Podcast: Play in new window
NYC Mayoral candidate, Mandami. NJ Gov candidate, Mikie Sherrill.
Radicals. Brainwashing kids.
What should Boomers do? Share basic truths.
US is not a Democracy, rather, US is a Constitutional Republic.
Govt by consent. Right to move away from problems.
Democrats passing state laws: overtax one town for problems in another.
Forcing Affordable Housing. Rent to those with criminal records.
Seaview Harbor. Strathmere, Avalon West
Precedent setting? Secede from bad town.
School choice. $20k per student.
Ocean City and Eutace Mita. Former Wonderland Amusement Pier. Dead zone of OC Boardwalk.
Who decides whether to allow new hotel at 6th and Boardwalk in OC?
Outrage of illegal alien deportations. Must continue.
AC Councilman George Tibbitt: high cost of various insurance. Hidden costs help pay for illegal aliens.
Seth’s history book. See first 50 chapters on L&P website.
1607- Socialism in America. Failed after 3 years.
No incentive with Socialism.
War in Gaza. 141 sq miles. What if Israel loses war?
Propaganda.
SETH GROSSMAN: However, our main priority right now is the election for Governor of New Jersey in November. Last week, we talked a lot about Zohar Mamdani, the Democratic Party for mayor of New York. However, Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic candidate for Governor of New Jersey, is just as radical. She agrees with the socialists on almost every point. She is very close to Ras Baraka, the radical leftist who is Mayor of Newark. Baraka was a far-left candidate for New Jersey Governor in the Democratic Party Primary last month. He is every bit as radical as Zohar Mamdani in New York. And Baraka also did much better than the Establishment expected.
The fact that he and Mikie Sherrill have so much support show how close New Jersey is to getting like New York. So we really have to get to the basics.
The basics are that we Boomers allowed our schools, media and Hollywood into brainwashing our kids and grandkids and nieces and nephews to hate America during the past sixty years. So while we Boomers have some money, some time, and a few years left, we owe it to our country to do our best to undo that damage.
That is the priority of Liberty and Prosperity right now. We do it every Saturday morning at our breakfasts. We do it on the radio. We do it with our postcards. We do it with our website, Facebook and Twitter. But the best way to reach young people is through you, the Boomers who are listing.
We’re not asking you to give lectures to your kids. It would just turn them off. But we are asking you to learn some basic facts you can use to mention to your kids when you have the opportunity. We want you to just casually mention from time to time a few of the basic ruths about America that we learned growing up. And and one of them is this idea of government by consent — that America is not a democracy.
We are a Democratic Republic. Yes, we use democracy to elect the people who run our government. However, once we elect them, the people we elect aren’t allowed to just do what they feel like doing. They have take an oath to follow a constitution. They have to follow rules. They have to respect the equal rights of everybody. And they can’t simply use their power to taking things away from some people and give it to other people who have more votes and influence.
Last week you asked me to explain how we can have government by consent? And I gave you a few examples. And one of the great things about our Saturday morning breakfasts is our open and honest conversations. Most of the folks said, Seth. You did a lousy job explaining that. Here are some better examples. And so we talked about it a a lot last week. And so here are some better example of government by consent.
Government by consent includes the right to move away from problems. So if you live in a town with high crime, high taxes and bad schools, you know, government by consent means you have the right to move to a different town with low crime, low taxes, and good schools. And if towns that have bad schools and high tax is in high crime, don’t like people moving away, then they have to do a better job of running their towns.
But the Democrats in New Jersey have just done the opposite for the past fifty years. They passed a whole bunch of state laws that force people in good towns to pay for people in bad towns. You know, it forces people in the suburbs to pay an income tax where 90% of that tax money we pay goes into, you know, towns with, towns with, you know, lousy schools and high taxes. And and then when you move to the suburbs, we have state laws that force us to build so-called affordable housing, so that the people we wanted to move away from end up moving right next door. In fact, the state has laws that basically force landlords to rent to people with criminal records.
