The Patriot Post® · Reader Comments

Editor’s Note: Each week we receive hundreds of comments and correspondences — and we read every one of them. What follows are a few thought-provoking comments about specific articles. The views expressed herein don’t necessarily reflect those of The Patriot Post.

Re: “Biden Admin Ignores SCOTUS”

“This is all based on the assumption that if humans are emitting it, it must be bad. That may have been true for many unnatural pollutants, but it’s not true with carbon dioxide (CO2). When CO2 levels were 10 times higher than they are today, the earth didn’t catch fire, and it won’t now. It is, in fact, the basis on which all life on planet Earth depends. Think about it. Early life was based on CO2. The carbon was stripped away to be used by the organism to create sucrose while the oxygen was discarded. The first known mass extinction was caused by a buildup of oxygen. The truth is that CO2 is being used by some to extract wealth from the end consumer. That is all it’s really about and it’s time the theft stopped.” —Washington

Re: “Surprise! Biden’s Not Done With Guns”

“Biden claims the legislation is ‘proof that despite the naysayers, we can make meaningful progress on dealing with gun violence.’ It may marginally affect the number of guns, or the ease with which law-abiding citizens are able to own or bear them, but it will have little or no effect on ‘gun violence,’ which is carried out by people who didn’t respect the gun laws that were already on the books (never mind the laws against robbery, assault, murder, etc.) and who will ignore these new laws as well.” —Georgia

“After the murder of Shinzo Abe, I looked up Japan’s gun control laws. They are very strict; less than one person in a thousand has one. Ditto for swords. Does this prevent suicides (one of the claims made for gun control)? No. Japan has a suicide rate twice that of the United States, and the proportion of murder-suicides (they call them family suicides in Japan) is also higher than in the U. S.” —Minnesota

Re: “The Student Loan Scheme”

“Maybe the Department of Education should require high schools to educate children so that they understand debt, student loan requirements, and what each major area of study qualifies for as far as future earnings, the number of jobs available in that field, and the long-term prospects for that field. Some jobs do go away, after all. Why get into a degree program for a job that is likely to end in 10 or 20 years? Why spend $150,000 for an education for a job that pays $35K a year? Nobody ever did that when I was in high school in the ‘70s. Nobody did that for my kids in the early 2000s. Nobody took the time to explore the opportunities and direction of jobs in high school. A major failing of public education.” —New Hampshire

“If government pays student loans, tuition will increase. This has been the single constant every time government announces an entitlement. The cost for the product or service for which the entitlement intends to relieve increases to at least meet the entitlement pecuniary value, and usually exceeds the value. That means anyone who does not qualify for the entitlement pays more. But because costs increase, more qualify. At every budget cycle, entitlement values increase, costs increase, and more qualify. There is no incentive to lower costs. Only the vendor (colleges) benefit. The taxpayer, especially those who do not qualify, pays the cost. And the free market is destroyed. How long after 'free college’ before we verify, ‘You get what you pay for’?” —Missouri

“These vote-buying schemes date back to liberal icon FDR. In Burton W. Folsom Jr.‘s book New Deal or Raw Deal, the author details how FDR used political patronage to essentially buy both the 1934 midterms and 1936 presidential election. Oddly, when FDR was campaigning for president in 1932, he was actually saying a lot that was true. Recovery, FDR maintained, would depend on the retraction of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs and the lowering of interest rates. Having won the election, FDR then had second thoughts and sought the advice of academics who got it completely wrong, thus allowing the Great Depression to continue and even worsen until the war years forced a return to economic sanity.” —Washington

Re: “A Small Victory for School Choice”

“Arguing about how to educate children properly while our public education bureaucracy still exists is like discussing how to live your life above ground while you’re still buried under the rubble of your house after an earthquake. If there’s one thing Americans should have learned by now, it’s that government bureaucracies, at all levels and for nearly all agencies, have devolved away from actually being motivated to serve the agencies for which they’re chartered. Those bureaucrats see their charter as a paycheck and very little more. Our government has been corrupted by generations of corrupt people out to line their pockets and to propagandize our children. Public education has proven to have been a mistake.” —Illinois

Re: “Biden’s Bid to Take Over Our Elections”

“The first paragraph of this article points out the very problem — there are 600 federal agencies?! The era of big government, indeed. That there are that many federal agencies shows that we are no longer living in a representative republic but in an administrative autocracy.” —Oregon