Digital Currency and More

As I understand it digital currency is being hailed as something new and radical. Yet, I have been using digital currency for some fifty odd years. It is called a credit card. This new digital currency is being invented by our government and sends up a huge smoke signal warning me that it is another way for Uncle to be looking into my private life for ways to take money out of my pocket. Digital currency would help streamline money transaction, and eliminate the need for paper or coinage. It is my belief that this would be okay if the government would then abolish one of it’s bureaucratic establishments. I must be dreaming, or maybe it is the effect of the cannabis supplemented coffee sweetener that I used today, but I think I saw a bureaucracy closing its doors. Yeah, I must be dreaming. Bureaucracies never go out of business, they only grow bigger.

I just finished reading a book titled “Poverty By America” by Matthew Desmond which deals with ideas of how to abolish poverty in our country. I thought it was a collection of words which I have somehow heard before, but with a slightly new twist. The author proposes the poverty can be eliminated by giving poor people more money. Yep, you read that right. He also proposes that we should break down the walls of racism by giving people of color entry into our neighborhoods. He must not realize that the laws affecting Real Estate allow people of color to buy housing in any neighborhood they want. But, he claims we racist white people build only neighborhoods with huge homes that most people of color can’t afford. He infers that we should be building affordable housing in between the current monster houses that we live in.

When I was much younger and I spent a lot of brain power on subjects like eliminating racism through housing I came up with a scheme that would dictate the spread of races throughout all neighborhoods equally. In other words if the people of color in America are twenty percent of the population then four out of every twenty houses should be sold to blacks, but the blacks must be spread out amongst the white proportionally. Anything less than that would create areas of color density similar to what happens in neighborhoods today. My theory was that if we spread the people we don’t like around equally(every fifth house would go to a black family) throughout the country we would then learn to love our neighbors. I ditched the idea when it struck me that this would not work well with our Constitution. It would mean that We the People would be dictating where people should live. It would also necessitate another bureaucracy to manage the spread of people around the country. What would happen if the ratio was met in one city, and there were still too many people to house? Would we force the over flow of poor people to another city, state, or even to another part of the country? How would we deal with ratios going out of balance within a neighborhood if one or the other color moved leaving a gap in the spread? Would we have to import people from other cities to keep a happy balance? I abandoned the idea after I realized it would be best to let the real estate market take care of buyers and sellers without any government interference dictating who can or cannot buy a given property.

It is a fact that Uncle now requires every village, town, or city to report their ratio of affordable vs unaffordable housing. The government guidelines dictate that federal money can be withheld from communities that do not meet the requirements. I searched the published list for my town of Frankfort and saw that we are perilously deficit in offering affordable housing. In fact, there were very few towns within the Chicago area that meet the criterion. The only neighborhoods that come close to meeting the spec are those that are over sixty years old. In other words they were built at a time when homes were small.

In the last year, I have noticed a resurgence of construction in the neighboring cities of Orland Park and Tinley Park. These cities are building high density neighborhoods cramming as many single family homes and townhomes onto available land. Most likely they are trying to catch up to conform to the government requirement. The neighborhood looks terrible with crowded townhomes as many as ten units in a row, and three stories tall. Alongside are single family homes squeezed onto narrow lots with houses so close to each other that you can shake hands with a neighbor by reaching out a window. They are more packed together than the neighborhood where I grew up. Our houses where so close together that our shoulders brushed up against the buildings when we walked from the front to the back. From a social perspective the neighborhood was nice because we knew almost everyone who lived within five blocks of us. To this day, I can name the families who lived on our street from one end to the other.

Along with the crowded living came a desire to be free and in wide open spaces. Thankfully, Mom and Dad took us visit Grandpa Jim in the country for summers. It was during that time that crooner Bing Crosby came out with a hit song called “Don’t Fence Me In”.

Along with this hit song came a lifelong drive to live free away from crowded cities, and the suburbs were born. I was twenty-three years old when I finally moved from my boyhood home to the suburbs. I was motivated to live in open spaces. I was happy there for thirty years then I got the lust for more space again, and we moved to Frankfort which was a frontier town on the edge of great Illinois farms. Lots of space between buildings and lots of free space. Now, I see a new fad returning toward crowded living spaces. Are we moving forward or backward? I say backward, but the population of the country is growing as the Administration allows thousands of people to cross the borders illegally and then helps them get lost inside our borders. These people are all poor and need places to live. Most likely they will cram into the oldest sections of our great city and force the current occupants to move out. Where will they go? Anywhere there is affordable housing.

