Thoughts and stories, by Pal

  This presents Communism and Socialism in reality! Are Communism and Socialism Really All That Bad? By  Mark J. Stoddard  · January 6, 2022 (Maurine and Scot Proctor are joining the Stoddard’s Heart of Russia Cruise August 20, 2022 and hope you’ll be with us. We’ve nearly filled the ship! The Proctors will be giving their presentations to not only our American friends, but to the many Latter-day Saint Russians and other Russians cruising with us. We’ll see all of the great sites of Russia like the Hermitage Gallery, Red Square and the Kremlin, hear Mikhail Gorbachev speak to our group, and get to know many Russian Latter-day Saints.  Call Liz Stoddard at 801-669-1777 for more information or go to this website at  www.HeartOfRussiaCruises.com/Meridian  ) Occam, a 14 th  century English cleric used a philosophy with such cutting precision that it became known as Occam’s “razor,” namely   “give  precedence  to simplicity: of two competing ...

The Second Reason Socialism is The Anti-Agency By  Gary C. Lawrence  · August 23, 2020 The first reason,  as discussed last time , is excessive government control – control, if not outright ownership, of the means of production; a centrally planned economy; and wage and price controls.  By their very natures, all diminish individual choice and freedom.  The second reason, out of the seven we will discuss in coming weeks, has to do with wealth.  Socialism’s goal is a more equal distribution of wealth.  I submit such efforts stifle the incentive to work and run counter to agency as a commandment to act and do. Socialists suppose wealth to be a self-existing and finite commodity.  So for someone to have more means others have less.  What could be more fair, the thinking goes, than to make sure everyone has an equal slice of that miraculous pie and no one goes hungry? Oh, the things that go wrong. More t...

This was published on July 30, 2020, and I missed seeing it!  I'll publish this today in my blog, and tomorrow I'll post the followup article. Last week we had the Democratic convention, and this week the Republican convention, in the United States of America.  It is really on our minds today! Why Socialism is The Anti-Agency By  Gary C. Lawrence  · July 30, 2020 In my previous column, I related the story of Mikhail Gorbachev asking Margaret Thatcher who in the UK economy tells producers how much to charge.  It never occurred to him, or to socialists in general, that pricing can be left to the seller and the buyer – to supply and demand – to hammer out a mutually agreeable price.  Nope. Government has to be involved, socialist thinking goes.  If a third party such as government gets involved in what should be a two-party dance, you can be sure that one party will get a better deal than the other party.  Or tha...