Recent Comments

1. 3 days ago on Non Sequitur

   When vaccinations are available for highly communicable diseases, those that choose to keep themselves vulnerable to becoming possible agents for infecting others should be prohibited from all public activities that put them in close contact with others.

   People have the right to expose themselves to harm, but not others, and especially children. Parents who make the choice not to vaccinate children should be found guilty of child neglect and abuse.

   When I refer to the CHOICE not to get vaccinated, of course that excludes those who cannot get vaccinated, such as infants and children who are too young, or those with medically verified medical exemptions.

2. 4 days ago on Non Sequitur

   — continuation…

   And then it gets even more bizarre. Even if you could actually implement a system of full public ownership of productive resources to the exclusion of private ownership, Marx then proposes that, after socialism is attained, the state will “wither away” into a blissful utopia he calls “communism,” as if any government would ever simply let its power “wither away” or that any society could ever operate a complex system of infrastructure, maintaining civil order and protecting the rights and freedoms of its people and the weak from the strong, without an orderly system of government — the state.

   While Marx’s historical analysis may be brilliant, his prescriptive and predictive models are utterly unrealistic and completely inconsistent with the underlying model that was admired in the first place.

   And, in fact, no true socialist state, much less a stateless utopia of “communism” has ever actually been established, because these idealistic fantasies are completely unworkable, unrealistic and internally self-contradictory. The fact that no such state has ever been implemented, despite its faux intellectual appeal based on its theoretical model, argues further against its realistic practicality.

3. 4 days ago on Non Sequitur

   — I clearly recognized and acknowledged that, other than including Adam Smith with your examples of “trickle down” (if not with that terminology, at least the concept, though my comment to which you replied was specific to the origin of the specific term), “As for your other examples, they are mostly correct.”

   It may have been a throwaway line, but it reflected a common misunderstanding of Adam Smith that I felt needed to be addressed.

   I am much more in agreement with your statements about Karl Marx. Like Adam Smith, he would indeed be mortified by what policies those who claim to be his followers promote in their names.

   Karl Marx’s label has been misappropriated, but his economic theory has never actually been implemented, partly because its two primary elements are self-contradictory.

   Marx’s descriptive analysis of history — adapting the Hegelian dialectic theory of change to a historical/economic model that he called “dialectic materialism” — is incredibly insightful, to the point of brilliance, which is one of the things that make it so attractive to many intellectuals, but his prescriptive remedies on specific public policy strategies for reform are unrealistic and self-defeating.

   In particular, Marx’s adaptation of the Hegelian dialectic model of thesis —> antithesis —> synthesis (with the synthesis stabilizing and becoming the new thesis for a new cycle), by which he analyzes the history of economics (feudalism —> mercantilism —> capitalism), breaks down at the arrival of socialism, the antithesis to capitalism (public administration of production and distribution of resources).

   It is intellectually inconsistent that the entire cycle — the basis of his brilliant model of historical analysis — would suddenly come to an end at the point where his system of policy proposals comes into play.

   continues…

4. 5 days ago on La Cucaracha

   Remember the words of the Eagles’ hit, “Hotel California”?

   “We are all just prisoners here, of our own device…”

   The robots are winning.

5. 5 days ago on Non Sequitur

   Like Trump’s willingness to APPEASE Putin by ceding portions of Ukraine to him, Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at the Munich conference will only encourage him.

   As the echoes of history ring down through the decades, the fact that the Munich Security Conference at which JD Vance disgraced himself so pathetically is also in Munich is just dripping with metaphoric significance.

   Winston Churchill was outraged at Chamberlain’s appeasement and quickly moved to replace him with more aggressive leadership in standing up to the dictatorial bully.

   Unlike Neville Chamberlain, who was at least sincere in his pusillanimous attempt to achieve peace through appeasement, Trump is not at all trying to stop Putin, his not-so-secret ally. Benedict Donald is more Quisling than Chamberlain.

6. 5 days ago on Non Sequitur

   — Thanks for the kind words. I check the comics every day, but since the elimination of comments from the editorial page cartoons, there is not much currently relevant commenting in the comics page cartoons.

   Cartoons that get printed on editorial pages are submitted pretty much in real time, so they remain current and up-to-date with the news cycles.

   Cartoons that get printed in the comics section have to be submitted two to three weeks in advance, so by the time they get around to covering any contemporary news event (which most don’t even do at all), it is old news.

   As for those who whine about a substantive comment (“TLDR” or responding to a political comment in a cartoon), if you don’t like a comment, just skip over it. As demonstrated by the number of “likes” and comments, it does appear that a certain number of people do like something of substance, so such comments are for them, not you.

