Congratulations, It’s a Parking Garage

I bet if you were free to build anything you wanted on a prime piece of Dayton real estate, say the intersection of Patterson Blvd. and the Great Miami River, you would build a business that would attract lots of people from all over to make lots of money. This location overlooking the Mad River merging with the Great Miami, overlooking the fountains, cries out for a thriving business that would bring people downtown every day. One of the last things you would build is a parking garage because that would squander one of the most beautiful locations in Dayton.

But Dayton’s rulers think they’re smarter than everybody else, so they’re putting a parking garage there. Instead of a thriving business where people could sit on a patio and enjoy Dayton’s most valuable natural resource and natural beauty, they’re building a parking garage that nobody will enjoy and will create virtually no wealth. It will just be another centrally planned eyesore along the river.

Maybe I’m being too harsh. At least they’re not putting a school there. They already put a school on the other side of the river. At least they’re not putting a park there. They put a wealth-destroying park across the street and across the river too. At least they’re not putting a firehouse there. They put a firehouse at Main Street overlooking the river; squandering another beautiful location.

This parking garage will serve residents and employees of PNC bank in Crawford Hoyings’ Water Street Redevelopment partially paid for by money stolen from taxpayers. Dayton’s rulers are very generous at giving money stolen from taxpayers to their rich cronies. The Dayton Daily News, parroting Dayton’s rulers, calls this Filling a need in downtown Dayton. Maybe they haven’t noticed half the commercial and residential space downtown is empty. All this building will do is take the riverfront away from the people of Dayton. Because of its central plan, it will attract few to visit, let alone move downtown. Our rulers tell us people are moving downtown, but they’re only moving because they are stealing money from taxpayers and using that money to subsidize their rent, making everybody but the recipients and themselves poorer. Oddly, our rulers and their media propagandists never report that as downtown becomes more impoverished every year.

In a related story, Dayton’s rulers will start their centrally planned Riverscape River Run whitewater project on the Great Miami River this year. The $4 million project is supposed to attract people downtown, as if a thirty-second whitewater ride with a view of Dayton’s scenic parking garage, school and firehouse is any attraction. At least the parks are pretty. Since there’s little to do downtown because our rulers bankrupted all the businesses, anybody who does show up will zip in and out of town without spending a dime. This is another waste of money, but at least it was raised voluntarily.

In contrast, the NBA finals featured images of the beautiful San Antonio Riverwalk. The San Antonio River, a creek by Ohio standards, teems with thriving businesses. Hoards of people visit and spend money there all day, every day, creating wealth that benefits everybody. It attracts tourists from around the world.

Dayton could be even better. If Dayton’s rulers freed the river, entrepreneurs would invest their own money and transform it into a world-class attraction and wealth-creation district in no time, but our rulers couldn’t profit off money stolen from taxpayers that way. They aren’t stupid. They’re using their power to legally steal to greedily advance their personal economic interests. They’ll make lots of money from the perfectly legal kickbacks they receive from these plutocrat enrichment projects.

Theft of wealth and central planning by Dayton’s rulers are the problem, not the solution to Dayton’s economic woes.

Schizophrenic Middle East Policy

Iraq as we knew it is gone. In a modern blitzkrieg, fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, also called ISIL), allied with Sunni militias and carved the Sunni Triangle out of Iraq. Formerly called al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the main enemy US troops fought during the Iraq surge, al Qaeda kicked the organization out of the al Qaeda umbrella for being too vicious. Pictures of ISIS fighters executing Iraqi soldiers, the same Iraqi soldiers Americans paid with blood and treasure to train for eleven years and who, despite greatly outnumbering the rebels, collapsed like a child’s backyard tent in a rainstorm, flood the internet. ISIS is enforcing Sharia law in every town it conquers.

Taking advantage of the situation, the Kurds took Kirkuk, effectively declaring their independence. Iraq is effectively split along tribal lines: Kurds to the north, Sunnis in the west, and Shia to the south.

