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President Biden’s campaign will continue using the popular social media site TikTok even though the president supported a provision in the military aid bill he recently signed forcing TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok within 270 days. If ByteDance does not sell TikTok within the required time, TikTok will be banned in the USA. Biden’s continued use of TikTok to reach the approximately 150 million American TikTok users, is not the only example of hypocrisy from politicians who support the TikTok ban.

The TikTok ban was driven by claims that, because ByteDance is a Chinese company, TikTok is controlled by the Chinese government and, thus. is helping the Chinese government collect data on American citizens. However, the only tie ByteDance has to the Chinese government is via a Chinese government controlled company that owns a small amount of stock in a separate ByteDance operation. Furthermore, ByteDance stores its data in an American facility not accessible by the Chinese government.

Just days before passing the TikTok ban, the same Senate that is so concerned about TikTok’s alleged violations of Americans’ privacy passed the FISA reauthorization bill. This bill not only extended existing authorities for warrantless wiretapping and surveillance, it made it easier for government agencies to spy on American citizens. It did this by requiring anyone with access to a targeted individual’s electronic device to cooperate with intelligence agencies.

Supporters of banning TikTok also cited concerns over the site’s “content moderation” policies. These policies reportedly forbid postings embarrassing to the Chinese government such as some related to the 1989 Tiananmen Square confrontation or the Free Tibet movement.

TikTok, like most social media platforms, engages in content moderation. The TikTok ban was supported by Democrats, including President Biden, who have a history of “encouraging” social media companies to censor Americans from using social media to spread “fake news.”

Fake news is defined as anything that contradicts the Democrat or “woke” agenda, including the truth about covid origins, dangers, and treatments; whether democracy was really threatened on January 6; and the full story of Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

One major reason behind strong bipartisan support for the TikTok ban is the wish to engage in a cold war with China. ByteDance’s Chinese connection makes it a convenient target to help foster anti-Chinese sentiment. Sadly, the anti-Chinese hysteria is a bipartisan phenomenon and has even infected some politicians who take sensible positions on US intervention in Ukraine.

Another major reason banning TikTok has strong bipartisan support is that the site is being used by many young people to share information on the Israeli government’s action in Gaza. The head of the Anti-Defamation League was actually caught on tape complaining about the “TikTok problem.” This use of TikTok made TikTok a target for the many politicians who think the First Amendment makes an exception for speech critical of Israel.

The silver lining in the TikTok ban is it is waking up more Americans, especially young Americans, to the threat the out-of-control welfare-warfare-surveillance state poses to their liberty and prosperity. This provides a great opportunity to spread the ideas of liberty and grow the liberty movement.

The post TikTok Hypocrisy appeared first on LewRockwell.

This will be brief, appropriate to the topic at hand.  It consists of a quote from Milton Friedman, found in Joseph Salerno’s outstanding book, Money, Sound and Unsound, p. 366:

If a domestic money consists of a commodity, [such as] a pure gold standard or cowrie bead standard, the principles of monetary policy are very simple. There aren’t any. The commodity money takes care of itself.  [emphasis added]

Imagine that.  If we have sound money we don’t need the Fed.  Or Congress.  We just need sound money.

End of essay.

Postscript:

Economist Nouriel Roubini once attacked the gold standard:

Roubini raises the following question: If you are on a gold standard, or modified gold standard, what do you do in the event of a bank run—if you don’t have enough gold to fully back the currency?

Translated: What happens if the banks have created bogus IOUs for their depositors’ gold?  Suggestion: Have them indicted for fraud.  Gold doesn’t “back” anything.  It is the money.  The banks issue IOUs for the money.  When they issue more IOUs than they have gold on hand, they’re cheating.

Murray Rothbard:

In my view, issuing promises to pay on demand in excess of the amount of the goods on hand is simply fraud, and should be so considered by the legal system. . . .

This is legalized counterfeiting; this is the creation of money without the necessity of production, to compete for resources against those who have produced.

In short, I believe that fractional-reserve banking is disastrous both for the morality and for the fundamental bases and institutions of the market economy.… [quoted in Monetary Central Planning and the State, Richard Ebeling]

Roubini also says that a “gold standard limits the flexibility and range of actions that central banks can take.”  That alone should recommend it.  He thinks it’s a shortcoming.

At the start of World War I the belligerent governments went off the gold standard so they could fight one of the bloodiest wars in human history.  Gold, since it can’t be created on demand, would have severely limited the “flexibility and range of actions” governments could take.

Sound money “does not emerge from central-bank policy decisions.” But who cares about sound money when you want to engage in massive human slaughter?

And of course it’s only the gold-less monetary standard that allows the corrupt regime to shore up the ongoing butchery overseas.

More recently, Roubini said, “the world is on a slow-motion train wreck.”

The unmolested gold coin standard avoids train wrecks, “Dr. Doom,” by staying on track.

A gold standard doesn’t need Roubini.  It doesn’t need Jerome Powell and his merry band of inflationists.  It doesn’t need Congress.  It doesn’t need the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund.  It doesn’t need the WEF, the FOMC, or AOC.  It doesn’t need the numerous insults of various economists who damned it as a barbarous relic.

It just needs to be left alone.

The gold standard “requires nothing else than that the government abstain from deliberately sabotaging it,” Ludwig von Mises wrote in The Theory of Money and Credit:

What all the enemies of the gold standard spurn as its main vice is precisely the same thing that in the eyes of the advocates of the gold standard is its main virtue, namely its incompatibility with a policy of credit expansion.  The nucleus of all the effusions of the anti-gold authors and politicians is the expansionist fallacy. (p. 421)

Credit expansion – inflation – is indispensable to a growing government. From Human Action:

The gold standard removes the determination of cash-induced changes in purchasing power from the political arena. Its general acceptance requires the acknowledgment of the truth that one cannot make all people richer by printing money. The abhorrence of the gold standard is inspired by the superstition that omnipotent governments can create wealth out of little scraps of paper. (pp. 471-472)

If wealth could be created out of scraps of paper or their digital equivalent, world poverty would be a thing of the past.

Remember, the commodity money takes care of itself — and us too, if we let it.

The post Sound Monetary Policy in Under 40 Words appeared first on LewRockwell.

“We live in an age of full spectrum deception.” — Edward Dowd

You realize, don’t you, that what’s going on in our country is the collapse not just of an empire, or an economy, but a comprehensive paradigm of human progress. The hallmark of post-war life in Western Civ was supposed to be a return to sanity after the mid-twentieth century fugue of mass psychotic violence. The wish for just and rational order was not entirely pretense. But that was then. Now that we are going medieval on ourselves, the not-so-ironic result will be our literally going medieval, sinking back into a pre-modern existence of darkness, superstition, and penury, grubbing for a mere subsistence in the shadow of scuffling hobgoblins, our achievements lost and forgotten.

What’s most appalling is that our governing apparatus is visibly willing that to happen. When Barack Obama warned America to not underestimate Joe Biden’s ability to fuck things up, was that some kind of joke? After all, it was Mr. Obama and his fellow blobsters — the cabal of Intel spooks, covert Marxist bureaucrats, lawfare ninjas, globalist megalomaniacs, post-liberal think tankers, weapons grifters, degenerate billionaires, and assorted mentally-ill camp followers — who inflicted Joe Biden on the body politic. And then ran him on the country like some demon algorithm designed to wreck the USA as fast as possible.

The source of anguish in all that is the struggle to understand why they would want that to happen. What debauched sense of history would drive anyone to such lunatic desperation? It’s a cliché now to say that the Democratic Party has turned its traditional moral scaffold upside down and inside out. It acts against the kitchen table interests of the working and middle classes. It’s against civil liberties. It demands mental obedience to patently insane policy. It’s avid for war, no matter how cruelly pointless. It’s deliberately stirring up racial hatred. It despises personal privacy. It feeds a rogue bureaucracy that has become a veritable Moloch, an all-devouring malevolent deity. And now, rather suddenly, it aligns itself with a faction that seeks to exterminate the Jews.

And how did the opposition to that epic divergence into bad faith turn so flabby? How did the Republican Party roll over and wheeze so feebly while the FBI ran amok swatting grandmothers in dawn raids, and the US attorney general made justice a whore, and a Republican Congress allowed the Frankenstein agency of Homeland Security to flood the country with its enemies and give them gobs of operational cash? If Mr. Trump was unappetizing to them as a leader, why were they unable to produce an alternative figure of standing and stature at least equally resolute? They look like traitors and cowards.

For the moment, the country lies mired, inert, and demoralized in the face of in those terrible mysteries. But events are still tending and the hidden hand of emergence still operates backstage, preparing surprises for us. You are necessarily aware that the center did not hold. It’s even hard to locate where the center used to be with the action so heavy on the far-out margins. You’re watching drag queens importune young children to shove all the Jews into the sea. And the kids are sitting next to their mommies. What happened to the mommies’ brains that permits them to think this spectacle is okay? How will the mommies ever get their minds right?

In some quarters, a great rage is building. Not a few resent the overthrow of common sense, common law, and common decency. You better believe they will be aiming to do something about it. They will stand up for their dignity, their culture, their history. Virtue isn’t dead; it’s just broke down on a lonely highway waiting to hitch a ride back to where the lights are still on. Don’t forget that this really is the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Meanwhile, prepare for action. It’s obvious that the enemies of the people don’t intend to rest. They are going to try to play out this string to the last move because otherwise a lot of them will be going to jail, or might even hang for their wickedness. Once they turned criminal, there was no turning back. They have dishonored themselves and they’re trying to dishonor their country.

It’s true nonetheless that we’re moving into a new disposition of the human project. It’s going to be smaller and leaner, and not nearly as complex as the tottering Rube Goldberg apparatus we’re currently trapped in. We don’t know yet what the shape and texture of that America is going to be. As the sage Yogi Berra observed, our whole future is ahead of us. If you’re not among the insane, have faith. We’ll get there and everything is going to be all right.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The post Pep Talk on a Dark Day appeared first on LewRockwell.

Years ago, Doug Casey mentioned in a correspondence to me, “Empires fall from grace with alarming speed.”

Every now and then, you receive a comment that, although it may have been stated casually, has a lasting effect, as it offers uncommon insight. For me, this was one of those and it’s one that I’ve kept handy at my desk since that time, as a reminder.

I’m from a British family, one that left the UK just as the British Empire was about to begin its decline. They expatriated to the “New World” to seek promise for the future.

As I’ve spent most of my life centred in a British colony – the Cayman Islands – I’ve had the opportunity to observe many British contract professionals who left the UK seeking advancement, which they almost invariably find in Cayman. Curiously, though, most returned to the UK after a contract or two, in the belief that the UK would bounce back from its decline, and they wanted to be on board when Britain “came back.”

This, of course, never happened. The US replaced the UK as the world’s foremost empire, and although the UK has had its ups and downs over the ensuing decades, it hasn’t returned to its former glory.

And it never will.

If we observe the empires of the world that have existed over the millennia, we see a consistent history of collapse without renewal. Whether we’re looking at the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish Empire, or any other that’s existed at one time, history is remarkably consistent: The decline and fall of any empire never reverses itself; nor does the empire return, once it’s fallen.

But of what importance is this to us today?

Well, today, the US is the world’s undisputed leading empire and most Americans would agree that, whilst it’s going through a bad patch, it will bounce back and might even be better than ever.

Not so, I’m afraid. All empires follow the same cycle. They begin with a population that has a strong work ethic and is self-reliant. Those people organize to form a nation of great strength, based upon high productivity.

This leads to expansion, generally based upon world trade. At some point, this gives rise to leaders who seek, not to work in partnership with other nations, but to dominate them, and of course, this is when a great nation becomes an empire. The US began this stage under the flamboyant and aggressive Teddy Roosevelt.

The twentieth century was the American century and the US went from victory to victory, expanding its power.

But the decline began in the 1960s, when the US started to pursue unwinnable wars, began the destruction of its currency and began to expand its government into an all-powerful body.

Still, this process tends to be protracted and the overall decline often takes decades.

So, how does that square with the quote, “Empires fall from grace with alarming speed”?

Well, the preparation for the fall can often be seen for a generation or more, but the actual fall tends to occur quite rapidly.

What happens is very similar to what happens with a schoolyard bully.

The bully has a slow rise, based upon his strength and aggressive tendency. After a number of successful fights, he becomes first revered, then feared. He then takes on several toadies who lack his abilities but want some of the spoils, so they do his bidding, acting in a threatening manner to other schoolboys.

The bully then becomes hated. No one tells him so, but the other kids secretly dream of his defeat, hopefully in a shameful manner.

Then, at some point, some boy who has a measure of strength and the requisite determination has had enough and takes on the bully.

If he defeats him, a curious thing happens. The toadies suddenly realise that the jig is up and they head for the hills, knowing that their source of power is gone.

Also, once the defeated bully is down, all the anger, fear and hatred that his schoolmates felt for him come out, and they take great pleasure in his defeat.

And this, in a nutshell, is what happens with empires.

A nation that comes to the rescue in times of genuine need (such as the two World Wars) is revered. But once that nation morphs into a bully that uses any excuse to invade countries such as Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Syria, its allies may continue to bow to it but secretly fear it and wish that it could be taken down a peg.

When the empire then starts looking around for other nations to bully, such as Iran and Venezuela, its allies again say nothing but react with fear when they see the John Boltons and Mike Pompeos beating the war drums and making reckless comments.

At present, the US is focusing primarily on economic warfare, but if this fails to get the world to bend to its dominance, the US has repeatedly warned, regarding possible military aggression, that “no option is off the table.”

The US has reached the classic stage when it has become a reckless bully, and its support structure of allies has begun to de-couple as a result.

At the same time that allies begin to pull back and make other plans for their future, those citizens within the empire who tend to be the creators of prosperity also begin to seek greener pastures.

History has seen this happen countless times. The “brain drain” occurs, in which the best and most productive begin to look elsewhere for their future. Just as the most productive Europeans crossed the Pond to colonise the US when it was a new, promising country, their present-day counterparts have begun moving offshore.

The US is presently in a state of suspended animation. It still appears to be a major force, but its buttresses are quietly disappearing. At some point in the near future, it’s likely that the US government will overplay its hand and aggress against a foe that either is stronger or has alliances that, collectively, make it stronger.

The US will be entering into warfare at a time when it’s broke, and this will become apparent suddenly and dramatically. The final decline will occur with alarming speed.

When this happens, the majority of Americans will hope in vain for a reverse of events. They’ll be inclined to hope that, if they collectively say, “Whoops, we goofed,” the world will be forgiving, returning them to their former glory.

But historically, this never occurs. Empires fall with alarming speed, because the support systems that made them possible have decamped and have become reinvigorated elsewhere.

Rather than mourn the loss of empire that’s on the horizon, we’d be better served if we focus instead on those parts of the world that are likely to benefit from this inevitability.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Falling From Grace appeared first on LewRockwell.

What’s the latest in labor union news?  The Dartmouth basketball team has formed a labor union.

Say what? Aren’t these labor organizations only for employees?  Isn’t it true that the Dartmouth basketball team members are students, not workers?  Yes, and yes, but in making these points, we reckon, is the absence of the fact that Dartmouth College is a member of the Ivy League, and they do things differently than ordinary mortals. Perhaps someone should check on whether the professors there, who led these student-athletes down this particular garden path, have been engaged in a bit of plagiarism, instead of rational teaching of their classes.  Maybe there’s something wrong with the water supply, if that is what they are drinking, in New England.

One way to look at this new initiative is that it is stakeholder theory gone berserk.  Stakeholder theory is the view that yes, the corporation should offer a fair return to the owners, the stockholders, but should also do so for complete strangers, and people who have no ownership rights in the company at all.  For example, workers, suppliers, customers, neighbors, the man in the street (not to say the man in the moon), and people halfway around the globe, to boot, for all we know.

The point is, if (Dartmouth) students can become employees, without working for an employer or being paid to do so, then anyone can.  Hey, I shop regularly at McDonald’s (I don’t, but work with me here).  I’m now going to sign up as many diners of this restaurant as I can, and form a labor union, organized against Ronald McDonald.  We’ll bargain for lower meal prices, cleaner restrooms, etc.  And woe betide management if they do not “bargain fairly” with me and my fellow rent seekers.

I also play chess at tournaments.  Ditto.  I’m gonna organize my fellow competitors, and we’ll demand reduced entry fees.  The National Labor Relations Board can hardly say me nay, given its support for the Dartmouth basketball players.

But I am just getting started.  I’m also a straight white male.  We’re gonna get organized and demand more respect from everyone else.  Pay, too.  I am also fat, bald, and bearded.  Yes, yet another “labor union” is in the offing.

Say what you will about these reductios ad absurdum, but it cannot be denied that they are absurd.  Wokist stakeholder theory leads down some weird garden paths.

This philosophy also supports ordinary labor unions, the ones with actual employees.  It does so on the grounds that these organizations are necessary to improve wages and working conditions from what they would be in their absence.  Nonsense.  No, let me take that back and correct it: nonsense on stilts.

What determines wages has nothing to do with labor organizations.  It is all predicated upon the productivity of the worker.  You can’t get blood out of a stone.  The marginal revenue product of the employee is what sets an upper bound on the full wages (money wages plus working conditions) he can command.

Joe’s productivity is $40 per hour.  That means that for every 60 minutes he spends on the shop floor, or on the assembly line, or behind a desk, his employers’ revenue increases by precisely that amount.  Can his remuneration be $50 per hour?  No.  Then the company would lose $10 hourly, and that is no way to run a railroad.  The employer would eventually go broke, assuming he overpaid not only Joe, but numerous others.

May Joe’s wage be $25?  No, that is not sustainable, either.  For at that low rate of pay, Joe’s employer will take down a cool $15 per hour off his services.  Some other firm will be happy to have Joe on its payroll at $26, pocketing only $14 per hour, but will reason that better they “exploit” Joe to the tune of $14 than that the other firm do so at the rate of $15.  Nor will this bidding process end there.  You see where I am going with this.  Another company will offer $27, and we’re off to the races.  Where will this process end?  As near to $40 as the costs of these transactions will allow.  Wage tends to equal productivity at all times.  At equilibrium, the two are equated.

