Poor Man Survival
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A Digest of Urban
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Socialists Asked Who Pays for “Free” Stuff —
Their Answers are Funny
There has been a constant drumbeat of news that young Americans
are turning to socialism, which has become the conventional wisdom.
Venezuelans
are eating dogs, cats and pigeons. The lucky ones get some supplies (after
waiting in line for hours on end, that is). They may have water (rain water, I
guess), but the food is gone, not to mention other supplies.
How
did this happen in a country that has the largest oil reserves in the world?
The
price of oil dropped, that's how. But that doesn't mean things were peachy
before. They had troubles for years. Culprit? The socialist regime.
As we know a college education today is seldom worth the sheepskin it is
printed on…those of us old enough to recall real late night comedy hosts like
Jay Leno and his humorous sketch ‘jay walking’ will recall his interviews with
college kids posing questions about American and world history and current
events to which most were completely in the dark about [not even able to answer
who won our Civil War]!…a shameful revelation about how poorly educated our
young have become.
Socialist policies are swiftly becoming
mainstream in the Democratic Party. Several of the 2020 Democratic hopefuls for
president enthusiastically tout things like Medicare for all, free college
tuition, and free housing daily on the stump. Self-proclaimed Democratic
Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders is leading some polls including the latest
University of New Hampshire Granite State Poll.
Socialism is especially popular with younger voters. They
love the concept of free stuff. Unfortunately, many millennials don’t have a
clue as to how the country would pay for it. Last year, Campus Reform’s Cabot
Phillips asked millennials in Astoria, New York about socialism. This
particular location was significant because it’s the home of insanely popular
and outspoken freshman U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat.
Like the Representative, the young people Phillips interviewed in her district
said, without hesitation, that they supported socialist policies. But, when
Phillips asked them who would pay for all of the “free” things, their answers
were revealing.
According to TheBlaze, one individual replied, “Some of it
should come from taxes, but the government should pay for it.” Phillips aptly
pointed out, “But the government is funded by taxes.” In comment to this
statement, the girl simply said, “Yeah.” One guy seemed to have more confidence
in Congress than most Americans do. He told Philips, “I don’t know where the
money would come from, but they can figure it out.” This same individual also
shared that he felt socialist countries are “doing really well.”
Another guy believed that “with a good idea and a good
reason to spend their tax money, people wouldn’t actually mind paying more
taxes.” Phillips’ interviews concluded with someone saying, “I’m liberal. I
don’t know exactly, like, where I stand, but I know, like, Democratic socialism
is better than conservative … it’s the better option.” When Phillips asked how
it was indeed better, the girl bizarrely answered “Um, when I think of it, I
just think of, like, more open-minded people, people that aren’t, like, as
economically conserved.”
Last month, Phillips again tackled the idea of socialism
with students on the campus of Florida International University in Miami. When
interviewed, most of the students revealed they preferred socialism to
capitalism. During this particular outing, Phillips used a clever illustration
to show the millennials how socialism could personally impact them. He inquired
of them how they’d like to “share” their GPAs and “spread the wealth” with
fellow students earning lower grades.
Unsurprisingly, the students thought the idea was a less
than stellar one. One individual said, “I’m all for helping; I wouldn’t give
some of my [GPA] points. … I’ve lost a lot of sleep, I don’t know if it would
be fair.” Another stated, “I sacrifice a lot to get my GPA … so, no, I wouldn’t
sacrifice my own things.” One student remarked, “That’s completely different.
I’m studying all day for my grade.” Another stated, “I guess it would be kind
of, like, hypocritical for me to say ‘no.’”
In an effort to gain votes, politicians have a habit of
promising pie in the sky policies like “free” healthcare. Sadly, these things
won’t be “free” for the hardworking individuals who will have to pay for them
through exorbitant taxes and other means. According to an Investor’s Business
Daily editorial, “In socialism, all roads lead to disaster. Or, as Friedrich
Hayek, the late Austrian economist, might say, to ‘serfdom.’ All forms of
socialism are the same: they replace consent and personal freedom with
government power on behalf of the ‘people’.
The piece went on to say, “Millennials need to rethink
their youthful allegiance to socialist ideology. It will bring them less
income, worse inequality, insecurity, hunger, despair and a loss of freedom.”
This certainly isn’t the rosy, sunshiny view of socialism the 2020 Democratic
contenders are painting. Conservatives need to expose the harsh realities of
socialism before the 2020 election. If they don’t succeed, America may never be
the same.
