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Prior to 1913 the US government was financed by tariffs.  It was under tariffs, not free trade, that the United States industrialized and became a manufacturing nation.  Indeed, the Union invaded and destroyed the Confederacy in order to impose the Morrill Tariff on the South that enabled the North to industrialize.  The North could not compete with British industry and required the protection of a tariff.

It is extraordinary to me that it has gone unremarked for 112 years that the income tax, which required a constitutional amendment, resurrected slavery.  In actuality, white people voted to impose slavery on themselves. 

Americans did not realize what was happening.  The income threshold for being subject to the tax was so high that few qualified to be taxed.  Moreover, the first tax rate was 1% and the progression halted at 7%.  To be taxed at 7% you had to have a phenomenal amount of income for those days of more than $500,000, the equivalent of multi-millions today. In the US in the 1900s a person who made $70,000 a year was considered extremely wealthy. When Henry Ford’s innovation of the moving assembly line was introduced in 1913, he raised his workers’ pay from $2.34 per day to $5, producing an annual income of $1,300. 

Only 3% of the US population was subject to the income tax. Many years ago I wrote an account of how the income tax amendment passed.  In Georgia the state legislative leader said Georgia had no objection to the amendment as no one in the state of Georgia had an income high enough to be subject to the tax.

Everyone overlooked that once an income tax was in place, the thresholds could be lowered and the rates raised. By 1918, that is, within 5 years, the top tax rate had jumped to 77%, dropping to 25% in 1925.

When the 16th Amendment to the Constitution was passed, slavery was resurrected.  Historically, the definition of a free person is a person who owns his own labor.  Serfs and slaves did not own their own labor.  Serfs were not owned by feudal lords, the the lords had use rights to as much as 30% of a serf’s labor. The labor of an enslaved person belonged to the slave’s owner.  

An income tax establishes government ownership over part of your labor.  How much depends on your income and the tax rate at the time.  If you fail to deliver the government’s share of your income, you are severely punished and can spend many years in prison.  Every American income taxpayer is partly enslaved and partly free.

A tariff is a tax on consumption, the preferable means of taxation according to the classical economists.  It establishes no government ownership rights in your income.  An income tax not only gives government a part ownership of your working time, it is also a tax on factors of production — labor and capital.  Taxing factors of production reduces economic growth and Gross Domestic Product.  It is a counter-productive tax that suppresses output.

The substitution of a tariff for an income tax is a pro-growth policy that will produce higher incomes and raise living standards.  Free labor is always more productive because you are working for yourself and your family.

Out-of-date neoliberal economists argue wrongly that tariffs violate free trade and reduce economic growth. In the Lionel Robbins Lecture in 2000, published by the MIT Press, Ralph E. Gomory and William J. Baumol proved that the case for free trade was false and that at best the notion that free trade was mutually beneficial was an occasional special case.  Paul Samuelson found their proof convincing, but overall the economists have preferred their free trade indoctrination to the effort it takes to master a new understanding.

The information from DOGE of the enormous fraud, abuse, and self-dealing that the US budget contains as a slush fund for insiders and for bribing foreign politicians and overthrowing foreign governments indicates that sufficient reductions are possible to establish a tariff at a reasonable rate.

To rescue Americans from the slavery of an income tax would be one the greatest achievements in history.  Let’s achieve it. See this.

The post President Trump’s Idea of Replacing the Income Tax With Tariffs Is Sound and a Great Advancement in the Restoration of Freedom appeared first on LewRockwell.

SOUTH BEND, Indiana – The University of Notre Dame is doubling down on diversity, inclusion, and equity practices despite a growing number of major corporations and institutions of higher learning across the U.S. scaling back their support for the controversial initiatives.  

A report published by First Things this week revealed that the school’s provost informed faculty three days before President Trump was sworn in via email that they are looking to “increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities on our faculty.”

John McGreevy also told employees that the move was “equally important” as the first “goal” he laid out in the email, which was “to hire Catholic faculty and other faculty deeply committed to our mission to ensure continuity with our past and our fate as the world’s leading global Catholic research university.” 

While it has been long regarded as the most prominent Catholic university in America, Notre Dame has increasingly failed to live up to its professed religious identity. As reported by LifeSiteNews before, the school gave pro-abortion Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden it’s prestigious Laetare Medal. It has also hosted drag shows on campus, celebrated June as “pride month,” and promoted many other pro-LGBT initiatives.  

