Bill Maher is almost there . . .

When he drops the climate change charade he will finally understand conservatives

I watch Bill Maher’s Real Time show every Friday night because Maher is brilliant and because he pokes fun at real problems to provoke people to think about those problems. An unabashed Liberal, Maher is reasonably balanced but somewhat biased against Conservatives in general and former President Trump in particular. Not hard to understand the animosity to Trump who many find a despicable character if they ignore the reality that he was among the best Presidents America has had in decades. Trump may be the grifter Maher often alleges, but he lowered taxes, strengthened NATO, supported the military, tried to control who gets into the country through the Southern border, repealed hundreds of costly and useless regulations and encouraged energy independence, not to mention Operation Warp speed where his administration fostered the COVID vaccine breakthrough. Trump is easy to dislike but hard to fault for his policy initiatives.

Democrat Joe Biden by contrast has dramatically increased national debt, fueled rampant inflation with reckless spending, curtailed growth in oil & gas production, canceled necessary pipelines, let anyone who chooses into the country simply by walking across the Southern border, weakened the military, executed an awkward withdrawal from Afghanistan leaving thousands of allies in the lurch, and been too cowardly to intervene forcefully to protect Ukraine despite an American agreement to uphold Ukraine sovereignity in the Budapest agreement signed by Bill Clinton. Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act” is itself not only left wing pork but also inflationary, and is being rebranded as somehow “fighting climate change” which is nonsensical since CO2 emissions have no material effect on climate and the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) scam is political science, not atmospheric science or an extension of the laws of physics which the AGW theory violates.

Democrats brand Conservatives as a “threat to democracy” inflating the importance of the January 6 protests as an “insurrection” ignoring the fact that there was plenty of warning of a protest yet Nancy Pelosi refused to call out the National Guard in advance and alleged FBI collaborator Ray Epps spent the day encouraging a more violent protest while AOC pretended her life was in danger as she cowered in a ladies washroom hiding from people in the office who turned out to be capital police. Democrats saw the protest as an opportunity to escalate the event into a putative “insurrection” for the political value of attacking Trump (who asked the protesters to be peaceful and go home”) and have held incessant “investigations” ever since trying to make the relatively peaceful protest into something it was not nor could have been for the political capital they think it will create so they can hang on to their tenuous grip on power in the mid-terms.

Maher conflates a social safety net with socialism ignoring the reality that the definition of socialism is “government ownership or control of the means of production and distribution” (and communism is a subset of socialism where central governments control who does what and who gets what). Socialism does not mean health care, pensions, welfare, public education, publicly built infrastructure or progressive taxation, all of which are part and parcel of both liberalism and conservatism alike and also present in many socialist regimes. Maher ignores the reality and danger inherent in the fact that today’s Democrats comprise many socialists and some outright communists and their objective is to bring down capitalism, which Maher recognizes is the economic system responsible for the world’s wealth and the only one that has a track record of success. Maher supports capitalism but opposes conservatism, an oxymoronic view that fails to recognize that today’s liberals are a threat to capitalism and openly admit it.

Congresswoman Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez says capitalism is “irredeemable” and that “corporations have taken over” the American government. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib wants to bring down capitalism. Former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is an admitted socialist who wants to end capitalism. The rallying cry for those wishing to end democracy and bring down capitalism is the climate change scam. United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres is a Portugese Socialist who makes mainstream media headlines regularly with speeches about the climate crisis. Is anyone surprised?

The motivating force behind socialism is a belief that inequitable distribution of income and wealth is a blight on society, deluded by their belief that a socialist regime would correct the inequities through socialist policies of income redistribution. Where on Earth has that ever worked? Trotsky? Lenin? Stalin? Mao? Ji Ping? Castro? Kim Jong Un? Maduro? Bolsonaro? Is there any sane person who thinks the distribution of income and wealth under these regimes is more equitable than under capitalism? Here are some hard data.

The Gini Index (or Gini Coefficient on a scale of zero to 100) is the most recognized metric of inequal distribution of wealth. Here are the data for the socialist versus capitalist countries as of 2022 using World Bank data. The higher the Index, the more extreme the inequality. In very poor countries, there is less inequality since there is less period.

