Tag: Seattle

The Socialist Failures in Seattle, and Everywhere Else

I tend to not think of political things as ideology and harmless thoughts cast into the swells of democracy, but in good or bad ideas. A bad idea is not a harmless thing, if a politician gets something wrong, lots of people suffer. People put a lot of faith into the people they elect, which is also a problem. But what they are asking is essentially a representative to conduct management on their behalf, so if they get it wrong and pick a bad manager, then the ramifications can be quite disastrous, so elections and the people who end up elected is no small matter. That is also why I care about these kinds of things so much. It’s not just about ideology and the beliefs that come from such endeavors, it is literally about success or failure. When put to practice you just can’t hide the results of bad ideas which is becoming obvious in American cities that are now overrun by liberal thoughts as conservatives retreated away from the high taxes of city living for the suburbs.

You might remember dear reader when many years ago I covered the election of Kshama Sawant onto the Seattle City Council. That event was notable because she was one of the first politicians in the country to openly call herself a socialist, and to be elected. Up until that point people like me were considered “radical” for even talking about the effects of socialism in our American political system because honestly the enemy was conducting themselves as a Trojan horse and nobody wanted to spook the guards, so they didn’t want anybody talking about it. But I was one who did and I remember covering the election of Sawant and warning everyone what would happen to Seattle.

I turned out to be correct, which doesn’t please me to say. Socialism is bad management and when you spring forth such elements the results will be noticed in the day-to-day conduct of whatever is being managed. Bad ideas do have consequences and the drug abuse, the homelessness and the general impression of the city of Seattle are now dangerously bad. They have real problems in Seattle that are a direct result of electing socialists into their management teams of city management. And now they can no longer live off their former reputations as some of the best cities in the world. Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and many other cities come to mind in following the trajectory of failure that Seattle is currently on, so this isn’t a case of just one city failing. It’s about the failures of a proper management philosophy running the cities and how people suffer as a result.

And I’m not speaking from a vacuum of comfortable midwestern political beliefs developed in the suburbs of a very conservative part of the world. Some ideas work and some don’t, so it’s not a matter of respecting the opinions of people who elected losers like Mayor Catherine Push in Baltimore who has just resigned due to scandal. It’s about electing people who can bring success to a city and avoiding the mistakes. Seattle is an interesting examination because it started with some really good attributes. It has a lot going for it as far as resources, population, and location and that gave it a reputation as being a destination of desire. Until the elements that made it good were taken for granted and socialism parasitically picked away the value of the city and left it a bleeding husk of a previous life. The same could have been said of Detroit, a city where Motown produced some of the greatest music of the modern era, and the big automakers were producing cars the world wanted. Heck, even the Howdy Doody show was produced there. I was surprised to learn while I was doing a television gig in Dayton, Ohio to learn that the studio I was in was the former set of the Phil Donahue Show, which I had thought previously was produced in Hollywood somewhere, or New York. I thought the studio I was in was particularly run down, the part of town was a disaster, so I couldn’t imagine that anything inspiring popular culture the way that show did for a previous generation could have come from such a place. But it didn’t take long for Democrats who were elected to the regional politics to destroy the town, and it was obvious in the crumbling studio.

I’ve traveled to places around the world where the socialist failures are more mature because they had openly embraced socialism much earlier than we had in the United States, places like France for instance. Notice how the investigation into the burning down of Notre Dame has just fizzled into the background. That is because their policy of immigration has destroyed the city of Paris. And why did they turn to immigration as their ultimate fix to most of their problems, well, because their high taxes pushed out all the wealth as France itself has been openly socialist for a long time. That’s not to say that the French people are bad, but only that they had turned toward a failed political philosophy supposedly out of compassion and the results are obvious. To maintain their tax base they opened their doors to immigration and now they can’t support their traditions and have insurgents who are still angry about the First Crusade, and they are activists out for revenge, so the churches around Paris are being desecrated by those angry immigrants who have come from the Middle East. And look what they have done to their cities in Lebanon, and Syria. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that Paris is not holding up. Coming out of the train station in Paris from London the first thing I saw was a homeless man threatening to drop a concrete block on the head of another guy as they argued in French at each other some erratic emotional diatribe. They were literally right outside the door to the train station. No police were there to scurry them away to maintain order. Additionally, beggars were everywhere harassing anyone who would listen for a scrap of donation so they could eat. It was a two-mile walk from there to get into the tourist areas where Paris could still be seen.