So that’s an example of government by consent to let people free to move to places with governments they like, and not just being stuck with the government picked by a majority of voters. We have to protect that right. We can’t let Democrats make laws that take away your freedom. That take away your ability to make these choices.
By the way, there was a very interesting decision last Thursday by the New Jersey State Supreme Court. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. It affected a beach community called South Seaside Park in Berkeley Township. Its by Garden State Parkway Exit 77, right next to Toms River.
South Seaside Park is a beachfront island very much like Strathmere. Strathmere is a beachfront island, but it is part of Upper Township. It’s also like Seaview Harbor, which is right next to Longport on the road between Longport and Somers Point. And it’s very much like the development near Avalon, called Avalon West which is part of Middle Township.
All of these people have big, luxury, waterfront homes, so they pay enormous property taxes. But they get very little benefit from those taxes. They don’t use the schools, the police, or the miles and miles of roads which are far away.
In fact, for years, Sonny McCullough, the mayor of Egg Harbor Township lived in Seaview Harbor. His taxes got so high he couldn’t afford to live there.
So all these high tax areas wanted to secede from the township, and join other low-tax beach communities. Strathmere wanted to quite Upper Township and be part of Sea Isle. Seaview Harbor wanted to quit Egg Harbor Township and join with Longport. Avalon West wanted to get out of Middle Township and be part of Avalon.
But normally the big townships opposed this and did not let it happen. They didn’t want to lose the tax money. In fact, the people in Seaview Harbor spent thousands of dollars in legal fees but got nowhere. But in 2014, and beach island community called South Seaside Park in Berkeley Township applied to leave Berkeley Township and be part of another beachfront town called Seaside Park. And last Thursday, after 11 years in court, the State Supreme Court said that South Seaside Park could do it!
So I wonder if that’s going to set a precedent for Seaview Harbor, Strathmere, or Avalon West to do the same thing. They are paying huge real estate taxes to these big townships for services they hardly use. They get very little benefit. The big townships will fight tooth and nail to keep them from leaving. I have a feeling that this is just a one shot deal, but it’s interesting.
Again, true government by consent means that voting is not the only way to get the government you want. You should be able to make choices. If your neighborhood has nothing in common with the rest of your town, you should be able to break away to be with other neighborhoods you have more in common with. That is freedom. That is liberty. That is government by consent.
We have the same thing with school choice. Our state income tax basically pays about $20,000 for each student in public school. If we had government by consent, a parent could say, I don’t want my kid to go to that school. I’d rather have you spend that $20,000 to sent my kid to a different school that is better.
And and by the way, the, probably the best example is what’s going on in Ocean City with with poor, Eustace Mita and that ICONA Hotel he wants to build at Sixth Street and the Boardwalk. Last Wednesday, I was on a music pier, seeing seeing this fantastic concert by the Ocean City Pops Orchestra, which is probably one of the most professional orchestras you have down here. And and as I was enjoying the concert for the intermission, I saw you had some people, you know, handing out, leaflets that said “Save Ocean City, Stop, the Hotel”. And as I looked out from the Music Pier, I saw this lively Ocean City Boardwalk. It was an absolute pleasure to be there, But then I saw that the Boardwalk was absolutely dead once you got to Seventh Street. You just have this dead zone where the, the Wonderland Amusement Park used to be. And you say, why is that?
Well, that’s a typical example of the difference between democracy and government with the consent of the governed. Because with democracy, if most people say, now we don’t want a hotel there, the politicians deny the permits, and you can’t build a hotel, in in a good section of the boardwalk. But if you have government with the consent of the governed, you would allow someone like Eustace Mita. He says, well, I think there ought to be a hotel here. And I’m willing to spend my money to build it. So he builds a hotel. And and if if it turns out it’s a good idea, then people would come to the hotel. He’d make money. It would be a success. And if it turns out that if Eustace Leiter makes a mistake and it’s a bad idea, then people would not go to the hotel. He’d lose money, and then he’d sell, and and somebody would build something else there. So the question is, who decides whether there should be a hotel at six in the Boardwalk in Ocean City? Should it be the government? Should it be the voters? Or should it be, you know, the people who build and the customers who use?