Nor must the initiative for this bidding war emanate, only, from the employers’ side.  The worker, too, can apply for a better paid job, helping this process along.

Actually, paradoxically, labor unions lower wages.  Who do you think pays for all those strikes, those elections, those efforts to organize, those slowdowns?  Those monies could have gone to the workers, but they do not.

Someone had better tell those Dartmouth jocks that labor unions are not the be-all and end-all that our friends the woke socialists think they are.

This originally appeared on American Thinker and was reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post When Student Basketball Teams Unionize appeared first on LewRockwell.

Blinken Accuses China of helping Trump Steal the Election in November

Last time it was Russiagate. This time will it be Chinagate?

While Blinken accuses China out of one side of his mouth, he threatens China out of the other side with sanctions unless China abandons its support of Russia. See here.

At the same time, Blinken is up to mischief in Taiwan and supporting US military aid and presence on the island despite the official US “one China” policy. Surely it must occur to the Chinese government that if China helps Washington isolate Russia, China herself is isolated. In view of such reports as this–“US Encircling China With Military Bases to Cut Off Ocean Access in Conflict Scenario”  Chinese “Russian expert” Professor Feng Yujun appears to be very foolish. It is difficult to imagine China’s development and Silk Road project without Russian energy.

But maybe not. Both the Russian and Chinese governments have delusional tendencies that if they refuse to respond with more than words to Washington’s provocations, everything will eventually be OK. As I see it, the policy of conflict avoidance simply increases the number and seriousness of the provocations.

As I emphasize, the most important step toward peace would be a Russian-Chinese-Iranian announcement of a mutual defense treaty. This would introduce a missing caution into US foreign policy and halt the provocations that are leading to nuclear war.

The post Why Did China Facing Endless Troubles from Washington Accept a Visit from Blinken Aimed at Disrupting China’s Relationship With Russia? appeared first on LewRockwell.

According to mounting data, one of the more serious side effects of the COVID mRNA jabs appears to be dementia, and worse yet, this previously untransmissible disease may now be “contagious,” transmissible by way of prions.

In my 2021 interview with Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., she explained why she suspected the COVID shots may eventually result in an avalanche of neurological prion-based diseases such as Alzheimer’s. She also published a paper detailing those mechanisms in the May 10, 2021, issue of the International Journal of Vaccine Theory. As she explained in that paper:1

“A paper published by J. Bart Classen (2021) proposed that the spike protein in the mRNA vaccines could cause prion-like diseases, in part through its ability to bind to many known proteins and induce their misfolding into potential prions.

Idrees and Kumar (2021) have proposed that the spike protein’s S1 component is prone to act as a functional amyloid and form toxic aggregates … and can ultimately lead to neurodegeneration.”

In summary, the take-home from Seneff’s paper is that the COVID shots, offered to hundreds of millions of people, are instruction sets for your body to make a toxic protein that will eventually wind up concentrated in your spleen, from where prion-like protein instructions will be sent out, leading to neurodegenerative diseases.

What Are Prions?

The term “prion” derives from “proteinaceous infectious particle.” Prions are known to cause a variety of neurodegenerative diseases in animals and humans, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or “mad cow disease”) in cattle, and chronic wasting disease in deer and elk.

These diseases are collectively referred to as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). They’re characterized by long incubation periods, brain damage, the formation of holes in the brain giving it a sponge-like appearance, and failure to induce an inflammatory response.

Infectious prions propagate by transmitting their misfolded protein state to normal variants of the same protein.

In short, prions are infectious agents composed entirely of a protein material that can fold in multiple, structurally distinct ways, at least one of which is transmissible to other prion proteins, leading to a disease that is similar to viral infections but without nucleic acids.

Unlike bacteria, viruses, and fungi, which contain nucleic acids (DNA or RNA) that instruct their replication, prions propagate by transmitting their misfolded protein state to normal variants of the same protein.

According to the prion disease model, the infectious properties of prions are due to the ability of the abnormal protein to convert the normal version of the protein into the misfolded form, thereby setting off a chain reaction that progressively damages the nervous system.

Prions are remarkably resistant to conventional methods of sterilization and can survive extreme conditions that would normally destroy nucleic acids or other pathogens, which is part of why prion diseases are so difficult to treat.

More Evidence mRNA Shots Can Trigger Dementia

Today, there’s even more evidence to support Seneff’s theory. In August 2022, tech entrepreneur Sid Belzberg wrote2 about prions.rip, a website he’d set up to collect data on the neurological side effects of the jabs. (This site is no longer live.)

Within a few months, the site had received about 15,000 hits and gathered 60 reports from people who got the jab and suffered neurological deficits shortly thereafter, including six cases of diagnosed CJD.

“Normally this disease affects 1 in a 1,000,000 people,” Belzberg wrote.3 “To get 6 cases you would need 6,000,000 hits to the site assuming everyone reports. The chances of getting 1 case in 15,000 hits is 1 in 66. To see 6 cases in 1 group of 15,000 is 1/66^6 or 1 in 82,000,000,000, or 20 times more likely to win a Powerball lottery! …

To reiterate, CJD is an exceptionally rare disease that is now a known and established severe adverse reaction (SAE) from the DEATHVAX. Injecting this slow kill bioweapon can cause ailments that are about as likely to develop in the real word as getting struck by lightning twice. The proof is now irrefutable.”

Frameshifting Can Result in Prion Production

In mid-December 2023, researchers reported4,5,6 that the replacing of uracil with synthetic methylpseudouridine in the COVID shots — a process known as codon optimization — can cause frameshifting, a glitch in the decoding, thereby triggering the production of off-target aberrant proteins.

The antibodies that develop as a result may, in turn, trigger off-target immune reactions. According to the authors, off-target cellular immune responses occur in 25% to 30% of people who have received the COVID shot. But that’s not all.

According to British neuroscientist Dr. Kevin McCairn, this frameshifting phenomenon has also been linked to harmful prion production — and that frame shifted prions, specifically, are infectious and can be transmitted from one person to another. As reported in the Journal of Theoretical Biology in 2013:7

“A quantitatively consistent explanation for the titres of infectivity found in a variety of prion-containing preparations is provided on the basis that the etiological agents of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy comprise a very small population fraction of prion protein (PrP) variants, which contain frameshifted elements in their N-terminal octapeptide-repeat regions …

Frameshifting accounts quantitatively for the etiology of prion disease. One per million frameshifted prions may be enough to cause disease. The HIV TAR-like element in the PRNP mRNA is likely an effector of frameshifting.”

McCairn explained this mechanism in a February 19, 2023, interview with Health Alliance Australia (video above). In it, he noted:

“Mis-folded proteins caused by prions can impact every level organ and tissue system in the body … [They] bioaccumulate and are resistant to degradation, thereby building up …”

Prions may in fact be the primary molecule that is being “shed” by COVID jab recipients, and if those prions are due to frameshifting, that could be very bad news indeed, considering their implication in dementia.

Another doctor who believes we’ll be facing an “epidemic of prion disease” is Dr. David Cartland. In late February 2024, he posted8 13 scientific papers linking the COVID jabs, prion diseases and CJD, noting that was just a “small selection” of what’s available in the medical literature.

Prions Implicated in Long COVID as Well

According to genomics expert Kevin McKernan, Ph.D., prions are also involved in long COVID (or as McKernan calls it, “long vax”).9 In one 2024 study,10 96.7% of long COVID sufferers had received the jab. In an interview with the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), McKernan stated:11

“If you frameshift over the stop codons, you’re going to be making proteins that are spike-mito proteins. When I talk to a lot of the long vax patients I hear of all these things that remind me of my time in the mitochondrial disease sequencing space …”

McKernan claims he tried to publish a paper on this in 2021 with Dr. Peter McCullough, but the editor of the journal “stepped in and torpedoed the paper.”12

World’s Largest Side Effect Analysis Has Been Published

In related news, the largest study13 to date on the side effects of the COVID jabs was published in the journal Vaccine in February 12, 2024, and it confirms what I and many other alternative news sources have been saying all along, namely that the mRNA jabs are the most dangerous medical products to ever hit the market.

The study — performed by the Global COVID Vaccine Safety (GCoVS) Project and funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Public Health Ontario and the Canadian Health Research Institute — evaluated the risk of “adverse events of special interest” (AESI) following COVID-19 “vaccination.”

Data from 10 sites in eight countries (Argentina, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, New Zealand and Scotland) were included, encompassing more than 99 million jabbed individuals.

Of the thousands of side effects Pfizer listed in its confidential report of post-authorization adverse events submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,14 the GCoVS focused on 13 AESIs that fall into three primary categories: Neurological, hematologic (blood-related) and cardiovascular conditions.

They calculated the AESI risk for each of the 13 AESIs based on the number of observed versus expected (OE) incidents occurring up to 42 days after injection. The “expected” number of side effects were based on vaccine adverse event data from 2015 to 2019. These rates were then compared to the adverse event rates observed in those who got one or more of the COVID jabs, either Pfizer’s BNT162b2, Moderna’s mRNA-1273, or AstraZeneca’s ChAdOx1.

Largest Study to Date Confirms COVID Jab Dangers

The analysis15 revealed several concerning side effects, including increased risks of myocarditis, pericarditis, blood clots in the brain, and various neurological conditions. Here’s a quick summary of the findings:

•Myocarditis and pericarditis:

◦Pfizer vaccine — OE ratios for myocarditis were 2.78 and 2.86 after the first and second shots, with the risk remaining doubled after the third and fourth shots.

◦Moderna vaccine — OE ratios for myocarditis were 3.48 and 6.10 after the first and second shots. Doses 1 and 4 also showed OE ratios of 1.74 and 2.64 for pericarditis.

◦AstraZeneca vaccine — OE ratio for pericarditis was 6.91 after the third shot.

•Blood clots in the brain (cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, CVST):

◦An OE of 3.23 for CVST was observed after the first AstraZeneca shot.

◦A significant increase in CVST risk was also noted after the second Pfizer dose.

•Neurological conditions:

◦Guillain-Barré syndrome — An OE ratio of 2.49 was observed following the AstraZeneca jab.

◦Transverse myelitis — Risk nearly doubled with the AstraZeneca shot.

◦Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis — OE ratios of 3.78 (Moderna) and 2.23 (AstraZeneca) were noted.

These findings really underscore the potential for serious side effects from the COVID shots, including conditions that may lead to other consequences in the longer term, such as stroke, heart attack, paralysis and death.

Effectiveness and Safety Was Wildly Exaggerated in Trials

Considering those findings, it’s no surprise to find that effectiveness and safety were exaggerated in clinical trials and observational studies. In a guest post on Dr. Robert Malone’s Substack, Raphael Lataster, Ph.D., writes:16

“An unofficial series of four crucially important medical journal articles, two by me, appearing in major academic publisher Wiley’s Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice reveals that claims made about COVID-19 vaccines’ effectiveness and safety were exaggerated in the clinical trials and observational studies, which significantly impacts risk-benefit analyses.

Also discussed are the concerning topics of myocarditis, with evidence indicating that this one adverse effect alone means that the risks outweigh the benefits in the young and healthy; and perceived negative effectiveness, which indicates that the vaccines increase the chance of COVID-19 infection/hospitalization/death, to say nothing about other adverse effects.”

Summary of Papers

The four papers in question include:

1.“Sources of Bias in Observational Studies of COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness” published in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice in March 2023, co-authored by BMJ editor Peter Doshi, Ph.D., statistician Kaiser Fung and biostatistician Mark Jones, which concluded that “case-counting window bias” had a significant effect on effectiveness estimates.17

As explained by Lataster, this “concerns the 7 days, 14 days, or even 21 days after the jab where we are meant to overlook jab-related issues, such as COVID infections, for some odd reason as ‘the vaccine has not had sufficient time to stimulate the immune system.’

This may strike you as quite bizarre since all of the ‘fully vaccinated’ must go through the process of being ‘partially vaccinated,’ sometimes even more than once. To make matters worse, the unvaccinated do not get such a ‘grace period,’ meaning that there is also a clear bias at play.

In an example using data from Pfizer’s clinical trial, the authors show that thanks to this bias, a vaccine with effectiveness of 0%, which is confirmed in the hypothetical clinical trial, could be seen in observational studies as having effectiveness of 48%.”

2.“Reply to Fung et. al. on COVID-19 Vaccine Case-Counting Window Biases Overstating Vaccine Effectiveness,” authored by Lataster, which discussed how the counting window bias not only affected effectiveness estimates in observational studies but also safety estimates, suggesting a need for reassessment of vaccine safety.18 The article also addresses “the mysterious rise in non-COVID excess deaths post-pandemic.”19

3.“How the Case Counting Window Affected Vaccine Efficacy Calculations in Randomized Trials of COVID-19 Vaccines,” again co-authored by Doshi and Fung, which detailed how case-counting window issues also overestimated effectiveness in Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials.20

4.A second article by Lataster, in which he highlighted and summarized the evidence showing that clinical trials were affected by adverse effect counting window issues that led to exaggerated safety estimates.21

“Together, these four articles make clear that claims made about COVID-19 vaccines; effectiveness and safety were exaggerated in the clinical trials and observational studies, whilst also finding time to discuss myocarditis and perceived negative effectiveness, meaning that new analyses are very much needed,” Lataster writes.22

Resources for Those Injured by the COVID Jab

Based on data from across the world, it’s beyond clear that the COVID shots are the most dangerous drugs ever deployed. If you already got one or more COVID jabs and are now reconsidering, you’d be wise to avoid all vaccines from here on, as you need to end the assault on your body. Even if you haven’t experienced any obvious side effects, your health may still be impacted long-term, so don’t take any more shots.

If you’re suffering from side effects, your first order of business is to eliminate the spike protein — and/or any aberrant off-target protein — that your body is producing. Two remedies shown to bind to and facilitate the removal of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein are hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. I don’t know if these drugs will work on off-target proteins and nanolipid accumulation as well, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to try.

The Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) has developed a post-vaccine treatment protocol called I-RECOVER. Since the protocol is continuously updated as more data become available, your best bet is to download the latest version straight from the FLCCC website at covid19criticalcare.com.23

For additional suggestions, check out the World Council for Health’s spike protein detox guide,24 which focuses on natural substances like herbs, supplements and teas. Sauna therapy can also help eliminate toxic and misfolded proteins by stimulating autophagy.

Sources and References

• 1 International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice and Research May 10, 2021; 2(1): 402-444
• 2, 3 2ndsmartestguyintheworld.com August 18, 2022
• 4 Nature December 6, 2023
• 5 Trial Site News December 7, 2023
• 6 The Telegraph December 6, 2023
• 7 Journal off Theoretical Biology May 2013; 325: 52-61
• 8 Twitter/X Dr. David Cartland February 24, 2024
• 9, 11, 12 LifeSite News March 4, 2024
• 10 Journal of Clinical Medicine 2024; 13(5): 1208
• 13, 15 Vaccine February 12, 2024 [epub ahead of print]
• 14 5.3.6 Cumulative Analysis of Post-Authorization Adverse Event Reports Received Through 28-Feb-2021, Pages 30-38
• 16, 19, 22 RW Malone MD Substack March 6, 2024
• 17 Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice March 26, 2023; 30(1): 30-36
• 18 Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice July 4, 2023; 30(1): 82-85
• 20 Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice July 15, 2023; 30(1): 105-106
• 21 Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice January 18, 2024
• 23 Covid19criticalcare.com
• 24 World Council for Health Spike Protein Detox Guide November 30, 2021

The post Doctors Predict Epidemic of Prion Brain Diseases appeared first on LewRockwell.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year, you’ve no doubt heard about Taylor Swift’s record-breaking Eras Tour. A reference to the various “eras,” or phases, of the singer’s life, the Eras Tour features a 44 -song set list spanning hits from every album of her 17-year-career. Time magazine reported that “[by] the end of 2023—less than halfway through the tour’s scheduled 152-show run—the Eras Tour had earned over $1 billion to become the highest-grossing concert tour of all time.” Sky-high ticket prices and near-instant venue sellouts led to the release of The Eras Tour movie on Disney+, and over 4.6 million viewers have now streamed the concert from the comfort of their own homes.

Now, I may be dating myself here, but I will readily admit to being among the first of the now-three generations to fall in love with Taylor Swift’s music. I vividly remember driving around Charleston, South Carolina, where I attended college, with a 20-piece chicken nugget meal from McDonald’s (oh to have that metabolism again!) singing “Love Story” at the top of my lungs like it was written especially about me. The next year, in 2009, I had a blast with my best friend at Swift’s Fearless Tour. I sobbed to her song “Back to December” on repeat in 2010 after what felt like a life-shattering breakup. And then there was that time I jumped on stage at a friend’s wedding reception, circa 2014, to belt out “Shake It Off” with the band.

But then something curious began to happen. As I left my college and law-school eras, filled with all the joys and sorrows and mistakes of youth, I entered a new series of eras: motherhood, then wifehood (suffice it to say, the order of these personal eras is a subject for another article). Then more motherhood. Then a conversion to Catholicism. As I grew and matured, however, Swift seemed to remain stuck in an earlier era. I found it more and more difficult to relate to her songs.

There’s a reason Gen Z and Gen Alpha love Swift with an ardency that surpasses even that of the Millennials who loved her first: Taylor Swift, though 34, is still “feelin’ 22.” It’s readily apparent that this is a woman entering the latter part of her prime childbearing years who remains lost and alone. She is a billionaire with the world at her feet, but it’s clear she has no real idea what to do with it. She remains emotionally stunted, repeatedly trying to fill the aching cry of her heart with created things and transient romantic relationships.

