Mediaboss Marketing

Ive heard the debate about whether Social Security and Medicare are entitlements or rights. Ive come to the conclusion that this debate really doesnt matter. Both programs are designed to fail just as Obamacare has failed and fiat money will fail. They are both Ponzi schemes and all Ponzi schemes end badly, particularly for the newer members coerced into the schemes. We are now below three taxpayers for every Social Security recipient and the number of taxpayers per recipient will continue to decrease. There are no reserves in the mislabeled trust funds and more benefits are handed out to recipients annually than taken in through working taxpayers under FICA and SECA taxation. This means the general fund makes up the differences that add to our ever growing national debt. Socialism has its price which usually is an economic collapse.

Now is the time for We the People to come to terms with our responsibility as sovereigns of this nation to try and save it or continue the Alfred E. Neuman philosophy of what, me worry? while we continue listening to the fake news and politicians feeding us lies and distractions.

Go here to see the original:
Hawkins: What price for Socialism? - Today's News-Herald

|

Posted: Mar 23, 2017 12:01 AM

The results of a new study were announced this week, and they are consistent with previous findings. The five million or so people who live in the Scandinavian country of Norway are among the happiest on earth.

Writing for Reuters (3/20/17), Patricia Reaney noted: Norway displaced Denmark as the world's happiest country in a new report released on Monday in a study that ranked 155 nations on earth. The United States ranked as 14th happiest, down from 13th last year.

At the bottom of the list? Countries in sub-Saharan Africa, along with Syria and Yemen. The research was conducted and compiled by the UN for the World Happiness Report 2017.

Reaney adds, The rankings are based on six factors---per capita gross domestic product, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, social support and absence of corruption in government or business.

Norway often tops the list of happiest nations. Why is that? Its not the weather. Meanwhile, there are many beautiful places throughout Norway, including the fjords.

My wife is from Norway. We were married in Norway. Most of her family still lives there. We have visited many times. Why do Norwegians tend to be happier?

I would argue that it is the Christian values that can still be found in many parts of Norway. Even todays secular-minded Norwegians are benefiting from Christianitys residue. About a millennium ago, Norway was the scourge of Europe, with the Vikings ravaging people all over the Continent. God, save us from the Normans, went up the prayers. And God answered by converting the Vikings to Jesus. Its one of the great stories of history.

Now Norway, formerly the land of Viking violence, hands out international peace prizes.

When the Reformation took place some 500 years ago, the Scandinavian countries threw their lot with Martin Luther and company. To this day, many of the state-churches in the Scandinavian countries are Lutheran.

When Bernie Sanders ran against Hilary Clinton on the Democratic side of the aisle last year, he made a big deal about the alleged success of the socialism of the Scandinavian countries. Others made similar points. Scandinavia flourishes because it is socialist lite. Were they correct?

Nima Sanandaji, whose family is from Iran, is from Sweden and is the author of the book, Debunking Utopia: Exposing the Myth of Nordic Socialism (WND Books, 2016).

In an interview we did for one of our D. James Kennedy Ministries television specials exposing the problems of socialism, Sanandaji told me, Nordic countries are not socialist. The prime minister of Denmark came to the U.S. at the end of 2015, went to Harvard, and spoke, and he said in effect, Stop saying that Denmark is socialist; were a market economy. And hes absolutely right, throughout their historyNordic countries have been perhaps the best example of how free markets create prosperity; and how high taxes, overly generous welfare, have destroyed the same prosperity. Today Nordic countries are very much market economies. They respect private property.

Sanandaji drilled deeper: Nordic countries are successful because of their unique culture, and this is why socialists only point to Nordic countries [as examples of successful socialism] because their success predates the welfare state and is because of culture, and their economic success is because of free markets. That is why they can never find a good case for socialism which is not about Nordic countries. Its all smoke and mirrors. [Emphasis mine].

Sanandaji points out in his book that Scandinavians who left Norway, Denmark, Sweden, etc. about a hundred years ago, when compared with their Nordic cousins who never left, tend to fare better by any comparison. He said, Nordic-Americans, because they have a Nordic culture of success, are already more successful than the Nordic people. He said there are 12 million Nordic-Americans, and they have a 50 percent higher living standard than do their cousins who never left Scandinavia.

