BERNIE SANDERS INVOKES HOLOCAUST IN DENOUNCING TRUMP, DENIES COMPARING HIM TO HITLER
Sanders brings up Holocaust, discussing Trump’s “intolerance” of Muslims
BY ROBERT SPENCER
SEE: http://www.jihadwatch.org/2016/04/sanders-brings-up-holocaust-discussing-trumps-intolerance-of-muslims; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
“On a personal note, some of you know I’m Jewish. My father came to this country at the age of 17 from Poland. He came over, other people in his family did not come over. Those people died. Children died. … So that is in my heart, to see what a lunatic can do by stirring up racial hatred.”
This is just a new variation on the common and hysterical claim that “Muslims are the new Jews,” which has been answered many times — as often as it has been asserted. Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong, Leftist “journalist” Jeffrey Goldberg, Islamic Republic of Iran front group Board member Reza Aslan, Muslim Brotherhood-linked Congressman Keith Ellison, Nicholas Kristof, Canadian Muslim leader Syed Sohawardy, and Hamas-linked CAIR leader Jacob Bender, among many others, have repeated it. The blazingly brilliant Daniel Greenfield takes it apart in this video.
And in 2014, Bill Maher noted: “Jews weren’t oppressing anybody. There weren’t 5,000 militant Jewish groups. They didn’t do a study of treatment of women around the world and find that Jews were at the bottom of it. There weren’t 10 Jewish countries in the world that were putting gay people to death just for being gay.” Indeed, and no one is calling for or justifying genocide of Muslims now; there is no individual or group remotely comparable to the National Socialists in any genuine sense.
The late Christopher Hitchens also refuted this idea when writing a few years ago about the Islamic supremacist mega-mosque at Ground Zero: “‘Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s,’ Imam Abdullah Antepli, Muslim chaplain at Duke University, told the New York Times. Yes, we all recall the Jewish suicide bombers of that period, as we recall the Jewish yells for holy war, the Jewish demands for the veiling of women and the stoning of homosexuals, and the Jewish burning of newspapers that published cartoons they did not like.”
The purpose of statements like the one Sanders made is to intimidate people into thinking that criticism of Islamic supremacism leads to the concentration camps, and thus there must be no criticism of Islamic supremacism. The unstated assumption is that if one group was unjustly accused of plotting subversion and violence, and was viciously persecuted and massacred on the basis of those false accusations, then any group accused of plotting subversion and violence must be innocent, and any such accusation must be in service of preparing for their subversion and massacre. It is simply a method to foreclose on any criticism of jihad terror and Islamic supremacism.
“Sanders references the Holocaust when discussing Trump’s ‘intolerance’ toward Muslims,” by John Wagner, Washington Post, April 2, 2016 (thanks to Lookmann):
______________________________________________________________MILWAUKEE — In the midst of chastising Donald Trump on Saturday for showing intolerance toward Muslims, Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders told an audience here that some of his relatives died in the Holocaust as the result of “a lunatic … stirring up racial hatred.”“On a personal note, some of you know I’m Jewish,” Sanders said during a town hall meeting here. “My father came to this country at the age of 17 from Poland. He came over, other people in his family did not come over. Those people died. Children died. … So that is in my heart, to see what a lunatic can do by stirring up racial hatred.”Sanders’s apparent reference to Adolf Hitler directly followed his recollection of Trump’s controversial comments late last year about temporarily banning Muslims from entering the country.The senator from Vermont told his audience here that he and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), a Muslim in Congress, visited a Washington mosque shortly afterward to denounce the Republican front-runner’s position and talk about “fighting Islamaphobia.”Sanders said if he is elected president, “trust me, Muslims, or anybody in this country, are not going to live in fear because of their religion, because of the color of their skin, because of the country they came from. That is not what this country is about.”Sanders then launched into his reflection on his family and the Holocaust.During an appearance Sunday on ABC News’s “This Week,” Sanders tried to clarify his comments.“I did not compare Trump to Hitler,” he told host George Stephanopoulos after he played video of Sanders’s remarks….
Socialism and the minimum wage
SEE: http://the-trumpet-online.com/socialism-and-the-minimum-wage/; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
Sorry, Sanders: Scandinavian policies are far from the ‘democratic socialism’ you keep claiming exists
Sanders speaks about socialism as if he’s never heard of its failed history, writes Jeffrey Tucker of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in a piece titled “Hating the Establishment is Not the Same as Supporting Liberty.”
Another one of Sanders’ key policies is minimum wage hikes.
Because he’s spent so little time earning a paycheck outside of politics, Sanders is also oblivious to the fact that minimum wage increases may improve quality of life for some in the short-term, but in the long-term will result in mass layoffs and consumer price inflation.
WHY MINIMUM WAGE INCREASES ARE DETRIMENTAL TO THE FREE MARKET
A piece written by David R. Henderson of “Library of Economics and Liberty” explains perfectly the result of government-induced minimum wage hikes:
Jonathan Meer and Jeremy West have found that increases in the minimum wage destroy jobs, not so much by destroying current jobs as by reducing the growth rate of new jobs.
That makes sense if employers’ investments in capital are even partially irreversible, that is, if some costs of capital investment are sunk, as seems plausible.
Here’s a simple numerical example to illustrate the point.
Imagine that an employer is contemplating investing $100K in the price and installation of a piece of machinery that he expects to last 5 years. Assume for simplicity that once it is bought and installed, the salvage value is zero. (Numbers greater than zero work also, but complicate the analysis, with no additional insight.)
Assume that the current minimum wage is $7 an hour and that the employer contemplates hiring a worker for a standard work year of 2,000 hours. At that wage rate, he can find a suitable worker. Assume that there are no other components of the pay package and that there are no other costs of production.
Assume that the employer expects to be able to sell the annual output from the machine/worker combination for $37,000. Assume, for simplicity, a zero real interest rate. (That, by the way, is often a bad assumption but in recent years, it is not far off.)
If the employer expects no increases in wages over the next 5 years, will he make the investment? Yes.
LET THE MARKET DECIDE
The reason is that his costs over the 5 years are $100K for equipment and $70K for labor, for a total of $170K. His revenues are $185K. Net profit: $15K.
But now imagine that after 2 years of operating profitably, the employer faces a minimum wage of $10 an hour.
Had he known this in advance, he would have known that his cost of labor over the 5 years would have been $14K plus $14K plus $20K plus $20K plus $20K, or $88K. So his total costs would have been $188K. Compare that to the $185K of revenue and the employer would not have invested.
But the employer has invested. The equipment cost is sunk. Will the employer continue? Yes he will. The reason: he now compares $20K of annual labor cost to $37K of annual revenue and finds that it is worthwhile to continue.
So he will not lay off the labor.
However, other potential employer/investors facing the same numbers will not make the investment. So whatever growth rate of jobs there would have been will not come about. The growth rate will be lower.