I also stayed for a time in the English city of Canterbury where my son-in-law is from and saw first hand the homeless problem they have there. You literally have to step over them when walking around the old city which predates Roman occupation. In the name of compassion liberal management has created a situation that produces more people who end up homeless than a city that produces successful people who can actively live life with a real job and contribute to the world around them. In socialism the desire to work hard and have things in life gives way to the human trait of just letting someone else do all the work while the lazy mooch off the results. And some people are so lazy that they will sleep on the sidewalk if they can get just enough food to get by. For them life is so detrimental that they’d rather take drugs to avoid dealing with reality so under socialism they are empowered to yield toward the worst of their natures. And that is how Seattle has been going for a long time now, and the results are showing.

The video above is worth watching. It’s a little over an hour-long but its an honest look at a great American city that is now in decline. But this is not a unique problem to just America, it’s a problem of all socialist management systems and anywhere where it occurs, failure is not far off. When a city is failing it is because of bad management and one thing that is very much proven it’s that socialism in any form brings about failure. And that should be a warning to anybody who is heading in that direction, don’t do it. Because it doesn’t and never will work. Socialism always, 100% of the time leads to failure, even in Scandinavia. The only reason that people like Bernie Sanders don’t see that failure is because they put a fresh coat of paint on it. But if you look just a little under the surface you can see the same failures that are obvious now in Seattle. And it’s not pretty to look at.

Rich Hoffman

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The Socialists of Seattle: Jeff Bezos tried to feed red meat to the wolves, and they bit him

Way back in 2013 I told you dear reader about Kshama Sawant, the socialist who was recently elected to city council in Seattle. Remember that? Well, she and the rest of her socialist brethren have proven me more than 100% correct with their anti-American brand of socialism that is going after the rich at every turn these days. The budget of Seattle is a disaster and these idiots are seeking measures to pay homeless shelters and taxing their big businesses to cover the costs—which has already pushed Boeing to remove a lot of jobs from the city to avoid the high taxes. Now the Seattle City Council has voted a new “head tax on their large businesses with an 8 to 1 vote on any company that earns $20 million or more in annual sales, 14 cents per employee hour, in an effort to raise $50 million per year toward outreach efforts for the homeless, including affordable housing and emergency shelters. This is what happens when people who have no idea what the value of businesses are truly for their communities or lack the understanding of what makes people homeless in the first place. Throwing money at the problem by stealing it from valuable companies is not the way to solve the problem. But when people follow the failed philosophy of Karl Marx, this is what you get in human intellect—deficient people too stupid to help themselves.

It’s a little funny that the big time liberal Jeff Bezos tried to appease these socialists in Seattle with his war on Trump by using The Washington Post as his personal blog to create an impeachment of his billionaire rival. Bezos is now the richest man in the world and he gambled wrong in thinking that the socialists of Seattle would stay away from him because of their mutual hatred of Trump. Obviously, Bezos is a smart guy who runs a great business in Amazon. But like many in his position he got caught trying to feed the wolves red meat hoping they would go away. Instead they only became hungrier.

The thing with socialists is that they always are looking for people of value that they can steal money from in an effort to call it “social justice,” “equality for all” and one for all and all for one, and all that garbage. Socialists mask their parasitic tendencies behind altruistic intentions, but what they really are reveals itself in decisions like their Seattle Head Tax—theft granted by government for the sake of those who work and produce and those who simply are too lazy to exist on their own. Socialists are those who want to live off the efforts of others, its that simple. There isn’t anything morally just about their actions, they are thieves—pure and simple.