The only evidence of “maturity” in her music over the last decade or so—and it is a false maturity to be sure—is that instead of the fairly innocuous lyrics of fairytale dreams and true love that were the central themes of much of her earlier music, she’s now unafraid to incorporate all manner of curse words (albeit sparingly compared to much other pop music) and make both open and veiled references supporting same-sex relationships and premarital sex. Some of her most popular songs still contain a troubling element of bullying, a mean-girl streak that most of us hopefully outgrow by the time we enter adulthood. There’s also a darker imagery that has crept into her work, with occult symbolism showcased throughout the Eras Tour and an overtly sexual cover for her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department.

Read the Whole Article

The post Taylor Swift Does Not Belong in Your Christian Era appeared first on LewRockwell.

The cashless society is a necessary step in preparation for the mark of the beast.

The mark of the beast, btw, is a concept based on a couple of short passages from The Revelation (end of chapter 13 and start of chapter 14), which say that there will eventually be a one world government just before Jesus returns, and the spiritual leader of that government will cause people everywhere to get a mark put in their right hand or in their forehead, without which they will not be able to buy or sell.

What we have used for centuries for buying and selling is cash (or checks). We have also progressed to credit cards.

So all of these would need to be replaced with the mark, in order for the prophecy to come true.

Is cashless society in World a bad step?

Cashless Means Automatic

If money is easy to spend, it is also easy to take. Convenience can easily become tyranny. Automatic payments that come directly from your bank account illustrate the point.

Below Is First 9 Major Risks of a Cashless Society:

1. Risk of Confiscation

The convenience of digital money that allows you to spend your money more easily, also makes it easier for banks, governments and thieves to take it.The message to depositors is clear- when you put money in a bank you are a creditor of the bank and if it goes bust you are at the bottom of the list of creditors. Your money** will be seized as part of any approved plan, perhaps even before the broke bank files for bankruptcy.

Your bank account can be raided by government authorities, like the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) without notice or reason given. If the IRS believes your bank account deposit and/or withdrawals activity is suspicious and/or may involve a pattern designed to avoid reporting requirements, they may seize your account.

Think your money is safe in the bank? Think again.

2. Risk of Theft

Digital cash a bit of Trap-it can be stolen.Think digital money is safer than cash and can’t be stolen?

3. Crime is Easier

Some actually believe that in a cashless society that crime will go down and drug dealers will go out of business. Think again.

In a cashless society, theft will occur on line and in far larger amounts than cash heists. An online thief never has to confront his victim, commit violence, crack a safe, get past an alarm system, dog or armed guards and carry away his loot. Rather, in a cashless society, the cyber thief merely has to hack the systems where the ‘money” is. The online heist involves no risk of death or threat to the thief’s personal safety and can be done from anywhere in the world.

4. Risk of System Failure

Without cash, the value of currency would have no independent value outside a functioning banking system to which you have access. Your money wouldn ‘work’ without a functioning banking system. If the banking system is down due to a power outage, solar flare, financial crisis, Internet failure, hack or network crash, your money is unavailable and potentially lost. If back up files are lost how do you prove you had $15,000 in your account?

5. Risk of Being Exiled From the System

Even if the digital banking system was 100% fool proof, you may end up being shut out of the system for wrong doing (actual or alleged), bad credit or failure to pay banking fees. Or you may be the victim of identity theft and as a “precaution” your account may be closed. Without access to the banking system, how will you pay your bills and buy items you need?

Read the Whole Article

The post 9 Major Risks of a Cashless Society appeared first on LewRockwell.

This week, the rise in JGB yields and the decline of the yen accelerated (note: the JPY chart is on an inverted scale). There is no doubt that there is a crisis developing.

Ever since the Fed raised interest rates, the Bank of Japan’s monetary policies have become exposed as being out on a limb. The BOJ has been pursuing QE since the year 2000, and in the process has accumulated nearly 60% of its own government’s debt. Relative to the size of the economy, this debt at over 260% of GDP is the highest of the world’s advanced nations.

Until now, these policies failed to fully disrupt the yen’s domestic purchasing power, due to the propensity of Japan’s population to save and the long-term trend of the dollar’s declining interest rates. But US interest rates are no longer declining and with the US Government in a developing debt trap the pressure on the Bank of Japan to raise rates firmly into positive territory is increasing.

Japan’s propensity to save is still there. It means that if the BOJ raises rates, savings will increase even further at the cost of consumption, throwing the economy into statistical recession. This is of course a Keynesian analysis whose errors are now being exposed. That said, Japan has been running on Keynesian hot air since the 1990s asset bubble imploded: that’s thirty years of denying the necessary creative destruction needed for an economy to regenerate.

From higher interest rates, there are some important consequences that flow from Japan’s Keynesianism:

·      Already at over 260%, government debt to GDP will soar not only due to continued budget deficits currently exceeding 5% and growing, but importantly because GDP will be contracting due to the savings paradox. It will not be long before this debt to GDP figure increases to over 300%, undermining the fiat yen’s credibility even if interest rates are permitted to rise.

·      The BOJ’s balance sheet equity of only Y100 million is already wiped out over hundreds-of-thousand times by bond losses on its QE holdings. These losses will now accelerate astronomically. How long can this bankrupt situation be allowed by markets to persist?

·      Going by Japan’s global systemically important banks, her commercial banking system is probably the most highly leveraged in the world. Like the Eurozone G-SIBs, this is because negative interest policies compressed credit margins and the only way in which banks could maintain bottom line profits was to increase their ratios of balance sheet assets to equity capital. Not only do higher interest rates lead to massive losses as the cost of funding rises above interest returns on assets (just like last year’s regional bank failures in the US), but non-performing loans will impact balance sheets as well.

·      With many years of suppressed interest rates leading to a decade of negative rates, Japanese local governments and corporates have become debt zombies. Positive interest rates will expose the errors of not addressing the imbalances that arose from the 1990s debt bubble and its subsequent collapse.

As the interest rate crisis facing Japan’s policy makers unfolds, there can be no doubt that Japan’s politicians, true to their Keynesian roots, will double down on trying to prevent deflation. Budget deficits will soar, not just as the balance between revenue and welfare spending tips further into the red, but because of political determination to keep stimulating a rapidly disintegrating economy.

The problems facing Japan are an extreme example of those facing other G7 nations. There is no salvation in higher interest rates either, only economic and monetary collapse. The combination of rising government debt, higher compounding interest costs and an entire economy wrongfooted by rising interest rates are a lethal mix. So what does Mrs Watanabe do about it? Well, getting out of fiat yen into real legal money, which is gold, could be seen as an increasing option. It is favoured by the East Asian masses, and probably by the ordinary Japanese people when they begin to realise what’s happening to their savings.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for domestic users of Japan’s yen to wake up to the increasing certainty that the fiat yen is in the early stages of outright collapse.

Reprinted with permission from MacleodFinance Substack.

The post Japan’s Slide Into Crisis appeared first on LewRockwell.

According to wfpusa.org- Is There Really a Global Food Crisis?

Yes. Right now, there is a global food crisis – the largest one in modern history. Since the United Nations World Food Program’s (WFP) creation in 1963, never has hunger reached such devastating highs. From the eruption of new conflicts and the escalating impacts of the climate crisis to soaring food and fuel costs, millions of people are being driven closer to starvation each day.

Nearly 350 million people around the world are experiencing the most extreme forms of hunger right now. Of those, nearly 49 million people are on the brink of famine. Behind these massive statistics are individual children, women and men suffering from the dire effects of such severe hunger. Malnourished mothers give birth to malnourished babies, passing hunger from one generation to the next. Children’s physical and cognitive growth is stunted. Farmers are unable to grow enough food to provide for their families and communities. Entire towns are forced to leave their homes in search of food.

The food crisis will be the biggest crisis of the 21st century. It will push up food prices and spread hunger and poverty. Surging food prices will create inflation and create more crisis in the world. This will not only affect developing countries but also developed countries. According to United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), more than 73 million people in 78 countries who depend on food handouts are facing reduced rations this year.

High prices have caused food protests around the world like Mexico, India, Senegal, London, Mauritania and other parts of Africa. India, Mexico, Haiti, Philippines, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Yemen have seen food riots this year protesting the food crisis. Hardest hit of this crisis will likely be African countries, where many of the world’s poorest nations are here. A lack of food as the primary needs of humans will cause riots, suicide and millions of people could die from it.

Nearly every region of the world is experiencing drastic inflation caused by food this year. Retail prices are up 18% in China, 17% in Sri Lanka and 10% or more throughout Latin America and Russia.

In 3 May 2008, a cyclone devastated Myanmar’s low-lying Irrawaddy delta region leaving more than 1 million people homeless, according to the UN. An estimated 80,000 people died in the delta’s Labutta district alone. Myanmar had been expected to export 600,000 tons of rice this year, including to Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. The cyclone flooded 5,000 square kilometers (1,930 square miles) of farmland. Cyclone Nargis struck the country’s main rice-growing area, worsening a food crisis that’s triggered unrest from Haiti to Egypt.

Why does it happen

Rocketing oil prices, global warming, biofuels, and the world population explosion are the cause of this food crisis. The primary driver is the soaring cost of oil, which reached $123 a barrel for the first time. Oil cost will make transportation more expensive, thus making food more expensive too. The price of oil has sent the cost of food imports skyrocketing this year.

The World Bank predicts global demand for food will double by 2030. This is partly because the world’s population is expected to grow by three billion by 2050. Food demand will also grow due to new prosperity in India and China.

Global warming will disrupt food production in many countries. It can cause climate instability which is bad for crop.

Food price are affected by accelerating demand for biofuels. Biofuels, made from food crops such as corn, sugar cane, and palm oil, are seen as easing the world’s dependence on gasoline. But when crude oil is expensive, these alternative energy sources can also be sold at higher price. Last year a quarter of the US maize crop was turned into ethanol to fuel vehicles. US supplies more than 60% of the world’s maize exports. According to the World Bank, this is putting pressure on countries’ food supplies.

The worldwide food reserves are at their lowest in 35 years. Demand is growing much more than supply.

Read the Whole Article

The post Global Food Crisis- Will Be the Biggest Crisis of the 21st Century! appeared first on LewRockwell.

This is the fourth in a dredging operation. I am not asking you to take this on board as gospel. I just want you to consider it, and over the next weeks and months, see what comes to you as evidence or corroboration. I’m working towards a meta-theory, rather than presenting you with something I can prove in court. However, this is hardly speculative, I have a lot of validating evidence, but I am rigorous. I need things locked down before I assert them as fact. Out there in the wildlands of the internet, millions of people, educated and not, ‘believe’ what I am presenting and they are in full opposition. Any politician looking for a way forward would be wise to look at this theory because he would immediately gain an active base. Which is why I think it’s worth considering.

Finally, if we know what has happened to us, we can change it. Ignoring reality because it is too dark or frightening, plays right into their hands. They want us weak, scared, and submissive. Who are they? The Bilderbergers, the Committee of 300, the European Black Nobility, the Olympians, the Illuminati, Skull and Bone, the Freemason hierarchy, the Venerable Order of the Knights of St John, Cultus Diabolicus, Force X, Club of Rome or for brevity: the World Economic Forum. HG Wells was commissioned to write their plans for us: The Open Conspiracy — Plans for a World Revolution.

We are looking at the stuff of conspiracy, the ancient association of the powerful who have been ruining the world since, well, as long as history has been recorded. They are our secret government. When Hillary Clinton was bent on leaving Bill in ’90, they sent one of their people, Pamela Harriman, to talk her into staying, promising her First Lady and then her own presidency. When Bush Sr was quavering over the first Iraq War, Thatcher summoned him to Aspen and gave him their orders.

Risibly, they trace their bloodlines back to the Nephilim, that race of Giants produced by “gods” uniting with human women in Sumer and Egypt. They operate in secret, because their goals mean us no good, and are richer by orders of magnitude than our prancing billionaires. The British Royal Family alone is worth $2 trillion and Prince Charles is the world’s largest landowner.

I have been principally focused on mind control. I’d already read the founding texts, and followed the building of the mind control system, so it was easier for me to track than their financial operations, though mind control is undertaken in order to make them richer and hide their black deeds (hence the Black Nobility). Their founding documents are available freely, and they built their institutions in full public view. They are among the most respected on the planet. A list is attached below. Most of them were birthed out of the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations which itself came out of the Wellington Club, which in 1914 angled to get Britain, then America into the 1st World War.

The British War Office through the RIIA, commissioned Lords Northcliffe and Rothmere (the Daily Mail) and Arnold Toynbee, head of RIIA, and an MI6 operative, to do a study on manipulating war information. The project was managed out of Wellington House. Americans Edward Bernays and Walter Lippman were roped in and they held brainstorming sessions to mobilize the working class, who were expected to die in record numbers. Using the Daily Mail, they tested and tested techniques and decided that 13% of us were capable of critical thinking. The rest they could play like meat puppets. Records of the time show that by 1917, 94% of the working class did not have the faintest idea what they were dying for other than the Germans were horrible and bent on destroying King and country and had to be wiped out. (John Coleman from War Office Records). Then they did it to Americans. They were dying to increase the wealth of these people.

It was so effective, mind control was born.

At present, mind control is being used to take land and resources from us in the Americas, as they have in the developing world since the 17th C., and use us as another resource, on admittedly better living standards than cobalt miners. We will have lost all self-determination, as our lands and property will have been alienated. Agenda 2030 and Agenda 2050 are a mapping of the world’s resources and a subsequent setting aside of 30%, then 50% and then 75%. 90%, of land, water, minerals, wood, farm and rangelands. All of that will be owned through a series of international treaties negotiated through the UN, with national and regional governments, to be exploited by these people without adherence to national laws.Biodiversitymapping.org is the propaganda, this map below is the reality. Turquoise zones are where humans will be permitted to live.

Consider the possibility that almost everything you think has been devised and given you to think, through the media which they own. Unless, of course, you are deeply religious. The worthy tropes of every dinner party are rooted in the clinics and labs and seminar rooms of the behavioural institutions we fund. Tolerance of flat-out evil like people dying on the streets in front of us? Programmed. All the ‘you go girl’, ‘take care of you’, ‘girl power’, ‘girl boss’, self-cherishing, lack of gravitas in middle class women is invented in those rooms. Overpopulation? Programmed. Catastrophic man-made climate change? Programmed. Crystals and tarot and wicca? Programmed. ‘We’re running out of resources’? Programmed and utter nonsense. Buddhism? Programmed passivity. Even the slang we use was devised for us. Our felt powerlessness is programmed. Our despair, the black-pilled, “I’mouttahere” disengaged? You are exactly where they want you to be. Our disinclination to confront and debate? Programmed. The passivity of medical staff in the face of unreason and cruelty during covid? It took decades, but that was deliberate.

Read the Whole Article

The post They Are The Dark; We Are the Light appeared first on LewRockwell.

 

 

di Brendan Brown

Ragionare a “mente calda” è una scorciatoia che corrompe i processi mentali e che il defunto Daniel Kahneman identificò attraverso esperimenti nel processo decisionale finanziario. La rapidità di pensiero affligge la risposta alla nuova minaccia dell’inflazione dei prezzi. Tale minaccia era emersa ancor prima che l’inflazione dei prezzi post-crisi sanitaria, scoppiata alla fine del 2022, si raffreddasse rispetto ai livelli di picco. L’impennata più recente dei prezzi si è materializzata anche se i suoi sintomi nei mercati dei beni sono stati attenuati dall’inversione delle precedenti dislocazioni sul lato dell’offerta.

Un tema spesso citato, e che illustra l’attuale angoscia inflazionistica, suggerisce che la FED inizierà a tagliare il suo tasso di riferimento entro l’estate di quest'anno. Secondo alcuni di coloro che temono l’inflazione dei prezzi, questa politica dei tassi striderebbe con un’economia americana che è straordinariamente forte – almeno secondo l’esercito di osservatori di dati le cui dimensioni sono aumentate in risposta al mantra ufficiale secondo cui le decisioni monetarie della FED sono diventate strettamente “dipendenti dai dati”.

L’ex-segretario al Tesoro (sotto Clinton) e consigliere economico capo di Obama, il professor Larry Summers – ora uno dei principali collaboratori di Bloomberg TV – dichiara categoricamente che il tasso d'interesse di equilibrio è salito ben al di sopra del livello degli anni 2000 e 2010, pertanto i piani della FED per “normalizzare i tassi ufficiali” aggraveranno il fenomeno inflazione.

In che modo questo è un esempio di ragionamento a “mente calda” difettoso? Nel rispondere dovremmo ricordare le osservazioni di Kahneman secondo cui la mente, nel prendere scorciatoie per facilitare una risposta rapida (in questo caso al pericolo percepito dell'inflazione dei prezzi), ignora i limiti della razionalità. Esempi di tali difetti includono l’eccessivo affidamento su campioni di piccole dimensioni e su ipotesi controverse, sebbene attualmente plausibili.

La piccola dimensione del campione è evidente in qualsiasi controversia sui tassi d'interesse di equilibrio. Esistono pochi periodi lunghi non sovrapposti e rilevanti ai fini della stima e il concetto di tasso di equilibrio è esso stesso un costrutto teorico a dir poco discutibile.

Il controverso “tasso d'interesse di equilibrio”

Il tasso d'interesse di equilibrio, per quanto ne sappiamo, avrebbe potuto essere anormalmente elevato per gran parte del quarto di secolo precedente la pandemia; le banche centrali hanno pilotato i tassi ufficiali molto al di sotto di tal livello.

Un’influenza chiave dietro l’elevato livello dei tassi d'interesse di equilibrio nel 1995-2020, come qui ipotizzato, è stata il boom (alcuni direbbero una bolla) nella costituzione delle catene di approvvigionamento industriali a livello mondiale. La rivoluzione della digitalizzazione aveva consentito il controllo micromanageriale su vaste aree geografiche e organizzative. Tutto ciò avvenne nel contesto dell'ingresso della Cina nell'OMC (come raccomandato al Congresso dal presidente Clinton nel 2000) e dell'accelerazione dell'integrazione economica regionale (compresa l'espansione del NAFTA e dell'UE dopo la caduta del muro di Berlino).