According to First Things, Notre Dame founded the “Office of Institutional Transformation” in 2022 and brought on several DEI staff to promote woke ideology on campus. Salaries for such persons were reportedly north of $6.5 million in total. A “Center for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” was also established in 2023. 

Not all is lost in South Bend, however. Joshua Haskell, a valedictorian for the class of 2024, recent launched a nonprofit that seeks to help college-age men break addictions to pornography.

While enrolled in the school’s honors business program, Haskell published a tell-all article titled “Escaping Porn’s Prison” in The Observer, a student-run newspaper. Haskell said that the response to his essay was “overwhelmingly positive” and that more than 100 of his fellow male students signed up for the program.

Also in 2024, student journalists who exposed a pro-abortion professor filed a lawsuit for over $100,000 to recoup attorney’s fees after defeating a defamation suit triggered by their coverage. An Indiana appeals court eventually sided with the students against the professor and her case was tossed out. 

Founded by French priest Fr. Edward Sorin in 1842, the university’s formal name is Notre Dame du Lac, or “Our Lady of the Lake.” While widely popular due to its highly accomplished football team, Notre Dame is also home to the Moreau Seminary for the Congregation of Holy Cross.  

In the 1970s, controversial president Fr. Theodore Hesburgh made Notre Dame co-educational and helped draft the heavily criticized Land O’ Lakes statement, a document approved by presidents of various Catholic universities across the U.S. that declared independence from formal Church authority and doctrines.  

This originally appeared on Lifesite News.

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The era of Europe freeloading off of the US and its liberal-globalists manipulating it into doing their geopolitical bidding against Russia might soon end to the benefit of peace-loving people and businessmen on all three sides.

Germany’s Bild cited unnamed members of Western security services to sensationally report that Trump is allegedly planning to pull all US troops out of Central Europe in compliance with one of the security guarantee requests that Putin put forth in December 2021 as an attempt to avert the special operation. Friedrich Merz, the frontrunner to become Germany’s next Chancellor, shortly thereafter publicly declared that his country must prepare for the possibility that Trump abandons NATO’s Article 5.

He’s unlikely to do either of these things, but American policy towards NATO will certainly change in the coming future, which will likely take the form of what was detailed in the policy brief that was published at the Trump-affiliated Center for Renewing America in February 2023. Titled “Pivoting the US Away from Europe to a Dormant NATO”, it describes how the US can get the EU to defend Europe while the US focuses on containing China in Asia and was analyzed here last July, which readers should review.

This goal explains why Trump is demanding that all NATO allies spend 5% of GDP on defense and accounts for the nascent Russian-US “New Détente”. Brokering an armistice or peace deal between Russia and Ukraine is meant to free up some of the US’ forces in Central Europe, which includes Germany, for redeployment to Asia. Forcing the Europeans to accept what had practically been their worst nightmare for the past three years should then motivate them to increase defense spending.

New US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth praised Poland as “the model ally on the continent” during his trip to Warsaw earlier this month and Trump sought to make Poland the US’ top ally there during his first term so he probably won’t pull out of there. In fact, “Poland Is Once Again Poised To Become The US’ Top Partner In Europe” for the reasons explained in the preceding hyperlinked analysis, which boil down to restoring its historical geopolitical role as a wedge between Germany and Russia.

The Baltics might not fare the same though since they have nowhere near the same regional significance as Poland does and they could try to provoke a war with Russia in order to drag the US in via NATO. Accordingly, Trump might calculate that it’s better to withdraw some or even all American troops from there while conveying to them that the US won’t come to their aid if they instigate a regional conflict, which could be expressed either behind the scenes or through one of his characteristic pronouncements.

The newfound US-German political tensions could even possibly see the US redeploy some troops from there to Poland, which in the most extreme scenario could result in transferring the headquarters of its European Command from Stuttgart to some Polish city, though it’s too early to say for certain. After all, something as serious as the second-mentioned requires a lot of work, and Trump might also wager that it’s better to keep the headquarters where they’re at in order to not lose more influence in Germany.

