A Grotesque Political Party

The Democrat Party has descended into weirdness, emptiness, and obsession.

The United States has a long tradition of reliance on a two-party political structure. For that structure to function effectively both parties need to be competent and responsible. Unfortunately, that is not the case now.

The lineup of Democrat presidential candidates currently stands at 25 and growing. Conrad Black has aptly described them as “unelectable non-entities.” The long and growing list is more like a tower of babel than a collection of credible leaders. Evidence of that is that leading the race currently is former senator and vice president Joe Biden.

Beyond the confines of the Democrat Party the reaction to Biden’s candidacy is typically, “Is this a joke?” Joe Biden? The guy is a goof. He is known primarily for his gaffes, flip-flops, plagiarism, and unwelcome advances toward women. The very fact he is leading the race is a sad indictment on all the other candidates.

The unreality of all the candidates’ policy positions, e.g. the Green New Deal, sanctuary cities, open borders, unlimited taxpayer-funded abortions, should be obvious to all sentient beings.

Democrats label all Trump supporters as racists, just as Hillary Clinton labeled them all “deplorables.” Trump supporters are seen as homogeneous members of a collective. It’s another variation on the Party’s addiction to identity politics and also a good definition of bigotry.

I don’t know about you but I don’t appreciate being labeled a racist by people who’ve never met me and know nothing about me. Racism is one of the ugliest of all slurs, one that is almost impossible to defend against. It is a Democrat proclivity that will surely shrink their voter base.

Furthermore, what is their definition of a racist? It must include every person who’s ever had a fleeting thought of racial differences. That’s the only way you could get tens of millions of “racists.” The entire party has become a bunch of Jussie Smollett clones.

Why do they rely so much on accusations of racism? Because it works, because they have nothing else, and because they have no shame.

Democrats also have the annoying habit of making wild, unsubstantiated exaggerations. Three examples are the significance and prevalence of “white supremacy,” “Russian meddling,” and “voter suppression.” Such accusations are never defined and never quantified.

The dearth of leaders for the party is nothing new. Consider who their previous nominees were — Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. What a strange collection of characters. To paraphrase William F. Buckley, “I’d rather be governed by the first 24 names in the phone book than any of these people.”

Hillary Clinton was an incredibly bad candidate. Why was she nominated? Amazingly, it was because she was the best they had! We can thank our lucky stars she’s not president and Bill is not the “first gentleman.”

Nancy Pelosi is currently the most powerful Democrat. She is the face of the party (as well as the hands). Is she someone who will inspire independents to become Democrats? Democrats love her. Conservatives can barely stand to look at her.

The most incompetently managed, crime-ridden cities in the country are run solely by Democrats. If they can’t run cities why would anyone want them to run the country? Those cities should be seen as canaries in the coal mine.

“Impeach Trump!” Would you mind telling me for what, specifically? Could you name just one of his “crimes and misdemeanors?” They’ve offered nothing but a bunch of vacuous accusations, e.g. he’s “unfit” to be president.

The Mueller report took 22 months and could not find any collusion or obstruction. It was based on something so flimsy and ludicrous it should not have taken more than 22 minutes to evaluate and reject. Even now the Democrats cannot let go of it.

To Democrats way of thinking the very thought of Donald Trump being president is simply too horrible to contemplate. He has driven the Democrats to distraction.

As Victor Davis Hanson wrote recently, “One way of envisioning the Democratic obsession with Trump is as an addiction.” Unfortunately, there are no rehab programs for political parties.

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◼ A Grotesque Political Party June 14, 2019

Ron Ross Ph.D. is a former economics professor and author of The Unbeatable Market. Ron resides in Arcata, California and is a founder of Premier Financial Group, a wealth management firm located in Eureka, California. He is a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma and can be reached at rossecon@gmail.com.

Intellectual Poverty on the Left

You may have noticed that conservatives are blessed with an impressive lineup of intellectual heavyweights. Liberals have none, literally none. A few of those on the conservative side are Thomas Sowell, Victor Davis Hanson, Dennis Prager, Shelby Steele, Jordan Peterson, and Mark Levin.

