George Rebane
Freedom and equality have never been bedfellows – naturally enabled inequality in all dimensions is the litmus test for a free society.
‘The Myth of Wage Stagnation’ is explained by Phil Gramm and John Early. Dr Gramm is an economist and the former chair of the Senate Banking Committee. Dr John Early is the former assistant commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Convincing the country’s lightly read that middle class wages have stagnated for decades is the Democrats’ sine qua non Big Lie, along with ongoing fake news reports, required to beat President Trump in 2020. The basis of their argument reduces to, ‘Do you believe your lying eyes or what we’re telling you?’ After supplying the reader with a snootfull of relevant economic data, Gramm and Early conclude with – “The suggestion that America hasn’t gotten a raise in 46 years doesn’t pass the laugh test. Poor measurements of compensation are more than misleading; they also cause many voters and policy makers to favor redistribution that would depress growth and compensation. Nothing is more critical to promoting sound policy than measuring economic outcomes accurately. A nation is only as good as its facts.” (more here)
Speaking of facts, our educational systems are supposed to teach us both facts about the world and how to deal with them to create wealth and benefit society. Two men who have outdone themselves to hinder America in these pursuits are David Coleman and the late Howard Zinn. Coleman is the maven behind the disastrous Common Core curriculum (extensively covered in these pages) that has put the latest dent into our public education system, and the man who is also the architect of taking down the merit-based SAT by appending to it a proprietary and secret “adversity score” to aid colleges in returning to sub-rosa, race-based admission policies. (more here). Zinn is the author of the notorious revisionist and widely-used The People’s History of the United States (1980) that has mangled the historical view of two generations of our country’s high school and college students. Historian Wilfred McClay has now written a counterpoint text, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story. While not “some saccharine whitewash of American history”, the tome does correct the country’s past from Zinn’s version as “a comic-book melodrama in which ‘the people’ are constantly being abused by ‘the rulers.’”, that explains today’s younger generation’s love affair with socialism. (more here)
Power from magnets may provide us a more hopeful future if the ‘Earth Engine’ prototypes of industrial engineer Dennis Danzick pan out. He claims to have cracked the long-hidden code of how to suck net energy out of magnetic fields, and has demonstrated the process as something that could soon be commercialized. No one, including Danzick, has yet to explain the physics of this contraption, and a couple of prominent physicists have poo-poohed the whole thing as yet the promotion of the latest perpetual motion machine. You can see a live stream of the ‘Crystal’ version of the engine working at the facilities of Inductance Energy located in Scottsdale, AZ. (more here and here)
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