We are equal in all ways besides talent. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced that it will end its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs because they simply do not work. Faculty at MIT will no longer be required to attend race-based training or be screened for such during the hiring process.
MIT President Dr. Sally Kornbluth explained the obvious – looking at race alone does not attract the top candidates. Instead, it skews scores in favor of race, gender, or sexual orientation and the most qualified candidates are often overlooked due to reverse racism and open discrimination that is permitted toward majority groups.
“My goals are to tap into the full scope of human talent, to bring the very best to MIT, and to make sure they thrive once here,” Kornbluth said. “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”
DEI is akin to Affirmative Action on steroids. It permits the open discrimination of White and Asian straight males, plain and simple. This is another reason why we are seeing an outlash across US universities over the Palestine-Israel conflict of which they have no core understanding.
Bill Ackman wrote a piece on X that explains the situation well:
“I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment. Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.”
The schools, funded by the left, are training school faculty that the majority population is inherently bad and privileged. They pass that message down to the impressionable kids who either walk away with a sense of entitlement or a savior complex as if anyone cares when it actually comes to business. The most qualified and intelligent people will succeed in the real world. This is the entire issue with Critical Race Theory (CRT) as well since they are brainwashing children from the time they are five years old to believe their sex, gender, or skin color somehow puts them on a social caste system in America.
DEI operates on exclusivity and not inclusivity as it champions the notion of entitlement for a select few and is simply unethical. It has become a political weapon that the left will not allow to be questioned. If we want society to advance, we must accept that those who work hard and are born with natural talent and intelligence will excel. Identity politics use tools like DEI initiatives to divide the people when our neighbor is not the enemy.
Posted originally on May 3, 2024 By Martin Armstrong
Home prices in the US are near all-time highs. As I repeatedly stated, we can no longer look at real estate on the national level. Demand and value are contained to certain states and areas of certain states that the public has deemed most desirable, largely due to political factors such as taxes. Yet, at the moment, buyers are swiping up real estate where available. The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller posted a 6.4% gain in February after January’s 6% spike, marking the fastest uptick in home prices since November 2022.
The 20-city composite jumped 7.3% on an annual basis, rising from January’s posting of 6.6%. The 10-city composite saw an 8% annual rise, up from 7.4% in January. February was the third consecutive month of rising home prices in all cities, with Washington D.C., New York, San Diego, and Los Angeles experiencing all-time highs in price.
San Diego saw an 11.4% annual rise in home prices, the largest jump in the 20-city composite. Detroit and Chicago posted 8.9% annual gains. Yes, we will eventually see the red states surpass the blue. Smart money is moving into assets like real estate. The downside of real estate is that they impose a property tax on it annually, but investors enjoy that passive income.
There is a notion of “now or never” among first-time buyers as it simply no longer makes sense financially to rent. A person’s ability to qualify for that first downpayment has diminished with rising rental costs. Rental costs increased 3.15% from February 2023 to February 2024, further rising to 3.6% annually in March of this year. This is close to the pre-pandemic growth rate of around 4.1%, but rental pricing is up 36.6% from the pre-pandemic era. While difficult to judge on a national basis, the average rental now costs $1,983 per month, but it is much higher in places like New York City ($3,206 average) or San Francisco ($3,024) hence why we are seeing people sweeping up real estate there.
Shelter is 34% of CPI. The April 10 release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that shelter costs have risen for the past 40 months. In March, shelter costs were the largest contributing factor for core inflation. Rising home prices will not benefit the economy or lead to any positive indicators that inflation is waning.
Posted originally on Apr 30, 2024 By Martin Armstrong
What brought thousands of people together to create something as simple as a pencil? Some may be familiar with the late economist Milton Friedman’s popular analogy of how a mere pencil represents the effectiveness of a free market.
No single human could create something as simple as a pencil. The phone or computer you are using to read this article took the collaboration of hundreds if not thousands of individuals to achieve from sourcing the materials, innovating the creation through design and trials, manufacturing the product, negotiating trade, shipping the final product, and selling it to you the consumer. People across the world came together, putting in countless hours of work, to provide you with commonly used products that one may not pay much attention to in their day-to-day lives.
What brought these people together? “The magic of the price system!” Friedman explains. They “cooperate so that you could have it for a trifling sum. That is why the operation of the free market is so essential–not only to promote productive efficiency, but even more, to foster harmony and peace among the people of the world.”
Friedman was criticized for promoting the idea that business operates for business purposes, and the “greed is good” doctrine. We now have those who want to implement environmental and social credit scores into business and large banks and institutions have adopted this ideology. . The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) pushes the CEI (Corporate Equality Index), a company’s social woke credit score. The Open Society Foundation, operated by the Soros family, funds the HRC. The ESG promotes a company’s green social credit score, promoted by BlackRock and the World Economic Forum. Companies are shying away from these arbitrary credit scores in droves.