Nima said something we dont hear often: Culture matters, and so what is Nordic cultural success? Now it has a lot to do with this Protestant, Lutheran working ethics---Protestant, Lutheran responsibility ethics, and the unfortunate thing is that that ethic has gradually been declining over time.

Sanandaji, an atheist, cannot be accused of a Christian bias. Yet he says retaining the Judeo-Christian traditions will be key to the future survival of the West.

Seeing the average Norwegian enjoying so many positive benefits tied to their national Christian heritage does not surprise me. They are consistently listed as among the happiest nations on earth. That is primarily because of their Christian heritage, which, sadly, is fading over time.

At the end of the day, each of us is as happy as we make our mind to be. To paraphrase that quintessential colonial American, Ben Franklin: Contentment makes poor men rich. Discontentment makes rich men poor.

BREAKING: ISIS Claims Responsibility for London Terror Attack

Go here to see the original:
Is Socialism the Source of Scandinavian Happiness? - Townhall

Congratulations To Bolivarian Socialism - Venezuela Stops Publishing Money Supply Data Forbes It's not unusual for people to be a bit more reticent about information that reflects badly upon them than they are about stuff that makes them look good. But we do still normally expect governments to keep pumping out the usual economic data. The US ...

See the original post:
Congratulations To Bolivarian Socialism - Venezuela Stops Publishing Money Supply Data - Forbes

BY: Jack Heretik March 22, 2017 9:17 am

Adigital short called "Democrats Love Socialism" by Ami Horowitz of Fox News was released on March 15 and highlights the struggles of citizens in socialist Venezuela, includingmass hunger and a high murder rate. Horowitz contrasts this struggle to Americans at the beginning of the short, who tell Horowitz there is nothing wrong with socialism.

In Venezuela, Horowitz walked with a man who was looking for acat or a dog to eat,and talked to people who claimedthey have to wait all day in a line to get just a small amountof food or milk. One woman said that she sometimes shakes at night due to hunger and passes out.

"Before all these problems started we were middle class, but now we are lower class," one Venezuelan woman said.

The Venezuelans Horowitz interviewed also discussedthe high crime rateandfrequent murders.

Horowitz said Venezuela has three times the amount of murder inthe United States, despite being less than one tenth of America's population. And although Venezuela bears strict gun laws, its capital city of Caracas has more death than Baghdad.

Venezuelanstold Horowitz about losing loved ones inshootings that are ignored by the police. The documentary has ascene where a man was just shot in a busy street, buta police officer casually walks by.

Horowitz then asked Venezuelans if socialism works, and what they think of the Americans who want it applied to the U.S.

"No, because if it really worked we wouldn't be in chaos and hunger," one man said.

"No, it doesn't work here," another man said. "It's all a lie they tell us."

"I would tell the Americans not to commit to that madness because that is all a lie," a woman said. "They lied to us. We don't have anything to eat. Crime has taken over."

Somepeople Horowitz spoke to said that those who advocate for socialism in the United States should go to Venezuelaand experience it first.

Horowitz closed the video by showing a woman preaching about socialism in the United States.

"They are one of the most productive, their people are the happiest, they have the least amount of crime, violence," the woman said. "There's nothing wrong with it in my eyes."

Read more:
Fox News Digital Short Shows Socialist Venezuela in Midst of Chaos - Washington Free Beacon

Im no historian, but I do have a laymans take on how we arrived at our current national nightmare. Its just one, personal approach, and its conditioned in part by my having grown up in England since before World War II, and during the war and the post-war period, and particularly by what I know of my earliest years. I was born in the northern coal-mining town of Newcastle-on-Tyne, where my father was the incumbent priest of a slum parish. Poverty and hunger were the norm, and my father, unsurprisingly, was an ardent socialistand I inherited his political beliefs.

