Author: Dean Scontras

I watched the speech that socialist-cum-Democrat nominee Bernie Sanders delivered to a packed house in Portland last week.  At many points, it seemed Sanders was channeling his inner Catwoman from the recent film, “The Dark Knight Rises.” The fictional city of Gotham, not unlike the actual city of Portland, was always in various stages of financial and political decay.  Just as Sanders described current-day America in his speech, joblessness and incarcerations were high in Batman’s Gotham.  Corruption and cronyism ran amok, giving rise to a criminal-political class which demagogued wealth and promised a new and just society, if only they…

Recently on Twitter, a very non-political friend of mine posted something about the failures of Obamacare.  It was only seconds before a lefty follower of his descended upon him about the evils of insurance companies and the subsequent need to eradicate them from existence and replace them with virtuous central health care planners.   I couldn’t resist.  In response, I wrote a sarcastic remark.  “Because, of course, the government bureaucrat is virtuous in nature”. The central planner scurried away into the twitter night, never to be heard from again. In his book, Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell defines economics as “the allocation of scarce…

I remember testifying several years ago in front of the Health and Human Services Committee in support of then Representative Rich Cebra’s welfare reform bill. After my brief testimony, as I was returning to my seat, a Democratic legislator directed a remark toward me saying something about “Wall Street greed” and its deleterious effects upon civilization. His remark seemed out of context. It had nothing to do with the merits of the bill, or my remarks, but he simply couldn’t help himself. The liberal insistence that the ills of society, indeed all human suffering, can be vanquished if, and only…