President Obama and his minions feigned surprise, but they’re lying. This result was predicted during the debate before the US invaded Iraq, and has been repeatedly predicted since. Reminding us that even a broken clock is right twice a day, then-Senator Joe Biden advocated dividing the country along sectarian lines to prevent just this kind of result once the US pulled out. He was roundly ridiculed. Obama even created a secret plan to stop ISIS from taking over Iraq a year ago. It failed.

In 2007, Ilana Mercer wrote, “Once we decamp, some Saddam-like strongman will fill the power vacuum left. The dictator to emerge from the ruins of Iraq will impose Sharia, pray to the hidden Imam, and compel women to walk about in black nose bags. We had it good with Saddam because he was secular, an enemy of fundamentalist Islam. Can we have back what, in our folly, we fouled up? No.” Oh, for the good old days of Saddam.

But this rebellion wasn’t only predictable; the US precipitated it with its policy in Syria. For years the US has been arming the Syrian rebels, and ISIS is the main fighting faction of those rebels. The US claims it doesn’t arm ISIS, but that’s a pretense. It directly arms supposedly moderate rebels knowing full well those rebels funnel the weapons to ISIS fighters because they’re on the forefront of combat. Arming the other factions just enables team Obama to implausibly claim “plausible deniability.” And not only is the US arming ISIS through its rebel allies, US proxies Saudi Arabia and Qatar are arming ISIS directly. Even Washington Post propagandists were forced to admit the civil wars in Iraq and Syria are really one war, and the US is on both sides.

It’s easy to think of any government as a monolithic entity, but like every other organization, the reality is it’s made up of individuals, each with their own goals. The US government is arming both sides, either as a matter of policy or it’s being done by different factions in the government. Iran is enemy number one in the Middle East, followed by Syria, and the Iraqi government is an ally of both, so it’s likely the US is secretly backing ISIS to weaken the Shiite-controlled government of Iraq. Maybe that’s why Iraqi soldiers claim they were ordered to abandon Mosul to the rebels.

The New York Times reports, “‘What we see in Iraq today is in many ways a culmination of what the I.S.I. has been trying to accomplish since its founding in 2006,’ said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New America Foundation, referring to the Islamic State in Iraq, the predecessor of ISIS.” With the NSA collecting every electronic communication in Iraq, it’s not credible that US agents were unaware ISIS always intended to attack Iraq. They gleefully destroyed old WWI treaty barriers between Iraq and Syria and triumphantly tweeted about erasing the Sykes-Picot Agreement that created that boundary.

Now Obama is sending 575 non-combat troops equipped for combat, whatever that means, back into Iraq. He calls 300 advisors, as if Iraqi troops need advice. He’s flying surveillance missions with fighter planes. He plans to oust Prime Minister Maliki and replace him with someone less friendly to Iran. He’s marching the US back into war one step at a time even though 74 percent of Americans are against going back. The Sunnis don’t want Americans there. The Shiites Americans would supposedly be protecting don’t want Americans there. The military doesn’t want to go back. The only people who have something to gain are the warmongers and war profiteers who instigated this disaster in the first place. They claim everything was great while the US was in Iraq while shamelessly proclaiming their support for the troops they killed before and the ones they plan to kill in the future.

Justin Raimondo summarizes, “If ever there was a crisis entirely created in Washington, what is happening in Iraq today is a textbook case.” The last thing we need is to get more Americans killed and create more terrorists by returning to Iraq.

America Has Gone to the Police Dogs

The topic of dangerous dogs has been in the news quite a bit lately, but the news rarely covers the most dangerous dogs of all: police dogs. The German shepherd was a ubiquitous symbol of the Nazi police state, so much so German shepherds were stigmatized for decades after WWII. Now they’ve become ubiquitous tools of the US police state. Cops understand that threatening serfs with large dogs invokes a primal terror, so they systematically use police dogs to terrorize Americans.

Not satisfied with inflicting terror, The Telegraph reports one way police make police dogs more dangerous, “AMERICAN police dogs are being equipped with a new weapon in the fight against crime: titanium false teeth designed to improve their bite - and their grip - on anyone trying to escape the law.” Titanium has a high strength-to-density ratio and is highly resistant to corrosion. Because of its high melting point, it’s also hard to work with, but nothing is too good or too expensive for US police when it comes to terrorizing Americans.