In any case, redeploying US troops from Europe to Asia would likely please Russia even if some are transferred from Germany to Poland, especially if Trump makes it clear that NATO members can’t provoke a conflict with Russia and expect America to ride to their rescue via Article 5. Retaining some troops in Europe alongside the integrity of Article 5 amidst the aforesaid conditions could be a pragmatic compromise between the US and Russia’s security interests.

The purpose would be to alleviate their security dilemma that was worsened by NATO’s eastward expansion after the end of the Old Cold War all while maintaining some American military influence on the continent as the US “Pivots (back) to Asia” to more muscularly contain China. The era of Europe freeloading off of the US and its liberal-globalists manipulating it into doing their geopolitical bidding against Russia would end to the benefit of peace-loving people and businessmen on all three sides.

This originally appeared on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

The post Trump Is Unlikely To Pull All US Troops Out of Central Europe or Abandon NATO’s Article 5 appeared first on LewRockwell.

Markets misbehave, sometimes when we least expect it. How badly they misbehave depends on the soundness of the hull and the level of self-reinforcing hubris.

When Benoit Mandelbrot’s book The (Mis)behavior of Markets was published in 2004, it was a revelation for many of us. I remember sitting in my car in a parking lot, unwilling to tear myself away from reading it.

Here’s the super-short summary: from time to time markets crash for no visible reason. The internal dynamics of market structures are fractal, and one feature of this structure is that markets break down unpredictably. After the fact, we seek an external trigger–a Federal Reserve “policy error,” inflation fears, etc.–but these post-mortem explanations gloss over the cause, which is the inherent instability of market structures.

Markets can trundle along for years appearing to be stable and controllable. Any spot of bother can be corrected with a reduction in interest rates or quantitative easing. Everything is known and controllable.

But this control is illusory. Out of the blue, markets stop behaving. They misbehave, and possibly quite badly.

Nature offers many examples. The seas are relatively calm, and suddenly an enormous rogue wave appears.

At that point, the condition of the ship matters. A sound craft will survive the rogue wave, the leaky, rotten hulk won’t.

Human hubris also matters. If the passengers and crew of the hulk have been persuaded by each other’s happy talk that the ship is rock-solid, then its breaking apart will come as a nasty shock.

In the current zeitgeist, the consensus is the mighty ship of the stock market is a superliner. No matter how big the rogue wave, the ship will handle it easily.

But what if the consensus is wrong, and we’re all passengers on a rotting hulk gussied up with new paint? What if the consensus isn’t based on the soundness of the hull, but on the self-reinforcing happy-talk around the dessert cart and bar?

The consensus is convinced the ship is unsinkable, and so the guaranteed path to profit is to “buy the dip” after the rogue wave has passed. This guarantee is not actually causal; it’s recency bias, as “buy the dip” has worked like magic for 15 years.

Nobody’s interested in leaving the first class casino to get in a lifeboat when guaranteed profits beckon. The question is: how sound is the hull? Who’s actually checking, and who’s just parroting happy-talk? Can we even tell the difference?

In a euphoric speculative bubble, the answer is “no.” In a speculative bubble, “buy the dip” is all you need to know to win big, and continue winning big. So who cares about rogue waves and rotten hulls?

