We Already Have UBI

Many people say a Universal Basic Income would destroy the fabric of the nation, turn people away from jobs that increase their self-esteem, yada, yada, yada.

I have three words in reply: "Wooster and Jeeves." 

If I were the child of a wealthy man, and inherited his income, I would have my basic income supplied by my inherited wealth. No one would argue with my lack of employment.

Would I be a better or worse man for it?
Well, that's up to me, right?

Whether we like it or not, every person alive today has inherited a vast sum of wealth, the accumulated knowledge of generations, all of it employed so as to make our lives easier. I don't know how my HVAC works, how my food is grown and harvested, how antibiotics are manufactured, but I benefit from all of it. We live on this inherited largesse every day, just as Bertie Wooster survived on his inherited income and the wisdom of his gentleman's gentleman, the illustrious Jeeves.

We ALREADY HAVE UBI.
We just call it A/C, antibiotics and grocery stores.

Now, we are being told that further UBI will destroy us.
A larger non sequitor would be hard to imagine.

Schismatics Teach the Pope

Differences in admonitions 

directed towards 

Pope John XXII (1333) 

vs Pope Francis (2017)

	Pope John XXII (1333)	Pope Francis (2017)
Teaching being debated	Not formally defined (a question concerning the Beatific Vision)	Formally defined (the status of married persons)
In reference to what papal statements?	A few private sermons made both before and after the papal coronation	An apostolic exhortation
Public Papal statement regarding the controversy	Pope said theologians were free to disagree with him, as the teaching was not formally defined	None
Theologians summoned to meet by?	King Philip VI of France	No one
Under whose direction did the group meet?	Dominican patriarch of Jerusalem	No one
Who created the document?	29 doctors of theology of the University of Paris consisting of 10 secular masters (including 7 regent masters), and 19 religious orders masters (including 9 regent masters).	No one of particular note or unusual standing
In whose presence did the theologians meet?	Kings, bishops and priests	No one of particular note or unusual standing
Document contained?	Profession of faith	No profession of faith
What did the theologians ask the Pope for?	Apostolic sanction to their decision	Nothing. They don’t ask for apostolic sanction of their assertions.  In fact, quite the opposite: they claim to teach the Pope.

Corporations as Government

CLAIM:

Here's how you discover the true beliefs of minimum wage supporters.

1. They claim that a forced $15 wage does no harm to the economy and that it is "fair".
2. They inherently know that a forced $100 wage would indeed harm the economy and would be unfair.

So...they know that a forced $15 wage is inherently unfair and would harm the economy as well--however slight--but they're willing to lie about their beliefs because getting what they want (a forced $15 wage) is more important than revealing the truth.

• −

• COUNTER-CLAIM
• 
  
  

  The choice is between living off the proceeds of your own labor, or living off the proceeds of someone else's labor.

  
  

  Man is nature, and nature will always follow the path of least resistance.

  So long as THE LAW allows people to sustain their lives at the expense of another person's labor...so long as THE LAW makes plunder less dangerous and less difficult than labor, plunder will be continued.

  Observe, however, that this is the original purpose and intent of THE LAW...to make plunder more difficult and more dangerous than labor.

  
  
  
  • 
    
  • 

    
    
    

    Steve Kellmeyer  "The choice is between living off the proceeds of your own labor, or living off the proceeds of someone else's labor."

    
    

    Every capitalist chooses to live off the proceeds of someone else's labor. If I run a business employing a thousand people, then I have captured their labor and marketed the products of their labor to someone else.

    That is the central key to capitalism. The value of a man's labor is not just what he produces, it is what he produces PLUS the marketing necessary to make other people aware of, and desirous of purchasing, what he produces. People who run companies understand that. Employees, by definition, either don't understand that, or cannot accomplish the necessary marketing (or they would be self-employed).

    So, EVERY successful businessman is, by your definition, a "plunderer". A successful CEO understands that government is, when properly used, merely an extension of his own marketing efforts, an enforcer of his own successful corporate policies.

    Government is a multi-purpose corporate tool that every corporation can access. Any corporation that manages to mold government regulation to his own advantage will succeed. Any that allows his competitor to mold government will fail. Now, some government regulations are good for corporations across the board, but the best government regulation - from my corporate perspective - is the regulation that benefits ONLY my firm and actively harms everyone else's. Writing such regulations and paying legislators to pass them into law is the hallmark of the superlative CEO.
  • 
    

Corporate lobbyists write the laws.
Corporations pay legislators to enact the laws they have written.
Corporations pay legislators to enforce the laws they have written.

The government is merely a group of independent contractors who work for whichever corporation paid them last or most. Government is not tyranny any more or less than Apple or IBM is tyranny.

We vote for corporations by buying their products. Corporations then use our votes (dollars) to gain market share. Some of it they spend on making new products, some of it they spend on buying laws favorable to themselves from the independent contractors we call "government." Success in either area gains market share, i.e., more votes (dollars).

Anyone who doesn't manage to buy a favorable law complains about "tyranny." In fact, they simply lost in the marketplace to a market actor whose market skills were superior to their own.

Government is as legitimate a market actor as any other business.
Government does not "distort" the free market. It is part of the free market. It is a natural consequence of free market corporate competition.

Dallas ISD Learns to Spell PC

Dallas ISD has decided to study up on whether the names of several schools in the district should have their names changed, in order to avoid honoring racists. Their list can be found here. Oddly enough, they left a few names off the list. Please email the DISD and let them know they can do better.