In un libero mercato i prezzi sarebbero scesi per 20 anni

In un sistema monetario sano/onesto, i prezzi al consumo sarebbero crollati nel corso di questi due decenni di costituzione delle catene di approvvigionamento internazionali, ma nulla di tutto ciò si è verificato con l’attuale standard dell'inflazione al 2%.

Le banche centrali hanno pilotato i tassi ufficiali per “contrastare la minaccia della deflazione”. La virulenta inflazione dei prezzi degli asset è diventata un ulteriore elemento motore della spesa aziendale, inclusa in questo caso non solo la costituzione delle catene di approvvigionamento internazionali ma anche più in generale la digitalizzazione per inseguire potenziali rendite di monopolio rese possibili dalla nuova tecnologia.

Uno degli esempi più estremi di tale distorsione monetaria si è verificato durante il periodo Bernanke/Yellen del 2013-2017. La bolla mondiale dei prezzi delle materie prime era scoppiata ed era stata originariamente alimentata dalle politiche monetarie e fiscali estreme della Cina nel 2009-2012, possibili solo nel contesto dell'inflazione monetaria alimentata dalla FED. Il crollo dei prezzi delle materie prime avrebbe dovuto significare un periodo di calo dei prezzi al consumo su un ampio arco temporale.

Invece abbiamo avuto un’inflazione dei prezzi degli asset

Invece Yellen/Bernanke hanno alimentato un’enorme inflazione dei prezzi degli asset, vantandosi di un tasso d'inflazione appena superiore allo zero. A sua volta il nuovo slancio dell’inflazione monetaria statunitense ha alimentato il boom della spesa per investimenti. Ora la rotta è stata invertita, pertanto non è chiaro il motivo per cui Summers dovrebbe avere ragione riguardo la sua ipotesi secondo cui il “tasso d'interesse di equilibrio” dovrebbe spostarsi a un livello più alto.

Infatti potremmo trovarci in un lungo periodo di tempo in cui questo tasso di equilibrio potrebbe scendere rispetto al periodo 1995-2020 e i debiti/deficit fiscali degli Stati Uniti non contraddicono questa conclusione. L’elevato debito pubblico statunitense, finanziato da diverse forme di tassazione schiacciante – tra cui la riscossione periodica della tassa sull’inflazione e altre forme di tassazione monetaria – difficilmente è una ricetta per il dinamismo economico. Al contrario, queste sono le caratteristiche di imperi un tempo prosperi e adesso in declino.

Le normative statali soffocano la crescita economica

Uno scenario decisamente non dinamico si profila all'orizzonte per gli Stati Uniti e per gran parte dell’economia mondiale sulla scia della Grande Inflazione Monetaria 1995-2024. Gli investimenti sbagliati in tutte le loro dimensioni vengono al pettine. Sì, l’intelligenza artificiale potrebbe essere uno stimolo alla crescita se davvero le forze dell’innovazione finissero nelle mani di coloro che trovano e sviluppano nuovi percorsi verso la fortuna economica. Tutto ciò, però, è tutt’altro che certo.

L’ormai lunga esperienza sulla rivoluzione tecnologica digitale con le sue caratteristiche speciali – chi vince prende tutto, soppressione del libero ingresso, corrosione dei diritti di proprietà (compresi i dati) – impone cautela. Non s'è rivelata un grande elemento motore per il tenore di vita nelle economie avanzate, in contrasto con gli indubbi vantaggi per le economie in via di sviluppo derivanti soprattutto dalla rivoluzione nelle catene di approvvigionamento mondiali.

E poi abbiamo le squallide prospettive per la seconda economia mondiale: la Cina. Sotto uno statalismo e una pesante repressione finanziaria, dove i timori di una futura povertà – soprattutto in età avanzata – spingono i risparmi a livelli record, il surplus netto di questa economia nel commercio di beni e servizi con il resto del mondo diventa gigantesco. Il corollario sono i massicci flussi di esportazioni di capitali dalla Cina, che influiscono negativamente sul livello di equilibrio mondiale dei tassi d'interesse.

Un paesaggio pericoloso davanti a sé

È ora di chiamare le cose col loro nome: quando ragioniamo a mente fredda piuttosto che a mente calda alla minaccia dell’inflazione, ci rendiamo conto che il concetto di “tasso d'interesse di equilibrio” è di scarso aiuto, se non nullo, alla nostra comprensione economica – a prescindere dalla persistente popolarità che ha goduto nei sistemi monetari fiat. È vero, nell'odierno sistema monetario le banche centrali formulano giudizi chiave sulla relazione tra il tasso ufficiale e il cosiddetto tasso neutrale, ma molto, se non tutto, questo è falso – sintomatico dell'attuale epoca oscura.

Tuttavia non vi è alcuna prospettiva che i sistemi monetari si allontanino dall’attuale diktat dei tassi di riferimento. Una tendenza al ribasso del tasso ufficiale, nonostante le proteste del professor Summers su Bloomberg TV, ci direbbe che l’attuale celebrazione del dinamismo economico statunitense sta ignorando le profonde controforze all’opera.

Ciò significherebbe un futuro meno inflazionistico di quanto molti temono oggi? No, ma è probabile che l’elevata inflazione futura arrivi a scatti: i prezzi generalmente virano verso l’alto e in gran parte in risposta a shock dell’offerta che non incontrano resistenza da parte del sistema monetario. E quando gli shock sull’offerta subiscono un’inversione, le banche centrali approfittano della situazione per potenziare l’inflazione monetaria piuttosto che consentire ai prezzi di ricadere verso il livello precedente allo shock.

Esempi di tali potenziali shock di offerta includono sconvolgimenti geopolitici, pandemie, carestie e altre disgrazie provocate da Madre Natura, caos sociale e politico interno ed espansione fiscale. Infatti dovremmo aspettarci che lo stato, incluso il sistema bancario centrale, sfrutti appieno questi episodi per avere l’opportunità di imporre periodi di dolorose tasse derivanti dall’inflazione e quindi frenare, almeno temporaneamente, una crescita inesorabile dell’ammontare reale del suo debito.

[*] traduzione di Francesco Simoncelli: https://www.francescosimoncelli.com/

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April 22 was Earth Day.. Brain-dead “President” Biden issued a proclamation about it. This said:

“More than 50 years ago today, some 20 million Americans came together across the country to demand that we prioritize our planet’s well-being.  They came from every walk of life and political background, and were united around a common vision:  to protect the Earth and our natural treasures for future generations. Their actions that day ignited an environmental movement and proved that nothing is beyond our capacity if we do it together.  Today, we carry on their legacy by building a greener, more sustainable planet and, with it, a healthier, more prosperous Nation.” See here.

I’m confident readers of LRC won’t be fooled by this. Protecting the environment sounds good, if you don’t know what the anti-humans behind Earth Day mean by it. What they have in mind combines a pagan religion, communism—it’s no coincidence April 22 is Lenin’s birthday—and the “climate change” hoax, which aims to wipe out humanity.

Let’s look at these points in more detail. Pagans want to replace Christianity, which teaches that man has dominion over the earth with a religion of earth-worship. Marcus Walker Van Every gives a good account of this:

“Tucked nicely into the overarching theme of Earth Day, are core pagan beliefs such as the veneration of Mother Earth, the reduction of human population, the introduction of animistic and pantheistic beliefs, and even the criminalization for man’s contribution to climate change.

Although Earth Day [established 1970] is not officially recognized as one of the sacred, pagan holidays, it has deep pagan roots and was born out of deeper religious conviction. Earth Day’s genesis can be traced back to a 1967 essay written by Lynn White, Jr., titled — The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis.

In his essay, White laid a “heavy burden” on Biblical Christianity for promoting man’s dominance over nature, all the while suggesting that in order to save our world, progressive thinkers must change the way they view the relationship between mankind and Mother Earth. His suggestion, of course, was to embrace our pagan roots and replace archaic, destructive Christian beliefs with a newfound veneration of nature and nature’s “spirits.”

“Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia’s religions (except, perhaps Zoroastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends … The spirits in natural objects, which formerly had protected nature from man, evaporated. Man’s effective monopoly on spirit in this world was confirmed, and the old inhibitions to the exploitation of nature crumbled.”

[Lynn White, Jr. — The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis — 1969]

In other words, the patriarch of the Earth Day movement believed with full conviction that until society returned to the pagan worship of nature and Mother Earth, mankind would inevitably destroy its own sacred environment. And make no mistake about it, pagan ideology considers the destruction of the planet as a more grievous offense that the destruction of human beings themselves. The neopagans of our day see mankind as the cancerous growth that has infected the earth with its waste and overpopulation.

And now, nearly 50 years later, our children have been indoctrinated with pagan ideology — passionately wanting to save a planet without even realizing why.

If you don’t believe Earth Day purely is a religious movement, here is another quote from White’s essay, which was premiered in the very first Earth Day manifesto in 1970.

“Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and refeel our nature and destiny.” See here.

Now, let’s look at Communism, Can it be an accident that, of all the dates in the calendar to pick for this phony holiday, Lenin’s birthday was chosen?  As Mises Institute President Tom DiLorenzo notes:

“Today is “earth day,” first established by the watermelon movement (green on the outside, red on the inside) on Lenin’s 100th birthday.  This pinpoints what has always been the main purpose of “environmentalism”:  to destroy capitalism and economic freedom and replace it with another totalitarian communist hell under the guise of “saving the planet” (but the hell with human beings).

Is there any doubt that if Lenin were alive today he would be giving full-throated support for the “Green New Deal”?  He would also probably be pulling down Bill Clinton-caliber speaking fees at “prestigious” American universities and perhaps even awarded the Al Gore, Jr. Endowed Professorship in Environmentalism at Vanderbilt University.” See here.

But what precisely is the tie-in between communism and Earth Day? Now we get to the heart of the matter. The communists want to destroy us, and one way they can do so in by ruining the American economy through measures designed to cope with the phony emergency of climate change. We can see that this is at the heart of Earth day if we have another look at brain dead “President” Biden’s proclamation:

“This work has never been more urgent.  Climate change is the existential crisis of our time; no one can deny its impacts and staggering costs anymore.  We have seen historic floods from Vermont to Kentucky to California.  Droughts and hurricanes are growing more frequent and intense.  Wildfires are destroying entire communities and spreading harmful smoky haze for thousands of miles while temperatures keep reaching record highs.  Season after season, I have met with families who have lost everything to major storms, wildfires, and other climate disasters, and I have stood with the brave first responders and firefighters who sacrifice so much to protect their neighbors.  Deforestation, nature loss, toxic chemicals, and plastic pollution also continue to threaten our air, lands, and waters, endangering our health, other species, and ecosystems.    Our actions matter, and together we can protect our planet and our futures.

Today, I am on track to conserve more lands and waters than any President in history — getting us closer to my Administration’s historic goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our Nation’s lands and waters by 2030.  It is a part of our “America the Beautiful” Initiative that supports locally led conservation, protection, and restoration through partnerships with Tribal Nations, local communities, and private landowners.  So far, I have protected over 41 million acres of our Nation’s lands and waters — from establishing national monuments like Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni on the outskirts of the Grand Canyon and Camp Hale high in the Colorado Rockies, to strengthening protections for treasures like the Tongass National Forest and Bristol Bay in Alaska.  These majestic places unite and inspire us and should be preserved for the ages.  To restore and protect the health of our ocean, my Administration is advancing America’s first-ever Ocean Climate Action Plan, accelerating offshore wind energy development, and working to designate new national marine sanctuaries in California and the Pacific Remote Islands.

Climate change is a global issue.  Certainly no one nation can tackle the climate crisis alone; we have to work together.  On my first day in office, I immediately rejoined the Paris Climate Accord, reclaiming American leadership in this critical work.  We have rallied the international community to tackle vital climate challenges, including collaborating with over 150 nations to commit to slashing methane emissions and over 140 nations to commit to halting and reversing forest loss by 2030 as we find new ways to boost resilience, strengthen our economies, and sustain our planet.  Last year, the United States galvanized other countries to agree for the first time to transition away from the fossil fuels that jeopardize the health of our people and planet.  Through our Women in the Sustainable Economy Initiative, we are working to ensure that women around the world have access to good-paying jobs in sectors such as clean energy, fisheries, recycling, forest management, and environmental conservation, that are critical to our future.  By pledging a historic $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund to help reduce emissions and boost climate resilience in developing countries, we are catalyzing further global action.

Last fall, we released the Fifth National Climate Assessment, our Government’s preeminent report on the impacts, risks, and responses to climate change nationwide and a go-to resource on emerging climate solutions.  Together — climate activists and business leaders; farmers, manufacturers, union workers, and Indigenous communities; courageous young people; and anyone concerned about the future we leave for our kids — we can make the changes needed to protect our planet.” See here.

Of course, “climate change” is a gigantic hoax. The key point of the people who preach this false gospel is that we need to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. But carbon dioxide isn’t a danger. It’s essential to life. Alan Coruba has some trenchant remarks about this:

“[Earth Day] It is the global platform for the Big Lie that carbon dioxide (CO2) is causing the Earth to warm and the basis of the environmental movement’s ceaseless efforts to reduce the use of energy for any reason.

Carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere has been increasing, but the Earth has been cooling due to reduced solar radiation. CO2 has virtually no relationship to the climate except to show up well after a significant change has occurred.

According to Wikipedia: “Carbon is the 15th most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, and the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. It is present in all known life forms, and in the human body carbon is the second most abundant element by mass (about 18.5%) after oxygen.] This abundance, together with the unique diversity of organic compounds and their unusual polymer-forming ability at the temperatures commonly encountered on Earth, make this element the chemical basis of all known life.” (Emphasis added)

Not one single piece of vegetation can exist without CO2. Without vegetation all animals and all humans would die. The Earth would look like Mars. One of the pillars of environmentalism is that humans are the greatest threat to the existence of the 4.5 billion-year-old Earth. The essence of Earth Day is that you are the enemy, primarily for your use of energy (coal, oil, and natural gas).

A global propaganda campaign will glorify Earth Day and its message is that you must change your life to accommodate the lies that sustain the environmental movement and permit government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency to strangle the economic life of the nation.” See here.

The propagandists for Earth Day say that unless we cripple our economy, the earth will heat up, causing disaster. But this false claim flies in the face of the evidence from geology. The earth was much warmer in past geological ages than even the wackiest global warming scaremongers are projecting, but life flourished abundantly then. The great David Stockman gives an excellent summary of the evidence:

“What we actually need to take into account is that the so-called Climate Crisis is complete hogwash, starting with the basics of so-called man-made global warming. The fact is, the present era is one of the coolest and least carbon-intensive periods of the last 600 million years.

Stated differently, the true science makes mincemeat of the elitist narrative espoused by officialdom through Europe and North America and the mainstream media. Yet it is now being used as an excuse for the unfolding economic disasters caused by the central banks and the Warfare State and a pretext for new rounds of authoritarian suppression of economic liberty exemplified by California’s recent move to outlaw combustion engine autos after 2035.

Indeed, the geological and paleontological evidence overwhelmingly says that today’s average global temperature of about 15 degrees C and CO2 concentrations of 420 ppm are nothing to fret about, and even if they rise to about 17-18 degrees C and 500-600 ppms by the end of the century, it may well on balance improve the lot of mankind.

And that’s only logical. When its warmer and wetter, growing seasons are longer and crop yields are better—regardless of the agricultural technology and practices of the moment. And it’s better for human and community health, too—most of the deadly plagues of history have occurred under colder climes, such as the Black Death of 1344-1350.

Yet the Climate Crisis Narrative shitcans this massive body of “the science” by means of two deceptive devices that invalidate the entire Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) story.

First, it ignores the entirety of the planet’s pre-Holocene (last 10,000 years) history, even though the science shows that more than 50% of the time in the last 600 million years global temperatures were in the range of 25 degrees C or 67% higher than current levels and far beyond anything projected by the most unhinged climate models today. But, crucially, at those temperature peaks planetary climate systems did not go into a doomsday loop of scorching meltdown—warming was always checked and reversed by powerful counter-veiling forces.

Even the history the alarmist do acknowledge has been grotesquely falsified. We are referring to the so-called “hockey stick” of the past 1000 years, which Al Gore made famous in his propaganda flick about global warming, which purports to show that temperatures were flat until 1850 and are now rising to allegedly dangerous levels.

But that’s a complete crock. It was fraudulently manufactured by the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) to “cancel” the fact that temperatures in the pre-industrial world of the Medieval Warm Period (1000-1200 AD) were actually higher than at present!

Secondly, it is falsely claimed that global warming is a one-way street in which rising concentrations of greenhouse cases (GHGs) and especially CO2 is causing the earth’s heat balance to continuously increase. The truth, however, is that higher CO2 concentrations are a consequence and by-product, not a driver and cause, of the current naturally rising temperatures.

Again, the now “canceled” history of the planet knocks the CO2-driver proposition into a cocked hat. During the Cretaceous Period between 145 and 66 million year ago a natural experiment provided complete absolution for the vilified CO2 molecule. During that period, global temperatures rose dramatically from 17 degrees C to 25 degrees C—a level far above anything today’s Climate Howlers have ever projected.

Alas, CO2 wasn’t the culprit. According to the science, ambient CO2 concentrations actually tumbled during that 80 million years expanse, dropping from 2,000 ppm to 900 ppm on the eve of the Extinction Event 66 million years ago.

You would think that this powerful countervailing fact would give the CO2 witch-hunters pause, but that would be to ignore what the whole climate change brouhaha is actually about. That is, it’s not about science, human health and well being or the survival of planet earth; it’s about politics and the ceaseless search of the political class and the apparatchiks and racketeers who inhabit the Washington beltway for still another excuse to aggrandize state power.