Read the Whole Article

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Lo scandalo USAID continua a mietere vittime illustri... ciononostante in Italia non esiste dibattito pubblico ampio su questo scempio di proporzioni epiche. Un qualcosa che coadiuvava diversi attori tra cui ONG, think thank, politica migratoria e media generalisti, è praticamente poco chiacchierata sui canali d'informazione ufficiali in Italia. Scopriamo anche che era dietro associazioni come il WEF, e dove avete sentito articolare in modo ufficioso la teoria secondo cui la cricca di Davos aveva infiltrati nell'amministrazione americana da cui traeva vantanggio per ottenere finanziamenti gratis? Sì, dal mio ultimo libro intitolato “Il Grande Default”. Questa agenzia governativa, inoltre, si occupava di comprare giornali e giornalisti in tutto il mondo, uno di questi Paesi era l'Ungheria ad esempio. Uno stato sovrano, democratico, in cui vige lo stato di diritto e appartenente al blocco occidentale era praticamente manipolato e sovvertito attraverso un'informazione pilotata ad hoc. Ma vi rendete conto che circa l'80% della stampa ungherese era sotto il dominio propagandistico della USAID? Ecco perché Orban faceva leggi anti-ONG, anti woke, ecc. La domanda successiva è: quanti erano in Italia e chi sono? Ancora non sono usciti fuori i nomi, ma dato l'andamento è inevitabile che ce ne fossero anche in Italia. E vi ricordate quando, 4 anni fa, passavano gli spot dei cosiddetti “professionisti dell'informazione”? Vi ricordate anche il coordinamento delle notizie date? Questa è tutta roba che mette i brividi, eppure in Italia non si scava nemmeno la superficie di questo scandalo. Non solo, ma i tentacoli di questa piovra hanno abbracciato anche le linee di politica riguardanti le immigrazioni, come s'è scoperto in Norvegia ad esempio. Cosa c'entra un'organizzazione di filantropia dello stato americano con il consiglio norvegese per i rifugiati? In Italia, però, non ci si interroga su tali quesiti intriganti e si sorvola a piè pari la portata gigantesca di quanto si sta scoperchiando: una rete d'influenza internazionale, mafiosa e criminale, che ha sostituito la politica nazionale in tutti i Paesi toccati e anche in Europa. Un piano diabolico, tra l'altro, che ha una cabina di regia ben definita ormai: la cricca di Davos.

____________________________________________________________________________________

di David Stockman

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/il-piano-di-trump-per-colpire-duramente)

Accidenti!

Elon Musk non solo ha fatto crollare l'intera burocrazia degli aiuti esteri del Deep State, ma i suoi investigatori hanno anche scoperto uno degli artifici più perniciosi della Palude: numerose agenzie federali, tra cui USAID, acquistano un sacco di costosi abbonamenti ai megafoni di Washington, come Politico, che per pura coincidenza inondano le persone con un flusso costante di “notizie” che avallano il copione dell'Unipartito.

E non stiamo parlando di spiccioli. Questi “abbonamenti” alla versione “pro” di varie newsletter di Politico, ad esempio, costano da $3.000 a $24.000 l'uno. Dal momento che due di queste ultime sono state acquistate dall'ufficio per le crisi climatiche della USAID, bisogna chiedersi cosa c'entrasse con l'eventuale nutrimento delle masse affamate del mondo o perché i burocrati della USAID avessero bisogno di pettegolezzi costosi sulla politica climatica quando le loro caselle di posta erano già inondate di propaganda sui cambiamenti climatici da decine di altre agenzie federali, think tank finanziati a livello federale, ONG e attivisti anti-combustibili fossili.

Il conto solo per le varie pubblicazioni di Politico si è accumulato a $8,2 milioni negli ultimi nove anni secondo USASpending.gov. Poiché la maggior parte di quel flusso di cassa era dovuto all'acquisto delle versioni “pro” ad alto prezzo, possiamo solo immaginare le intuizioni “profonde” che devono essere contenute nelle analisi a $5.000 all'anno.

Sì, ho qualcosa contro Politico principalmente perché quasi sempre si schiera dalla parte di più stato, più sciocchezze sulla crisi climatica, più interventismo statale e più guerra. Ma ricordo anche che è stato fondato da due ex-reporter del Washington Post, un fatto che ha innescato un viaggio nella memoria riguardo quella stessa macchina di spesa per gli aiuti esteri che Elon ha ora mandato in frantumi.

Vale a dire, poco dopo l'insediamento nel 1981 stavo ultimando il primo bilancio di Reagan e avevamo tagliato un bel 33% in aiuti esteri in una proposta inviata al Dipartimento di Stato il 27 gennaio. L'inchiostro non si era ancora asciugato sul dettagliato e ben giustificato piano dell'OMB per risparmiare quelli che all'epoca era un sacco di soldi, circa $2,6 miliardi all'anno, quando il nostro bilancio confidenziale trovò la sua strada sulle prime pagine del Washington Post il giorno dopo!

Il tono, ovviamente, era che noi burocrati dell'OMB dovevano farci gli affari nostri. Infatti, quando ci trovammo di fronte alla nostra resa dei conti sulla questione con il Segretario di Stato, ebbe un modo davvero buffo di intavolare la questione. Disse l'ex-generale Al Haig: “Signor Presidente, il suo direttore del bilancio, che conta i fagioli, vuole metterla in imbarazzo davanti al mondo intero, facendole fare un passo indietro e infilando la testa direttamente in un temperamatite!”.

