The Ten Radical New Rules That Are Changing America

National Review ^ | 4/1/2021 | Victor Davis Hanson

[bitt]

There are ten new ideas that are changing America, maybe permanently.

1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much.

Prior presidents ran up huge annual deficits, but at least there were some concessions that the money was real and had to be paid back. Not now. As we near $30 trillion in national debt and 110 percent of annual GDP, our elites either believe that permanent zero-interest rates make the cascading obligation irrelevant, or that the larger the debt, the more likely we will be forced to address needed income redistribution.

2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore. Joe Biden took an oath to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” But he has willfully rendered federal immigration laws null and void. Some rioters are prosecuted for violating federal laws, others not so much. Arrests, prosecutions, and trials are all fluid. Ideology governs when a law is still considered a law.

Crime rates do not necessarily matter. If someone is carjacked, assaulted, or shot, it can be understood to be as much the victim’s fault as the perpetrator’s. Either the victim was too lax, uncaring, and insensitive, or he provoked his attacker. How useful the crime is to the larger agendas of the Left determines whether a victim is really a victim, and the victimizer really a victimizer.

[bitt]

see links at the website

[Rurudyne]

There’s a reason why Bill Ayers stopped making bombs to focus of shitting into kid’s heads and calling it education.

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

Bookmark

[Presbyterian Reporter]

“”””Silicon Valley is the new Vatican; and Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are the new gospels.”””

---

And these are now the four ‘synoptic’ gospels.

[brownsfan]

Changing?! I’d say “changed”.

This is not the country I grew up in, and it has a very bleak future.

[LS]

Money was always a “construct.” Value is assigned by people based on trust.

In the 1990s I attended a round table Liberty Fund symposium with, perhaps, five or six leading Libertarian economists to discuss the book by Leland Yeager called “The Fluttering Veil” about a return to the gold standard.

Realize, these were people totally in favor of gold.

After three days not one of them could offer a system backed by anything that would even remotely work. They tried gold, platinum, market basket of goods, etc. Even today’s “bitcoin” is NOT working as intended, which was a medium of exchange, but instead is like a rare painting, simply a store of value. For how long? Only as long as people have faith in it.

VDH is not appreciating the phenomenal and radical transformation of the world economy caused by computers. Beginning in the 1990s, we went into a real deflation. This was hard to see because it was entirely based on computer value-added and slave-labor from China/Mexico driving real prices down, while values soared.

Recently I saw an article on entropyeconomics.com where the guy valued a 2020 iPhone based on what it would cost to make it in 1990. Between $51,000 and $51 million. I don’t doubt it. No one, anywhere, has come close to accurately valuing our tech.

Then there are the deficits. Well, are there? In the 1980s, economist Robert Eisner discovered that America’s stated debt undervalues the US assets by trillions because, by law, those assets are valued in the dollars of the YEAR PURCHASED. Our gold supply alone was worth several thousand percent more; American land was worth trillions more, none of it captured on the balance sheets.

Then there is this: Economist Robert Gordon in “Rise and Fall of American Growth” that the CPI and asset valuations of the late 1800s early 1900s were not just off, but WAY off because they took a static view of goods & services. A candle light was measured against a light bulb solely in cost. But when measuring QUALITY (lumins) and quality of life (massive decline in fires due to kerosene), the GDP was way off.

[Alas Babylon!]

Love VDH but do not like the Never Trumper National Review.

For those like me, here’s Dr. Hanson’s ten points:

1) Money is a construct.
2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore.
3) Racialism is now acceptable.
4) The immigrant is mostly preferable to the citizen.
5) Most Americans should be treated as we would treat little children.
6) Hypocrisy is passé.
7) Ignoring or perpetuating homelessness is preferable to ending it.
8) McCarthyism is good.
9) Ignorance is preferable to knowledge.
10) Wokeness is the new religion, growing faster and larger than Christianity.

[Pollard]

1) Democrats are free to cheat in elections

Nothing else matters after that

[Steamburg]

Never forget, a dictatorship can forgive any debts accumulated by any previous government and may nationalize all funds, personal wealth and companies under penalty of reeducation/erasure... Or, will China make all this paper due and payable in the very near future?

Either way, we can still decide our future, but not for much longer. The children no longer belong to us.

[a fool in paradise]

>>2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore.

Neither are “Non-disclosure agreements”

[a fool in paradise]

>>8) McCarthyism is good. Destroying lives and careers for incorrect thoughts saves more lives and careers. Cancel culture and the Twitter Reign of Terror provide needed deterrence.
>>Now that Americans know they are one wrong word, act, or look away from losing their livelihoods, they are more careful and will behave in a more enlightened fashion. The social-media guillotine is the humane, scientific tool of the woke.

The Left was NEVER against the tactic. They always stood WITH the Communists including Joseph Stalin and the KGB.

There won’t be any calling this Nanzism or Obamunism or somesuch. Textbooks will never discuss this period of our history as such. Historians instead will talk about a vile rise in white supremacy by the supporters of Donald Trump.

[Migraine]

Falsely being called a racist makes one more guilty than falsely calling someone else a racist.

I THINK I get it; but that sentence does chase its tail a little bit.

[wildcard_redneck]

There’s a reason why Bill Ayers stopped making bombs to focus of shitting into kid’s heads and calling it education. A pithy and brilliant summation.

[sport]

Its future is non existent. It just don't know it. It will die of its own hand. Its policies and laws will lead to its downfall.

[sport]

The 2020 Election evidenced that. The Republican Party approved. The Supreme Court approved. The Lower Federal Courts approved. The media approved. Congress approved.

[ThunderSleeps]

1) Democrats are free to cheat in elections

Nothing else matters after that

I would expand on that a little. Democrats and their useful idiots (eg. illegal invaders, BLM, Antifa, et. al.) are free to ignore and break any and all laws. This includes election laws, rioting, burning, looting, immigration law, private property, the Bill of Rights, murder (particularly if you're a Clinton!) - anything and everything.

The leftists hate America. They hate the freedom and liberty we have (well, had). The left lusts for power and control. Therefore they naturally not only do not feel bound by our laws but actively seek to break them, to diminish them and render them null and void. They want to replace our laws, customs, and ideals with their own. We are at war with the left, and they are winning.

[Lurkinanloomin]

They are winning because we keep re-electing Assistant Democrats wearing R jerseys.

[redgolum]

Read it.

Learn it.

This is the game now. Stop pretending it is other wise.

Prepare for hardcore persecution or plan an exit (probably to late for the latter).

#2 is the most important. Ink on paper is nothing.

[redgolum]

I know an author that has been pushing deflation for a long time. Never really believed it. Still don’t

But I am an engineer. My equations have to balance. Economics doesn’t