Thomas Sowell is an economist, ex-Marine, Hoover Institution scholar, and the author of over 30 books. If you’ve never read one you don’t know what you’re missing. Two of his classics are Knowledge and Decisions and The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. He is well known for his many pearls of wisdom which he terms, “random thoughts on the passing scene.” Those now can be found on Twitter.

Jordan Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Hillsdale College. He is best known for his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Several million copies have been sold. It was even a number-one bestseller in Sweden. If you read that book you will understand life better, and if you follow the rules you will be a better person. The book is nothing short of a masterpiece.

Jordan Peterson is possibly the wisest man alive. Fortunately for the rest of us he shares his wisdom through his books, interviews, podcasts, and seminars. Peterson is despised by the left. That says much more about them than him.

Besides his columns, daily radio show, and books, Dennis Prager is the founder and frequent contributor to Prager University. Prager U presents concise, thoughtful five-minute lectures on a weekly basis, and recently reached a milestone of two billion views. His latest book is The Rational Bible: Genesis.

Victor Davis Hanson is a former professor of classical Greek history and is also a scholar at the Hoover Institution. He writes columns usually once or twice a week and appears on Fox News about as often. The amount of logic and historical perspective he includes in his columns is mind-boggling. His latest book is The Case for Trump.

Mark Levin is founder of the Landmark Legal Foundation, the author of several best-selling books, host of a daily radio show and a weekly hour-long interview show on Fox News. His just published book, Unfreedom of the Press, is the number one best seller on Amazon. Levin never leaves you wondering what he believes.

Shelby Steele is another scholar at the Hoover Institution and the author of The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, and Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country. His essays appear regularly on the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages.

You cannot name a single liberal who has anything approaching the above credentials or intellectual output. Why? There are a number of reasons.

Liberalism is fundamentally about feelings rather than thoughts. Also the left focuses on intentions, the right focuses on results and the ways by which results are achieved.

An advantage of making intentions your goal is that once you choose and announce them, you’re done. No need to follow up to see if your intentions were realized. No need to consider second or third order effects.

Leftism is about force, conservatism is about freedom and voluntary exchange. The use of force needs no theory or ideology. Anyone willing to rely on force to accomplish his or her objectives doesn’t really need to understand how the world works.

The mindset of the writers listed above reflects what is written in Ecclesiastes, “And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven… and I gave my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly.”

The foremost source of the left’s intellectual poverty is arrogance. Arrogance kills curiosity. Those on the left feel they already know all they need to know. They have nothing left to learn or to bother thinking deeply about. Ironically, they feel intellectually superior to conservatives.

A prerequisite for being a serious thinker is curiosity. It requires being curious about how things work — society, the economy, human nature, for example. Curiosity is the incentive for doing the hard work of study and serious thought.

The left also feels morally superior to any of our predecessors. Conservatives, on the other hand, possess a deep respect and reverence for the wisdom we’ve inherited from, for example, the Greeks, the Bible, Shakespeare, and the Founding Fathers.

Isaac Newton famously said, “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Even Newton needed to know what those preceding him had discovered. On the left there’s no gratitude for the wisdom endowed to us by our forebears. Rather than gratitude there’s disdain, another reflection of their arrogance.

The opposite of arrogance is humility. As Isaac Newton also recognized, “What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.”

A 2018 study reported in the Journal of Positive Psychology entitled “Links Between Intellectual Humility and Acquiring Knowledge” found that Intellectual humility (IH)

was associated with a variety of characteristics associated with knowledge acquisition, including reflective thinking, need for cognition, intellectual engagement, curiosity, intellectual openness, and open-minded thinking.… These links may help explain the observed relationship between IH and possessing more knowledge.

The entire study, by Elizabeth Krumrei-Mancuso, Megan Haggard et al., is worth reading.

As long as the left holds on to its arrogance it will never match the richness of the right’s intellectual offerings. It’s another reason why being a conservative is a whole lot more fun than being a liberal.

Fossil Fuels Phobia

Democrats always wind up hurting those they ostensibly care about.

The Democrat Party’s Green New Deal is nothing but a pipe dream. Its only value is to serve as a reminder of the party’s fossil fuels’ lunacy.