Questo è ciò che disse, apparentemente convinto che spendere al servizio dell'Impero non fosse una questione da lasciare ai principianti, come chiariscono i paragrafi principali dell'articolo del Washington Post.

Fummo travolti da quello che era già allora il consolidato consenso dell'Unipartito secondo cui la sicurezza della patria americana dipendeva dal mantenimento di un impero all'estero. Pertanto enormi quantità di aiuti umanitari, assistenza allo sviluppo e denaro per i governi stranieri alleati nei Paesi in via di sviluppo erano parte integrante di tale requisito.

Di sicuro riuscimmo a strappare a Haig e ai suoi alleati nello Stato profondo una specie di pareggio: in dollari di potere d'acquisto odierni (2024) il budget operativo per gli aiuti esteri e il Dipartimento di Stato era a $33,7 miliardi nel bilancio in uscita di Jimmy Carter per l'anno fiscale 1980; nel 1988, e nonostante tutta la resistenza interna al gabinetto Reagan e quella delle burocrazie statali e degli aiuti alle commissioni di stanziamento a Capitol Hill, il budget per gli aiuti esteri/Dipartimento di Stato era stato ridotto, anche se di un modestissimo 7%, a $31,5 miliardi.

Le stesse voci di bilancio oggi ammontano a $63 miliardi, ovvero più del doppio del livello in uscita di Reagan. E questo vale anche se la motivazione principale di Haig per la grande spesa in aiuti esteri, ovvero la necessità di contrastare le macchinazioni sovietiche nei Paesi in via di sviluppo, è scomparsa nella pattumiera della storia 34 anni fa.

Durante il suo primo mandato Donald aveva ingenuamente riempito il suo apparato di sicurezza nazionale con amanti dell'Impero presso l'NSC, il Dipartimento di Stato, il Dipartimento della Difesa e le agenzie di intelligence. Non sorprende che quando lasciò con riluttanza lo Studio Ovale nel gennaio 2021, il budget per gli aiuti statali/esteri aveva raggiunto $61,4 miliardi.

Quindi, spendendo il doppio di quanto il Gipper aveva accettato a malincuore sotto la pressione costante dell'apparato di sicurezza nazionale dello Stato profondo, Donald Trump non si rivelò una minaccia effettiva per quest'ultimo. E questo nonostante gli attacchi incessanti e l'opposizione dello Stato profondo e i suoi molteplici tentativi di defenestrarlo e infine di metterlo sotto accusa.

A questo giro, però, Donald ha sguinzagliato Elon Musk e, qualunque sia la motivazione, ha trovato lo stesso marciume in cui ci imbattemmo noi 44 anni fa: l'intero complesso dei fondi statali e USAID, che fluiscono verso la Banca Mondiale, l'FMI, le varie agenzie delle Nazioni Unite e letteralmente a migliaia di ONG e agenzie di stampa come la Reuters, Associated Press, la BBC, Politico e innumerevoli altre sono la vena madre del campo base dell'Impero sul Potomac.

Tagliate il bilancio degli aiuti esteri e presto l'intero Stato profondo si ritirerà su vasta scala, mentre i burocrati non eletti che lo popolano si renderanno conto all'improvviso che la loro presa apparentemente permanente e ineffabile sul potere verrà tolta loro da sotto i piedi.

Possiamo solo sperare che questa volta Donald si renda conto che se si riesce a fronteggiare i bellimbusti che gestiscono il lato debole dello Stato militare, le elezioni del 2024 potrebbero davvero significare qualcosa, e per la prima volta in più di quattro decenni.

C'è una cosa che Trump potrebbe fare per garantire che il taglio agli aiuti esteri abbia più successo di quello che abbiamo tentato 44 anni fa: potrebbe insistere sul fatto che una politica di sicurezza nazionale America First deve concentrarsi strettamente sulla deterrenza nucleare e una potente difesa convenzionale delle coste e dello spazio aereo nordamericani. Non c'è bisogno di un impero, né di una rete di alleanze che abbracciano il globo e di infinite intromissioni negli affari economici e politici interni di terre lontane che non hanno alcuna attinenza con la sicurezza della patria e la libertà del popolo americano.