And this story gets worse. “‘Before [a police dog] had these fitted, he was hesitant to bite,’ said Tim Ellis, a sheriff's department deputy who has worked with dogs in Polk County, 40 miles south of Orlando, Florida, for the past five years,’ the paper continued. “‘Both these teeth were damaged and it was interfering with his work. We had to do something to maintain his biting proficiency and getting the titanium teeth fitted seemed the best solution.’” In normal society, this would be considered animal cruelty, but in the twisted world of the US police state, the more damage government enforcers and their attack dogs can inflict on their victims, the better.

It’s funny to see police make excuses for the dangerous dogs they create. CBS tells the story of escaped police dogs in Denver. “The dogs are highly trained, but the sheriff’s office says they are not at all killers,” reports CBS. That’s reassuring. “They worry that if approached the wrong way by someone the dogs could react aggressively, making finding them a priority for their office.” Nevermind. Apparently they are killers, buf if the dogs kill somebody, it’s the victim’s fault for approaching them the wrong way. It has nothing to do with owners training them to attack and their negligence in caring for them. Michael Vick went to prison for training dogs to fight other dogs, but when our rulers train them to attack people, we’re supposed to bow down and thank them.

Comparing how government and its propagandists treat government dogs to how they treat people and their dogs illustrates the sickness of our society. Last July, the Dayton Daily News ran a story on the death of a Bellbrook Fire Department dog which died of cancer. It didn’t run a story when my dog died of cancer.

Last June police arrested Florida linebacker Antonio Morrison for barking back at a police dog after the dog had barked at him. He was arrested “for interfering with a police canine”.

William Norman Grigg describes a police attack in Aurora, Colorado. “Cell phone video of the police assault shows a wall of officers in riot gear directing ‘non-lethal’ fire at a group of unarmed and terrified civilians — including several small children, who were shielded by a man who appeared to be their father,” Grigg wrote. “Another officer unleashed a police dog, which immediately attacked a stroller containing an infant. A bystander who interposed himself — and was mauled by the dog for doing so — probably saved the child’s life.” Titanium teeth make it easier to kill babies in strollers.

And police may be the biggest threat to your dog’s life. A Google search for “police kill dog” returns 51,500,000 hits. A DDN search for the same string returns 319 hits. If you think there are checks and balances limiting police killing of dogs, you’re wrong. The DDN reveals, “There have been 44 Dayton Police Department internal investigations of officers discharging firearms at dogs since 2008, according to a review of police records. Officers were cleared of any wrongdoing in all cases.” Of course they were. Police investigations of themselves are always a sham. It’s like a mafia enforcer investigating himself. In 2010 an Oakwood cop shot dead a dog on a tether instead of backing up out of reach like a normal person, the only firearm discharge by an Oakwood cop in 25 years. Needless to say, Oakwood police cleared him of any wrongdoing. If you had done the same, you would have been prosecuted.

And you can’t trust police reports. In 2008, an Oklahoma cop killed a dog, claiming he feared for his life. Unfortunately for the cop, the canicide was caught on video. Police subsequently tried to bribe the owner to keep her from showing the video. She refused, so you can see the cop killing her dog at theagitator.com.

Denver’s three missing police dogs are worth $100,000. Yours are only good for target practice.

There’s no defense against America’s supreme predators.

Obama Unleashed

With the 2014 election all but sure to be a wave election for Republicans, President Obama must feel he’s finally unleashed to do things he’s wanted to do for over five years, but was reluctant to because of political consequences. For those of us who put in the work before the 2008 election to discover who Obama really is and what his goals really are, this is frightening.

Obama is a follower of Columbia professors Cloward and Piven. In 1966 they developed the Cloward-Piven strategy for collapsing the US crony-capitalist system by overwhelming the welfare system. From Wikipedia: “They stated that full enrollment of those eligible for welfare ‘would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments’ that would ‘deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas.’”