Fossil fuels are an issue that sharply distinguishes Democrats from Republicans. Republicans consider fossil fuels a blessing, Democrats consider them a curse. Democrats openly advocate leaving our fossil fuels in the ground beyond the reach of humans. The radical environmentalist group Greenpeace is waging a “keep it in the ground” campaign.

The Democrats protest every attempt to increase the supply and reduce the prices of oil and gas. They fight fracking, pipelines, offshore drilling, and development of ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Reserve). They have advocated special taxes on fossil fuels (the “carbon tax”), and arbitrary mileage requirements for cars and trucks. Fracking is banned in the entire state of New York. They guilt-trip everyone for their so-called “carbon footprints.”

Fossil fuels provide a wide array of benefits to humans. Those benefits are nothing short of profound — warmth, mobility, illumination, cooking, air-conditioning, just to name a few of the more obvious ones. Fossil fuels are not a minor blessing, they are a gigantic blessing. Without them our living standards would be a fraction of what they are now.

Fossil fuels are the raw materials for a mind-boggling array of products. Natural gas, surprisingly, is the primary ingredient in the production of nitrogen fertilizer, a major factor in “the green revolution.”

When oil and gas prices are low the benefits reverberate throughout the economy. Oil and gas prices can be thought of as “super prices,” prices that affect thousands of other prices. (Other examples of super prices are exchange rates and interest rates.)

Energy is a major cost for businesses and industries. For individuals low oil and gas prices are the equivalents of a pay raise or tax reduction. Democrats claim to be champions of low and middle income groups. Their disdain for the enormous benefits of low prices shows them for the frauds they actually are. Judging by their policies Democrat politicians are economic sadists.

California is an example of what happens when Democrat policies are pursued without opposition. Gasoline prices in the state are typically a dollar per gallon higher than those prevailing in the rest of the U.S.

Another way fossil fuels are a blessing is their sheer abundance. Humans have been enjoying the benefits of fossil fuels for over 200 years and yet the known recoverable reserves are greater than ever before.

Although the physical quantity is no greater than it was at the beginning of that period, our ability to identify and recover what’s there has increased exponentially, basically because human knowledge and technology have increased exponentially. As R.W. Emerson put it, “invention breeds invention.” Amazingly, known reserves are increasing faster than they’re being depleted. The once common concern known as “peak oil” looks silly in hindsight.

The two main factors contributing to the abundance of oil and gas are fracking and horizontal drilling. Fracking makes possible the recovery of oil and gas from shale formations which are common across the globe under both land and sea.

For example, the Permian Basin in southwest Texas is now responsible for a third of all the oil and gas produced in the U.S. Although once a major source of production, it had reached a peak in the early 1970s. With the advent of fracking it is now the world’s most productive oil field, recently surpassing Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar field. A bonus is that oil from the Permian is “sweet” (meaning low sulphur), making it less costly to refine.

Three new pipelines connecting the Permian Basin to the Gulf are scheduled for completion next year. Their combined capacity will be more than 2 million barrels a day.

The abundance of oil within our borders provides us foreign policy flexibility. We can get along just fine without Iranian and Venezuelan oil.

An often underappreciated advantage of fossil fuels is that they are “energy dense.” Solar and wind energy are anything but energy dense because sunlight and wind are not energy dense.

Relying on solar panels to power a thousand homes requires 32 acres of land. Additionally, that land will be taken up for as long as the power is generated. The grotesque solar panels and windmills will be visible for who knows how long. Windmills kill more birds every year than oil spills ever have or ever will.

A major challenge with so-called renewables is storability. The electricity generated by solar and windmills often does not match when it’s needed. Oil, gas, and coal are relatively easy to store and match availability with need. For automobiles, gas tanks are cheaper and last longer than batteries. Filling a gas tank is more time efficient than charging a battery. Time is the scarcest resource.

An oil or gas well requires an opening in the ground approximately one foot in diameter. After the well is completed the drilling rig can be taken away and used again elsewhere. Horizontal drilling reduces the necessary footprint even further by increasing the area reachable from a single well.

Fossil fuels are relatively easy to transport. Oil is a liquid, natural gas is, of course, a gas. Because of those characteristics both can be transported to ports and refineries via pipelines. Pipelines are much cheaper and safer than the alternatives, e.g. trains, ships, and trucks.