In breve, gli aiuti esteri non fanno assolutamente nulla per la sicurezza della patria americana e dovrebbero essere eliminati del tutto. Ciò ridurrebbe la forza lavoro federale di oltre 10.000 burocrati in un colpo solo, e farebbe risparmiare più di $40 miliardi all'anno.

Inoltre c'è un modo semplice per contrastare il piagnisteo della Beltway sul taglio dei finanziamenti ai programmi per combattere la fame, l'HIV/AIDS e malattie come il colera, la malaria e il morbillo nei Paesi in via di sviluppo: proclamare che tutti questi sforzi meritevoli rientrano nel regno della filantropia, non nella politica di sicurezza nazionale o nel giusto mandato del governo.

Di conseguenza si potrebbe annunciare l'istituzione di un Humanitarian Help Fund e chiedere a Bill Gates e al resto dei miliardari liberal di contribuire ciascuno con $1 miliardo. Ciò li farebbe tacere subito, soprattutto se un grande cartellone pubblicitario al neon venisse installato presso l'ex-quartier generale della USAID nel Ronald Reagan Building indicando il livello dei loro contributi fino ad oggi rispetto all'obiettivo di $1 miliardo ciascuno.

Dopo tutto, non c'è scempio più grande della USAID domiciliato nel Ronald Reagan Building. Mentre si tappava il naso sul suddetto bilancio da $30 miliardi, non ha mai rinunciato alla sua opinione personale che gli aiuti esteri sono una gigantesca manna per gli scrocconi e i nullafacenti. E possiamo testimoniare di averlo sentito ripetutamente e senza esitazioni.

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

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President Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth have recently been critical of NATO, calling for the European NATO countries to pay for their own defense. This is all to the good, though it does not go far enough. As the great Dr. Ron Paul has pointed out, “We also need a change in policy. Americans are beginning to understand the economic costs of maintaining a global military empire. US taxpayers are forced to cover more than half of the entire NATO budget while European countries rattle sabers at Russia and threaten war. If Europe feels so threatened by Russia, why don’t they cover the costs of their own defense? Why do poor Americans have to pay for the defense of rich Europeans? Haven’t we had enough of this? I very much hope that President Trump follows through with his plan to drastically reduce our bloated military budget. We can start by closing the hundreds of military bases overseas, bringing back our troops from foreign countries, and eliminating our massive commitments to NATO and other international organizations. We will be richer, safer, and happier.”

We should exit NATO entirely and we should never have started this nefarious and ill-considered organization. NATO was founded in 1949 and originally consisted of twelve member states, and it has now expanded to 32 nations. It was intended as a way to prosecute the Cold War with Soviet Russia, which would be deterred from invading Western Europe, it was claimed, by the presence of NATO armed forces and the possibility of nuclear war, should a Soviet invasion take place. The NATO signatories are committed to come to each other’s defense in case of invasion.

There was no need for this. As David Stockman points out, the Soviets, exhausted from the great losses incurred during World War II, were in no position to invade Western Europe, and that continues to be the case today, despite the anguished fears of such an invasion expressed by skittish European political figures. “To be sure, Stalin was among the most wretched, evil rulers ever to oppress a decent-sized chunk of mankind and would have remained a blight on his own countrymen and ogre before the world during the remaining six years of his despicable life. But he was no threat to the American homeland as the now open archives of the old Soviet Union prove in spades.”

Stockman means that a search of the Soviet archives hasn’t turned up any documents showing that Stalin planned to invade Western Europe. “These documents, in fact, amount to the national security dog which didn’t bark. Dig, scour, search and forage through them as you might. Yet they will fail to reveal any Soviet plan or capability to militarily conquer western Europe.”

Stockman proceeds to an analysis of Soviet policy that is fully in line with that of the great Murray Rothbard. After presenting Stockman’s case, I’ll try to show that there is a deeper point that requires our attention. Even if you think that Stockman vastly underestimates Stalin’s aggressive intentions, it doesn’t matter. You might find this a surprising thing to say, but I’ll try to justify it. But first, let’s listen to Stockman: “Washington’s standing up of NATO was a giant historical mistake. It was not needed to contain Soviet military aggression, but it did foster a half-century of hegemonic folly in Washington and a fiscally crushing Warfare State – the fiscal girth of which became orders of magnitude larger than required for defense of the homeland in North America. Needless to say, the arrival of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO – within 25 months between March 1947 and April 1949 when the NATO Treaty was signed in Washington – sent Stalin’s wartime understandings into a tailspin. Slowly at first and then aggressively in the end his initial fear that the wartime alliance was being abandoned by his capitalist allies gave way to a paranoid certainty that they were once again in the business of attempting to encircle and destroy the Soviet Union.