For years, people in America were free to use their money to buy land and invest money to build things on it. And it work and we had prosperity. That’s how New Jersey ended with the motto of Liberty and Prosperity.
Meanwhile, and back to some some national news, the, of course, the key national news is the the so called outrage over the, the deportations that Trump is doing. And we just have to tell ourselves over and over again, if we wanna save our country, as ugly as they look, the deportations must continue. 8,000,000,000 people in the world, 3,000,000,000 living in extreme poverty. Those 3,000,000,000 are in extreme poverty because they live in countries that don’t share our culture, that don’t respect, the 10 commandments, love your neighbor as yourself, that don’t respect individual liberty, protection of unalienable rights. They have a culture where you do whatever you get away with, and and I I could whatever I do to benefit me and my family is okay if if I don’t get caught. That’s the culture they have there. And if we bring 3,000,000,000 people from those cultures to our culture, we’re not gonna improve their way of life, and they’re just gonna drag us down. And the only way to do it is you have to say, it doesn’t matter if illegal immigrants, are committing a crime or not. The important thing is our country can only afford to have a certain small number of people come in each year. We’ve had these immigration laws since 1920. When we enforce them, America was great. When we stopped enforcing them in the nineteen nineties, America started to unravel. And so as ugly as it looks, we have to make sure that the law is enforced. And and by the way, that ties into something that, that George Tibbitt was talking about yesterday in an interview with Harry Hurley. He was talking about what’s killing, you know, people in New Jersey today, especially young people, is the outrageous cost of insurance. The high cost of, of, property insurance, insurance, the high cost of auto insurance. And as George Tibbitt pointed out, most of those high costs are subsidies or indirect taxes to pay for illegal immigrants. We pay high health insurance because we have to pay the hospitals for the oldest free care they’re giving the illegal immigrants. We have to pay high auto insurance, because of, all the, the, accidents that illegal immigrants are having, injuring people, breaking, you know, cars. And and who pays for it? Well, the the responsible people who pay for the insurance were paying double what we should be paying. So, the the hidden cost of of illegal immigration are out there, but we forget about it a lot.
JOHN DEMASI: Yeah. That that you’re right. There’s so much to hidden costs. There really is.
SETH GROSSMAN: And here’s another item. One of our projects is a history book I’m writing. We’re calling it the Rarely Told History of South Jersey. The first 15 chapters are posted on our libertyandprosperity.com website. And I invite people to look at it, and we’re looking for comment before it goes to final publication. But one of the interesting things I forgot talking to you last week when we were talking about socialism is that America started out with socialism. In sixteen o seven, the Jamestown Colony in Virginia, when the settlers came, they didn’t own private property. They all the property was owned in common. They would harvest the crops. They would put all the food into a storehouse, and then they distribute the food based on who needed it. Guess what happened? Within three years, they almost starved to death because nobody was working very hard and nobody saw a need to work hard if most of what you were working for was going for somebody else. So after they had a period called the starving time, when two thirds of the colony died of starvation, they they changed the system. They gave each family its own land. And surprise, surprise, the families would work day and night to clear the land, harvest their crops, weed the crops, and they had bountiful harvest when they got rid of socialism and everybody worked for themselves and got to keep, you know, what they produced. And the same thing happened with the pilgrims in Plymouth. When they founded, the the pilgrims came, in 1620, most of the people starved because they they owned all the land in common. They worked the land in common, and they they didn’t become prosperous until they divided the land and gave each family their own land. And only then and people work hard and, and take care of their crops and, and they prospered. So because of that experience, that’s how America embraced capitalism and freedom. It’s not like we didn’t try socialism first. We did. But unless we teach this type of history to our kids, they’re never gonna know. And and that’s a pretty good pretty good definition. There’s just no incentive with socialism. That that’s the point. Where you spend all your energy trying to play politics, to chisel stuff from somebody else as opposed to producing it yourself.
