, would have been likewise supported by Trump had he been reelected, and has been defended by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., thus rendering vacuous his claim to be a defender of children and human rights.
During the recent Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that Harris has been “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza”, which was certainly news to everyone actually paying attention to this issue.
But even if we assume for the sake of argument that it is true that she has been “tirelessly” involved in the Biden administration’s efforts, all that would mean is that Harris is totally on board with Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide.
Sure, we’ve heard since last year that the Biden administration has been working toward a ceasefire. But what that has really meant is that the administration worked tirelessly to provide Israel with the arms it has needed to perpetrate a genocide, to block ceasefire resolutions in the UN Security Council, and to announce a supposedly Israel-backed “ceasefire” proposal for the purpose of shifting the blame for the absence of a ceasefire onto Hamas when the truth is that the regime of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear from the start that it would not agree to ending its genocidal military campaign before achieving the stated aim of eliminating Hamas, only to a temporary pause involving an exchange of hostages, which is to be followed by a continuation of Israel’s criminal violence.
Agreeing to its own destruction along with the continued destruction of Gaza and indiscriminate massacre of Palestinian civilians is obviously a non-starter for Hamas, the antithesis of an actual ceasefire, and Israel has otherwise been making demands clearly intended to ensure that no ceasefire can be achieved. And the Biden/Harris administration cannot possibly be incognizant of how their “tireless” efforts to achieve a ceasefire have in fact been facilitating Israel’s genocide, but, you see, the narcissists, megalomaniacs, sociopaths, and psychopaths who exercise government power over you think that you are just too stupid to see through their ridiculous pretenses of benevolent intent.
Everyone participating in the US presidential election is, by the act of voting, legitimizing the outcome, which any sane person can foresee will be the perpetuation of the criminal activities of the regime in Washington, DC. For Americans to place faith in either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris to change this course for the country is completely irrational. It is up to free-thinking, rational Americans to effect real change, and a good first step would be to stop legitimizing your own disenfranchisement, consenting to servitude, and perpetuating the regime’s criminal violence and human rights violations.
Cross-posted from JeremyRHammond.com.
