News Story of the Day: Historian and economist Thomas DiLorenzo has a new book out that takes apart socialism while being aimed at millennials. The book, entitled “The Problem With Socialism,” will be published July 18. Here is a statement via LewRockwell.com:
My new book, The Problem with Socialism, will be published on July 18 by Regnery Publishers. It is available now for advance purchase on Amazon.com.The sixteen-chapter book is aimed mostly at the under-30 millennial generation (and their parents), 69 percent of whom informed a recent poll that they “could vote for a socialist for president.” My hope is that the book will help avoid the absurdity of the millennials turning into “the Bernie Sanders generation.” Any reasonable person who reads and understands this book, along with Henry Hazlitt’s classic Economics in One Lesson, is not likely to become a socialist.The book title comes from a statement Margaret Thatcher once made that “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples’ money.”
Chart of the Day: Uh oh. Donald Trump may not like this new finding from Bloomberg News: China churned out the most steel ever after an incredible increase in the price. The maker of half of the world’s steel amplified production to a record in April amid soaring domestic prices and mills firing up the furnaces. Here is the chart:
Illustration of the Day: It seems all what college professors teach today are the virtues of socialism. They espouse how bad capitalism is, how great Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton is and how socialism could save the world from poverty, war, injustices and inequality. The professors today are also the culprits of this asinine safe space, trigger warnings, political correctness that have infected campuses all across the United States and the rest of the world. But here is a funny meme from Turning Point USA:
— Kaptain Kannabis (@ValVenisEnt) May 6, 2016
Quote of the Day: The American Enterprise Institute has an excellent old Town Hall column from legendary economist Thomas Sowell. He talks about how wealth redistribution, though the dominant theme of the 20th and 21st century, has been an udder failure. His excellent take shows just how today’s liberals, socialists, Bernie Sanders supporters and average Americans need to be reading more Sowell and less Trotsky.
“The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only example.
In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people ought to make the rest of the society more prosperous. But when the Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became scarce. As many people died of starvation under Stalin in the 1930s as died in Hitler’s Holocaust in the 1940s.
How can that be? It is not complicated. You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth — and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding while raising them to maturity.
We have all heard the old saying that giving a man a fish feeds him only for a day, while teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime. Redistributionists give him a fish and leave him dependent on the government for more fish in the future.
If the redistributionists were serious, what they would want to distribute is the ability to fish, or to be productive in other ways. Knowledge is one of the few things that can be distributed to people without reducing the amount held by others. That would better serve the interests of the poor, but it would not serve the interests of politicians who want to exercise power, and to get the votes of people who are dependent on them.”
Video of the Day: Do you want to see what the typical millennial anti-Trump video looks like? Then look no further than Gavin McInnes’s hilarious “The Millennial Case Against Trump: ‘He’s literally Hitler!'” video. It highlights exactly what’s wrong with today’s voters: a shorter attention span and a misunderstanding of history.
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