If Jeff Bezos didn’t build Amazon up bit by bit over the last several decades what would it be? Would Kshama Sawant create Amazon, would the city council? Would the homeless people they want to help make Amazon the great company that it is today? If Jeff Bezos didn’t have all those sleepless nights in the 1990s when he was building his empire of e-commerce with distribution warehouses all over the nation for a business that was on the cutting edge at best—where were the socialists of Seattle back then—playing video games, reading books about Karl Marx, protesting the breeding patters of fruit flies cut off from a thousand-year old hole in the ground where someone wanted to build a housing development? They certainly weren’t trying to create jobs like Jeff Bezos was.

In a capitalist society—in ANY society a job creator is one of the most important aspects of civilization. Without job creators there is no economic expansion. Government doesn’t create jobs unless you count useless bureaucratic positions equivalent to slow ass workers at the BMV or a Clerk of Courts. People like Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump have far more value than a socialist looter trying to use the power of government to steal the hard work of those who take the big chances in business to create jobs from nothing. Yet where Bezos went wrong is that he tried to appease those progressive minded by tossing money at them hoping they’d go away—only they didn’t. Once they realized where the money was—after all Bezos is now known as the world’s richest man—and he lives in the neighborhood so to speak of people like Kshama Sawant—their target went to him. For a socialist it’s like a nice pile of shit for a fly to swoop on to take away all they could get while the gettin’ was good. Such lessons have come hard and now Amazon doesn’t have much choice in the matter, they’ll have to move their operations out of the Seattle area. Starbucks is in the same situation—Seattle is now notoriously unfriendly to business, and the word is out. Businesses will have to leave Seattle.

I was in Paris, France recently and the effects of their open socialism is grotesquely obvious. There are no big chain restaurants, no big factories—not like there should be for such a large city with so much history. The socialism of France has pushed away so much business investment because it’s a pain in the ass to do anything. It’s hard to even use the restroom in Paris, even near the tourist attractions the restrooms were dirty, and they charge you money to use them. I was stunned to see a toll turn style at the bathroom at Notre Dame with some Pakistani guy smoking a cigarette and collecting $2 a piss. I told him I’d just piss on the sidewalk outside which is what I dd. And so were about five other guys. No wonder Paris these days smells like piss everywhere you go. The city to deal with the exodus of their most productive turned to immigration to refill their empty apartments which has created their current crises—of mixing Muslims from the Middle East with the Christian Crusaders of old to extract revenge for the long conflict between religions that are left over from the Dark Ages. Instead of thinking of building new vehicles for space and colonizing Mars, the people of Paris are trying to keep piss off the sidewalks and nobody in their right mind is opening up a McDonald’s with free bathrooms across from the Eiffel Tower. Socialism has destroyed the opportunities for private investment to make a deal.

I’ve seen plenty of homeless people, I got to know them quite well in Canterbury, England where I’ve spent some time living in the city. Because of the social justice policies of that town ran by first the church, then by a much more socialist government in England after World War II homeless people have been incentivized into sleeping on the sidewalks. They are actually well fed and people befriend them letting them know that there is a safety net in case they fall from life. Knowing that, the weakest among us tend to throw in the towel too soon and retreat to a sleeping bag on the sidewalk rather than to shake a drug addiction, a family problem or whatever crises has come at them and destroyed their ambitions. When you give people free shelter, food and companionship—what reason do they have to keep fighting in life? Nothing, which is why when you start giving such people resources you get more of them, not less.

So Seattle has quite a problem now and there is no end in sight. I think it’s a good thing that the people of America can watch Kshama Sawant and her city council destroy their city, because it’s a good warning shot to the rest of the nation—socialism is dangerous, and it doesn’t work. And this is also a good lesson for people like Jeff Bezos. He should have never have tried to appease the socialists in the way that head hunters tried to appease their gods with human sacrifice, because it just makes the blood thirsty even thirstier. The only way out of all these messes is more capitalism and a defining stance against socialism before everyone can advance. Anybody who wants to help the homeless truly will learn these lessons quickly, the best way to keep people off the streets is to give them a job and let them earn their way through life. Giving things away for free while stealing from those who work hard and truly are people of value destroys opportunity for everyone. And that is something I think we can all agree is not what we want to see happening.

Rich Hoffman
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