Unfortunately, protesters and lawsuit filers do everything in their power to obstruct pipeline construction. Completion of the famous Keystone Pipeline that goes from Canada to the Mississippi River is currently on hold because of one judge’s order. Fortunately, the Trump administration recently submitted a new permit application for the pipeline so it may once again be back on track for completion. Democrats love talking about the need for more investments in “infrastructure,” but anytime it goes from talking to doing they’re missing in action.

So why do Democrats think that fossil fuels are a curse and that we should even cease using them altogether? There is only one reason they offer — the possibility of man-made climate change.

The choice we face is between enormous current benefits that are 100 percent certain compared to the possibility of climate disaster decades in the future. Keep in mind the disaster is a prediction, not a certainty. It is not even a probability, at least not one that has been quantified. Something in the future cannot be certain, especially not decades in the future.

At this point the possible connection between CO2 and climate change is a theory, not a proven fact. The predictions are based entirely on computer models which have been dismal failures in predicting past climate changes. Climate alarmists don’t even offer a clear definition of “climate change.”

Democrats believe that all the benefits we derive from fossil fuels can be derived by developing “alternatives,” the so-called “renewable resources.” Renewable and non-renewable are how they define good and bad. It’s not that simple. In the real world every choice has advantages and disadvantages.

The Democrats’ hostility toward fossil fuels leads them to all kinds of counterproductive policies. Their ethanol mandates result in forty percent of all the land used to grow corn being devoted to ethanol production. Currently that’s over 34 million acres in the U.S. alone. That has the secondary effect of reducing the supply and increasing the prices for food available for humans and other animals, once again exposing the Democrats willingness to punish those they profess to care about.

Ethanol does serious harm to small gasoline engines. (Do not put it in your lawnmower.) Gasoline is oil-based, ethanol is water-based. Mixing them and keeping them mixed is problematic.

Ethanol produces only about two thirds as much energy per gallon as does gasoline. That difference reduces mileage about one to two miles per gallon, ironically at the same time the government is increasing mileage requirements. In light of the abundance of fossil fuels, using farmland to produce energy is a terrible idea.

To deny humanity the enormous blessings of fossil fuels is ridiculous. The Green New Deal proves that the Democrat Party is not serious. The party that was once serious has detached itself from reality.

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◼ Fossil Fuels Phobia April 25, 2019

Ron Ross Ph.D. is a former economics professor and author of The Unbeatable Market. Ron resides in Arcata, California and is a founder of Premier Financial Group, a wealth management firm located in Eureka, California. He is a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma and can be reached at rossecon@gmail.com.

There’s Something Rotten in Academia

The deterioration of American higher education is a national tragedy. Regarding the current admissions cheating scandal, Alan Dershowitz, who was a Harvard Law School professor for over forty years, said, “It is the tip of a very, very deep iceberg.” Too true. A vital societal institution has become deeply corrupted and obscenely overpriced.

Increased price, decreased value

College tuition has increased at rates far beyond prices in general. Since 1980 tuition has increased 260 percent vs. 120 percent for the general price level, according to the Department of Education. That discrepancy is not an accident. It has been deliberate and devious.

Like sellers in general, colleges “charge what the traffic will bear.” In a number of ways they have increased what the traffic will bear. One such way is selling the idea that everyone needs a college education. That, of course, is absolutely wrong and a huge misallocation of resources has resulted from making everyone believe it’s true.

There is, of course, method to this madness. The Democrat Party is the most enthusiastic proponent of the “everyone ought to go to college” mantra. It is typical of the Party’s “one-size-fits-all” mind-set. Bernie Sanders’ campaign issue of “free college for everyone” is another big step in that direction. The Democrat habit of calling everything a “right” is one of their favorite government-growing deceptions. The last thing we need, however, are more taxpayer subsidies going to higher education.

Since almost everyone in academia is a Democrat or a leftist, it’s an effective way to transfer wealth to their friends and supporters. It is as big a “conflict of interest” as you could ever find.

