Why are Democrats Wrong So Often? (Part 3)

This post is a continuation of my exploration into the many examples of cases where democrats are wrong.

The Great Depression was Caused by Hoover’s Limited Government Views

One historian said that every one of FDR’s big government programs began with a smaller Hoover version. Herbert Hoover was an engineer—he wanted to create systems to solve problems. Contrary to popular belief, he was not a free marketer, he was an activist president.

From ChatGPT: “Hoover was not a laissez-faire president once the Depression was underway. Particularly in 1931–32, his administration adopted federal credit programs, agricultural intervention, public works, housing finance, and banking measures that Roosevelt either retained or greatly expanded.”

The Great Recession of 2008-2009 was Caused by Deregulation and Low Interest Rates

Alan Greenspan has been incorrectly blamed for the Great Recession of 2008-2009 because he personally favored less regulation and interest rates were held low during his tenure.

“Greenspan’s critics argue he carries much of the blame for the crisis and the housing bubble that triggered it, due to the low mortgage rates on his watch from 2000 to 2006, as well as his support for deregulation. Missing from this evaluation of Greenspan’s career is any recognition that for extended periods during the postwar era, mortgage rates were significantly lower than they were in 2000-06, yet they created no housing bubbles. Also missing is that for two decades leading up to the crisis, financial regulation grew stricter.”

For this quote and more, see Phil Gramm and Jeb Hensarling.

The Hunter Biden Laptop was Fake News

“We learned more this week about those 51 former intelligence officials who in 2020 pulled their own version of the 2016 Hillary Clinton-James Comey Russia-collusion hoax. In October 2020 the 51 released a public statement declaring that emails ‘purportedly’ belonging to Hunter Biden’s laptop exhibited ‘all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.’ Joe Biden used this to deflect a debate question about the laptop as ‘a bunch of garbage’; social-media companies used it to justify censoring the New York Post’s laptop stories; and American voters were kept in the dark about the Biden family business in the runup to November’s razor-thin election result.” [Source: Wall Street Journal]

Many news organizations have never come clean on their actions perpetuating the Hunter Biden laptop hoax. NPR said at the time: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” NPR has never offered a mea culpa.

The Rich Don’t Pay Their Fair Share of Taxes

Most people who make this statement have no idea how progressive the taxation system already is. Here are the facts:

“The top 1% of income-tax filers provided 40.4% of the revenue in 2022, according to recently released IRS data. The top 10% of filers carried 72% of the tax burden.”

Based on this, can we say that middle-class and poor Americans don’t pay their fair share of taxes?

The Second Amendment Protects Firearms for Hunting Only

The Second Amendment was written by the same people who in Concord and Lexington fired upon British soldiers that were intent on confiscating canons that had no purpose other than to be used in battle to kill the King’s soldiers. Canons were not used for hunting; canons were used to kill enemy troops.

The people who wrote the Second Amendment wanted canons for war purposes, not hunting.

The Supreme Court is a Rubber Stamp for President Trump

This would come as news to Donald Trump, as the Justices have struck down Trump’s signature initiatives on tariffs, birthright citizenship, and the Federal Reserve. According to Justice Elena Kagan:

Tariffs is probably the key policy issue for this President. I mean, something he campaigned on, he ran on, he cared an enormous amount about. I don’t think that there are all that many decisions in the recent times, where a court strikes down such an important policy to a sitting President.

The Trump/Russia Collusion Story

The story that led to headlines for years during President Trump’s first term was fabricated by Hillary Clinton’s organization with help from the FBI. See Russiagate, above.

Voting Fraud is Non-Existent

How would anyone know if voting fraud was non-existent if there are no systems currently being used to validate voters’ eligibility? To test this statement, we would need to run an experiment with and without valid identification and compare the results. Or, retrospectively, one would need to look through the registry of voters and identify what percentage were invalid using some other method.

Either way, statements to the effect that voting fraud is non-existent are hopeful, not factual, because of incomplete testing.

Voter ID is Racist

Democrats argue for the importance of voting, as witnessed by the constant encouragement for us to get out and vote. And yet if voting is so important, shouldn’t we make efforts to ensure that fraud is limited? What better way to do this than voter identification? After all, we can’t fly on airplanes, rent cars, or check into a hotel without a valid government ID. Democrats, themselves, require a valid ID to attend the Democratic National Convention.