Indeed, the Climate Change Narrative is the kind of ritualized policy mantra that is concocted over and again by the political class and the permanent nomenklatura of the modern state—professors, think tankers, lobbyists, career apparatchiks, officialdom—in order to gather and exercise state power.

To paraphrase the great Randolph Bourne, inventing purported failings of capitalism—such as a propensity to burn too much hydrocarbon—is the health of the state. Indeed, fabrication of false problems and threats that purportedly can only be solved by heavy-handed state intervention has become the modus operandi of a political class that has usurped near complete control of modern democracy.” See here.

Let’s do everything we can to expose the phony Earth Day “holiday”.

The post Earth Day—A Phony Holiday appeared first on LewRockwell.

In an essay entitled “A Strategy for the Right” the late economic and libertarian scholar, Professor Murray N. Rothbard, called John C. Calhoun’s Disquisition on Government “one of them most brilliant essays on political philosophy ever written.”  Published in 1850, the year of his death, Calhoun’s Disquisition warned – and explained – how the American political system could evolve into tyranny, and how to stop that from happening.  Americans are now living under the tyranny that Calhoun feared, proving once again the prescience and brilliance of his Disquisition.

Calhoun’s 173-year-old treatise is not just a diagnosis of how we got here, but a roadmap for escaping from this tyranny and being rid of the “woke” totalitarians among us who are so hellbent on destroying America and replacing it with, well, they don’t really know, in the tradition of Marxist revolutionaries everywhere.

Who Was John C. Calhoun?

John C. Calhoun was born into a family of Scots-Irish immigrants in the South Carolina upcountry in 1782.  He had two uncles who were killed by British soldiers during the Revolution and his father Patrick was a frontier scout.  His early education included intimate knowledge of the American Revolution from his family history as well as his studies.  He was mostly home schooled, which prepared him to enter Yale University where he was the 1804 class valedictorian. His mentor was Yale university president Timothy Dwight, a renowned expert on Lockean political philosophy.

Calhoun was a Jeffersonian philosophically.  Professor Clyde Wilson, the editor of The Collected Works of John C. Calhoun, has written that Calhoun viewed all American issues through the lens of the great philosophical divide between Jefferson the decentralist/states’ rights/strict constitutional construction advocate and his political nemesis Alexander Hamilton, who championed centralized, monopolistic, and “energetic” government, including a “permanent president” elected for life.  Hamilton denounced the Constitution after its ratification, calling it a “frail and worthless fabric,” because of its limitations on state power.  It was Hamilton who invented the “implied powers” (aka, not listed in the document) theory of constitutional interpretation; the perversion of the Contract and Commerce Clauses of the Constitution; and other subterfuges designed to turn the document into a de facto rubber stamp on anything the government wanted to do – as long as it was “properly” interpreted by people like himself.  That is why Jefferson and his political heirs, such as Calhoun, considered the brilliant and Machiavellian Hamilton to be a dangerous threat to American freedom.

Calhoun was the last of the founding fathers, philosophically speaking, and considered his Disquisition on Government to be a statement of his “understanding of society and government” and his “bequest to posterity,” writes Clyde Wilson.

Calhoun was a member of “the great triumvirate” in American politics of the early nineteenth century along with Daniel Webster and Henry Clay.  In that capacity he served as a member of congress from South Carolina, secretary of war under President James Monroe, U.S. senator from South Carolina, secretary of state under Presidents John Tyler and James Polk, and vice president of the United States during the administrations of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson.  It is these life experiences, along with his deep knowledge of the literature of liberty of the time, especially the Lockean tradition that fueled the Revolution, that he relied on in writing the Disquisition.

Calhoun on Government and Society

Calhoun was a brilliant expositor of the natural rights philosophy that rights to life, liberty, and property are God given; that the primary purpose of government is to secure these rights from domestic and foreign enemies of freedom; and the realization that there is always a danger that governments can be perverted in a way that they destroy rather than protect these God-given rights.  In this his writings are very much in sync with a French contemporary of his, Frederic Bastiat, who articulated his views of the natural rights philosophy in his famous book, The Law, published in 1850, the same year as the Disquisition.  It is also the same year that both of these great men died.

To Calhoun “society” is ordained by God for our benefit; government is created by men and its only legitimate purpose is to secure our natural rights to life, liberty and property.   That is the purpose of constitutions, he said.  However, the powers invested in governments to prevent injustice and oppression, he wrote in the Disquisition, “will, if left unguarded, be by them converted into instruments to oppress the rest of the community” (emphasis added).  Government, after all, “has itself a strong tendency to disorder and abuse of its powers . . .”  (As Yours Truly has written on numerous occasions, the purpose of government today is for those who run it to plunder those who do not).  This is reminiscent of Jefferson’s dictum that “a government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have.”

By “society” Calhoun meant the myriad local communities established by Americans without direction by any government.  As Clyde Wilson writes in Calhoun: A Statesman for the 21st Century, the original colonists were not wards or employees of government but “people who conquered a wilderness with their own labor and capital and at the risk of their own life and limb.” Thus, the American revolution was not a revolution in society, writes Wilson, but “the action of the existing societies of the 13 colonies to preserve themselves against the interference of a distant government . . . the preservation of living societies from the schemes of rulers.”

This is the true meaning of “consent of the governed.”  “Consent” was given to ratify the Constitution by the separate political communities of the sovereign states, and they reserved the right to withdraw that consent should the government that they created as their agent interfere with their “happiness,” as the ratification documents of New York, Virginia, and Rhode Island specifically declared.  The Constitution was not ratified by a majority vote of the general population but by separate political communities organized at the state level by the “free and independent” states, as they are called in the Declaration of Independence, at state political conventions.  This was required by Article 7 of the Constitution itself.

To the Jeffersonians “consent” did not mean a mere majority of any popular vote, especially since elections and vote counting could always be rigged, as they fully understood, being keen students of political history.  A “leading error,” Calhoun wrote, is to “confound the numerical majority with the people” and their consent.  This will eventually destroy constitutional government, said Calhoun, for it implies that all that is needed for perfect government is “the right of suffrage – and the allotment to each division of the community a representation in the government, in proportion to numbers.”  In reality, majority rule is nothing more than one part of society coercing and plundering another part (the minority), the very “violence of faction” that James Madison warned of in Federalist #10, writing that, historically, it had destroyed popular governments everywhere by creating a pervasive sense of injustice.  The whole purpose of the Constitution, said Madison, was to limit this “violence of faction” by electoral majorities.

Calhoun was battling the top Hamiltonian “nationalist” statists of his day, such as Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story and U.S. Senator Daniel Webster.  In his famous 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States Story wrote that “the majority must have a right to accomplish that object by the means, which they deem adequate for the end . . . .  The will of the majority of the people is absolute and sovereign, limited only by its means and power to make its will effectual” (emphasis added).  This “power,” of course, is the coercive power of a heavily-armed government.  “Trust in the efficacy of frequent elections,” said Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster in his 1830 senate debate over protectionist tariffs and nullification with Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina.  History has proven that to be one of the most farcical statements ever made by an American politician.

What all of this means is that the Constitution was meant to be society’s vehicle for controlling the state, not the state’s vehicle for controlling society, as it is today, where the limits of everyone’s freedoms are periodically decreed by five black-robed government lawyers with lifetime tenure.

The bigger error, Calhoun wrote, is “the prevalent opinion that a written constitution . . . is sufficient, of itself, without the aid of any organism – except such as is necessary to separate its separate departments, and render them independent of each other – to counteract the tendency of the numerical majority to oppression and the abuse of power.” The separation of powers would never be sufficient to enforce the Constitution, in other words, contrary to Madison’s theory on the subject.  History has proven Calhoun to be right and Madison wrong on that point.

The party in power – whichever party – will be opposed to the constitutional restrictions intended to limit it.  “As the major and dominant party, they will have no need of these restrictions . . . .  The ballot-box . . . would be ample protection to them.”  (Especially if the party in power administered the elections!).  “[T]hey would . . . regard these limitations as unnecessary and improper restraints; and endeavor to elude them, with the view of increasing their power and influence.”

The “minor, or weaker party,” on the other hand, will make its strict construction arguments for actually enforcing the constitution, but “the party in favor of the restrictions” will inevitably “be overpowered,” wrote Calhoun.  It is folly, he said, to believe that “the party in power” and “in possession of the ballot box” and “the physical force of the country” could “be successfully resisted by an appeal to reason, truth, justice, or the obligations imposed by the constitution.”

The “end of the contest” would then be “the subversion of the constitution.”

This will occur, said Calhoun, because of a kind of class struggle in society, but not the Marxian class struggle between the capitalist and working “classes.”  Instead, in a democracy “[S]ome one portion of the community must pay in taxes more than it receives back in disbursements; while another receives in disbursements more than it pays in taxes.”  Society will be divided into two classes:  net tax payers versus net tax consumers.  “The necessary result . . . is to divide the community into two great classes; one consisting of those who . . . pay the taxes, and, of course, bear exclusively the burthen of supporting the government; and the other, of those who are the recipients of their proceeds . . .”

The right of suffrage causes this condition and can in no way counteract it.  It does not perfect government but turns it into an authoritarian tyranny of “absolute government” as Calhoun called it.

Echoing Calhoun, economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe described democracy as “a soft variant of communism” in his book Democracy: The God that Failed.  After all, if one single “social plan” is imposed by force on all of society by government (i.e., communism), it makes no difference whether that is done by a dictator or by a legislature.  Socialism is socialism.

In order to generate genuine consent, and not the phony “consent” of electioneering, each portion of the society must be given “a negative on the others,” said Calhoun.  This “negative power” may be called “veto, interposition, nullification, check or balance of power” and this is what makes a constitution a useful tool for societal control of its own government.  It is what makes the people the masters rather than the servants of the state.  He called this idea the “concurrent majority.”

Calhoun was always a unionist and viewed nullification of laws thought to be unconstitutional as an alternative to secession.  In this he was following the footsteps of Jefferson and Madison, authors of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798, respectively, which nullified the abolition of free speech invoked by the Adams administration’s Sedition Act by declaring that it would not be enforced within their borders.  (The Adams administration used its “Sedition Act” to imprison journalists sympathetic to Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican party and even imprisoned an opposition member of Congress, Rep. Mathew Lyon of Vermont, a member of Jefferson’s party, for criticizing Adams in the House of Representatives.  The Sedition Act declared “malicious” talk about the government to be illegal, with the government itself determining what is “malicious”).

Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolution, for example, stated:  “Resolved, that the several states composing the United States of America, are not united on the principles of unlimited submission to their General Government” and “[W]hensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.”  Madison’s Virginia Resolution said virtually the same thing.  New England, Ohio, Wisconsin, Delaware, and South Carolina would invoke Jeffersonian nullification  on a variety of issues, from banking to immigration policy to trade policy, that they believed were unconstitutional during the antebellum era.

Calhoun also believed nullification would encourage the enforcement of constitutional limits on government by letting the powers that be know that unconstitutional legislation designed by one faction of the country only to plunder another faction could be ignored or nullified, rendering their plundering efforts useless.  Compromise rather than plunder would then be encouraged, he argued. Moreover, with protections of a concurrent majority in place, the franchise could be expanded, wrote Calhoun.

Under simple majority rule, on the other hand, an expansion of the franchise would guarantee and expansion of political plunder by more and more enfranchised factions.  The protections of a concurrent majority would encourage “patriotism, nationality, harmony, and . . . promoting the common good” instead of “faction, strife, and struggle for party ascendancy,” he wrote.  As an added benefit, Calhoun argued, the kind of people attracted to government would be, shall we say, less sleazy and corrupt and more patriotic and public spirited.

Calhoun’s Economic Policies

In the 1820s the South was largely an agricultural society that sold as much of three-fourths of its agricultural products overseas.  Most manufacturing, such as it was, was in the Northern states, and they had been pursuing the Hamiltonian policy of high tariffs and a protectionist trade policy to shield themselves from competition and raise prices.  They also championed what we today call “corporate welfare” or “crony capitalism.”  Their first political success was a tariff increase in 1824 that garnered only 3 of 107 yes votes in the House of Representatives from Southern states and 2 of 25 yes votes in the U.S. Senate.

The South was in agreement with modest “revenue tariffs” of 10-15 percent that would fund the constitutional functions of government, but believed that they were being plundered by high, protectionist tariffs.  Protectionist tariffs forced them to pay significantly more for farm tools, clothing, shoes, and much more, with little benefit from the tariff revenue.  Almost all of the benefit went to Northern manufacturers who, being isolated from international competition, raised their prices and profit levels.  To make it worse for the South, protectionist tariffs impoverished their European trading partners whose profits from American markets dried up.  This made them less able to buy American exports, primarily cotton, rice, and tobacco grown in the South.  This is why Bastiat labeled protectionist tariffs “legal plunder.”

Emboldened by their success with the 1824 tariff and their new-found dominance in Congress, the Northern states then passed the hated “Tariff of Abominations” in 1828 that raised the average tariff rate to nearly 50 percent.  Some items, such as imported woolen blankets, had a 200 percent tariff attached.  The price of woolen blankets and dozens of other items skyrocketed.

Led by Calhoun, South Carolina invoked the principle of Jeffersonian nullification.  An ordinance of nullification was enacted at a political convention that declared the tariff act to be “unauthorized by the Constitution of the United States, and violated the true meaning and intent thereof.”  It was therefore “null, void, no law . . .”  All tariff enforcement in Charleston Harbor was suspended.

President Andrew Jackson threatened to enforce the tariff, but in the end a compromise was reached in 1833 – and secession avoided – with a lowering of tariffs over the next ten years.  Nullification had worked just the way Calhoun explained it should work, as an alternative to secession that could keep the union together by encouraging regional compromise.  By 1860 the average tariff rate was the lowest ever during the nineteenth century – 15 percent.  (But was raised to the 60 percent range by Lincoln and the Republican party, where it remained for the next half century).

Calhoun made many speeches on the subject of free trade with the clear intent of educating the public.  In an 1842 speech he hit the nail on the head regarding the true purpose of protectionism by asking, “Protection against what?  Against violence, oppression, or fraud? . . . .  No; . . . It is against low prices.”  He also pointed out that the tendency of protectionist tariffs is “to make the poor poorer and the rich richer.”

Do the protectionists “ask that a tax should be laid on the rest of the community, and the proceeds divided among them,” he asked.  “No, that would be too open, oppressive, and defensible.”  Squelching competition with protectionist tariffs achieves the same result, but in a much more obfuscating way that makes it easy to pull the wool over the public’s eyes.  It should rightly be called “monopoly” or “plunder,” he suggested.

In that same 1842 speech Calhoun announced his economic ideas to be: “Free Trade: Low Duties:  No Debt:  Separation from Banks:  Economy:  Retrenchment: and Strict Adherence to the Constitution.”  Competition, no deficit spending in peacetime; no collusion between bankers and Big Government; Cutting government spending; and spending only on the items listed as the legitimate constitutional functions of the federal government, in other words.

Free trade was literally “the cause of civilization and peace,” he said.  By “cause of civilization” he meant the benefits of the international division of labor, not today’s corrupt, socialistic “trade deals” with their thousands of pages of regulations written by corporate lobbyists and their political puppets.  That is not free trade but the opposite:  socialist central planning.  The latter point about peace was perhaps best expressed by Frederic Bastiat when he said, “If goods can’t cross borders, armies will.”  People who prosper together through trade and commerce, who become business associates and even friends, are less inclined to wage war on each other.

The “deep state” of his day hated and despised Calhoun for these views and to this day he is demonized and marginalized because of such ideas.  As is Jefferson for that matter, especially by the “court historians” of the academic history profession.

Calhoun’s Foreign Policy

A onetime secretary of war, Calhoun believed that the purpose of national defense is to defend America and Americans from foreign adversaries, not forcing our version of “salvation” on other countries.   He was an anti-imperialist, another reason why the deep state of his time despised him.  Diametrically opposed to Calhoun was John Adams, who wrote in his diary that he considered America to be “the opening of a grand scheme and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth” (emphasis added).  Adams can be thought of as the original “neocon.”  Fast forward several hundred years and one hears his voice in  President George W. Bush promising that his “war on terror” will eliminate evil from the world.

In a speech regarding the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), Calhoun disputed the idea “lately urged in a very respectable quarter” that “it is the mission of our country to spread civil and religious liberty all over the globe . . . even by force, if necessary.  It is a sad delusion.”  At the end of the Mexican-American War there were those in Congress who wanted to essentially conquer and occupy Mexico. To this Calhoun said:  “I am at a loss to see how a free and independent republic can be established in Mexico under the protection and authority of its conquerors.  I can readily understand how an aristocracy or a despotic government might be, but how a free republican government can be so established under such circumstances, is to me incomprehensible.”  He could very well have been discussing the U.S. government’s 21st-century military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan under the guise of “nation building.”

Calhoun believed that the Mexican war was a Caesar-crossing-the-Rubicon moment.  It was a “deed . . . from which the country would not be able to recover for a long time if ever.”  He wrote to his daughter Anna that “Our people have undergone a great change.  Their inclination is for conquest and empire . . .”   That, he believed, was a mortal threat to American prosperity and freedom.

Calhoun’s Roadmap for a New America?

America is already experiencing a soft secession movement with more conservative citizens leading the way in moving away from the socialist disasters of New York, California, Illinois, and almost all of the big cities run by the hard-Left Democrat party political machines.  They are moving to more conservative or even libertarian parts of the country such as Florida, Texas, South Carolina, Montana, and elsewhere.  (Of course, each of these states also has its islands of “woke” socialism, usually around the state capitals, university towns, and inner cities with large welfare populations).