This wasn’t simply an academic discussion. Activists in New York City bankrupted the government by swelling the welfare rolls. Robert Chandler writes, “The socialist test case for using society’s poor and disadvantaged people as sacrificial ‘shock troops,’ in accordance with the Cloward-Piven strategy, was demonstrated in 1975, when new prospective welfare recipients flooded New York City with payment demands, bankrupting the government.” New York state government almost went bankrupt too.

Cloward and Piven applied strategy developed by infamous Chicago Marxist community organizer Saul Alinsky who dedicated his handbook on community organizing to Lucifer. ACORN was formed to implement the Cloward-Piven strategy around the country. Then community organizer Obama, a student of Alinsky, joined ACORN to help implement the strategy. After obtaining his law degree, Obama taught Alinsky to students at Chicago Law School. Around this time avowed Marxist and domestic terrorist Bill Ayers chose Obama to run his Chicago Annenberg Challenge program, designed to radicalize Chicago students.

As an aside, Hillary Clinton is also a proud student of Saul Alinsky; she wrote her senior college thesis about him then tried to keep it secret.

Finally, when Obama first moved to Chicago, he sought out a church, choosing the church of virulent racist Reverend Wright whom Obama called his mentor and who taught his own brand of Black Liberation Theology, a philosophy with Marxist roots. Wright claimed that government created HIV to wipe out “people of color.” Wright cursed, “God damn America.”

Collapsing the US system has been Obama’s life’s work, exposed by the choices he made and the people he sought out, and it hasn’t changed. In March of 2013, Obama quoted Alinsky to Israeli college students. But so far through his presidency, with the exception of Obamacare which was designed to overwhelm our healthcare system in Cloward and Piven fashion by driving up prices, reducing the number of doctors, and increasing the number of patients, Congress hasn’t passed much that promoted his destructive agenda. Increasing spending, taxes and regulation alone will not overwhelm the system.

That’s why Obama, feeling free from political constraints, began implementing damaging policies dictatorially.

In 2008 Obama promised to bankrupt the coal industry, severely reducing supply and raising the cost of energy. Obama recently fulfilled that promise with an EPA regulation requiring power plants to cut CO2 emissions by 30 percent by 2030. This effectively bans coal power plants. Patrick Michaels explains this isn’t about global warming or politics. “The EPA’s own model, ironically acronymed MAGICC, estimates that its new policies will prevent a grand total of 0.018ºC in warming by 2100,” he wrote. “Obviously, that’s not enough to satisfy the steadily shrinking percentage of Americans who think global warming is a serious problem.” This is about raising prices and overwhelming our power grid in Cloward and Piven fashion, creating rolling blackouts and riots on the way to collapsing the system.

In the south, a sudden, inexplicable flood of under-aged illegal immigrants is overwhelming the US immigration system in Cloward and Piven fashion. Tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors coached to surrender to border agents have created a humanitarian crisis in Texas and Arizona, both red states, but not in California or New Mexico, both blue states. Obama plans to give them all lawyers and bring their parents to the US to further overwhelm the system. Former border agents told World Net Daily Obama orchestrated this: “‘This is not a humanitarian crisis. It is a predictable, orchestrated and contrived assault on the compassionate side of Americans by her political leaders that knowingly puts minor illegal alien children at risk for purely political purposes,’ said the statement released by the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers.” They claim US agents are shepherding children through the dangerous Mexican passage.

Obama won’t stop there, but he needn't worry. The Federal Reserve, under President Bush’s appointee Ben Bernanke, has already blown the bubble that will collapse our system for him. Obama is just piling on.

Blame the Fed

With President Obama stomping all over the world, destroying wealth like Godzilla, and making deadly foreign enemies and domestic political enemies of Democrats, it’s easy to blame him for our economic problems. And there’s a lot of truth in that. Personal Liberty Digest reports, “‘From 2009 to 2013, regulators have published $494 billion in final rules,’ Sam Batkins, director of regulatory policy at the American Action Forum, wrote in the report. ‘This figure dwarfs the gross domestic product (GDP) from countries like Sweden, Peru, and Ireland. With more than $87.6 billion in proposed rule costs this year, burdens will continue to increase in 2014.’”