Most surveys I’ve seen indicate the real majority of
Americans want practical solutions to the challenges this nation faces which
include our power grid and infrastructure.
Each time government grows [under Democratic plans] the people lose something,
usually money and rights as they have a history of poor stewardship of managing
both.
Source~ Conservative Zone
--Is it any wonder our Middle Class is vanishing?
Part II below:
No One Is Coming to
Rescue You—Especially Not a Presidential Candidate
By Brittany Hunter
We are only a few months
into 2019, and already the 2020 presidential election season is well underway.
Each week, it seems that more candidates are entering the race, especially in
the Democratic field.
And as the country cycles
through its political flavors of the week, social media has become overrun by
passionate posts that read more like stump speeches in support of a given
candidate.
Nearly every single
person has an opinion about who this country should be supporting. And nearly
every single one of them believes that their lives will be significantly
better, or worse, based on who occupies the White House.
But this gives politicians
far too much power.
In order to truly better
our lives, we need to rely less on political talking heads and more on
ourselves. Only then can we begin to make a bigger difference and change the
world.
Politicians Can’t Save You
Every four years, it is the
same old song-and-dance as Americans make a pastime of rooting for political
candidates in the same way they root for their favorite sports teams.
Instead of merely holding
the position of a civil servant, modern-day politicians have stepped into a celebrity
role in which their brand speaks louder than their actual voting records.
Beto O'Rourke and Bernie
Sanders, for example, have the “cool” factor, which attracts young people
willing to drop everything and campaign despite not fully understanding their
stances.
These cults of
personality are dangerous and they elevate politicians to an undeserved status.
The more we place politicians on pedestals and believe that they can personally
make our lives better, the more we relinquish our own sense of personal
responsibility. And to be perfectly clear, that is the only way we can hope to
better our own lives, or anyone else’s for that matter.
We’ve all heard the
promises political candidates make when it comes to improving the lives of
their constituents: Andrew Yang is going to help the little guy get ahead by
providing a universal basic income. Bernie Sanders is going to be the first
person in history to make socialism work and create true and lasting equality.
And Elizabeth Warren is going to personally save every woman from misogyny by
becoming the first female president. These are, of course, no different from
the promises we have heard in the past.
Donald Trump was going to
save the American middle-class and the businesses sector. Barack Obama was
going to save our health care system. And, at the risk of sounding repetitive,
Hillary Clinton was going to save us from misogyny and create seamless gender
equality by becoming the first female president. But when the ballots have been
cast and all is said and done, few people’s lives are dramatically impacted
based on who sits in the oval office. And most of the problems that existed
before the four-year term begins will exist afterward.
If anyone has any doubt
of this, ask yourself if the health care system in the post-Obama world is
really any better than before he came to office. It goes without saying that
the “if you like your plan you can keep your plan” promise went out the window
as soon as the realities of Obamacare made themselves known. Oh, and insurance
policy premiums also skyrocketed.
Likewise, it would be
equally false to believe that Trump somehow managed to save our health care by
undoing all the damage caused by the Affordable Care Act with the snap of his
fingers.
And if you do believe
this to be true, ask yourself: why were so many people shocked to find they
still had to pay the individual mandate penalty on their taxes this year?
Additionally, no matter
how many promises have been made to completely withdraw the troops from
Afghanistan over the years, we still hear of American military casualties occurring in regions we should no longer be occupying.
Even the recent tax cuts
that were supposed to help all of us were not as impactful as we had once
thought they would be.
While corporate tax rates
were slashed—and this is a good thing—individuals saw only small decreases when it came to their own tax rates. (And a small percentage saw their taxes go up.)
From a policy front, our
lives change very little depending on who is the president. But there is a
deeper issue here than one of just policy. In fact, it’s almost as if we view
politicians as our personal saviors.
In Utah, when Mitt Romney
was a 2012 Presidential candidate, many Utahn’s referred to him as the “white knight,”
who had come to save our country and our Constitution.
While this is the extreme
of the cult of personality worship, it highlights the seriousness of the
problem. The “white knight” reference implies that we need someone to come save
us instead of realizing that we are capable of saving ourselves.
A politician cannot save
us, not in the policy realm or our personal lives. But as individuals, we have
nearly unlimited power to do this for ourselves.
We’ve Got to Save Ourselves
Objectivist and renowned
American psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden cautions against waiting on someone
else to come rescue you from your problems. In his book The Six Pillars
of Self-Esteem, Branden writes:
No one is coming to save
me; no one is coming to make life right for me; no one is coming to solve my
problems. If I don’t do something, nothing is going to get better.