Academic/government loan sharks

Another way what the traffic will bear has increased is the enticement and easy availability of student loans. Total student debt is now nearly one and half trillion dollars and climbing. Students leave their college days long on debt and short on knowledge. It often takes them decades to repay and causes major life distortions — delayed marriage, child bearing, home purchases, etc. Having those loans forgiven by way of bankruptcy is virtually impossible. Higher education and its big government enablers have become the world’s biggest loan sharks.

Perverse redistribution of income

The unnecessarily high cost of college has caused an enormous transfer of wealth from productive members of society to bloated administrations and overpaid professors. Professors and administrators have incomes far above the mean. Inequality, of course, is one of the Democrats favorite obsessions which they remind us about ad nauseam.

Grade inflation and grade elimination

Besides tuition inflation, grade inflation has lessened the value of what students pay the higher price for. At most universities it’s now almost impossible to receive a grade lower than a “C.” Many universities have abandoned grading altogether. It’s akin to all participants receiving a trophy or not keeping score. That is a huge mistake. Entire universities have become “safe spaces” from the trauma of a bad grade. Grades used to be important sources of incentives and information. No longer. A college transcript provides less and less real information.

Mission creep

As is true in many parts of our culture higher education has been corrupted by “mission creep.” Rather than focusing on its age-old and traditional goal of transferring knowledge from one generation to the next, universities now consider themselves crusaders in charge of saving the world from every imagined kind of catastrophe. Professors and administrators have grossly exaggerated senses of self-importance. The media, of course, suffer from the same affliction.

A more appropriate description of what’s happening in academia is “mission inversion.” Campuses used to be known for freedom of thought, intellectual diversity and open-mindedness. They’ve flipped. They’ve become repressive and intolerant, and even violent against opposing ideas.

College campuses have become bland, monotonous intellectual dead zones. There is total intellectual conformity and a deep fear of and hostility toward differing points of view. They’ve become mini-North Koreas.

The obsession with multiculturalism has resulted in English majors graduating without ever having read anything written by Shakespeare. The very term “Western Civilization” is scorned. “Western civ” used to be a standard requirement of “general education” and still should be.

The proliferation of the so-called “studies” curricula is another way higher education has been diluted. “Gender Studies” departments have no discernable purpose or definition beyond victimology and offering a catalog of reasons for resenting men. What, precisely, is the definition of and mission statement of “ethnic studies?” After graduation what’s been “learned” is of no real value to potential employers and another impediment to repaying student loans. Seeing Gender Studies as a major on an applicant’s résumé is probably a “stay away” sign to most employers.

Abandonment of merit-based standards

The admission-buying scandal has correctly been described as a zero-sum game. The students who were admitted dishonestly resulted in legitimately qualified students being denied admission. However, the population of wronged applicants victimized in that context is dwarfed by the same kind of injustice created by affirmative action and academia’s’ diversity obsession. Affirmative action and diversity goals are race-based selection systems. That is racism pure and simple.

Student snowflakes

Another tragic error committed by spineless college administrators is the coddling of their students. The students are treated, not like adults, but as delicate and fragile orchids. The students’ demands for “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” ought to be ridiculed and ignored, not catered to. Universities are busy creating a generation of thin-skinned, emotional weaklings.

That is a serious disservice to those students. It is no way to prepare them for the harsh and unsympathetic world they will enter after graduation. “Safe spaces” are few and far between in the real world.

Why I left academia

Upon finishing graduate school in 1969 I taught economics for ten years at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California where I still live. There was a combination of reasons why I decided to leave teaching, but the one foremost in my mind was this — I came to the conclusion that about a fourth of the students in my classes were in the wrong place. They were wasting their time, my time, and theirs’ or their parents’ money.

The issue, as I saw it, was their lack of intellectual curiosity. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. We all have different interests. Some were there as a way of delaying adulthood for four more years. (Many of them managed to do that for five, six, or seven years.) There’s nothing essentially wrong with that either, but it ought not be subsidized with taxpayers’ money.

The inevitable result was a decline in the content of the course. A fourth or more of the class cannot be ignored. Even back then the administration would not allow that many students receiving failing grades. It was necessary to simplify the course material.