BlackRock even came out and said that the concept of stakeholder capitalism, introduced in 1932 but currently promoted by the World Economic Forum and its partners, was bad for business. BlackRock has $700 billion tied up in ESG policies, and this pivot marked a change in business trends. The first bill that President Joe Biden vetoed was a bill intended to dissolve the ESG climate social credit score, which was only foreshadowing the policies that later came about, most notably the Inflation Reduction Act that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted was intended to combat climate change. Yet this push to an essentially socialistic society has been undeniably ineffective.
In one of his many writings, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” Friedman explains why capitalism produces results. “The whole justification for permitting the corporate executive to be selected by the stockholders is that the executive is an agent serving the interests of his principal,” the late economist stated. Friedman was beyond his time. He used the example of what could happen if a company were required to adjust its prices and policies “to contribute to the social objective of improving the environment,” hire less qualified individuals in the name of equality, or change prices to adjust for overall inflation.
The answer is simple – the corporate executive making these decisions would be “spending someone else’s money for a general social interest,” and thus, socialism. “Insofar as his actions in accord with his “social responsibility” reduce returns to stock holders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers’ money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employes, he is spending their money”
Friedman argued that individuals could spend their personal money as they saw fit, but businesses have no such social obligation. Adjusting prices for social causes is essential imposing taxes and decided how the tax proceeds should be spent. Taxation without representation. The corporate executive and business leaders are the chosen representatives of the shareholders. “Here the businessman—self‐selected or appointed directly or indirectly by stockholders—is to be simultaneously legislator, executive and jurist. He is to decide whom to tax by how much and for what purpose, and he is to spend the proceeds—all this guided only by general exhortations from on high to restrain inflation, improve the environment, fight poverty and so on and on.” Forcing businesses to operate based on social policies degrades the elected representative to a “public employee, a civil servant, even though he remains in name an employee of private enterprise.”
Joe Biden continually states he is cracking down on corporate greed. How are we to expect business to combat such a complex topic?
As Milton Friedman explains:
“He is told that he must contribute to fighting inflation. How is he to know what action of his will contribute to that end? He is presumably an expert in running his company—in producing a product or selling it or financing it. But nothing about his selection makes him an expert on inflation. Will his holding down the price of his product reduce inflationary pressure? Or, by leaving more spending power in the hands of his customers, simply divert it elsewhere? Or, by forcing him to produce less because of the lower price, will it simply contribute to shortages? Even if he could answer these questions, how much cost is he justified in imposing on his stockholders, customers and employes for this social purpose? What is his appropriate share and what is the appropriate share of others?”
Separating the public and private sectors is necessary in a free market. “In an ideal free market resting on private property, no individual can coerce any other, all cooperation is voluntary, all parties to such cooperation benefit or they need not participate. There are no “social” values, no “social” responsibilities in any sense other than the shared values and responsibilities of individuals.” This is precisely in opposition to what we have seen with CEI and ESG policies, where businesses have been barred from operating freely due to social pressures from Washington and global organizations. The climate change zealots expect the entire energy sector to reform instantaneously without the realization that is utterly impossible to achieve any of their zero CO2 targets.
Milton Friedman speaks extensively on this topic in the book, “Capitalism and Freedom,” as well as countless articles published during his lifetime. The fact of the matter is that the private sector produces for the good of all based on “greed” or profits as that is the motivating factor. Everyone acts according to the invisible hand theory, which Adam Smith put forth years ago. Thousands of people would not have felt compelled to create a mere pencil if it were not for their own self-interest that ensured they would receive something in return for their time and work.
Socialism, climate change initiatives, DEI initiatives, CEI, and ESG scores all suppress the free market and deter business. Taxing businesses into oblivion to support big government suppresses the free market. Absolutely everyone reaps the benefits of a free market where goods flow, jobs are abundant, and talent is rewarded. We must separate the private and public sectors as we do with church and state. History has taught us time and time again that operating under the premise of “social responsibility” leads to utter failure, feminine, and deteriorating economic conditions for all.
Posted oeiginally on Apr 28, 2024 By Martin Armstrong
Under Communism, everyone made the same. That removed the incentive to even invent anything. The socialists looked at Henry Ford and despised his wealth. They ignored that Henry Ford invented the assembly line and created the auto industry; when everyone could afford a car, they expanded and began moving to the suburbs where they could commute. To the Socialists, all they look at is the money one person earns and say that is not fair. That is what destroyed Communism, and it will destroy the West as well – it’s just our turn.
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