Peaceful American disunion is inevitable in the opinion of your author.  It may not happen tomorrow or next week, but it will happen.  We are at the end of the road of a country of some 330 million people ruled, essentially, by a few hundred (or perhaps a few dozen) political oligarchs who control one or the other of the two major political parties.  The day will come when there will be a New America and New Americans.  The old America will remain in the socialist hellholes of New York City, Chicago, Baltimore, San Francisco, etc. while the segment of the population that still values freedom and prosperity over tax slavery and imperialism will go elsewhere.  They will take to heart the advice of the author of the Declaration of Independence that when government becomes destructive of the consent of the governed it is the peoples’ right to alter or abolish it and institute a new government more conducive to their safety and happiness.

The ideas of John C. Calhoun, the inheritor of the Jeffersonian political tradition in America, provide a roadmap for these freedom-seeking Americans of the future.  As for the role of government in the new American societies of the future, Calhoun would counsel peace and “a wise and masterful inactivity” that would give all Americans the greatest chance to enjoy prosperity and to live as free human beings.

Thomas Jefferson himself would most assuredly approve of the coming American disunion.  In an August 12, 1803 letter to John C. Breckenridge regarding the New England secession movement (which culminated in the 1814 Hartford Secession Convention) Jefferson wrote that, should there be a “separation” into two confederacies, “God bless them both, & keep them in the union if it be for their good, but separate them, if it be better.”

The post Can John C. Calhoun Save America? appeared first on LewRockwell.

New York – I was kicked out of New York’s prestigious Collegiate private school many moons ago for ‘revolutionary and disruptive activities.’

Thank goodness my wise parents sent me to the International School of Geneva, Switzerland where I thrived.

The underground French fascist group, ‘la Main Rouge’ repeatedly threatened to kill me for organizing student demonstrations against France’s colonial war in Algeria.  But I survived.

Being a life-long rebel and hell-raiser, I am naturally sympathetic to today’s pro-Palestinian student protests that are now sweeping American and European campuses.

Students may be poor and too emotional, but they are often filled with repulsions at the sight of mass killing, political brutality, and murderous hatred such as we see today in the prison camp of Gaza.  They have yet to learn the sordid truth about how money can buy indulgences from killing civilians and other war crimes.

Just ask Joe Biden, and British PM Rishi Sunak.  They are continuing to arm and finance Israel’s mass killing and starvation in Gaza for the sake of huge cash donations as elections loom, and the support of ardently pro-Israel voters who are marching to the drum of Israel’s far right-wing government.  The US and British media have been whitewashing the genocide in Gaza and twisting their reporting to justify mass killing of civilians. The New York Times has earned opprobrium by ordering its staff to slant the news it misreports.  This once great newspaper has ruined its reputation.  It reminds of the great Mark Twain’s famous bon mot, ‘If you don’t read the news you are uninformed. If you do, you are misinformed.’

Let’s be frank.  President Joe Biden, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and their pal Egypt’s despot Abdel el-Sisi are directly responsible for the deaths of 14,000 Palestinian children, almost 35,000 Palestinian civilians seriously wounded, some 2 million Palestinians now homeless, growing starvation and disease across Gaza used by Israel as a refuse dump for unwanted Arabs.  The Biden administration is providing over $14.1 billion in arms to Israel, including the deadly 2,000lb bombs used to crush entire civilian apartment buildings and hospitals, plus tank shells fired at residential targets.  All in clear violation of US arms export laws written by Congress.

Why is Biden the key player in such mass destruction? Why is his UN delegation vetoing resolutions to stop Israeli laying waste to Gaza?  It’s election time coming up.  And because the Democrats get the lion’s share of their finances from pro-Israel sources.

Big money talks. Human rights walk. The US Congress, a sorry collection of used car salesmen, has been bought and sold. What a disgrace for the USA.  The oil Arabs could also have bought Congress, but they were too busy squabbling with one another.

So, while the high and mighty averted their gaze to massacres and famine in Gaza, it was left up to students around the globe to raise their voice in anger over the crimes there. My alma mater, Georgetown Foreign Service, raised a chorus of protests. So too Columbia University and UCLA, Sciences Po in Paris, in fact just about everywhere except Germany, whose people are still paying Israel for World War II. 

Big money donors, who made billions off our rigged financial system, are trying to silence protests over Israel’s wanton cruelty.  Israelis are right to be furious over the killing of an estimated 1,139 Israeli civilians and soldiers.  But killing tens of thousands of innocent Arabs was wildly out of proportion and clearly criminal.

America, Britain, and Canada have disgraced themselves – all for the sake of money.  The Gaza massacre has revealed the US to be a deeply corrupt society.  University students at least helped save America’s honor. They are doing the right thing.  Alas, they do not yet have a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young band to turn their protests into electrifying music.  Meanwhile, Palestinian children continue to starve or die of disease while Israel ruins its name and paid-for politicians spout lies.

The post Students Go After the Hypocrites appeared first on LewRockwell.

The classical liberal defense of contractual freedom is derived from the principle of individual autonomy. Freedom of contract entails the right to enter into or exit from contracts at will. As Richard Epstein argues in his defense of the contract at will:

The first way to argue for the contract at will is to insist upon the importance of freedom of contract as an end in itself. Freedom of contract is an aspect of individual liberty, every bit as much as freedom of speech, or freedom in the selection of marriage partners or in the adoption of religious beliefs or affiliations (p. 953).

Utilitarian classical liberals, like Epstein himself, who agree with him on the value of individual liberty therefore defend the widest possible scope for contractual freedom. They would only accept limits on that freedom in exceptional cases which Epstein defines as “the infrequent cases in which discharge of the contract at will is inconsistent with the performance of some public duty or with the protection of some public right.”

By contrast, from a natural-rights libertarian perspective freedom of contract is derived from the right to self-ownership: “The right to contract is strictly derivable from the right of private property” (Rothbard, Ethics of Liberty, p. 133). This entails the right to enter into agreements in respect of oneself or one’s property: “the right of property implies the right to make contracts about that property to give it away or to exchange titles of ownership for the property of another person.”

From a Rothbardian perspective “the only enforceable contracts (i.e., those backed by the sanction of legal coercion) are those where the failure of one party to abide by the contract implies the theft of property from the other party [or] where the failure to abide by the contract means that the other party’s property is retained by the delinquent party, without the consent of the former (implicit theft)” (p. 133). As Rothbard explains, all rights are property rights, and there are no rights that are not also property rights. From this perspective there is no right to enforce a contract for “public policy” reasons, nor does “public policy” constitute the rationale for why particular contracts should not be enforced.

Nevertheless, in practice there is a great degree of overlap between Epstein’s and Rothbard’s perspectives because libertarian boundaries of property rights (where one person’s property encroaches upon another person’s property) often coincide with the specific types of public policy which Epstein has in mind in his defense of the contract at will. In Epstein’s view “the principle [of the contract at will] must be understood against a backdrop that prohibits the use of private contracts to trench upon third-party rights, including uses that interfere with some clear mandate of public policy, as in cases of contracts to commit murder or perjury.” From a Rothbardian perspective a contract to commit murder would violate the right to self-ownership and a contract to commit perjury would in many cases constitute fraud (implicit theft) so such contracts would violate property rights and there could be no grounds for enforcing them.

The example of promises to marry

To understand the boundaries of enforcing contracts the example of marriage contracts is instructive. The law for centuries treated a promise to marry as legally binding. Writing in 1929, Robert C. Brown observes that “One of the lurid and sensational forms of American court activity is the suit known technically as a suit for the breach of a contract to marry, but more popularly by the simple designation of a ‘breach of promise’ suit.” As Brown highlights, the remedy sought in these cases, as in all cases of breach of contract or tort, was damages as compensation either for losses incurred or for defeated expectations:

…when the term “breach of promise” suit is used, neither lawyer nor layman has any difficulty in understanding what is meant. It is that action dear to the heart of the reporter for the sensational newspaper, which is normally brought by young and attractive but sophisticated women against mature and wealthy men, and where the plaintiff very often wins a competence for life.

If necessary, the courts could even arrest the delinquent party, for example if he seduced a woman and failed thereafter to marry her and haul him to court to account for his conduct. This example arose in the following 1892 case:

…the defendant, by false and fraudulent representations as to the nature and consequences of the act he solicited, and by means of undue influence, taking advantage of the position of the plaintiff as his affianced wife, the trust and confidence thereby obtained, and her absence from her relatives and friends and natural protectors, and her isolation in his home and dependent position there, inflicted this gross wrong and outrage upon her, and thereafter abandoned her, leaving his home for a distant place and refusing to marry her (Hood v Sudderth, Supreme Court of North Carolina, 1892).

It may be morally abhorrent to resile from a promise of marriage after stringing a woman along in such circumstances (such cases were almost exclusively brought by or on behalf of women), but few people in liberal Western society would argue that there ought still to be a legal remedy for breach of such contracts:

Breach of promise, although not actionable in most jurisdictions, is a breach of a promise to marry another; in other words, it is a broken engagement. It is a tort against the breaching party. The principle of breach of promise treats the promise to marry as an enforceable contract which may entitle the non-breaching party to receive damages. However, such an action has been barred in most of the jurisdictions and does not give rise to a valid cause of action.

The marriage analogy is a powerful illustration of what classical liberals mean by individual liberty. As Rothbard observes, “Compulsory marriage is such a clear and evident form of involuntary slavery that no theorist, let alone any libertarian” would insist that people be forced to enter into a marriage simply because they have promised to do so.

By extrapolating from the example of marriage contracts it is easier to see why contracts – other than contracts in relation to property rights – ought not to be legally enforceable. Forcing anyone to be bound by a contract against his will is a form of slavery. If contracts that violate the principle of self-ownership were enforceable then chattel slavery itself could be justified if the slave willingly agreed to it. While a classical liberal would reject that outcome as being against “public policy,” some libertarians wrongly think that in theory, as in Walter Block’s thought experiment, contracts to enslave human beings would be legally binding and enforceable as long as the agreement is entirely voluntary. To the contract absolutist the rationale for not enforcing such contracts would simply be their involuntary character. Unbound by the public policy concerns of classical liberals, contract absolutists make the error of treating freedom of contract as absolute in the sense that any contract is legally binding and enforceable if all parties willingly agree to it. This was the defense put forward in a German case involving a contract between Armin Meiwes and Bernd Brandes to eat and be eaten:

In one of the most extraordinary trials in German criminal history, the self-confessed cannibal admitted that he had met a 43-year-old Berlin engineer, Bernd Brandes, after advertising on the internet, and had chopped him up and eaten him … Crucial to the case is a gruesome videotape made by Meiwes of the entire evening, during which Brandes apparently makes clear his consent.

The confusion surrounding this case arose because of that element of consent: “The unprecedented case has proved problematic for German lawyers who discovered that cannibalism is not illegal in Germany.” This highlights the gravity of the error into which contract absolutists fall, when they suppose that anything people agree to must be enforced without regard to the reason why any contracts should be enforced in the first place.

The importance of self-ownership

The right to private property is derived from the principle of self-ownership which is rooted in human nature and the inalienable liberty and free will of human beings. No human being can consent to be a chattel, much less consent to volunteer himself as dinner for a cannibal. As Rothbard explains:

Unfortunately, many libertarians, devoted to the right to make contracts, hold the contract itself to be an absolute, and therefore maintain that any voluntary contract whatever must be legally enforceable in the free society. Their error is a failure to realize that the right to contract is strictly derivable from the right of private property (p. 133).

To avoid confusion about which contracts ought to be enforceable Rothbard highlights the importance of identifying the reason why contracts other than those involving property rights are not enforceable. He asks: “Clearly, liberty and compulsory slavery are totally incompatible, indeed are diametric opposites. But why not, if all promises must be enforceable promises?” (p. 134). The reason why contracts are not generally enforceable is that enforcing an agreement is incompatible with the other party’s freedom to exit from the agreement at will. We may exhort one another to keep our word and not break our promises as reflected in the old adage that a man’s word is his bond, and people may choose to shun us if we break our promises, but force cannot be deployed to force us to do as we agreed. Agreements may or may not be morally binding, but they are not legally enforceable:

…it may well be the moral thing to keep one’s promises, [but] it is not and cannot be the function of law (i.e., legal violence) in a libertarian system to enforce morality (in this case the keeping of promises) (p. 133).

Based on the right to private property, it can be seen why Rothbard argues that a contract would only be enforceable in a case which amounted to theft or implicit theft (e.g. fraud), as this would entail the enforcement not of the promise itself but of the property rights alienated under the agreement. The simplest example would be a contract to purchase property where the buyer takes possession of the property but reneges on his agreement to pay for it.

Employment at will

Applying this analysis to the employment contract, it is clear that just as we no longer think a husband owns his wife, so we no longer think a master owns his servant or an employer his employee. The contract of employment is simply an agreement by a free person to work in return for a wage paid by another free person. Either party is free to leave the contract at will and has no duty to give reasons or show just cause for doing so. Epstein argues that there are no policy reasons to constrain that liberty and shows that on the contrary public policy falls in favor of the freedom to hire and fire at will. As with the case of the broken marriage engagement, upholding one’s agreement may be the moral and kind thing to do and willful breach of a promise may ruin one’s reputation, but it ought not to be legally enforceable. Thus, the ruling in Payne v. Western & Atlantic Railroad (1884) was correct:

[M]en must be left, without interference to buy and sell where they please, and to discharge or retain employees at will for good cause or for no cause, or even for bad cause without thereby being guilty of an unlawful act per se. It is a right which an employee may exercise in the same way, to the same extent, for the same cause or want of cause as the employer.

Based on the principle of self-ownership, the libertarian analysis yields the same result. The libertarian rationale for defending employment at will is clear: “there can be no property in someone’s promises or expectations.” (Ethics of Liberty, p. 134).

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

The post Freedom of Contract and Property Rights appeared first on LewRockwell.

This is an excerpt from David Stockmans book: Trump’s War on Capitalism.

As we have  seen,  The  Donald’s economic policy  actions and nostrums were  thoroughly wrong-headed and  counterpro- ductive. But   the  opposite  assumption—that market capitalism was  working according to the  texts   penned by  Adam  Smith— was also  dead wrong and  had  been  for decades. Today’s bailout- ridden crony capitalism is not  remotely the  real  thing, and  that’s especially because free markets can’t function efficiently and  pro- ductively when  they  are flooded with  cheap credit printed by the central bank.

The  ill effects  of these  perversions are  legion, but  one  of the most  obnoxious is the  massive  financial windfall to  a tiny  elite of the  wealthy and  a concomitant depletion of the  middle class. Ironically, The Donald was  elected and  heralded by  the  latter, but   his  policies did  absolutely nothing to  change the  system’s long-standing windfalls to the rich.

Here is but  one of the smoking guns that can be offered in evi- dence. To wit, in 1989 the collective net worth of the top  1 percent of households weighed in at $4.8 trillion, which  was 6.2x the $775 billion net worth of the  bottom 50 percent of households. By Q1 2022, however, those figures were  $45 trillion versus  $3.7 trillion, meaning that the wealth differential was now 12.2x.

In round numbers, therefore, the top  1 percent gained $40 tril- lion of wealth over  that thirty-three-year period compared to  the mere  $3 trillion gain  of the  bottom 50 percent. Stated differently, there are currently 65 million households in  the  bottom 50 per- cent,  which  have  an average net  worth of just  $56,000. This com- pares to  the  1.2  million households in  the  top  1 percent which currently sport an average net worth of $38,000,000.

Needless to say, there is no reason to believe that left to its own devices  free  market capitalism would generate this  680:1 wealth differential per  household. Indeed, three decades ago—and well before the  Fed went  into  money-printing  overdrive—the per household wealth differential between the  top  1 percent and  the bottom 50 percent was barely half of today’s level.

Back  in  the  heyday of  America’s  post-war prosperity, in  fact, President Kennedy’s famous aphorism that “a  rising tide  lifts  all boats” was repeatedly confirmed. But once Alan Greenspan inaugu- rated the current era of rampant central bank money printing, stock market coddling and  egregious bailouts, the  more  accurate charac- terization is that a rising tide  mainly has been  lifting all the yachts. And it goes without saying that only a teensy-tiny number of MAGA red caps were to be found actually lounging aboard these  vessels.

The  truth is, Donald Trump’s tenure in  the  Oval  Office  wit- nessed the  steepest climb  ever in the  wealth of the  top  1 percent. Nor  is that surprising. The  Donald was relentless in demanding that the  Fed  push interest rates  ever  lower  and  run  the  printing presses ever  faster. Most of the  billionaires, however, have  never bothered to thank him  for the resulting windfall.

There  is no  mystery, of  course, as  to  why  capitalism lost  its historic middle class growth mojo  during recent decades. Or why that occurred even  as  financial markets became bubble-ridden fountains, pumping egregious amounts of windfall wealth to the very top  of the economic ladder.

The culprit was “financialization.” By inducing relentless debt creation and   leveraged speculation,  the  Fed  and   other central banks have  bloated the  financial asset  sector out  of  all  historic proportion to the real economy.

Net Worth of Top 1 percent versus Bottom 90 percent, 1989 to 2022.

Thus,  between 1954 and  the  mid-1990s, total household  finan- cial  assets  oscillated around  2.5x–3.0x GDP, as  tracked by  the purple line  below. But  once  the  Fed’s  printing presses went  into high gear  under the  Greenspan “wealth effects”  doctrine and  the serial  bailouts that flowed  thereafter, the  ratio escalated steadily skyward, reaching nearly 5.0x GDP in 2021.

The  fact  is,  there was  no  sustainable or  sound basis  for  the eruption shown in the chart below. As we indicated with respect to total assets  in Chapter 2, this  ratio amounts to the  price-earnings (PE) multiple for the  entire economy. And since  the  trend rate  of economic growth and  productivity has deteriorated notably sincem the turn of the century, if anything the macroeconomic PE multi- ple should have  been  falling, not  rising.

Nor  is this  eruption of the  de  facto  macroeconomic PE  ratio merely an  academic curiosity. At the  1954–1987  average of 2.7x GDP, household financial assets  in 2021 would have  totaled $64 trillion, not  the actual level of $114 trillion. That  is to say, finan- cialization has  generated upwards of $50 trillion  of extra house- hold financial assets  out  of thin air.  And  about three-fourths of that bloated asset total is held by the top 10 percent of households.

