Obsession with partisan hatred diverts you from economic truth

By David McElroy · March 2, 2022

I noticed this morning that gasoline prices had jumped by another 10 cents per gallon overnight. I texted a friend to see if he had noticed.

“Unbelievable,” he texted back. “Biden gas is expensive! Biden inflation is expensive!”

I can’t stand Joe Biden. I also can’t stand Donald Trump. I detest what all these politicians collectively represent. All of them believe that they have the right to make decisions for your life and mine. All of them believe that you and I must be required to obey them — by force, if necessary.

But I know that gasoline prices would be sky high right now no matter who the president was. I understand that the dip in gasoline prices for the previous couple of years was because demand was reduced during a time of lower economic activity. And I understand that the Russian invasion of Ukraine last week caused prices to spike because Russia is a major oil producer.

These are obvious truths for anyone who’s being intellectually honest, but those who are filled with partisan hatred would rather find a ridiculously simplistic explanation that allows them to blame whoever they hate.

This isn’t new. Each time there’s a change in who controls the White House, the angry people of the political mainstream switch sides. The people who have spent four years blaming the incumbent president for everything suddenly decide the new guy — their new hero — isn’t responsible for anything that goes wrong.

And this idiotic game has gone on for decades, allowing almost everyone to ignore the economic looming disaster which was set in motion more than a hundred years ago.

Presidents and members of Congress do things to make the long-term problem worse, but they never fix the underlying problems. Never.

Politicians like to spend money. Republicans have their sacred cows that they don’t want to cut. Democrats have entirely different sacred cows. And as some 1930s programs of the New Deal — such as Social Security — have become entrenched, they become sacred cows for both sides.

Almost every year, politicians argue and posture in front of cameras. One side will say the other side is trying to kill old people. Or babies. Or force minorities into the streets. Another side will say the other is trying to leave us undefended against foreign aggressors.

Of course, most people ignore the fact that labor unions and various special interests on the left are the real voices (and votes) behind what Democrats want. And they ignore that defense contractors and rabid militarists of the right always want to spend more money. (And neither party wants to see a military base closed in their own congressional districts, no matter how useless it might be to the military.)

The money supply is controlled by the Federal Reserve Bank, which is actually owned and partly controlled by the country’s largest banking interests. Politicians appoint the people who run the regional Federal Reserve Banks, but they’re supposed to be quasi-independent. The truth is that it’s mostly a collection of people who believe in the same top-down policies of economic control — and these people generally “happen” to favor what the fat cats of Wall Street want.

The entire Fed system — and the world’s dominant central banking system — is based on the creation of fictitious currency. There was a time when a nation could issue only as much currency as it had the actual gold and silver to use to back it. Today, there is no connection between the two.

A central bank — and the Fed is the U.S. central bank — can create as much “money” out of thin air as it can get away with. Central banks which push this fiction too far send their countries into disastrous inflation, because there’s suddenly way too much cash chasing the same amount of goods.

This is what has happened in the U.S. in the last couple of years.

In order for the U.S. government to spend money at an unprecedented rate for the past two years, the Fed created more fictitious currency — out of thin air — than ever before. Anybody who had even the slightest understanding of economics knew that inflation had to be the result.

This system was set up in 1913 with the creation of the Fed. At the time, politicians and bankers promised that decisions would be made reasonably and responsibly. But over time, one bad decision after another has created the ticking time bomb that sits underneath the economy today.

The facts are all there for anybody who wants to pay attention. It’s not secret. It’s not hidden. But understanding what’s going on requires a person to care about intellectual honesty more than the emotional desire to blame whichever politician they hate.

The truth is that what a president does matters only in fairly small ways. Yes, a president and a Congress can make things worse — usually by spending more money and creating long-term problems for the future — but the overall economic direction was set many decades ago.

If you want to keep playing the idiotic blame game — pretending that the other side’s latest president is the source of all ills — you can do that, but that’s a game nobody is going to win.

That’s because the short-term blame game ignores the big picture. Even if this president or that one does something especially stupid — as happens from time to time — the overall economic direction wouldn’t have changed much regardless.

Joe Biden didn’t create the current inflation. He didn’t cause over high gasoline prices. (His anti-oil rhetoric and actions certainly didn’t help, but the problem would be here regardless.)

In the same way, Donald Trump isn’t responsible for the COVID-19 mess during his presidency. He was bumbling in the way he handled the issue and his rhetoric was insane at times. But the disease was going to rip through the population no matter who the president had been — and no matter what had been done.

It’s stupid to waste time worrying about the idiocies of this politician or that one. It’s like arguing about competing decorators and designers who re-arrange the inside of a building — while there’s a massive bomb underneath the entire thing that’s going to blow it to smithereens regardless of who does what.

I’d like to think that someone might look at these facts and say, “Hey, maybe I should be looking at something other than partisan politics,” but I know that’s unlikely.

Hating the other side seems to be too popular. I expect each side to go right ahead blaming the other — and when things finally fall apart, whoever isn’t in power is going to gleefully scream, “See? You’re the one who did this!”

Note: If you’d like to understand the economics behind this, I can recommend you explore the websites of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) and the Mises Institute. Both of these organizations produce some excellent economic materials.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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