You can imagine, then, how surprised I was, with this background, to discover when I first arrived on this side of the pond, that socialism was a word so vile that it could not be uttered in polite society. I exaggerate only a little. I did not know much of American history, but was vaguely aware of the social achievements of FDR and the subsequent Communist scare of the 1950s. When I become a citizen in 1972, I was still required to swear, under oath, that I was not then and had never been a member of the Communist Party. I thought the exercise a little absurd, but went ahead and dutifully swore, thankful that at least I had not been asked if I was a socialist. (To be quite honest, I still have difficulty with the notion of swearing allegiance to a country or its flag, but thats another essay.)

As I was growing up, then, the words conservative and socialist had rather different connotations than they do here in the US. In broad terms, the Conservative Party represented the interests of wealth and social privilege; the Socialist, or Labour Party stood for the working class, the poor, and the underprivileged. I had never questioned my allegiance to the latter.

Since my arrival in the United States, even the (formerly) less charged term liberal has come to share in the disrepute of socialism. By those on the right, it is most often uttered with angry contempt for those leaning more to the left. And, in a curious andto my mindunfortunate reversal, those with the most at stake in the social contract have been co-opted, no matter their own interest, into the conservative camp. Political ideology failed, in the form of McCarthyism; but corporate interests have proved successful in deluding the working classes and the poor into the belief that socialismor liberalismis anathema. The word itself summons nothing but fear and loathing. The means to achieve this end has been a continuous stream of simplistic slogans fed out by those in power in the form of barely disguised propagandafacile platitudes about such things as individual freedom, big government and the tiresome familiarity of anti-tax rhetoric, repeated so often and in so many ways that they have come to be accepted as irrefutable truth.

So it is that here, in this wealthiest nation in the history of the world, we have sacrificed all sense of social responsibility on the altar of delusory individual rights. We have been persuaded to submit to the axiom that government is the great Satan, and that we can dispense with its servicesmost notably those that provide for others than ourselves. The rabid opposition to universal health care, readily disparaged as socialized medicine, is a case in point. Every other country at our stage of economic development has found a way, at considerably less expense than ours, to assure the protection of its citizens from the personal, financial and emotional ravages of sickness, injury and old age. Only here in America, it seems, do people clamor angrily against even the relatively meager coverage (for themselves!) achieved under Obamacare. Only here in America do the insurance companies and drug manufacturers wield sufficient power to prevail against all common sense and human compassion in their advancement of a for-profit system that functions not for the health of citizens but exclusively for corporate benefit.

Its not only health care, of course. The fear of socialism prevails in every aspect of our lives. Its rooted deeply in our system of justice, which benefits wealth and privilege to the detriment of the poor and powerless. It is a malignant force in the perpetuation of racial prejudice. It disempowers our government from sensible regulationwhether of financial markets, banks, air and water pollution, even guns It is particularly pernicious in delaying the increasingly urgent need to manage and protect our threatened resources and our natural environment. And so on.

Some form of socialism is the accepted norm these days in European nations, where it partners in various ways with free-market capitalism without apparent detriment to the economic well-being of actual peopleeven the very wealthy. It thrives, indeed, in our own country, in multiple unacknowledged ways. The so-called entitlements that constitute our indispensible social safety net go unrecognized as socialist programs by many who depend on them: Get your government hands off my Medicare! Yet even these are now under attack by the right-wing, supposedly conservative politicians who are in ascendancythose same politicians who have been elected, and are passionately supported by those who deplore big government and rail against taxation.

The great question remains unanswered: if the primary and avowed purpose of the current administration is the deconstruction of the underpinnings of a civilized society, and if they are successful in this attack, what will happen to those who were duped into unwittingly supporting them in this endeavor? When will our new would-be emperor be exposed as a man of unmitigated ignorance and greed? What innocent child is going to point to his parade and say: But, Ma, he has no clothes.

It seems to me that first were going to have to recognize some rights beyond our own, to accept a common responsibility for our fellow human beings. We need to educate our young people in a serious way about the history and the true meaning of socialism; and to become, in our personal and political lives, just a little bit more socialist ourselves. In the real sense of that much-maligned, much-despised, much-mistrusted word.

See more here:
SOCIALISM: THE POWER OF A WORD | The Huffington Post - Huffington Post