Obama has also increased taxes and spending, which takes resources away from the productive private sector and squanders them in the parasitic political economy. Economist Robert Higgs explains, “Private investment is the most important driver of economic progress. Entrepreneurs need new structures, equipment, and software to produce new products, to produce existing products at lower cost, and to make use of new technology that requires embodiment in machinery, plant layouts, and other aspects of the existing capital stock.”

Higgs tells why Obama compounds the lack of investment problem with regime uncertainty. “Regime uncertainty pertains to more than the government's laws, regulations, and administrative decisions. For one thing, as the saying goes, ‘personnel is policy.’ Two administrations may administer or enforce identical statutes and regulations quite differently,” he writes. “A business-hostile administration such as Franklin D. Roosevelt's or Barack Obama's will provoke more apprehension among investors than a business-friendlier administration such as Dwight D. Eisenhower's or Ronald Reagan's, even if the underlying ‘rules of the game’ are identical on paper.”

But while Obama visibly stunts economic growth, the Federal Reserve (Fed) is quietly doing even greater damage. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed has printed untold trillions of dollars in an attempt to recreate the bubble that popped in 2008, as if that is a good idea. Most central banks followed suit, and they’ve succeeded to an extent. US and world stock markets are near record highs. Yields on bonds remain low. The number of millionaire households is soaring. Demand and therefore price for luxury items, especially New York City condos, has skyrocketed. Even the International Monetary Fund has warned of a global housing bubble. Because the Fed has printed an unprecedented amount of money, this bubble is unprecedentedly large.

When the Fed prints money, it doesn’t reach everybody at the same time. It first goes to the big New York banks. The bankers spend it first, which drives up prices for luxury items, especially condos in New York. The money meanders through the economy, inflating the bank accounts of rich people first, and causing prices to rise. Poor people see little of the money, but they have to pay the higher prices. Printing money also steals people’s savings. The result is a fantastic transfer of wealth from poor people to rich people.

Our rulers tell us this creates jobs, but they lie. The poor jobs report in May exposed the lie that harsh weather kept the economy down during the winter. Because of all this printing of money, our economy remains stagnant. Official unemployment remains over 6 percent, but that’s only because seven million people have dropped out of the workforce since Obama took office. And the jobs that have been created are low paying jobs compared to the jobs destroyed.

Economist Frank Shostak explains in order to begin growing again, the economy must liquidate unproductive businesses, but the Fed won’t let that happen. “Most commentators are of the view that the Fed’s massive monetary pumping of 2008 has prevented a major economic disaster. We suggest that the massive pumping has bought time for non-productive bubble activities, thereby weakening the economy as a whole,” he writes. “Contrary to popular thinking, an economic cleansing is a must to ‘fix’ the mess caused by the Fed’s loose policies. To prevent future economic pain, what is required is the closure of all the loopholes for the creation of money out of ‘thin air.’”

Banker Patrick Barron describes central bank policy, “[Central banks] are following Keynesian dogma that increasing aggregate demand will spur an increase in employment and production. So far all that these central banks have managed to do is inflate their own balance sheets and saddle their governments with debt.”

Barron concludes, “New fiat money cannot conjure goods out of thin air, the way central banks conjure money out of thin air… In fact rather than stimulate the economy to greater output, bank credit expansion causes capital destruction and a lower standard of living in the future than would have been the case otherwise. Governments and central bankers should concentrate on restoring economic freedom and sound money respectively.”

Like all bubbles, this bubble will pop. It’s inevitable, and it’s global. Because it’s the biggest bubble in US history, it will produce the biggest crash in US history. The only unknowns are when the crash will strike in earnest and whether it will be inflationary or deflationary.

