In June 1948, in an effort to bring Berlin to its knees, the Soviets closed off all ground access to the city. In response, the United States and Great Britain - realizing the psychological and strategic importance of Berlin to both Europe and the world - launched the Berlin Airlift, an epic and ultimately successful endeavor to supply the city entirely by air. After 11 long months, the Soviets acknowledged defeat and gave up on the blockade. In our own time, we face a close analogy in the island nation of Taiwan. The Communist Chinese insist that Taiwan is part of China. The Taiwanese insist they are an independent nation. The rest of the world has, in varying degrees, humored the communists by pretending that their claims about Taiwan are legitimate. Unfortunately for everyone, the days of being able to finesse the question of Taiwan are coming to a close - just as the days of finessing the question of Berlin came to a close in the wake of the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, not coincidentally done on the watch of a newly minted Democratic president in the United States. Taiwan is the key to the Pacific region. A Chinese assault on the island would compel everyone - the United States, Australia, Japan, the Philippines, New Zealand - to take sides and to take action. Or, alternatively, to surrender the Pacific to the Chinese communists. Just as Berlin was crucial to control of the middle of Europe and consequently the world in 1948, so Taiwan is crucial to the Pacific and the world in 2021. Not long ago, Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso said that in the event of a Chinese assault on Taiwan, “Japan and the U.S. must defend Taiwan together.”

Yet, Mr. Cook continually pushed back against Congress, lobbying to weaken a bill it was crafting preventing U.S. companies from using slave labor in China. Last December, in a separate report, the Tech Transparency Project found one of Apple’s most well-known iPhone suppliers was using forced Uyghur labor in its factories. China became a key component in Apple’s supply chain in the 1990s and early 2000s because of the country’s vast number of low-cost laborers. Apple seems willing to overlook China’s on-going human rights violations in order to have access to this cost-effective manufacturing base and the country’s 1.4 billion consumers. Apple has a history of cowering to the CCP. Wired reported that “Apple began hiding the Taiwan flag from users in Hong Kong and Macau,” reinforcing the CCP’s “One-China” policy. Additionally, Apple told some of its television producers to avoid portraying China in a negative light in their productions, as to not anger the CCP, BuzzFeed News detailed. Moreover, to comply with CCP, Apple began storing Chinese iCloud accounts in China, “making it easier for the government to potentially obtain information on its citizens,” Wired reported. Yet, Apple wants Americans to believe it’s woke, virtuous and promotes a just world for everybody. Mr. Cook issued a statement, saying the company would donate to groups like the Equal Justice Initiative, “which challenge racial injustice and mass incarceration.” How bitterly hypocritical. Until Apple disavows the totalitarian CCP and stops using suppliers that rely on slave labor, Mr. Cook’s lectures to the American public amount to nothing but garbage.

Apple, one of the “woke” corporations, continues to use slave labor in China to make its products, a new report shows. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has categorically denied the technology firm sources from Chinese companies that use Uyghur slave labor in its production lines. Mr. Cook said: “Forced labor is abhorrent, and we will not tolerate it in Apple.” A new investigative report from the website The Information shows seven Apple suppliers have been accused of using slave labor. “The Information and human rights groups have found seven companies supplying device components, coatings and assembly services to Apple that are linked to alleged forced labor involving Uyghurs and other oppressed monitories in China,” the report reads. “At least five of those companies received thousands of Uyghur and other minority workers at specific factory sites or subsidiaries that did work for Apple, the investigation found.” International human rights groups have charged China with genocide against more than 1 million Uyghurs. The minorities are sent to concentration camps, in many cases sterilized, and subjected to live and work in poverty, as a way for the Chinese Communist Party to “cleanse” them from their Islamic faith. The Information, associated with other human rights groups, uncovered “previously unreported public statements, photos and videos by Chinese local government offices and state-run media” in China as well as with unnamed Apple employees, to back up their reporting. In a statement to The Information, Apple said that “we undertook further investigations and found no evidence of forced labor anywhere we operate.”