The argument is that certain groups, such as blacks, aren’t capable of acquiring government identification. If that statement isn’t racist, what is? If it is true, that black Americans aren’t capable of obtaining ID cards, are Democrats purposely trying to limit black attendance at the Democratic National Convention?

Wildfires are Proof of Global Warming

Wildfires rely on warmer and drier air, of course. And yet forest management is important and areas that have been properly managed burn less frequently and less violently.

“But California’s leading forest scientists say that fire suppression and the accumulation of wood fuel, not climate change, are what’s made California’s fires more intense. [US Forest Service scientist Malcolm] North estimates that there is five times more woodfuel in California’s forests, on average, than before Europeans arrived.” [Source: Michael Shellenberger]

“And now a large, well-managed forest [Shaver Lake in California] appears to have turned a high-intensity fire into a low-intensity one, proving that how forests are managed outweighs the higher temperatures and longer fire season caused by climate change.” [Source: Michael Shellenberger]

“For the last half of the 20th Century, the annual area burned in California was just 250,000 acres a year, whereas the best-available science suggests 4.4 and 12 million acres burned in California annually before the arrival of Europeans.” [Source: Michael Shellenberger]

The number of acres burned each year was much higher in the 1930s than it is now. The Earth is warmer now, but wildfires used to burn more acreage before suppression was widespread. We see a similar trend since the early 2000s. According to Bjorn Lomborg, the percentage of the world’s area that has burned each year due to wildfires has declined by about 25% since the early 2000s.

Further, arson is a key contributor to wildfires. The January 2025 Palisades Fire in California was allegedly caused by an arsonist. The August 2026 fire in Spokane, Washington was set by an arsonist.

“Aaron Farinacci, 37, of Spokane told investigators he planned the Old Trails blaze for two weeks, using a weather app to research conditions and predict a day with high winds, low humidity and high heat, according to an affidavit prosecutors filed in court.” He also admitted to setting 25 other wildfires near his Spokane residence since July 2025. [Source: CNN]

Is arson increasing or decreasing? We don’t know. How many others believe, along with Farinacci, that “fire is powerful, beautiful” and have set fires?

Without the FDA, Drug Companies Would Sell Dangerous Drugs

Drug companies know they live in glass houses. They understand that selling dangerous drugs will hurt them eventually.

Here’s what I wrote in “Pharmaceuticals: Economics and Regulation” for The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:

“In 1937, to make a palatable liquid version of its new antibiotic drug sulfanilamide, the Massengill Company carelessly used the solvent diethylene glycol, which we now recognize as antifreeze. Elixir Sulfanilamide killed 107 people, mostly children, before it was quickly recalled; Massengill was successfully sued and the chemist responsible committed suicide.”

One physician wrote the following about his personal involvement in the Elixir Sulfanilamide debacle:

“But to realize that six human beings, all of them my patients, one of them my best friend, are dead because they took medicine that I prescribed for them innocently, and to realize that that medicine which I had used for years in such cases suddenly had become a deadly poison in its newest and most modern form, as recommended by a great and reputable pharmaceutical firm in Tennessee: well, that realization has given me such days and nights of mental and spiritual agony as I did not believe a human being could undergo and survive. I have known hours when death for me would be a welcome relief from this agony.” [Source: FDA website]

Among these two involved in this disaster, one killed himself and the other would have welcomed death. This is not the reaction one would expect from insiders who were purposefully involved in selling and prescribing dangerous drugs.

Consider a more modern example: the ill-fated Vioxx.

After running the APPROVe clinical trial, designed to test whether Vioxx could prevent the recurrence of colon polyps, Merck & Co. determined that Vioxx increased the risk of heart attacks by 80 percent after 18 months of therapy. Just days after the data became available and even though no patients died from these cardiovascular events in the trial, Merck decided to voluntarily stop selling its blockbuster Vioxx.

Some wondered if Merck would survive the wave of subsequent lawsuits. I have never met a pharmaceutical executive who wanted to repeat the Vioxx fiasco, with the army of lawyers filing cases that nearly led to Merck’s corporate death.

Marketing dangerous drugs can lead to corporate death. Why, again, do people think companies would try to sell dangerous drugs and put their companies at such risk?

Coming Next

In a follow-up post I’ll posit my theories about why democrats are so often wrong. If you agree with my basis here, that democrats are often wrong, I’d like to hear your theories about this phenomenon.