In the “good old days” property owners took advantage of the need for more housing by converting their basements and attics into apartments. Most suburbs have enacted laws to prohibit such activity by homeowners. In a typical modern suburb the houses are so huge that the owner could easily add two more families into the space and help pay for his mortgage. In my own home I already have house within my house, all it lacks is a separate entrance. Laws such as the one I just described are part of a “racial wall” described by the author. Another of his recommendations is to tear down the walls designed to prevent undesirable people from living in their neighborhoods. A few of the walls he describes are red lining neighborhoods (Banks with holding loans to people from red-lined areas), charging very high interest rates for people who have low paying jobs, stop exploiting the poor by charging high interest for payday loans, and the list goes on. As I stated above non of these things are new, they have been discussed and in some cases implemented without success.

In conclusion, I would say that this author is restating many old principles espoused by Karl Marx in his attempt to paint communism as a pretty picture.

The Grapes of Wrath-2023

There aren’t too many books that I have re-read in my lifetime, but today I finished reading The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. By far he is my favorite author. He makes me see the characters, and the places he writes about with amazing clarity. His writing style is what made me read this book a second time. It has probably been forty years in between, but I still remember the story, and yet I enjoyed it more this time than I did the first. I doubly enjoyed his descriptions of the time and the sadness of the tale.

The Grapes of Wrath has so many messages such as: the effect of weather forcing a mass migration, the desperation of poor people, the strength of family, the will to live, the shame of accepting government help in extreme poverty, the effect of starvation on health, the rejection by the communities that were affected by the influx. The list goes on. Steinbeck tells the history of the era in great detail. He was born in an agricultural valley in central California and most likely witnessed the people streaming into the region looking for work. He understood the attitudes of agricultural workers forming unions, and the land owners fighting to protect their properties. It is a scary time and a sad time because the differences between the people could be likened to the differences between North and South in the Civil War. In this case the land owners against those who don’t own land.

Most of the migrants came from Nebraska, South Dakota, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Most were share croppers. They didn’t own land but rented the land and the rent payment was a share of the crop they produced. When the global warming of the nineteen thirties hit the plains and water dried up the land turned to dust. The winds blew the dust away from the farms and destroyed them. Crops were lost, lives went bankrupt. Bankers foreclosed on the sharecroppers and the landowners sold to corporate farms. The tiny farms of twenty and forty acres that once provided sustenance for families became massive company farms tilled by modern tractors on thousands of acres to provide a return on investment. People be damned, it was up to them to move on, and to provide for themselves. Had the migration moved slower, and the people who left to find jobs did so in a trickle things might have been different. The combination of weather killing crops and corporations buying the land to make money fast caused the migration to happen rather suddenly. It is estimated that two hundred and fifty thousand people were displaced from their farms in one summer, and the majority moved to California to find jobs as pickers. They moved in old junky cars and trucks bought from charlatan dealers who raided junk yards for inventory and sold the vehicles to desperate people who needed to find work.

The current situation in the United States is not much different, except the migrants aren’t coming across the state line, but across the border from starving Central America, or they are refugees displaced by war. They come by the thousands because they have seen the promise of the United States. What hasn’t changed much is our attitude toward the intruders. In modern America, those coming in are not coming in junky jalopies that barely run, they walk in, and our government uses buses or airplanes to transport them all across the country to unsuspecting cities where they are let loose to fend for themselves. In some cases the receiving city puts them into unoccupied hotels, until more suitable housing can be found.

This book was first published in 1939 and the story closely relates to the current conditions in the USA. Does this mean that we have not solved a single worldwide social problem since then? Why are we paying all the exorbitant taxes? Where does the money go? One place it goes is to fuel the salaries of all the degreed people working for all the bureaucracies invented to deal with social problems like homelessness, starvation, etc.. Then there are those people who work diligently to expand those services. I often wonder how many staff people we employ to handle a single poor person.

Hooverville

In the new emigration the people’s wants are similar to those of the thirties. Most seek only employment so they can better themselves. They aren’t really coming here to go on welfare, they want to make their own way by working. The people who do go on welfare are those who are born here, and are too lazy to take the low paying jobs that immigrants are willing to do. What the impact will be on the USA is that the influx of immigrants will lower the standard of living for everyone.