That lower course quality was a cost borne by the rest of the class. It’s one of the primary results of telling everyone they should attend college. I found it to be an extremely frustrating situation. I decided to switch from teaching economics to doing economics and went into private practice as a wealth manager. That’s what I still do.

I loved my time as a student and as a professor. It pains me to witness what higher education has descended to. I fervently hope that sooner or later it will return to its former heights. In the meantime you can help by ignoring your alma maters’ fund-raising requests.

If you happen to be thinking about going to college, explore your alternatives. Your time and resources might be better spent elsewhere. If you’ve been rejected by the college of your choice it could well be a blessing in disguise. Life is full of those.

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◼ There’s Something Rotten in Academia March 29, 2019,

Ron Ross Ph.D. is a former economics professor and author of The Unbeatable Market. Ron resides in Arcata, California and is a founder of Premier Financial Group, a wealth management firm located in Eureka, California. He is a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma and can be reached at rossecon@gmail.com.

The Anatomy of a Self-Annihilating Political Party

The Democrat Party has lost its mind. What’s happening there, however, is not happening in isolation. In society and in life nothing happens in isolation.

There’s a word that describes the Party’s behavior: nihilism: “a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless, a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially moral truths.”

That definition fits the current Democrat Party. The Party and the left place little or no value on tradition, the Constitution, the sanctity of life, borders, private property rights, voting-law enforcement, election outcomes, standards of behavior, or free speech. These are all fundamentally different kinds of rules or systems of rules. The left does not like rules (at least not for themselves).

If you do not like rules, you do not like order, and the alternative to order is chaos. The Democrat Party is attempting to lead the country into chaos. Once you recognize that the Democrat Party is nihilistic it becomes easier to understand why they think and act as they do.

Jordan Peterson’s profoundly brilliant and important book is titled 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos. In it he writes “Chaos and order make up the eternal, transcendent environment of the living.” Chaos and order also define one of the important differences between liberals and conservatives.

As President Trump has said, “If you don’t have borders you don’t have a country.” That’s actually fine with the Democrats and the left. For example, Democrats want to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE). They not only want to prevent more border wall being built, some of them want to tear down the wall already in place.

The messes that San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City have become are stark evidence of what happens when laws are no longer enforced. The left has more sympathy for law breakers than law enforcers. “Sanctuary cities” create immigration chaos. Virtually every belief and policy of the Democrat Party is fundamentally a war against order.

Democrat politicians and their enablers in the media believe “the end justifies the means.” They see nothing wrong with lying, distorting, making things up, or the violent termination of the essence of innocent life.

It isn’t just that the end justifies the means, it’s that if you reject “moral truths,” you don’t need to justify lying. It also explains why they have no shame.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the unofficial leader of the Democrat Party. AOC is the perfect standard bearer for how the Party is evolving. She has zero real-world experience (beyond making martinis and margaritas). She hasn’t the slightest idea what’s she’s talking about. Her Green New Deal is little more than a utopian hallucination. Nevertheless, she is the most popular Democrat. More than anyone else, she defines the party.

Democrats’ fascination with AOC shows that they place no value on experience, maturity, or judgment. She did not invent chaos, but she embodies it, particularly mental chaos.

Beyond nihilism the Democrat Party is motivated by hate and the negativity. Their decision rule is, “If Donald Trump is for it, we’re against it.” If his goal is to “make America great again,” they’ll do everything they can to prevent that from happening.

They hate Donald Trump first and foremost because he won. They hate him because he is the exact opposite of who they are. He is positive, they are negative. They hate his supporters because they caused him to win.

A Chinese proverb says, “Hate destroys the container in which it is stored.” And Martin Luther King said “Hate destroys the hater.” No political party can sustain itself on hate. They apparently have little else.

College campuses provide much of the raw material for negativity and nihilism. There it comes under the name “postmodernism.”

Postmodernism is “post because it denies the existence of ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything to everybody, a characteristic of the so-called modern mind.” It denies the existence of any universal truths and even denies that logic exists.

Postmodernism is as dangerous and destructive philosophy as has ever been conceived. It is as direct a route to evil as you could ever find.