COVID-19 originated from a Wuhan laboratory in late 2019 is a hypothesis that had been roundly dismissed by some scientists and a huge portion of the media and popular pundits in early 2020. This hypothesis is now being revisited with renewed fervor at some of the highest levels. In reality, the hypothesis was never all that farfetched and certainly not part of a conspiracy theory. Numerous items concerning the Wuhan Institute of Virology origins of the coronavirus have been appearing lately not only in the Times but in other national press outlets such as The Wall Street Journal. The hypothesis is eerily similar to a much smaller scale incident that transpired in April 1979 involving the bacterium Bacillus anthracis (anthrax). At that time, the Soviets claimed the dozens of deaths that occurred in Sverdlovsk, USSR (now Yekaterinburg, Russia) were from consumption of tainted meat or other natural sources. Many doubted and challenged that claim. It wasn’t until the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s that the real reason was confirmed. KGB records showed that the inadvertent release of weaponized anthrax from a Soviet lab was the source. The weaponizing of anthrax can be compared with the gain-of-function research that increases the lethality of naturally occurring viruses. And gain-of-function research for military ends defies the peaceful-purposes clause of the BWC to which China also agreed in 1984. Perhaps history has been repeated at a devastatingly larger scale from a leak at the Wuhan lab. Further investigation now underway may reveal that a Communist country has once again hidden the origin of a deadly germ release.

Criticism of Richard Branson’s recent space sojourn crossed ideological and political boundaries. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders used it as an opportunity to renew his call “to tax billionaires,” while CNN’s Brian Stelter wondered if it was “ethical to be launching rockets and flying off to space and spending all this money and burning all this fuel in an age of climate crisis?” But take a look deeper and you will find one key ingredient to the public reaction missing: Hypocrisy. While Mr. Branson and his political allies would be the last to admit it, his reach for the stars would be impossible without the Land of Enchantment’s fossil fuels. It goes beyond the literal rocket motor fuel that powered Mr. Branson’s ship. The taxpayer dollars that funded the billionaire’s space adventure also came from fossil fuels. Before Mr. Branson’s liftoff, New Mexico taxpayers had to first shell out $220 million for the spaceport needed to get off the ground. Additionally, the Spaceport approached lawmakers for more roads and other infrastructure for the massive facility needed for Branson’s photo-op. 30% of New Mexico’s state budget is made up of revenue from the oil and natural gas industry. In other words, Mr. Branson’s space flight burned a lot of money from my state’s energy workers in every sense of the word. However, Mr. Branson doesn’t like fossil fuels. In the same year New Mexico’s energy workers began funding the Spaceport he required, Mr. Branson was pledging to “invest in fuels to actually replace fossil fuels.” Mr. Branson says he doesn’t like burning fossil fuels, but he has no problem burning the money they generate.

Just last year, Michael Bloomberg absurdly claimed on Firing Line, “Xi Jinping is not a dictator.” When incredulous host Margaret Hoover offered him a mulligan, Bloomberg doubled down. “No, he has a constituency to answer to.” Yeah. The problem is, he answers them with bullets in the back of the head. Communist Party USA presidential candidate Gus Hall gushed over the “miracle” of Kim Il-Sung. “The world should see what North Korea has done,” he said, and recommended, ”If you want to take a nice vacation, take it in North Korea.” “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results,” is a quote wrongly attributed to Albert Einstein, but one that endures because it’s so manifestly true. So is Margaret Thatcher’s, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money,” which would be happening faster than it already is in the socialist states of Europe if the capitalist USA didn’t foot the bill for their defense and spend so much of our disposable income on overrated French wine. Lenin said, “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” and so we are as we bankroll regimes like China’s. Clear-eyed about the evil of communism, Ronald Reagan proclaimed that “freedom and democracy will leave Marxism and Leninism on the ash heap of history.” Cuban cries for freedom should be a reminder to follow Winston Churchill’s urging and “strangle Bolshevism in its cradle” whenever it rears its ugly head. Communism has been tried again; it has failed every single time.

The USSR. Venezuela. Now Cuba. All were held up as Marxist utopias, as was Hitler’s National Socialist regime and former Socialist Party leader Benito Mussolini’s fascism. But when things go wrong, as they always do, apologists treat us to the same absurd claim: “Real communism has never been tried.” In the words of Sting, “It’s a lie we don’t believe anymore.” America’s foremost socialist, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT), insists the U.S. embargo caused the Cuban people to revolt over COVID-19. Never mind that the embargo doesn’t block medical supplies, or that protestors are waving the Stars &Stripes, not the hammer and sickle. Bernie’s go-to move is blaming America, just as he did when Venezuela and Nicaragua imploded. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial said: “[O]ne of the ways that Cuba funds its government right now is by sending its doctors and nurses overseas.” This mercenary brain drain left everyday Cubans to fend for themselves, a grim fact unlikely to inspire a sequel Michael Moore’s propaganda documentary praising Havana health care, which left Fidel and fellow dictator Hugo Chavez to suffer torturous deaths. Communist dictators were rebranded as “presidents.” But they show their true colors, and they’re “authoritarians.” In any case, the idea that communism is an ideology fresh off the assembly line would shock Lenin, Stalin, the Castros, Hussein, Bashir Assad, Pol Pot, and all the others who’ve proclaimed socialist paradises over the past 100 years, only to see each one end in mass graves, hunger, and repression.