Financialization of the US Economy: Financial Assets as Multiple of GDP, 1948 to 2021.

What has kept the financialization ratio trending skyward was the very opposite of sound, sustainable economics. After 1990 the savings rate  dropped precipitously, even as the debt-to-GDP ratio rose to new heights. America did not  save its way to solid  financial prosperity but  borrowed its way to a fantasyland of phony wealth for the few and  deteriorating economics for the many.

The  cornerstone of  long-term growth and  wealth creation is net  savings from  current economic output. The  latter measures true  savings or  the  amount of  economic resources left  for  new investment in productivity and  growth after  government borrow- ings  have  been  subtracted from  private household and  business savings.

But as to the current trend, fuhgeddaboudit. This measure aver- aged a healthy 7.5 percent to 10 percent of GDP in the  economic heyday before 1980. But  especially after  the  money-pumping era of Greenspan and  his  heirs  and  assigns commenced in the  early 1990s, the net national savings ratio headed relentlessly south. By 2022 the ratio was an anemic 1.0 percent of GDP—a sheer rounding error in the sweep  of post-war history.

Again, the  actual net  national savings in  2022 was  just  $260 billion, but  that figure  would have  computed to  $1.96 trillion at the 7.5 percent net savings rate  of the pre-1980  period.

That  $1.7 trillion of net  national savings has  gone missing, of course, does  make  a huge difference. Gross savings by the private sector had  fallen  sharply, and  then The  Donald came  along and enabled governments to  scarf-up most  of the  available new  sav- ings  to fund massive, serial  budget deficits.

So,  the  obvious question answers itself.  A true  MAGA  policy would have  reversed the  Fed’s  long-standing war  on  savers  via dramatically higher, normalized interest rates, while  at  the  same time  getting the US  Treasury’s sharp elbows out  of the  bond pits by balancing the federal budget.

That  would have  generated the  surge in net  national savings needed to revitalize investment in productivity and  growth. Alas, sound money and  fiscal rectitude were not  terms that the  Donald had  any familiarity with  whatsoever. In fact,  his  stance on  these crucial matters  was  worse   than that of  every  Democrat presi- dent of modern times, starting with  Joe  Biden and  going all the way  back  through Obama, Clinton, Carter, Johnson, Kennedy, Truman, and  FDR.

That’s right. At the end  of the day, The Donald’s monetary and fiscal  policy  bacchanalia amounted to  an  outright war  on  capi- talist  prosperity. That  alone should disqualify him  from  another berth on the Republican ticket and  term  in the Oval  Office.

The nation can ill-afford four  more  years of The Donald’s apos- tasy  on  the  core  issues  of  central banking and  the  public debt. That’s  because neither public nor  private debts liquidate them- selves  over time. If the   badly unbalanced income/outgo  rela- tionship is  not  addressed, chronic cash  shortfalls from  current operations just  cause  debts to accumulate and  compound.

It is not  surprising, therefore, that during the past  half century the  nation’s combined public and  private debt-to-income (GDP) ratio soared skyward. In fact,  the  150 percent debt-to-GDP ratio which  had prevailed through the  1970s  went  vertical thereafter, reaching 358 percent by  the  time  of  the  Great Financial Crisis, where  it remains stranded to this  day.

As it happened, once the Fed got into  the money-printing busi- ness after  1970, everybody joined the debt accumulation parade— governments, businesses, financial institutions, and  households, too. Accordingly, the  $1.7 trillion of total public and  private debt outstanding on  the  eve of Nixon’s dollar default in August 1971 rose to $10.7 trillion upon Greenspan’s arrival at the Fed in August 1987;  and  it then reached $50.0  trillion on  the  eve of the  Great Financial Crisis in late 2007, stood at $66 trillion when The Donald was sworn in, and  totters at just  under $95 trillion at present.

In  effect,   continuous  Federal  Reserve money-printing  has resulted in what  amounts to a massive  national leveraged buyout. Just during the thirty-six years since Greenspan took over the Fed, total public and  private debt (i.e.,  held  by households, businesses, and  financial institutions) has  soared by a factor of 9.2x.  By con- trast, America’s  nominal income (GDP) rose  by just  5.6x during the same  period.

Again,  we are not  talking about mere  academics. Had the  red line in the chart remained at its 1.5x level of historic times, which ratio was pretty much constant all the way back  to 1870 and  which had  accompanied the  greatest century of  economic growth and middle-class prosperity in human history, the  nation’s total debt today would be about $40 trillion.

Accordingly, the  aforementioned actual figure  of $95 trillion means that the  main  street economy is now  lugging around an incremental debt burden of $55 trillion. And  that’s  why aggregate economic growth and  middle-class prosperity is faltering badly.

Yet,  did  Trump—the King of  Debt—have a  clue  during his presidency or after?

He most  definitely did  not.

National Leverage Ratio: Total Debt to GDP, 1947 to 2022.

In fact,  real  economic growth has  dropped from  a trend rate of 3.5 percent per  year  before the  turn of the  century to  barely 1.5 percent per  annum since  then. And  the  reason for that is real fixed private investment has stopped growing because the meager private savings available have  been  channeled into  private specu- lation and  public debts.

Since  the  year  2000, real  net  fixed  private investment—which strains out  the  inflation and   the  annual depreciation from  the gross  investment figures—has dropped  from  $933 billion to  just $621 billion during The  Donald’s final  year  in office.  Relative to national income, this  figure  plunged from  7.1 percent of GDP at the turn of the century to 3.4 percent in 2020.

Stated differently, main  street has  experienced a continuing deterioration in the  share of national income being plowed back into  new  investment—the motor fuel  of growth and  rising pros- perity. But  then again, Donald Trump’s MAGA  notwithstanding, the 1 percent did  get their yachts.

Real Net Private Investment  Percent of Real GDP, 1997 to 2020.

The Sound  Money Road Not Taken

Had he accepted it, the true  mission of the Low Interest Man was to  make  the  dollar good as gold again. That  meant big  budget surpluses, high interest rates, a tumbling stock  market, the end  of financial engineering in the C-suites, and  the painful sweating out of inflation that became embedded over the last several  decades in wages,  prices, costs,  house prices, and  much more  on main  street.

Those  were the things which  draining the Swamp was actually all about.

But none of that was in The Donald’s DNA. Not  even remotely. Nevertheless, deflationary austerity  was  and   remains  the   only viable  alternative to  the  failed  spend, borrow, print, and  inflate economic policies of  the  Washington  uniparty—the embedded groupthink apostasy that Donald Trump embraced with  unre- served gusto.

The  truth is, all of today’s maladies—low growth, high infla- tion, a shrinking middle class, and  the concentration of vast wind- fall  wealth at  the  tippy-top of  the  economic ladder—stem from the  central bank’s basic  modus operandi. That  is, the  Fed’s  over- whelming presence in Wall  Street money and  capital markets via massive  bond-buying, interest rate  pegging, yield  curve  manipu- lation and  price  keeping operations designed to prop-up equities and  other risk assets.

This   modern  form   of  Wall   Street–centric central banking has  been  an  abject failure and  not  just  because it is anti-growth, pro-inflation, and  deeply biased in  favor  of the  super-rich, who own  most  of  the  financial assets  which  have  been  inflated to  a fare-thee-well. Its even more  fatal  defect is that it led to near  total capture  of the Fed by  Wall  Street operators, traders, speculators, and  their shills  in the financial press.

The result was crony capitalism in capital letters. And that put the Eccles  Building at the very epicenter of the Swamp.

There  is no  mystery as to  why  this  is the  case—even  crediting the arguably good intentions of the twelve people who serve on the FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee). With every Fed meeting there are extant literally tens of trillions worth of bets that have been placed by Wall Street’s fast money-operators based on the expected FOMC policy  announcement. The latter include changes in money market rates  by as little  as twenty-five basis points, guidance on the monthly rate of bond-buying or selling to the nearest $5 billion, and hints in the post-meeting statement and chairman’s press conference as to  what  hairline maneuver the  FOMC might undertake at  the next  monthly meeting and  in the months immediately beyond that.

In a word, the  rise at the  Fed  of what  Alan  Greenspan called “the   wealth effects  doctrine” has  fundamentally changed Wall Street. In days  of yore  it invested based on  the  facts  embedded in the flow of business and  financial information on the free market. But  now  it trades overwhelmingly on the  flow of monetary policy tweaks coursing through the  brains of the  twelve  FOMC mem- bers  and  a handful of  Wall  Street gurus who  attempt to  divine their latest revelations and  intentions.

Accordingly, the Fed dare  not  disappoint the momentary Wall Street consensus because its  entire “policy transmittal” process works  through the Wall Street–centered financial markets, not  the main  street banks and  S&Ls of times  gone by. Under today’s Fed model, prices in the  money, bond, stock, and  real  estate markets are actually the  transmission mechanism which  purportedly con- veys the Fed’s policy signals and  intentions to main  street.

So, for want  of a better term, Wall Street has the FOMC by the short hairs. And it never  lets go. Doing Wall Street’s short-term bid- ding at  meeting after  meeting after  meeting leads  to  nothing less than permanent policy capture of the Fed by traders and speculators.

And  we  do  mean traders, not  investors. In theory the  latter were   historically happy  with   honest  market-based  pricing  of financial assets  on Wall Street and  a convertible dollar linked to a fixed  weight of gold. After  all,  old-fashioned “investors” were  in the  business of picking profitable investments for  the  long-haul based on the intrinsic facts of the instrument in question.

That’s  not  the  case  with  today’s Wall  Street traders. Not  by a long  shot. To  the  contrary, they  make  their money through Fed subsidized carry  trades or  options market positioning based on zero or negative cost of capital in real terms, and also via artificially low cap  rates  (i.e.,  long-term interest rates  and  their reciprocal in the form  of higher P-E ratios). So if you are invested in assets  that are appreciating due to rising valuation multiples and  are funding them to the tune of 80 percent or more  in zero cost overnight debt markets, it is truly  a case of shooting fish in a barrel.

This proposition cannot be overstated. Dwelling down in the canyons of Wall  Street cheek-by-jowl with  the  traders and  specu- lators, the  members of the  FOMC lose all contact with  the  long- term  trends they are  fostering through their day-to-day capitula- tion  to the demands of the fast money. For instance, the overnight interest rate  (Fed funds and  money market rates  which  track it) is of little  use to main  street because prudent businesses do not  wish to finance either fixed  or short-term capital in overnight markets that can  be  here  today and  gone tomorrow in  terms of rate  lev- els, conditions, and  availability. And that’s  for the obvious reason that their funded capital—buildings, machinery, inventory, receiv- ables,  etc.—is not  highly liquid or capable of being monetized at book value  on a moment’s notice.

Besides, their capital stock  is designed to  support the  long- term  capacity of an  enterprise to  produce goods or  services. It’s not  there to be liquidated in order to pay  off short-term funding that can’t be  rolled over.  So the  Fed’s  number one  policy  tool— the  Fed  funds rate—is  essentially irrelevant  to  the  main   street economy.

But  in contrast to main  street businesses, Wall  Street traders’ books are  far  more  liquid, meaning that assets  can  generally be quickly liquidated, even  if it  involves a mark to  market loss,  if funding is interrupted. It also means traders are inherently incen- tivized to  borrow short and  cheap and  to  invest  in  longer term assets  with  more  yield  and  and/or appreciation potential. In this context, therefore, cheap carry  trade finance is the  mother’s milk of speculative riches.

As it turns out, during the  years  of egregious money-printing, the  inflation-adjusted or “real”  cost  of carry  trades has  been  neg- ative  during the  preponderance of time. For  instance, during the 108  months between February 2008  and  Trump’s arrival in  the Oval  Office,  the  real  federal funds rate  was negative every  single month. And  when  that span is extended out  to  the  present—184 months—the data shows  it  has  been  negative 96 percent of  the time.

So, if you were a fast money operator on Wall Street you made profits by borrowing on the money market and  rolling it over day after  day,  even  as the  longer-duration assets  being funded were producing higher yields  or better rates  of appreciation and  there- fore a positive spread on the carry.

In the  great scheme of things, this  was damn near  criminal. It showered Wall  Street speculators with  hideous riches, and  pro- vided a giant incentive for  capital and  talent to  flow  into  finan- cial speculation. And also, for the corporate C-suites to indulge in massive  financial engineering—huge stock  buybacks, overvalued M&A  deals,  leveraged recapitalizations, etc.—in  lieu  of  produc- tive investment on main  street.

The  latter point cannot be  emphasized strongly enough. The Fed’s day-by-day Wall Street coddling, subsidizing, and  price-sup- porting  actions have  turned the  capital markets into   a  casino where  short-term trading is everything, and  investing for the long run  is hardly an afterthought.

Unfortunately, stock  options–endowed  corporate executives cannot resist  the  resulting temptation to get  richer quicker. That is, the  opportunity to goose options’ value  via financial engineer- ing machinations that generate stock  price  gains  in the short-run, even  as  they  undermine long-run earnings growth through too much debt accumulation and  too little  investment in plant, equip- ment, technology, and  human capital.

A succinct word for  this  perverse process, of course, is finan- cial strip-mining.

The  question therefore recurs. How did  the  monetary policy mechanism work before the Fed fell into  bed with Wall Street after Greenspan’s post Black  Monday bailouts in October 1987? And why  in  those now  forgotten earlier times  did  the  US  economy thrive just  fine absent the  heavy  hand of Fed  micro-management of the nation’s total GDP?

The  answer is that even  Volcker  did  not  target interest rates or  attempt  plenary management of  the   GDP.  His  goal   was the  restoration of  sound money and  returning goods and  ser- vices inflation to  absolutely minimal levels.  Likewise, the  great William McChesney Martin before him  had  no pretense that he and  the  FOMC were  running the  US  economy. He knew  that was the  job of businessmen, investors, savers,  workers, consum- ers, and  even  speculators pursing their own  best  interest on the free market.

In short, for the  Fed’s  first seventy-three years  of existence up until Greenspan’s arrival in August 1987, its modus operandi had not strayed too far from the original vision of its legislative author, Congressman Carter Glass. The latter’s vision  was that the  Fed’s purpose would be to safeguard sound money and  to ensure that the  commercial banking system remained liquid as the  US  econ- omy  expanded in  the  normal course or  encountered temporary rough patches from  time  to time.

But   the   watchwords  were   sound  money and   a  well-func- tioning banking system. The  pre-Greenspan Fed  was  not  in  the jobs,  growth, housing, business investment, and  2 percent infla- tion  business. All that claptrap was  invented by  Greenspan and his  heirs  and  assigns based on  the  excuse  that the  misbegotten Humphrey-Hawkins mandates of 1978 made them do it.

The  latter did  not—there are  no  rigid inflation or  unemploy- ment targets in the  legislation, just  a motherhood-type aspiration for  full  employment and  low inflation. But  the  Fed’s  subsequent mission creep into  outright monetary central planning has  now gone so far that the damage can only be undone by returning to a strict  Carter Glass  approach to central banking.

That  is to say, the  one  decisive reform that is needed is to jet- tison the  FOMC and  all  activist day-to-day Fed  intervention in financial markets and  return to a passive discount window modal- ity.  That  shift  and  that shift  alone would rescue the  Fed  from  its captive status deep down in the bowels of Wall Street.

To  be  very  clear,  under this  alternative monetary regime the banking  system could  get   liquidity when   it  was  needed, but only  at  a penalty spread above a market-driven floating rate  at the  Fed’s  discount window. Under a revived Glassian model the money market, not  the FOMC, would set the discount rate  based on  the  supply of  savings and  the  demand for  borrowings. And the discount window would be open for business one commercial bank-borrower at a time,  day in and  day out.

There  would be  no  monthly Fed  meeting drama—endlessly amplified by financial TV—about the  Fed  funds rate  and  level of bond-buying. Nor  would there be a massive  concentration of bets (i.e.,   front-running) around the  Fed’s  expected action because policy-action would be delivered in tiny fragments and  via contin- uous pricing bits at the market-driven discount window, not  via a “breaking-news” flash on bubblevision ten times  per  year.

Moreover, the  remit of  the  Fed   under the  Glassian model would be strictly limited to support for  commercial bank liquid- ity. Period. The private economy would take  care of growth, jobs, and  the  other elements of  GDP. And  White House bullies like LBJ and  Donald Trump could huff  and  puff  at length about eas- ier money, but  to no  avail  because there would be no  FOMC or monetary politburo to heed their wishes.

At the same time,  there would be no financial bubbles or main street goods and   services   inflation, either.  That’s   because the mechanism by  which  the  Fed  fosters financial bubbles and  CPI inflation—artificially low interest rates  and  inflated financial asset prices—would be disabled.

The  vast  unearned  windfalls garnered  by  the  super-rich in recent years  were  not  the  natural product of capitalism at  work. Bubbles happen when  the  central bank subsidizes debt and  cod- dles  speculation. This inherently attracts talent and  capital to the speculative trading pits,  leading to  even  higher asset  prices and ever larger speculative bubbles.

However, under a  Glassian model, attempts  at  debt-fueled speculation  would self-correct. That’s  because the  interest rate at  the  discount window would automatically rise  in  response to surging demand for  credit, and  appreciably so.  That  was  effec- tively  demonstrated by  the  Volcker  interlude in  the  early  1980s when  Tall  Paul essentially enabled the  Fed  funds rate  to  find  its own  market-clearing level.  It did—at  22 percent in the  face of the virulent inflation that had  been  unleashed by the  money-printers during the previous decade.

At the  same  time,  the  banking system would not  be left  high and  dry.  But  instead of  validating the  Wall  Street canard that discount window borrowing is a bad  thing because it taints the reputation of the bank obtaining the  Fed  advance, such  discount borrowing would become par  for  the  course. It would become the  one  and  only  source of sound money liquidity injections into the  banking system to support real  growth and  productive main street investment.