If there aren’t such things as facts and no objective reality, there’s no point in learning anything or needing to think clearly. There’s no difference between a lie and the truth. That explains the media’s comfort with fake news. They simply see no distinction between fake and real. It explains how Democrats can still advocate socialism despite its perfect record of disasters and why they never bother explaining how their trillion dollar ideas will be financed. Nothing they say needs to make any sense.

The mission for conservatives is to make people aware of the danger of what is happening. The Democrat Party is doing well in that regard on its own. But this will be a long-lived war. Conservatives have a champion in the White House but he needs all the support he can get. He has many enemies, he’s going to need lots of friends.

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◼ The Anatomy of a Self-Annihilating Political Party March 7, 2019,

Ron Ross Ph.D. is a former economics professor and author of The Unbeatable Market. Ron resides in Arcata, California and is a founder of Premier Financial Group, a wealth management firm located in Eureka, California. He is a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma and can be reached at rossecon@gmail.com.

Donald Trump Is an Underappreciated Comic Genius

Last week after Elizabeth Warren announced that she had formed an “exploratory committee” for a 2020 campaign for the presidency, President Trump was asked, “Do you really think she believes she can win?” His answer was both hilarious and brilliant: “Well, that I don’t know. You’d have to ask her psychiatrist.”

Every time I think about that response I start laughing. If you’ve ever had any sales training you might have been told about “talking past the sale.” That occurs, for example, when you’re talking to a car salesman about buying a new vehicle. If she thinks you’re on the verge of buying, she might ask, “Do you think you’ll be wanting all-wheel-drive?” It’s a persuasion technique that makes you feel you’ve already decided to buy and makes it harder to resist the vision of driving home in a new car.

Trump’s response to the question about Elizabeth Warren makes the assumption that she has a psychiatrist (not that there’s anything wrong with that). It helps that he says it very matter-of-factly. In a courtroom he would be reprimanded for “leading the witness.” In this instance, it’s not the witness he’s leading, it’s the listener or viewer.

Also in his response Trump first modestly admits that he’s not qualified to read Senator Warren’s mind. That’s a job for the professionals, i.e. her shrink.

Can you imagine anyone else coming up so quickly with such a clever response to a question? No one I’ve ever known thinks that fast.

More than is the case with most humorists, Trump’s humor is multi-purposed. His primary purpose is combating his opponents and achieving his goals. His supporters get the dual benefits of laughing and seeing their political opponents flummoxed. That’s one of the reasons why, according to Gallup, Trump’s approval percentage has been the most consistent of any president’s first two years in office.

Something that no doubt drives Trump’s opponents crazy (all of whom need their own psychiatrists) is that he is having the time of his life. He doesn’t often laugh out loud, but he has to be laughing on the inside.

Trump’s supporters are having far more fun than his opponents. To conservatives the Democrat Party looks like a clown show. How can the Democrats possibly want Nancy Pelosi as their leader? It’s probably because she’s the best they’ve got.

In 2016 Donald Trump dispatched sixteen relatively normal Republican primary opponents. Imagine what fun he’s going to have between now and the election with the Star Wars’ bar scene of Democrat candidates.

An interesting aspect of Trump’s putdowns of his opponents is that they tend to be sticky. His targets can’t seem to just let them go or just walk away. A good example is calling Senator Warren “Pocahontas.” (At least he didn’t use Mark Steyn’s suggestion: Fauxcahontas Crockajawea).

At an Iowa campaign rally over the weekend Warren admitted, “I am not a person of color. I am not a citizen of a tribe.… I grew up out in Oklahoma. And like a lot of folks in Oklahoma we heard the family stories of our ancestry.” Well, I grew up “out in Oklahoma” too and I don’t remember hearing many stories about ancestry, at least not with a native American reference.

An interesting aspect of Trump’s humor is that his supporters get virtually all the benefit. The ill-tempered Democrats are constitutionally incapable of recognizing humor even when it’s right in front of them. Trump’s humor goes right over their heads. They take Trump and themselves far too seriously. They’re missing out on all the fun. What a shame.

I’m 77 years old, only a month older than Bernie Sanders. I’m having as much fun as I’ve ever had in my life, partly because of Donald Trump’s wit and never-ending supply of tweets. God bless you Donald Trump. Keep it up.