VA Scandals Never End

Veterans Administration (VA) scandals are as old as the VA. I can’t remember a president who didn’t have one. President Obama knows this. He criticized President Bush for a VA scandal. Despite the never-ending failures at the VA, Obama and his minions pushed the VA as a model for healthcare, via Obamacare, for all Americans. World Net Daily reports, “WND has discovered that during his transition into the White House in 2008-09, President Obama proposed in his ‘Obama-Biden’ plan to ‘make the VA a leader of national health care reform so that veterans get the best care possible.’”

In a representative piece quoted by Truth Revolt, Paul Krugman wrote with breathtaking dishonesty, “Multiple surveys have found the VHA [Veterans Health Administration] providing better care than most Americans receive, even as the agency has held cost increases well below those facing Medicare and private insurers…the VHA is an integrated system, which provides health care as well as paying for it. So it’s free from the perverse incentives created when doctors and hospitals profit from expensive tests and procedures, whether or not those procedures actually make medical sense.”

Ask Paul Krugman if he thinks Exxon should have a monopoly on oil and gas production, refinement, and delivery, and he will undoubtedly explain why monopolies are always a bad idea. Yet he claims a government monopoly on health care is better than a competitive system. Furthermore, the costs for the VA skyrocketed from $88.8 billion in 2007 to $123.5 billion in 2012.

This propaganda wins Nobel Prizes in upside-down world.

Obama played stupid when the news broke, like he had no idea of the problems at the VA. Like he wouldn’t keep on top of the model for his signature legislation. He probably ordered the cover-up and counted on his accomplice press to keep it quiet.

And the cover-up continues. The VA initially admitted 23 veterans died due to long waits for health care, but the Dayton Daily News discovered, “The VA paid $188.7 million to resolve claims where the description includes ‘delay’ of care — including $64 million paid for 304 cases that resulted in death.” That’s since 2001. And the VA is rife with corruption beyond long waits including falsifying records and leaving the bodies of vets unburied in morgues for over a year. The extent of corruption is unfathomable to most Americans because most Americans work in the private sector, but it’s typical of socialist programs. We just don’t hear about it much with other programs because they don’t leave vets sick and dead.

Krugman concluded, “Yes, this is ‘socialized medicine’…But it works, and suggests what it will take to solve the troubles of US health care more broadly.” You can’t make this stuff up.

With every new VA scandal comes calls for heads to roll to fix it. These calls are misguided.  Every socialized medicine system in the world has the same problems because the problem is inherent in socialism. Socialism can’t be fixed.

The root problem is socialism has no prices and no profits. The people in charge cannot perform economic calculation. Unable to do so, they can’t make rational economic decisions about providing their service. The VA could be run by the most intelligent, compassionate and experienced people in the world, and it would still be terrible because those people wouldn’t have the price information necessary to provide an effective service. Instinctively, people at the VA know this. That’s why they outsource some of their care to the fascist, misnamed private healthcare system. While greatly perverted by government to the detriment of consumers, the fascist system at least has prices and profits. Economic calculation can still be performed, making the system less bad.

Unable to perform economic calculation, socialists make rational decisions that advance their own interests based on other factors, mainly politics. Economist Ryan McMaken explains why government is obsessed with providing health care, “The reason for this of course is that by providing health care directly through VA health care and VA hospitals, government can more easily subsidize and favor certain corporations and other government contractors who provide drugs, equipment and services to VA providers. If veterans were simply given stipends, then the veterans themselves might choose the ‘wrong’ (i.e., not-politically-favored) providers. ...

“Consequently, the real constituents of the VA are the corporate providers of health care supplies and services, not the veterans themselves. So who can be surprised when we find that the veterans are being treated like garbage? ... Any intelligent VA official quickly figures out how to thrive in that system.”

You might think Speaker Boehner’s call to privatize the VA is good news, but don’t be fooled. As crooked as Obama, Boehner is playing politics too. The Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress for four years and did nothing to abolish the VA. When out of power, Republicans pretend to support smaller government to win votes, but when in power, they rule no differently than Democrats. Both parties profit from socialism, so both parties advance socialism at the expense of the people.