In the historic monetary literature this was called a “mobilized discount rate.” This  kind of  free-ranging market rate   not   con- strained by the  Fed’s  heavy  foot  would choke off excess  demand for credit, and  do so long  before today’s plague of Fed-subsidized financial asset  inflation had  time  to build up a head of steam.

One   more   feature of  a  restored  Glassian discount  window model is crucial and  would guarantee that its  modus operandi would be  non-inflationary at  the  CPI level,  as well.  Glass  never intended for the  Fed  to be in the  business of buying and  holding Uncle Sam’s debt paper, thereby subsidizing the government bor- rowing rate  and  encouraging the  politicians to run-up the  public debt. Government debt came to dominate the Fed’s portfolio only by the accident of enlisting it to finance WWI.

By contrast, Congressman Glass  was  a believer in  what  was called the “real bills” doctrine back  in the day.  In simplified terms it held  that bank loans  backed by already produced goods (i.e., finished inventory or receivables paper due  for settlement within a set period such  as ninety days) were the  only  suitable collateral for loans  at the Fed discount windows. Accordingly, when  the Fed printed new  money to  advance a discount loan  to  a commercial bank member, the  associated collateral would signify  that new supply of goods had already been  brought into  existence to match with  the expanded credit.

To be sure,  the  real bills  route to Fed  liquidity support for the banking system was not  perfect. But it stands head and  shoulders above the  current defective arrangement where  the  Fed  creates endless amounts of new credit by buying government paper with- out  regard to the supply-side of the economy.

For  this  to  work  in the  present era  only  one  change would be needed, and  it  would bring the  Fed  inflationary money-printing spree  and  endless showering of windfall wealth on  the  1 percent to an abrupt hall.  A present day Glassian Fed would accept only secured commercial loans as collateral for new Fed credit. It would therefore cap its current holdings of federal debt and guaranteed housing paper at the present $8.3 trillion level and undertake a fixed plan of paydown.

For  example, as long  as it was fixed and  irrevocable, the  Fed’s current rate  of $95 billion per month of government debt liquida- tion  (called quantitative tightening or QT) would result in an end game  of  zero holdings of  government and  GSE  paper roughly seven  years  down the  road. Under that scheme the  Fed  would never  buy  another US  Treasury bill,  note, bond, or  guaranteed GSE  security, ever again.

Accordingly, the  Fed’s  heavy-handed price  supports for Uncle Sam’s  debt emissions would end  and  legislators would have  to service  the  public debt in the  bond pits  out  of private savings at honest market rates. Upon the  Fed’s  ending of public debt mon- etization, therefore, yields  on  Treasury paper would soar,  caus- ing profligate spending by the  Washington War  Machine and  the domestic stimulus racketeers to come  to an abrupt halt.

That   would  also   end   the   current  inflationary  disconnect between excess  demand fueled by  US  Treasury debt monetized by the Fed  and  the available supply of goods and  services. Under a Glassian discount model, Say’s Law would prevail: new supply would come  into  being first and  only then could new central bank credit follow.

Equally important,  the  cavalcade of  money-printing central banks that have  enabled the  collapse of America’s  trade accounts and industrial economy would undergo a decisive volte-face. Dollar- denominated interest rates  would rise, causing the dollar’s FX rate to  sharply strengthen. And  that would be  unrelenting bad  news for the  mercantilist exporters, which, as The Donald so unartfully described it, were stealing production and  jobs from  America.

More precisely, these  great mercantilist production machines have had  one Achilles  heel all along. Namely, they converted their dollar-based imports of  energy, metals, and  myriad other com- modities into   processed goods and   finished manufactures and components, which, in  turn, were  resold to  the  US  and   other advanced economies at a profitable mark-up. However, were these goods converters to allow  their currencies to abruptly collapse in the  face  of  a  newly  hardened dollar, their domestic economies would face  gale-force inflation as the  domestic currency cost  of imported supplies soared.

At length, China and  the  other mercantilist exporters of the world would need to  severely  tighten their monetary policies by raising rates  and  shrinking their own  domestic money supplies. This  would be  necessary in  order to  support plunging FX  rates and  thereby counter the  severe  imported inflation that would be generated by a strong global dollar. Even  then, local wages would have  gone up  with  rising domestic inflation, while  debt service and capital costs would also rise owing to higher interest rates and credit scarcity. In short order, the  artificially competitive advan- tage  that had  materialized during the  Fed’s  money-printing era would be substantially vaporized.

In a word, a sound dollar has been  the  key all along to revers- ing the  accumulating main  street disaster in trade, industrial pro- duction, jobs,  and  middle-class incomes. And yet, Donald Trump was and  remains surely  the  most  pig-headed dollar-trasher to rise to the top  of American politics. Ever.

The current roadblock to fixing  the  Fed,  and  therefore fixing the  American economy and  restoring sustainable prosperity,  is that the  conservative party in America has  come  under the  thrall of a dangerous protectionist, statist bully, and  monetary quack. Unless he  is sent  to  the  showers decisively there is literally no hope for  an  outcome that does  not  end  in  financial, fiscal,  and economic disaster.

The post The Rising Tide Which Lifted All the Yachts appeared first on LewRockwell.

When I was still in graduate school and still in my early twenties, I was riding on the airport shuttle to an event at the Mises Institute when I encountered an interesting phenomenon. It was the phenomenon of the “libertarian” who is free-market in the small stuff, but embraces war and statism in the big things.

I still remember that shuttle ride well. I had become involved in a discussion with a man who was probably twenty years my senior. He was on the way to the same Institute conference, and was expressing the usual free-market sentiments about low taxes and the problems with government regulation.

When the topic turned to foreign policy, however, freedom and the evils of the state were quickly forgotten. This man ended up singing the praises of Washington’s interventions in Central America and in its illegal arms sales to Iran. That is, he sided with the neoconservatives who had perpetrated the Iran-Contra affair. This self-described libertarian was lamenting that the Reagan administration had been caught illegally spending federal money while meddling in wars in both the Middle East and in the Americas.

When I suggested that illegally fomenting foreign wars was not exactly compatible with a “limited” state or even constitutional government, he then reverted to a well-worn tactic often used by older men who lack a real argument: he said I was too young to understand.

Now that I am at least as old as that man was then, I’ve been around long enough to have encountered many people like him. It is easy to find libertarians who will act on principle on the small, easy topics, but will then abandon all principle on the big stuff.

What is the small stuff? It’s things like smoking marijuana, rent control, prostitution, and ride-sharing. At libertarian conferences and in online discussions, it’s pretty straightforward and easy to oppose government regulation of taxi services, or to denounce rent control, or be against locking up women—most of whom are poor—for accepting money in exchange for sex. These issues, however, are generally rather peripheral to state power. To remove state action from these areas does little to endanger the state or its core powers. To favor restraints on state power in these topics, we might say, is to be a “microlibertarian.”

The big stuff is another matter. It’s those more controversial topics like war and peace, geopolitics, and—as we have learned in the past several years—”pandemics.” These topics are much more central and dear to states and their agents. As Charles Tilly noted long ago, “war made the state and the state made war.” Or, as Randolph Bourne put it, “war is the health of the state.” Murray Rothbard has explained how the issue of war is at the very heart of any efforts to defend freedom and human rights.

Moreover, we have recently seen how regimes employed many of the same propaganda and fear-based tactics employed in wartime in the name of “fighting the pandemic.” Many of the same policies employed during wartime were employed during the covid panic: embracing “emergency powers,” demanding total obedience to “experts,” and accepting near total state control over entire sectors of the economy. In both wartime and pandemic-time we are told that state power cannot be limited, because otherwise the “enemy”—whether an imagined foreign bogeyman or a disease—will win. There are far fewer libertarians willing to embrace true laissez-faire and freedom in these cases. But such immovable stalwarts do exist. We might call this smaller group of libertarians “macrolibertarians.” They stick to defending freedom even when it comes to the big, controversial stuff.

Your average microlibertarian will quickly surrender his liberties and defer to state power in an effort to combat the “threat.” The supposed defenders of freedom in “peacetime” or “non-pandemic time” will happily explain to you why free-markets work “in theory” sometimes, but that the really important stuff like “national interest” and “public health” require government control.

In the case of pandemics, for instance, some microlibertarians even embraced vaccine mandates. Walter Block, for instance, has called for the death penalty for those who refuse a vaccine mandate, writing:  “Would I compel the 60 percent to get the vaccination on libertarian grounds? You’re darn tootin’ I would. Not so much to save them. That would be paternalism. But, rather, in order to save the lives of the 40 percent who are vulnerable. If any member of this 60 percent refused this vaccination, I would execute him as threatening mass murder of 40 percent of the population.”

Things are even worse for microlibertarians when it comes to foreign policy. This was often found in the refrain “I agree with Ron Paul except on foreign policy” during Paul’s presidential campaigns of 2008 and 2012. The sentiment expressed a common position: “I think the state is bad on some things, but I’m not really interested in confronting the major issues at the core of state power.”

Historically, of course, we have seen a precipitous decline in the popularity of libertarian ideology whenever the regime has managed to whip the public into a war frenzy. Perhaps the most salient and recent example of this is what happened after 9/11. During the 1990s, anti-government sentiment grew throughout the decade as many Americans in the post-Cold War world recognized that the American state was a far greater threat to them than any group of foreigners. That, of course, largely evaporated after 9/11 as countless self-described advocates for “small government” embraced warrantless spying, torture, and endless war.

We see a similar phenomenon today with both the Ukraine War and the State of Israel’s war against Gazans. The microlibertarians over at the CATO Institute, for instance, fired Ted Galen Carpenter because he wasn’t sufficiently enthusiastic about perpetual war between NATO and Russia.

When it comes to the war in Gaza, leading microlibertarian Block has encouraged the “heroic Prime Minister Netanyahu” to be more aggressive in his efforts to “pulverize” women and children in Gaza. Are there any limits on the Israeli state in this view? Not so long as the “threat” needs to be stamped out by strong state action.

In these cases we see the microlibertarian position in action: limits on state power work for the small stuff, but not for the big stuff. Consequently, the powers and prerogatives most central to state power—and which offer the greatest threats to the lives and freedoms of ordinary people—get a free pass.

This isn’t to say that the “small stuff” is unimportant. Of course it is good and important to condemn rent control and the drug war and the countless ways that states impoverish and control us. I have written on many such topics myself and have published many articles on these topics on mises.org. Rothbard certainly did not ignore these topics. On the other hand, to oppose rent control while also favoring the mass murder of 100,000 civilians is not simply a matter of having some minor “blind spot.” It is an enormous contradiction.

To take this position is to refuse to hit the state where it hurts. It reflects a fundamental complacency when it comes to murderous and despotic state power so long as that power is used during alleged “emergencies.” This is any extremely common position, of course, and many well-meaning people embrace it. Those who do, however, are effectively neutralized when it comes to opposing the issues most dear to states and their agents.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

The post The Problem with Microlibertarianism appeared first on LewRockwell.

The first thing to know about Dr. Thomas E. Woods, Jr.’s’ book Our Enemy, the Fed is he’s giving it away.  Click the link, get your copy and read the whole book.  Clearly, such intellectual charity is not only rare but in the educational spirit of Mises.org. The subject matter is light-heavy but Woods, author of the bestseller Meltdown (reviewed here), navigates it with the smooth skill of a master, making the reader experience satisfying from beginning to end.

The title reflects another insight, paralleling as it does Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State.  Most of us were raised to believe government and its agencies serve our best interests.  As libertarian scholarship has shown the truth is the exact opposite, particularly with government’s sleazy relationship with money and banking.  Admittedly, it’s a hard idea to accept since it involves a pernicious breach of trust, but Woods makes it abundantly clear.  To our overlords we are easily-duped chattel.

Until Ron Paul decided to run for president and his End the Fed came along in 2009, the general public was mostly blind to the Fed’s existence.  Austrians aside, the few who knew something about it — mostly university-trained economists on the take from the Fed — considered it a vital part of an advanced industrial economy.  Yet the Fed had been around for 96 years when Dr. Paul’s book emerged.  Given that it’s in charge of the money we use how did it remain in the shadows for tax-burdened citizens for nearly a century?  What’s up with that?

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis tells us the Fed’s congressional assignment is “to promote maximum employment and price stability.” (Bold in original)  For these it talks about interest rates, and its aim is to increase the money supply so that prices rise gently at or around a 2% rate.

How gentle is a 2% rate?  After 10 years of 2% monetary inflation, it would take $121.90 to buy what $100 bought in year one.  But that’s over a decade, and you might not notice it unless you’re one of the hungry poor not on welfare.  The Fed’s inflation of the money supply has been ongoing since it began operations in 1914, draining 96% of the dollar’s purchasing power.

On what planet is a 96% devaluation considered stability?  Its real purpose is to inflate then assure us it makes good sense.  Never mind the boom – bust cycle it creates along with the debauchery of our currency.  We’re being gaslighted.  Where did all the newly-created money go?

Dr. Paul, who had a long career in Congress whose confrontations with Fed Chairmen Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke have become legendary in libertarian circles, tells us:

Law permits this highly secretive, private bank to create credit at will and distribute it as it sees fit.

The chairman of the Federal Reserve can blatantly inject in a public hearing that he has no intention of revealing where the newly created credit goes and who benefits. When asked, he essentially answered, “It’s none of your business,” saying that it would be “counterproductive” to do so.  [My italics]

The picture I get is of people in a hideout somewhere — in this case, the FOMC meeting in the Eccles building in Washington, D.C. — cranking out money then injecting it into the economy in some mysterious manner, while telling us in Keynesian doublespeak their operations keep us safe and prosperous.  Is it really hard to fathom that those in charge might be up to no good?

Woods comes out swinging

After defining the Federal Reserve System — the Fed — as the American central bank enjoying “a government-granted monopoly on the creation of legal-tender money,” Woods proceeds to evaluate the Fed from a broad or macro perspective.

What exactly did the Fed fix?  Christina Romer who served under Obama as Chair of his Council of Economic Advisors found that “recessions were in fact not more frequent in the pre-Fed than the post-Fed period.” Even comparing the periods of 1796-1915 to post-WW II — thus omitting the Great Depression of 1930-1945 — “economist Joseph Davis finds no appreciable difference between the length and duration of recessions as compared to the period of the Fed.”

Woods takes us back through American history to see how banking and credit developed.  Government, which has no money of its own, befriends ones that have it.  During the period between the expiration of the first Bank of the US and the creation of the Second Bank of the US — 1811-1817 — the government granted banks the privilege of expanding credit unsecured by deposits while allowing them to tell depositors attempting to withdraw their money to “come back in a couple of years.” While banks could be charged with legal counterfeiting and embezzlement, Woods does not use the terms.  In fact nowhere in the book does he use the words “counterfeit” or “embezzle.”

When the Second Bank of the US started inflating in 1817 it created the Panic of 1819.  He writes:

The lesson of that sorry episode — namely, that the economy gets taken on a wild and unhealthy ride when the money supply is dramatically and artificially increased and then suddenly reduced — was so obvious that even the political class managed to figure it out.

Many inflationists before the panic became hard-money believers after.  Condy Raguet and Daniel Raymond, a disciple of Alexander Hamilton, became hard-money advocates and wrote books on economics.  John Quincy Adams cited the hard-money Bank of Amsterdam “as a a model to emulate.”

But the inflationists persisted and pushed for more government intervention, and one in particular: Unit banking.

In the nineteenth century, nearly all American states instituted a regulation known as unit banking, which limited all banks to a single office. No branch banking was allowed, whether intrastate or interstate. The obvious result was a very fragile and undiversified banking system in which banks could be brought to ruin if local conditions turned sour.

Fractional-reserve banking is a major cause of bank panics. But the US went further.  Other countries did not “cripple their banking systems” with unit banking laws.  Canada, in particular, had no unit banking laws and no banking panics.  The Bank of Canada did not emerge until 1934.

As Milton Friedman was fond of pointing out, although the Great Depression claimed over 9,000 American banks, the number of banks that failed in Canada at that time was zero. American bank panics, it turns out, were in large part the result of government intervention — in the form of unit banking — in the first place.

Yet it was the market and the imposed pseudo-gold standard that took the blame, and Americans got Hoover’s meddling then FDR’s New Deal.

Later in the book Woods mentions the hands-off approach to the depression of 1920-1921, “which saw unemployment shoot up to 12.4 percent and production decline by 17 percent. Wholesale prices fell by 56 percent.”  And the Fed kept its printing press quiet.  According to the National Bureau of Economic Research the depression was over by the summer of 1921.

Falling prices are bad?

One of the strongest parts of Woods’ book is his treatment of deflation — falling prices.   It is only in the inflationary world of larcenous economics that falling prices are the “It” to be avoided.

A few of the points he makes:

— Increasing the money supply to support increased production is a fallacy.  “Any supply of money can facilitate any number of transactions.”

— The money supply under a hard money system grows “relatively slowly, and the supply of other goods and services increases more rapidly. With these goods and services more abundant with respect to money, their prices fall.”

— The claim that people would stop buying things if they knew prices would fall ignores the fact that people “value goods in the present more highly than they do the same goods in the future. This factor offsets the desire to wait indefinitely for a lower price.”

— If deflation is anticipated entrepreneurs and the firms they deal with would adjust their bids accordingly.

— With the increase in money’s purchasing power people could save simply by hoarding.

— Who’s hurt the most by deflation?  The power centers in society — government and Wall Street.  We hear hysteria over deflation because it hurts the establishment the most, “and only the mildest concern about inflation, which hurts everyone else.”

Conclusion

Tom Woods has published another gem and is giving it away.  The war we’re fighting now depends for its outcome on sound information and, as always, personal integrity.  Never forget, the Fed has to go.  His book provides much of the intellectual ammunition needed to neutralize the enemy and avoid repeating the mistakes that brought us this mess in the first place.

The post Woods Targets the Fed appeared first on LewRockwell.