I didn’t expect this book report to turn into my ranting about society and the ills of big government, but it did, and I am sorry for that, but now that it is in type I must post my thoughts and opinions.

She Hit It Outta’ the Park

A truly great essay and a genius level analysis of our millennial generation. How can our youngsters truly know what living poor is all about? They can’t know and never will know until they get into the world and have to fend for themselves. Prosperity is their norm. Please read the attached essay by Alyssa Ahlgren

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To Whom It All Concerns….
My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity Around Us
I’m sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis trying to think of what to write about.
I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of Democratic candidates calling for policies to fix the so-called injustices of capitalism.
I put my phone down and continue to look around. I see people talking freely, working on their MacBooks, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me.
We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we’ve become completely blind to it Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose.
These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don’t give them a second thought.
We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty. One. Times. Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards.
Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful.
Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow.
Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, “An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity.”
Never saw American prosperity!  Let that sink in.
When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I’ve ever heard in my 26 years on this earth.
Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided.
My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity.
I know this first hand, I went to college, let’s just say I didn’t have the popular opinion, but I digress.
Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as prosperity?
We have people who are dying to get into our country. People around the world destitute and truly impoverished.
Yet, we have a young generation convinced they’ve never seen prosperity, and as a result, elect politicians dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism. Why?
The answer is this, my generation has only seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn’t live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, the Korean War, The Vietnam War or see the rise and fall of socialism and communism.
We don’t know what it’s like to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones.
We don’t have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it’s spreading like a plague.”

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

When one lives in prosperity from the minute they are born, how can they understand poverty? People of my generation witnessed the struggle of our parents working to give us what they never had. My grandfather John sent my Dad to America because he “could not feed him”. My Dad left, and never looked back. He knew what poverty was.

My dad had an aversion to potatoes, and when I challenged him once on why he didn’t take any potatoes at the Sunday dinner table he told me “I ate enough potatoes in my home country.” He left when he was seventeen. In my mind that is a whole lot of potatoes to eat in seventeen short years.

As an adult, I traveled to the far east on my job. I visited some pretty poor places in Malaysia and Indonesia. I came home with one major impression. These people work for pennies per hour because they are hungry and those pennies represent more money than they have ever seen before.  In the USA we have people who protest the poor wages in these far away countries yet our poverty level salary would make the people in those countries very rich. As my mother reminded me often “we have a loaf of bread under each arm and we complain that we don’t have anything to eat.”

What socialist leaning millennials do not understand is that to bring the level of poverty up in the world will also mean reducing the wealth of our nation. So the complaint of never having seen prosperity will reverse to seeing poverty in a grossly mis-calculated backfire.

Exactly

Alyssa knows the truth.

 

College Student: My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity Around Us

The title describes the author, Alyssa Ahlgren, who’s in grad school for her MBA.  It’s a short article but definitely worth a read.

I’m sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of Democratic candidates calling for policies to “fix” the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around. I see people talking freely, working on their MacBook’s, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we’ve become completely blind to it. Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose. These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don’t give them a second thought.

Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, “An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity.”

Never saw American prosperity. Let that sink in. When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I’ve ever heard in my 26 years on this earth. Now, I’m not attributing Miss Ocasio-Cortez’s words to outright dishonesty. I do think she whole-heartedly believes the words she said to be true. Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided. My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let’s just say I didn’t have the popular opinion, but I digress.

“Never saw American Prosperity”.  It’s stunning when you think of it in those terms, but the attitude that AOC voices is obvious all around us.  The US has roughly 5% of the world’s population but contributes about 25% of world GDP; global prosperity, if you will.  Producing that quarter of the world’s GDP gets us derided by those same college students for using more than 5% of the world’s energy to generate that outsize contribution!  Instead, they should be asking why the other major economic powers aren’t contributing as much.  The US has lifted more people out of abject poverty, spread more freedom and democracy, and has created more innovation in technology and medicine than any other nation in human history. When a disaster happens somewhere in the world, US citizens routinely donate more out of their own pockets than any other country’s citizens, and generally giving more than entire nations do with tax money (that is, not voluntary charity).

Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as prosperity? We have people who are dying to get into our country. People around the world destitute and truly impoverished. Yet, we have a young generation convinced they’ve never seen prosperity, and as a result, elect politicians dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism. Why? The answer is this, my generation has only seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn’t live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, or see the rise and fall of socialism and communism. We don’t know what it’s like not to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don’t have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it’s spreading like a plague.