At first glance, this
might seem like a bleak statement. But in these words rests the immense
personal power we need to transform our lives. No politician can save you, just
like no parent or friend can save you. If you really want to fix your life and
be a tool for change on a grander scale, you’re going to have to learn how to
save yourself.
As a young person in my
20s, my life revolved around getting Ron Paul elected. In my humble opinion, I
still believe he would have been the best president this country has ever
known, but that doesn’t negate the fact that in pursuit of getting him elected,
I stopped trying to work on myself and improve my own life.
During that 2012 campaign
season, I stopped talking to family and friends who disagreed with me, I
routinely made excuses as to why I didn’t have to be kind to someone who
supported another candidate, and I abandoned all self-improvement endeavors in
pursuit of getting Dr. Paul elected. At the time, I truly believed a Paul
presidency would fix all my problems.
Instead of starting small
and fixing whatever I could in my own personal sphere, I looked to someone in
Washington to rescue me. I made the mistake of abandoning everything right in
front of me. My four-year relationship was on track to escalate to an
engagement, but my preoccupation with the campaign resulted in a nasty breakup
instead. Additionally, lifelong friendships deteriorated because I couldn’t
seem to see past our political differences. And when it came to my family, I
stopped attending Sunday dinners and holidays because I didn’t have time for
anything that wasn’t centered around my political pursuits. Additionally, my
own health was beginning to deteriorate because I couldn’t find the time to
sleep well or eat properly.
And when the election
season was over, and my dreams of a President Paul had not come to fruition, I
was left with the harsh realization that my personal life was a complete mess.
I had tried so hard to change things in Washington—something I truly had very
little control over— that I completely neglected to fix what I could control. I
did not realize at the time that I was capable of saving myself.
During an appearance on
Joe Rogan’s podcast, psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson spoke of the
importance of fixing your own life before you try to take on bigger tasks. He
said:
“…don’t be fixing up the
economy, 18-year-olds. You don’t know anything about the economy. It’s a
massive complex machine beyond anyone’s understanding and you mess with that
your peril. So can you even clean up your own room? No. Well you think about
that. You should think about that, because if you can’t even clean up your own
room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?”
In my quest to elect Dr.
Paul, my proverbial room had grown chaotically messy.
And instead of doing what
I could to fix it, I was out campaigning, attempting to tell other people what
to do when I truthfully did not even know how to handle my own life. As
Peterson also says,
“My sense is that if you
want to change the world, you start from yourself and work outward, because you
build your competence that way.”
Peterson’s sentiment
actually echoes similar
words written by Plato in a passage from The Republic, in which he writes:
“But in truth justice
was, as it seems, something of this sort; however, not with respect to a man’s
minding his external business, but with respect to what is within, with respect
to what truly concerns him and his own. He doesn’t let each part in him mind
other people’s business or the three classes in the soul meddle with each
other, but really sets his own house in good order and rules himself.”
During that campaign
season, I had ample opportunities to take small steps in rescuing myself, but I
never did. Instead, I thought that I could bypass saving myself in pursuit of
something greater. But this is not possible. You cannot run without first
learning how to walk, and in order to be capable of great change, you have to
first fix yourself. This doesn’t have to be some grand gesture, you can start
small by cleaning your room, or even begin by simply organizing one small
corner of your room. Eventually, as Peterson says, you can take on bigger
tasks.
…and then maybe you’ll
learn enough by doing that so that you can fix up your family a little bit, and
then having done that, you’ll have enough character so that when you try to
operate in the world, at your job, or maybe in the broader social spheres, that
you’ll be a force for good instead of harm…
Imagine what you could do
if you got your own life in order? This seems like a small step, but maybe by
cleaning your room and getting your own life together you could start a
business and create jobs for others. Or maybe you could be a more effective
activist if you first did all you could to work on yourself before petitioning
for larger change.
If you want to live in a
world where women have more opportunities, don’t elect another woman to office;
become the female who is bringing that change to pass in her everyday life. We
make the grave mistake of assuming politicians are qualified to save us. But
how many political candidates have actually made the effort to “clean up their
own room” before attempting to save the country? The answer is probably very
few.