Specifically, if the DISD wants to change school names, they should start here:

• César Chávez Learning Center
• Oliver Wendell Holmes Middle School and Classical Academy
• Franklin D. Roosevelt High School
• Woodrow Wilson High School

César Chávez
César Chávez  hated illegal immigrants:

"In the mid 1970s, he conducted the “Illegals Campaign” to identify and report illegal workers, “an effort he deemed second in importance only to the boycott” (of produce from non-unionized farms), according to Pawel. She quotes a memo from Chavez that said, “If we can get the illegals out of California, we will win the strike overnight.” 

The Illegals Campaign didn’t just report illegals to the (unresponsive) federal authorities. Cesar sent his cousin, ex-con Manuel Chavez, down to the border to set up a “wet line” (as in “wetbacks”) to do the job the Border Patrol wasn’t being allowed to do. Unlike the Minutemen of a few years ago, who arrived at the border with no more than lawn chairs and binoculars, the United Farm Workers patrols were willing to use direct methods when persuasion failed. Housed in a series of tents along the Arizona border, the crews in the wet line sometimes beat up illegals, the “cesarchavistas” employing violence even more widely on the Mexican side of the border to prevent crossings."

Oliver Wendell Holmes
And let us not forget Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes was a staunch advocate of the kind of eugenics later practiced by Nazi Germany.

"Eugenics was his only political cause and was obviously is in line with his Darwinism. Holmes’ eugenic views were in fact more extreme than those of other eugenics enthusiasts of his time. Others talked about sterilizing “imbeciles” while Holmes advocated executing unfit babies."

"Holmes had no regard for civil rights or civil liberties. See, e.g., his majority opinion in Buck v. Bell (upholding coercive sterilizaton, which he clearly thought was not only constitutional but a good idea), his dissent in Meyer v. Nebraska (arguing that states should be allowed to ban the teaching of foreign languages), his (unpublished) dissent in Buchanan v. Warley (arguing that banning blacks from buying houses in white neighborhoods is a reasonable regulation of property and should be upheld). A sign of the times is Alschuer's very critical biography, Law Without Values. An even more significant sign of the times is that if I'm remembering correctly, this book received a very positive front page review in the New York Times."

Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927)Majority Opinion: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Vote: 8 to 1 (Justice Pierce Butler Dissenting)
In 1927, the “eugenics” movement was gaining ground, and not just in Germany. When the State of Virginia engaged the mighty force of the U.S. Supreme Court to prevent Carrie Buck, 18, from ever bearing children again, the venerable Civil War veteran Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. obliged. The court ruled that it was not  unconstitutional for a state to determine that it, the unwilling adult victim and presumably her yet-to-be-born children, would be better off if she were forcibly sterilized.
Holmes observed that Buck was “feeble minded,” as was her mother and her daughter. Though later investigation proved that not to be entirely true, Holmes relied on the trumped-up record to pontificate that, in his infamous observation, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
After reading these cases, one might come to agree with Holmes if it applied to certain Supreme Court justices.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt
FDR is listed #6 on the Huffington Post's "Most Racist Presidents" list (Woodrow Wilson is #7). FDR interned innocent Japanese-Americans. He appointed former KKK member Hugo Black to the SCOTUS. When Hugo was a senator in Alabama he infamously filibustered an anti-lynching bill. Hugo also wrote positively of Roosevelt in his memoirs, specifically pointing out that while the KKK was increasingly being frowned upon by the American public, Roosevelt considered that a positive on Black's part:

"[Roosevelt's] best friends and supporters he had in the state of Georgia were strong members of that organization."   ~Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Kindle locations 2636 -- 2657.

Hugo Black would go on to repay FDR with the Korematsu v. United States case that defended the constitutionality of imprisoning people of Japanese descent in America. Even Hitler commented on FDR's internment of Japanese-Americans:

"He (Roosevelt) had done all in his power to provoke the Japanese...they (America) were more obsessed than ever with the idea of the Yellow Peril."
-Transcribed by his secretary on 18th February 1945

FDR (1933-1945): “Subjects to do with breeding and race seem, indeed, to have held a certain fascination for the president…. Roosevelt felt it in order to talk, jokingly, of dealing with Puerto Rico’s excessive birth rate by employing, in his own words, ‘the methods which Hitler used effectively’ [to make them] sterile.” His Vice President, Henry Agard Wallace, said, “if we could practice eugenics on people. We could turn out a beautiful golden race.” As Assistant Secretary of the Navy,  FDR introduced condoms to the military in order to keep low-life enlisted men from breeding,

Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson was the man who segregated the federal government and he famously both screened and praised the KKK movie "Birth of a Nation" at the White House.

From the PBS website:

"[Wilson] dismissed 15 out of 17 black supervisors who had been previously appointed to federal jobs and replaced them with whites. He also refused to appoint black ambassadors to Haiti and Santa Domingo, posts traditionally awarded to African Americans. Two of Wilson's cabinet ministers, Postmaster General Albert Burelson and Treasury Secretary William McAdoo, both Southerners, issued orders segregating their departments. Throughout the country, blacks were segregated or dismissed from federal positions. In Georgia, the head of the Internal Revenue division fired all black employees: "There are no government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro's place in the corn field." He said. The President's wife, Ellen Wilson, was said to have had a hand in segregating employees in Washington, encouraging department chiefs to assign blacks separate working, eating, and toilet facilities. To justify segregation, officials publicized complaints by white women, who were thought to be threatened by black men's sexuality and disease."