John Kennedy



Articles by John Kennedy

The new Iranian president sets the stage for negotiations

From Mullah to ProgressiveOn May 19, 2024, the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, was killed in a helicopter crash in the mountains of Iran. He was a Shi’ite cleric and lawyer who won the presidency in 2021. After his death, a man by the name of Masoud Pezeshkian won the following presidential election. Pezeshkian is a polar opposite of the previous president Raisi; he has been called a reformist by Western and Middle Eastern media outlets.The New York Times has reported that, “Mr. Pezeshkian has said he wants to steer Iran toward becoming more prosperous, more open socially, and more engaged with the West.” Other media outlets, such as CBS, have stated that Pezeshkian has no plan to “reshape Iran’s theocracy,” but only to moderate the morality police that enforce policies such as head

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The Regime No Longer Wants Biden

After the first presidential debate on June 27, 2024, the media did something no one suspected: they began running headlines questioning President Biden’s mental capacity. CNN named its first analysis, titled “Biden’s disastrous debate pitches his reelection bid into crisis.” The author claimed that “objectively, Biden produced the weakest performance since John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon started the tradition of televised debates in 1960.”In the same analysis, the author claimed that “there has been no public sign that Biden is unable to perform the duties of the presidency.” While anyone can watch Biden speak over the last four years to know this is untrue, a special counsel’s report in February 2024 on the President’s handling of classified material claimed Biden is mentally unfit to

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Connecticut’s Housing Shortage Is Rooted in Government Policies

There is no shortage of experts that the government is willing to hire to gain public favor for a particular policy. For Connecticut, that expert is a man named Cameron Rifkin, a policy associate for the National Council of State Legislatures. On December 4, 2023, at a legislative roundtable discussion on housing, Mr. Rifkin spoke of the grim reality of the housing situation in Connecticut, stating, “Sixty-eight percent of renters in Connecticut with extremely low income are severely cost-burdened, spending 50 percent of household income on rent. About 13 percent of middle-income households are spending 30 percent or more on rent. An income of $66,000 is needed to afford a two-bedroom rental.”Other problems presented at the roundtable included a deficit of eighty-nine thousand housing

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US Foreign Policy Is a Far Cry from the Founders Intent

In July 2021, the Watson Institute of Public Affairs at Brown University reported that since September 11, 2001, 7,057 US military personnel have been killed in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan alone. Civilian contractor deaths reached 8,000, although the institute admits this is an estimate considering many contractors were not US citizens, so some deaths went unreported. Finally, 30,177 US service members would commit suicide after their deployments to these war zones, and the number of wounded veterans is even higher, as the Watson Institute would claim:
Over 1.8 million veterans have some degree of officially recognized disability as a result of the wars—veterans of the current wars account for more than half of the severely disabled veteran population. Many additional

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The Mixed Economy Model Still Disrupts Private Markets

Market processes rely on prices, which are not established by a government decree or by the randomness of the human mind but are instead determined by supply and demand. The consumer’s wants and needs are signaled through prices, which are in turn satisfied by the producers, who want to make a profit. Despite the success of this process, many still believe that government intervention is necessary to help the poor and to provide services that may not be available in the market.
So, throughout the world, many nations adopted a mixed economy model. While private property and private ownership exist, government intervention in the economy is still necessary in order to achieve social aims such as providing services to the poor and unemployed and intervening in industry, all of which is funded

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Strikes Always Have Economic Consequences and the Latest UAW Strike Is No Exception

On September 15, 2023, the United Auto Workers (UAW) union staged a massive strike consisting of thirteen thousand workers, and for the first time, the union hit three separate automotive enterprises simultaneously: General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis. The Associated Press noted that only three assembly plants are on strike at the moment: a General Motors factory in Wentzville, Missouri; a Ford plant in Wayne, Michigan; and a Jeep factory owned by Stellantis in Toledo, Ohio.
What is the UAW demanding? Another Associated Press article outlined the demands of the UAW and its president, Shawn Fain:
The union is asking for 36% raises in general pay over four years—a top-scale assembly plant worker gets about $32 an hour now. In addition, the UAW has demanded an end to varying tiers of wages

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Censorship through the Centuries: Free Speech Suppression by the Government and the Mainstream Media

The United States government, which prides itself in being the leading force in defending freedom throughout the world, has a history of putting a muzzle on news organizations and individuals throughout its history. From the early colonial period to the beginnings of the internet, the state has consistently silenced its critics, which seems to be its true nature.
The Sedition Act of 1798
Signed into law by the Federalist Party president John Adams on July 14, 1798, the Sedition Act made it illegal to print, utter, or publish any false, scandalous, and malicious writing about the government. Section 2 of the Sedition Act outlines the punishment for violating this new law: “Such person, being thereof convicted before any court of the United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be

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The Failure of Public Works and Public Funding

State projects are funded by your money, either through taxation or by inflation, most times both. Money is either taken directly from you or you lose purchasing power. The result is the same, as you will lose the ability to buy or produce as much as you wanted because of these projects. However, this is the alleged cost of living in a “civilized society.” Without these projects, we would be driving on dirt roads, living in shacks, and working for pennies a day.
However, these projects usually make the country poorer. Henry Hazlitt, in Economics in One Lesson, noted the unseen aspect of public works, such as a bridge project, writing:
If the bridge costs $1,000,000 the taxpayers will lose $1,000,000. They will have that much taken away from them which they would otherwise have spent on the

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The World War Boom and ’46 Bust: Why War Does Not Keep Us Out of Recessions

When I took my high school’s twentieth-century world history class, both the teacher and workbooks claimed repeatedly that World War II took us out of the Great Depression. Why would anyone question this? After all, unemployment went down. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics measured the unemployment rate from 1929 onward. In 1939 the unemployment rate stood at 17.2 percent. By 1942 it was at 4.7 percent, and by 1944 it was at 1.2 percent.
Professor Friedrich Hayek wrote in his essay “Full Employment, Planning, and Inflation” about the phenomenon of full employment and the reason behind it. Professor Hayek stated:
Full employment has come to mean that maximum of employment that can be brought about in the short run by monetary pressure. This may not be the original meaning of the theoretical

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How Bad Were Recessions before the Fed? Not as Bad as They Are Now

With a recession looming over the average American, the group to blame is pretty obvious, this group being the central bankers at the Federal Reserve, who inflate the supply of currency in the system, that currency being the dollar. This is what inflation is, the expansion of the money supply either through the printing press or adding zeros to a computer screen.

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