7. 5 days ago on Non Sequitur

   — continuation…

   I have, and have studied, the full five-volume work of Adam Smith, “Wealth of Nations.” FIVE VOLUMES. 750+ pages (though this may vary depending on formatting and type size). It doesn’t take FIVE VOLUMES to say, “get the government off my back” and that is not what Smith said.

   What most conservatives fail to understand is that Adam Smith, the father of Capitalism, who promulgated the theory in his classic work, “Wealth of Nations,” supported many aspects of regulatory oversight that are opposed today by those who invoke his name the loudest, including:

   Progressive tax rate structures (Book V, Chapter 2, Article I)

   Reasonable proportionality of profits (Book I, Chapter 6)

   Opposed monopolistic alliances that limit competition (Book I, Chapter 10)

   Regulation of financial, investment and capital markets (Book II, Chapter 2)

   Public spending for infrastructure, social justice; public order (Book IV, Chapter 9)

   Public spending for public education (before it was widely practiced) (Book V Part III)

   Adam Smith did NOT support deregulation, nor did he once use the expression “laissez faire,” a FRENCH term (remember, Smith was BRITISH and the French and British were long-time enemies) that goes back to a 1736 speech by René de Voyer, Marquis d’Argenson (40 years before “Wealth of Nations”), which a man of Smith’s education would surely be familiar with and, in his silence, tacitly rejected.

   The invisible hand of the market may guide the economic playing field and the balanced interplay of supply and demand, but Smith understood that every playing field needs rules and boundaries within which a range of choices can be made.

8. 5 days ago on Non Sequitur

   — The concepts behind “supply side” “trickle down” certainly precede the invention of the term. My reference was to the comment about the origin of the term “trickle down” and how it was coined in response to one specific iteration of that policy of class warfare against working people.

   As for your other examples, they are mostly correct if irrelevant to the etymological origins of the term, except for Adam Smith.

   Your misunderstanding of Adam Smith is a common one. He did NOT present a model that was similar to “supply side” which is an imbalanced overweighting of the supply side of the supply/demand balance.

   The market capitalism of Adam was NOT, as is often misunderstood, a treatise on “laissez-faire” unregulated jungle economics.

   Far be it from me to defend a work written by an upper class Scottish aristocrat (living and writing in London) and proud supporter of King George III in London in 1776 against our Founders, writing about a pre-industrial mostly agrarian economy of the butcher, baker and candlestick maker of mom-and-pop mercantile shops, but PLEASE, it is important to point out how utterly misrepresented the capitalism of Adam Smith, for all its flaws and imperfections, written in an agrarian and pre-industrial age, is distorted by the TrumpubliCONS who spew the name of Adam Smith and the concept of “capitalism” when they know absolutely nothing of either, and try to equate it with unregulated “laissez-faire,” which ADAM SMITH REJECTED.

   Despite its many imperfections, true capitalism as introduced by Adam Smith, the “Father of Capitalism,” in his most famous work, “Wealth of Nations,” is far closer to liberalism than today’s conservatism. While I certainly find plenty to reject from this royalist, it is also important to note that today’s elitist conservatives who give lip service to him obviously have no real understanding of capitalism other than what they heard on Faux “News.”

   continues…

9. 5 days ago on Non Sequitur

   — Without FDR and the U.S., the USSR, UK and France would not have been able to defeat Germany. No one said that FDR acted alone from his wheelchair. Of course he had treaties, alliances and a massive mobilization of personnel (both military and civilian — my Mom was a “Rosie the Riveter”), armament production capacity and technology (including the nuclear weapons that finished the job).

   No, FDR did not do it alone. Vast international teamwork was required to achieve the feat. But my reference was to the U.S. economy and FDR’s role in it which did, indeed, include playing a key role in winning World War II.

10. 6 days ago on Non Sequitur

    — Yes, you are correct. Will Rogers is credited with the first known use of the term “trickle down.” He was a supporter of FDR in the 1932 election against Hoover. He was criticizing the economic policies of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover — all economic conservatives — whose policies had crashed the economy and created the Great Depression.

    Following FDR’s economic reforms, the country recovered from the Great Depression, won World War II and enjoyed record prosperity until Reagan resurrected the failed policies. Now, as a result of Reagan’s war on working people, undermining the unions, and tax giveaways and corporate welfare for the few richest elites, we now see a return to rampant homelessness (which we did not see in the 1950’s and 60’s, massive income and wealth inequality and working people priced out of home ownership and forced to work two or even three jobs just to barely get by.