In the United States, there are a number of states that do not have income taxes ― such as Florida, Texas, South Dakota, Washington, etc. High-tax states such as New York, California, New Jersey and Illinois have politicians who say this is “unfair,” because their citizens vote with their feet and move their wealth and bodies to low-tax places. The evidence is that many high-tax states and high-tax countries waste much of the tax money through mismanagement and/or corruption. The 130 countries have in theory agreed on a minimum 15% corporate rate, but the rate is only part of the equation. It is claimed that China and Russia have agreed to join the tax cartel. What are the chances that they and many other countries will actually play by the rules and not cheat? And what are the chances that France or the next Democrat administration in the U.S. does not soon demand a higher minimum rate? In most countries, including the U.S., it is illegal for businesses to collude on prices ― because price collusion results in less innovation, poorer services, and higher consumer prices. A tax is a price of government services, and tax monopolies are as damaging as business monopolies or collusive oligopolies. So why is abuse of power good when government does it and bad when businesses do it? Of course, in practice government abuses can be far worse. Establishing global or domestic minimum corporate or individual tax rates will provide more fodder for corrupt and incompetent politicians and governments at the expense “of the people” ― who will suffer from fewer job opportunities, lower wages, and less liberty.

The latest really bad idea is for a global minimum corporate tax rate. It will take away much of the right of people in sovereign countries to decide on their own tax structure and rates. Government spending and taxing as a percentage of national income is already much higher in most countries than that which would maximize job growth and national income, and a global minimum corporate rate will only make matters worse. Corporate income taxes are one of the most destructive forms of taxation, in that they fall on productive inputs of capital and labor rather than consumption, as less harmful taxes do. Global minimum tax rates destroy tax competition that helps check the irresponsibility of governments and bully small jurisdictions into adopting tax policies that are not in their citizens’ interest. Unlike the average citizen, the leaders of multinational companies are well-aware that the “corporation” does not actually pay the tax; it is only a tax collector while the real tax is mostly paid by their workers in the form of lower wages. A number of small countries do not have corporate taxes or, if they do, they are at a very low rate. The high-tax-rate countries shout “unfair tax competition” because multinational corporations set up legal homes in these low-tax jurisdictions. For a small country without natural resources and limited tourist potential, becoming a tax efficient jurisdiction is a way of attracting financial businesses and corporate offices that will employ its citizens at good wages. Large, high-tax countries like France, have no morality when they implicitly argue it is just fine to crush the ability of poor people-in the Caribbean and elsewhere-to have good-paying jobs.

Thousands of Cubans took to the streets on July 12 in at least 14 cities, in a police-controlled country that surveils and jails dissidents - to protest communism, not just the country’s abysmal COVID-19 response. Cubans must stand in hours-long lines to buy simple necessities such as bread. They experience blackouts as the country’s electric grid is overrun, suffering for hours in the scorching summer months, where it can be unbearable to live without a fan or air conditioner. Government-run stores sell overpriced items in currencies the Cuban people don’t possess. Hospitals lack beds, stretchers, medication, and in some cases, running water. Scabies - a skin disease that can be easily treated with an antibiotic - has infested the island because drugs are not readily available. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cuba has been outsourcing its medical professionals and supplies to other countries as a way for the Communist regime to pocket hard currency, which is in short supply. The State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report writes of a “government policy to profit from labor export programs with strong indications of forced labor, particularly its foreign medical missions program.” The report continues, saying Cuba “capitalized on the pandemic by increasing the number and size of medical missions and refused to improve the program’s transparency or address labor violations and trafficking crimes despite persistent allegations from observers, former participants, and foreign governments,” of its abuses. The conditions in Cuba are so bad its people are fleeing the island in record numbers.