Churchill spoke of socialism as the “Gospel of Envy” and the daily media spew reeks of that envy taken all the way to resentment.  In the US we have people living in the top 10% of incomes in the country resenting the small percentage making more than they do.  Society stratified so that everyone resents the next higher level of income, with most of those people thinking how bad they have it instead of how good.

Open Borders?

What is an open border? Just what does that term mean? I just compared the area of Europe to the United States, and Europe is just slightly larger in area than the USA.

(United States is 9,833,000 square kilometers while Europe is 10,180,000 square kilometers—however, European countries are closer in size to eastern states in America (which are smaller and closer together than western states).

A few years ago, in the 1990’s my wife Barb and I took a trip to Europe and toured Prague, Salzburg, Munich, and Frankfurt. Prague was still in the Soviet Union and when we crossed into Austria we had a border stop. Our tour bus waited in line as the Austrian border guards check passports and visas. Most countries in Europe are small like our Eastern states. When a European travelled from Germany to England for instance he might have to cross two or three borders. Each time he would be stopped to check his credentials. Imagine a United States where every state had a closed border (Every state does have a border and each State respects the boundaries.), and we had to carry passports and get Visa’s to visit our relatives in  another part of the country. I think we would be very upset.

By the year two thousand Europe opened it’s borders so people could move freely from country to country without hesitation. That was a major improvement for Europeans. In other words open-borders made Europe more like the United States.

Here we sit in 2018 with the Democrats using open borders as their policy to make America great. Except, this time opening our last borders with Mexico and Canada would be a huge mistake.  Until we revise our immigration laws to make coming here easier we must keep the borders closed. The revised law must allow us to track everyone who enters. The Mexican border is the only one that is so wide open. The Canadian border is open also but about half of it is an impassable water hazard called the Saint Lawrence river, and the Great Lakes.

The population of Canada is 35 million of which 5% (1.75 million) live in poverty. The population of Central and South America is 472.5 million of which 16.5% (77.5 million) live in poverty. The likelihood of illegal immigration is greater from the Mexican border than it is from the north. In addition, Canada has some safety-net policies to take care of those in need. People want to leave Central and South America because of poverty, oppressive regimes, and socialism.

If someone comes from Asia or Europe by plane they must pass through immigration at the airport. We can track them and check them, but when someone is allowed to walk into the country at will, how do we know who they are, why they have come, and what their intentions are when they get here? We have to create a new Ellis Island type of entry that will vet entrants coming from the south. My parents entered via Ellis Island and were properly vetted before being allowed to enter. A lot of migrants were returned (deported) back to Europe for various reasons. Many of them because they carried a disease we didn’t want to deal with. Today, we allow people with terrible contagious diseases to come including the Ebola virus. We will never know what the migrants from the south bring in.

At this moment in history our country is booming economically. We need workers. They will most likely have to come from Central and South America, Africa, and the Mid-East. If we do this properly we will give ourselves enough time to allow them to assimilate more gradually than a mass arrival would. What good would seven million new people who can’t speak the language, or know the rules, drive, read write, etc. do to fill the seven million job vacancies we have. Business is business and they would fill the jobs, but at whose expense? Ours. Poor service, lousy products, crazy demands for working conditions (prayer breaks five times a day in special prayer rooms), squat toilets, the list can go on for ever.

What kind of argument is there to support open-borders except to destroy the sovereignty of the USA.? Mexico surely wants to reacquire land ceded to the USA by treaty during the Mexican-American war. It is my opinion that Mexicans who want the land back don’t want to pay us for it, but are at war with us and violate the treaty signed between countries. Other than that, I see not one valid argument for wanting an open border with Mexico. 

I do understand that socialists are so desirous of bringing their utopian misery to the United States they want to drive the U.S. into bankruptcy to do it. They follow the Cloward-Piven theorem, that using the welfare laws and policies of a country to overload the social systems, the country can be bankrupted and taken over by a dictator. So anti-American liberal factions encourage millions of poor people (living on $4.50/day) to enter under the premise of finding a better life. I don’t think it would take much more to overload the welfare, healthcare, and educational systems. We have seen the cost of illegal immigration rise to tens of billions of dollars in the recent years.

It is simple folks, we don’t want open borders, we don’t want socialism, we don’t want communism, or any other failed ideology to take away our liberties. If that were to happen we will see a reverse flow of immigrants wanting to leave the country.

I see only one route to take and that is to defend to the death our current liberties and borders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_welfare_state