Socialist or Communist Countries
68.6 North Korea
64.3 Vietnam
48.9 Brazil
49.0 China
44.8 Venezuela
36.0 Russia
38.0 Cuba
33.5 Portugal
AVERAGE 47.8

Capitalist Countries
48.0 United States
33.0 Canada
31.7 Germany
34.3 United Kingdom
32.4 France (almost socialist)
34.3 Spain
30.2 Austria
33.0 Australia
AVERAGE 34.5

The popular left wing belief that socialism will solve inequality is nonsense devoid of any factual underpinning. The fact is that inequality is part and parcel of the human condition and most (if not all) democracies have enacted policies to ameliorate the wealth and income gaps through progressive income taxes, old age pensions, public health care, public education, publicly owned roads and bridges, and minimum wage laws. These efforts have been reasonably effective as demonstrated by the datum that shows that capitalist countries have Gini indices about 30% lower than socialist or communist countries. Stated simply, citizens give up their freedoms for socialism and get nothing in return but a wider inequality between the ordinary citizen and the elites who run the country.

Capitalist democracies would do even better if their leaders faced reality and stopped pretending that corporate taxes help (since corporation just pass on those taxes in price profiting corporate owners and increasing the cost of living for corporate customers, usually the lowest income group comprising those most affected), and stop pretending that 2% inflation is a useful goal since inflation is little more than a tax on the poor which benefits the elite.

Maher buys the “climate change” theory holus bolus but it is utter nonsense. In its name, America under Joe Biden is squandering billions to try and alter nature, reminiscent of the Incas and Astecs sacrificing their children in a vain effort to change the weather. The result (and in my opinion the intended result) is a global energy shortage that is crippling democratic economies in Europe and the United Kingdom while authoritarian communist economies in Russia, China and North Korea are not only spared but benefit from the higher energy prices resulting from the man-made scarcity of fossil fuels, particularly Russia which the world’s second largest energy producer. Russia’s balance of payments year to date August of $181 billion is triple the 2021 figure, benefitting from the U.S. led “sanctions” that have only harmed the U.S. allies in Europe and done nothing to harm the Russian economy but in fact strengthened it.

When I was young man a studying history at Royal Military College of Canada and reviewing theories of political science, I learned (as was the case) that liberalism meant low taxes, small government, and a high degree of personal freedom. For fifty years, I voted Liberal since these are worthwhile objectives for Canadian society. That has changed throughout North America where today “liberal” or “progressive” means big government, excess regulation and suppression of free speech and limits on personal freedoms all for what the leaders tell us is the “public good”.

At this point in history, it is the Democrats in United States and Liberals and New Democrats in Canada who are the threat to democracy and the American Republicans and Canadian Conservatives who are the last bastion of freedom and democracy. In their efforts to bring down capitalism, the Democrats in United States attack the Constitution and fundamental institutions like the Supreme Court, claiming the Supreme Court has taken away a woman’s freedom to end the life of her unborn child. Women never had any constitutional right to end the life of an infant, not at the time the Constitution was written nor today, and the Supreme Court’s only act in reversing the 1973 decision Roe v Wade was to uphold the Constitution and send the issue of abortion back to State legislatures where it belonged. Rather than organize voters to change state laws to satisfy their goals (isn’t that how democracy is supposed to work?) the Democrats attack the Supreme Court and blame the GOP for the repeal of Roe. The issue of abortion is complex, nuanced and has been abused since 1973 with the 63 million unborn children who lost their lives largely for the convenience of their pregnant mothers (and in some cases where the procedure was necessary to save the mother’s life or remedy cases of incest or rape, although those cases would be a great pandemic than COVID if that amounted to 63 millin cases since 1973 and I suspect it is a tiny fraction). The states that are enacting abortion laws today are doing so through their elected representatives and Democrats who complain are complaining about democracy’s failure to deliver what they want. You can’t both claim to be protecting democracy while protesting the outcome of a democratic process. Get real!

Overturning democracy will not help, but will make things worse. Authoritarian countries in the mid-East oppress women, toss LGBTQ people off rooftops, execute heretics to their radical religious beliefs and generally mistreat citizens. Socialism inevitably leads to an authoritarian regime and the result is severe losses of freedom and abuses of citizens for a plethora of made-up reasons. If Democrats think socialism is such a good idea, they should move to North Korea, Venezuela, Brazil or China and enjoy the benefits of a socialist order. They can always come back through the porous Southern border where they will be flown to cities around the country at taxpayer expense and don’t have to prove they were vaccinated to enter.