The Progressives Won

The state has a problem. Since it exists by stealing wealth from the people, it must control the people to keep them from resisting. To maximize the wealth it steals, it must engender the loyalty of the people. But familial loyalty competes against loyalty to the state, so the state wages war on the family to undermine familial loyalty and turn that loyalty to itself. Of course, most of the progressives who control both political parties will never admit this. Feminists are the exception.

Economic Policy Journal quotes Linda Gordon, “The nuclear family must be destroyed… Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process,” and Robin Morgan, “We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.”

USA Today reports mission accomplished, “A record-low 51 percent of adults aged 18 and older in the United States were married in 2010, compared with 72 percent in 1960, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census data.”

Progressives accomplished this using carrots - welfare - and sticks - fear and war. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson pushed the warfare agenda with the Philippine occupation and WWI. Franklin Roosevelt expanded welfare with Social Security and the New Deal and warfare with WWII. Lyndon Johnson further expanded welfare with Medicare and warfare in Vietnam. The income tax, Federal Reserve, war on drugs, and every other coercive policy weakens families by taking wealth and power from them too. Since Kennedy, every president has expanded both the warfare and welfare state, undermining the family with every coercive new policy. Every power the people allow the state, it uses as a weapon against them.

But nothing has done more to destroy the family than government schools. US government schools are modeled on the Prussian system which was specifically designed to pry children from their families and engender loyalty to the state. For most children, the scariest day of their childhood is the day government kidnaps them from their parents, locks them into prison-schools and chains them to a desk. Government agents - teachers - brainwash them with terror tactics including lockdown drills and alarmism about global warming. The Globe and Mail reports, “Child psychiatrists, psychologists and educators say they’ve seen an escalation in the anxiety levels of today’s youth, who are constantly exposed to doomsday talk about the destruction of our planet.” Children are also encouraged to spy on their parents.

Butler Shaffer explains that regimentation is the most important “R” of government schools, “A newspaper headline reads: ‘Parent-teacher collaboration key to improving student behavior.’ Behavior, not learning, is the stated objective, and now such ends are openly admitted. I can just imagine government-school administrators and teachers pondering the question: ‘how are we gonna’ make the little bastards obey us?’” Government schools aren’t about teaching children to learn. They’re primarily about brainwashing children to obey.

But government schools are grossly unnatural and harmful to children. Healthy children rebel. For that, government agents punish them, and if punishment doesn’t work, other government agents - doctors - drug them into submission.

Government schools cause serious health problems for children. One in thirteen children are on psych meds. In 2011, the CDC reported one in 88 American children had autism. By 2014, the number jumped to one in 68. This is insane. These children aren’t, or weren’t, unhealthy. Government coercion makes them unhealthy.

And boys are diagnosed more often than girls. If a boy acts like a boy, he’s considered mentally ill, diagnosed with either ADHD or autism, and medicated into submission. If a boy acts like a girl, he’s considered transgender, his fantasy is nurtured, not rejected, and progressives compel others to treat him as a girl. This too is insane. When children fantasize about invisible friends, nobody nurtures that fantasy. If a child thinks he’s a dog, nobody nurtures that fantasy. But progressive insanity forces society to support transgender fantasies to the point of delusion. Government schools allow delusional children to use the other gender’s bathroom. The concerns of non-delusional students and their parents don’t matter.

The New York Times highlights this madness, “The night before Susan and Rob allowed their son to go to preschool in a dress, they sent an email to parents of his classmates. Alex, they wrote, ‘has been gender-fluid for as long as we can remember, and at the moment he is equally passionate about and identified with soccer players and princesses, superheroes and ballerinas (not to mention lava and unicorns, dinosaurs and glitter rainbows).’” These parents demand everybody else conform to their damaging parenting.

The progressives have won. Masculinity is a mental illness. Men must act like girls to be considered normal in progressive’s upside-down world. Progressives broke marriage and family institutions then patted gays on the head and gave them their discarded marriage institution. They viciously demand votes in return for their poisoned gifts. Now the first gay Episcopal bishop is divorcing his husband. Some victory. The only victor in all this is the state.