All You Can Do Is Start With Yourself
We would each do well to
remind ourselves that an election season will not make or break us as
individuals. Unless you are willing to take the steps needed to clean your room
and be your own savior, you cannot expect someone else to do it for you. So instead
of arguing back and forth on social media in favor of this or that candidate,
do something that will help you change your own life and, thus, better prepare
you to make bigger changes.
As Confucius says:
To put the world in
order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we
must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must first
cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.
No one is coming to help
you, so you might as well stop waiting and start fixing your own life today.
Yours in Self Reliance,
Bruce ‘the Poor Man’
P.S. We hope everyone had an enjoyable holiday
weekend. Ours was filled with work at
our cabin and as it turned it out, we were delayed a day practicing the art of
capitalism where we made a tidy sum and acquired some nice inventory [both
personal and for resale] at an incredible savings the old fashioned way – not online!
We’ ve added several new useful
books to our online storefront including how to live without electricity based
on the Amish lifestyle, a guide to
collecting knives, Prepper’s Rifle Guide and more…
USEFUL RESOURCES
Despite repeated advice from financial planners to ‘plan ahead’ with a cash cushion…
Certain communities were more prone to economic hardship in the
event of missing a paycheck. Roughly two-thirds of households earning less than
$30,000 annually and Hispanic households would be unable to cover basic living
expenses after missing more than one paycheck, the researchers found.
We’re losing our freedoms for one simple reason: most of us don’t
know anything about our freedoms. At a minimum, anyone who has graduated from
high school, let alone college, should know the Bill of Rights backwards and
forwards. However, the average young person, let alone citizen, has very little
knowledge of their rights for the simple reason that the schools no longer
teach them. So grab a copy of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and
study them at home. And when the time comes, stand up for your rights before
it’s too late.
Offered to select Facebook partners, the data includes not just
technical information about Facebook members’ devices and use of Wi-Fi and
cellular networks, but also their past locations, interests, and even their
social groups. This data is sourced not just from the company’s main iOS and
Android apps, but from Instagram and Messenger as well. The data has been used
by Facebook partners to assess their standing against competitors, including
customers lost to and won from them, but also for more controversial uses like
racially targeted ads.
Silver Supply/Demand Crunch Part II: Primary Silver
Producers Stuck in Quicksand and Still Sinking [We’ve been stocking up on silver – you
should too]
Underpinning the erosion in supply is the deterioration in mine
production. This is important, because most of the bullion you and I buy comes
from newly-mined silver. Secondary sales (products that have been previously
bought and sold) will always have a place in the bullion industry—and a growing
role in a supply/demand crunch—but to be prepared for the kind of rush Mike
Maloney see ahead, mine production will need to be healthy and rising.
Feed
Hungry Troops
If
you can spare packs of trail mix, tuna packs or ramen noodles, consider sending
them to Forgotten Soldiers [ForgottenSoldiers.og] – the nonprofit will include
the items in care packages it sends to deployed soldiers. Send to:
3550 23rd Ave S., Ste. #7, Lake Worth, FL 33461
A Final Note…
Contributors and subscribers enable the Poor Man Survivor to post 150+ free essays annually. It is for this reason they are Heroes and Heroines of New Media. Without your financial support, the free content would disappear for the simple reason that I cannot keep body and soul together on my meager book sales & ecommerce alone.
Useful
Resources from our storefront-See new items!
You Can’t
Buy Life Insurance After You’re Dead-Prepare NOW for Emergencies…
Finally,
grab an emergency power cell or solar/battery radio weather radio!
Having
the Patriot Power Cell on-hand for emergencies keeps your essential electronics
up and running in case you need to call for help.
“The Cell is a workhorse of power — it’ll charge your phone
soup to nuts 3 to 8 times… I think of the Patriot Power Cell as “everyday
prepared.” Awesome for travel or avoiding inconveniences while saving your
bacon in an outage. It’s a MUST HAVE for your survival lineup."
10,000 mAh Battery/Water Resistant/2 LED Flashlight/1.5 Watt
Solar Panel/6-Hour Charge Time
In stock again!
2 comments:
20 years ago the press and my friends would have pounced on anyone calling themselves a socialist, let alone running for president as such-I/we are dumbfounded this taking place in our country. I guess se shouldn't be surprised that our press is so happy to go along with it as many of them have been closet communists for decades.
By all rights the Dems should split into two parties-you've stated it and so have others...in their current state they've become reprehensible but what do you expect? I'm still amazed at how stupid some Blacks are to continue voting for them when it was the party of the KKK & the party of LBJ who created the welfare system to keep them on the federal plantation...dumb and dumber.
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