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◼ Donald Trump Is an Underappreciated Comic Genius January 10, 2019

Ron Ross Ph.D. is a former economics professor and author of The Unbeatable Market. Ron resides in Arcata, California and is a founder of Premier Financial Group, a wealth management firm located in Eureka, California. He is a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma and can be reached at rossecon@gmail.com.

Give Thanks for Being a Conservative

Maybe you do not need another reason to be thankful, but here’s one that you may not have considered — you’re a conservative. (If you’re not, my condolences.) There are numerous blessings that result from conservatism.

For example, being a conservative means you love your country. You take pride in being an American. Love and pride are two things that contribute to happiness. If you’re ashamed of your country, as many on the left are, if you feel the need to “take a knee,” you’re at a big disadvantage, happiness-wise.

As the Lee Greenwood song that’s played at the start of all of President Trump’s rallies says:

And I’m proud to be an American Where at least I know I’m free And I won’t forget the men who died Who gave that right to me And I’d gladly stand up next to you And defend Her still today ‘Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land God Bless the U.S.A.

Conservatives love and appreciate police officers and all other first responders. Conservatives know that such people voluntarily and on an almost daily basis go towards ugly and dangerous situations. We do not recklessly and erroneously accuse these brave people of racism. Conservatives are the ones most likely to say, “Thank you for your service.”

In one of his typically brilliant Prager University five-minute lectures, Dennis Prager explains “The Key to Unhappiness”:

You can’t be a happy person if you aren’t grateful, and you can’t be a good person if you aren’t grateful. Almost everything good flows from gratitude, and almost everything bad flows from ingratitude. Here’s a rule of life: ingratitude guarantees unhappiness. It is as simple as that.

So, be thankful you’re thankful.

If you’re a conservative you also are happy with the kind of economic system we have, i.e. free market capitalism. You’re not frustrated that we do not have socialism. The free market is the economy that allows for the massive wealth creation that we enjoy. It is the kind of economy that provides important parts of the freedom we have. Conservatives don’t begrudge businesses for making profits.

Self-loathing is an all too common attitude among progressives. I don’t think I’ve ever met a self-loathing conservative. Give thanks for not hating yourself.

Conservatives are by and large optimistic. At the very least they are not profoundly pessimistic. They do not believe they are their fellow humans are destroying the planet or causing mass extinctions.

Conservative women do not accuse their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons of “toxic masculinity.”

Hillary Clinton is not president.

Conservatives do not waste their valuable time “checking their privilege,” whatever that means.

As a conservative you subscribe to individual responsibility, not societal or government responsibility. Personal responsibility is much more empowering than the alternative. It makes you the “master of your fate and the captain of your soul.” Conservatives spurn anything resembling an “entitlement mentality.”

Conservatives do not classify themselves as victims. It’s hard to be happy when you’re feeling victimized.

As a conservative you think it’s perfectly ok to be happy. They love to laugh and don’t feel guilty for doing so. Liberals think there’s too much suffering in the world to be happy. Their so-called comedians have ceased being funny.

Liberals absolutely despise President Trump. They hallucinate about his impeachment. Conservatives, for the most part, like and admire him. Judging from his over-flow, enthusiastic campaign rallies, many conservatives love him. They look forward to his reelection. They love his tweets. Love is far more conducive to happiness than hate.

Recently liberals have become extremely intolerant, especially of opinions different from their own. This is partly reflected in their enthusiasm for political correctness. Intolerance is another happiness killer.

Virtue signaling is a widespread preoccupation on the left. A need to virtue signal indicates that you doubt your own virtue, or at least doubt that your virtue is apparent.

If you’re a conservative who believes in God you will know who to thank on Thanksgiving. That can’t be better said than George Washington’s 1789 “Thanksgiving Proclamation,” the first sentence of which is the following:

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor, and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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◼ Give Thanks for Being a Conservative November 20, 2018

Ron Ross Ph.D. is a former economics professor and author of The Unbeatable Market. Ron resides in Arcata, California and is a founder of Premier Financial Group, a wealth management firm located in Eureka, California. He is a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma and can be reached at rossecon@gmail.com.