Above Image: Map of Gaza Strip with 2.2 million people living in area of 141 square miles. Half of Gaza population is less than 18 years old. It had a population of 600,000 in 2006 when Israel withdrew from the area.
Above Image: Map of Philadelphia with 1.6 million people living in area 135 square miles. Philadelphia has a population of 1.5 million people. It had a population of 2.1 million in 1950.
SETH GROSSMAN: And that leads us to my final issue today. This is the war in Gaza which is turning a lot of young people against the Boomer generation. We keep forgetting that the Gaza Strip where all the fighting is taking place is a 141 square miles, almost the exact same size of Philadelphia. Both Philadelphia and Gaza both have about 2,000,000 people.
Notice that when you ask Microsoft Big the size and population of Philadelphia, it just gives you the numbers. But if you ask the same question about Gaza, it first tells you “Gaza is one of the most densely populated regions in the world”, even though it has the same size and population as Philadelphia!
Also, imagine what it would it take to fight a war in Philadelphia if the enemy spent twenty years building hundreds of miles of tunnels connected to every single house. You see these horrible videos on TikTok and YouTube and Instagram showing, Israeli soldiers, killing children. But look at the way the war is is being fought. Hamas uses tunnels to ambush and kill Israeli soldiers from behind. Then they run into the tunnels, and they go back to their homes through the tunnels. So if you’re an Israeli soldier, what do you do? Do you attack the house with women and children there that’s been booby trapped? Do you let the soldiers alone in the house so they could come out of their tunnels later and kill you later? Or do you wait out the enemy and hope you get a clear shot and try to bomb or or shoot when there are fewer civilians around? That’s what Israel is doing. But no matter what you do, innocent people are going to get killed. But and a lot of our veterans understand that who’ve been at war. But our, you know, the younger kids, don’t understand that. And we’ve just got to tell them the reality that if Israel loses this war, we’re going to see the same Wahhabi, Salafi, jihad extremist doing the same thing in this country. So we just have to do what we have to do to stop that jihad. So that’s the image that we and again, this is a psychological war. It’s fought with, with images on on TikTok and YouTube and Instagram, as much as it is on the battlefield. But our kids are just so gullible. They’re not prepared to deal with this propaganda. And we, the parents, have to teach them now what we forgot to teach them or never taught them for the last, sixty years.
LibertyAndProsperity.com is a tax-exempt, non-political education organization of roughly 200 citizens who mostly live near Atlantic City, New Jersey. We formed this group in 2003. We volunteer our time and money to maintain this website. We do our best to post accurate information. However, we admit we make mistakes from time to time. If you see any mistakes or inaccurate, misleading, outdated, or incomplete information in this or any of our posts, please let us know. We will do our best to correct the problem as soon as possible. Please email us at info@libertyandprosperity.com or telephone (609) 927-7333.
If you agree with this post, please share it now on Facebook or Twitter by clicking the “share” icons above and below each post. Please copy and paste a short paragraph as a “teaser” when you re-post.
Also, because Facebook, YouTube and other social media often falsely claim our posts violate their “community standards”, they greatly restrict, “throttle back” or “shadow ban” our posts. Please help us overcome that by sharing our posts wherever you can, as often as you can. Please copy and paste the URL link above or from the Twitter share button to the “comments” section of your favorite sites like Patch.com or PressofAtlanticCity.com. Please also email it to your friends. Open and use an alternate social media site like Gab.com.
Finally, please subscribe to our weekly email updates. Enter your email address, name, city and state in the spaces near the top of our home page at Homepage – Liberty and Prosperity. Then click the red “subscribe” button. Or email me at sethgrossman@libertyandprosperity.com or address below. Thanks.
Seth Grossman, Executive Director
LibertyAndProsperity.com
info@libertyandprosperity.com
(609) 927-7333