But even the resulting Soviet departure from the cooperative modus operandi of the wartime alliance arose from what might well be described as an unforced error in Washington. We are referring to the latter’s badly misplaced fears that deteriorating economic conditions in Western Europe could lead to the aforementioned communist parties coming to political power in France, Italy and elsewhere. But as we have seen, that wasn’t a serious military threat to America’s homeland security in any event because the post-war Soviet economy was a shambles and its military had been bled and exhausted by its death struggle with the Wehrmacht. To be sure, communist governments in Western Europe would have been a misfortune for any electorate who stupidly put them in power. But that would have been their domestic governance problem over there, not a threat to the American homeland over here. Nevertheless, Washington’s gratuitous antidote for what was essentially an internal political problem in western Europe was a sweeping course of economic and military interventions in European affairs. These initiatives were clinically described as ‘containment’ measures designed only to keep the Soviet Union in its lane, not a prelude to an attack on eastern Europe or Moscow itself.

But if you examine a thousand random documents from the archives of the Soviet foreign ministry, top communist party echelons and correspondence to and from Stalin himself it is readily apparent that these initiatives were viewed in Moscow as anything but a polite message to stay in lane. To the contrary, they were seen on the Soviet side as a definitely unfriendly scheme of encirclement and an incipient assault on the Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe, or the cordon sanitaire, that Stalin believed he had won at Yalta.”

Now, let’s try to justify the claim I made earlier. Our traditional foreign policy was one of non-intervention in European power politics. The great powers of Europe for hundreds of years been locked in constant struggle to prevent one power from gaining hegemony over the whole continent. If one power gets too strong, the others will balance against it. But the United States decided to avoid participation in this never-ending battle. George Washington defended this policy in his farewell address, and it was continued by Thomas Jefferson. It received a classical statement in John Quincy Adams’s address on the fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution: “the Declaration of Independence:

“Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence, has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign Independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brow would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of Freedom and Independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an Imperial Diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

Our traditional policy, then, was to stay out of Europe, not to prevent one nation from becoming dominant. It is no concern of ours. And this does not mean trying to broker a settlement in the Ukraine war. It means staying out completely. We should not send any weapons there. Let’s do everything we can to return to complete non-intervention in European power politics!

The post Why We Need To Get Out of NATO appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last Friday, while leaders around the Western world were up in arms about J.D. Vance’s confrontational address to the Munich Security Council, the Washington Post published a good old-fashioned piece of journalism. From “U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts”:

Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.…

[The] Home Secretary has served Apple with… a technical capability notice, ordering it to provide access under the sweeping U.K. Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, which authorizes law enforcement to compel assistance from companies… The law, known by critics as the Snoopers’ Charter, makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government has even made such a demand.

This rare example of genuine bipartisan cooperation is fascinating for several reasons. Oregon’s Ron Wyden teamed up with Arizona Republican Congressman Andy Biggs to ask new Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for help in beating back the British. While other Democrats like Michael Bennet and Mark Warner were smearing Gabbard as a Russian proxy in confirmation hearings, Wyden performed an homage to old-school liberalism and asked a few constructive questions, including a request that Gabbard recommit to her stance against government snatching of encrypted data. Weeks later, the issue is back on the table, for real.

The original UK demand is apparently nearly a year old, and Apple has reportedly been resisting internally. But this show of political opposition is new. There has been no real pushback on foreign demands for data (encrypted or otherwise) for almost nine years, for an obvious reason. Europe, the FBI, and the rest of the American national security apparatus have until now mostly presented a unified front on this issue. In the Trump era especially, there has not been much political room to take a stand like the one Wyden, Biggs, and perhaps Gabbard will be making.

The encryption saga goes back at least ten years. On December 2, 2015, two men opened fire at the Inland Center in San Bernardino, killing 14 and injuring 22. About two months later, word got out that the FBI was trying to force Apple to undo its encryption safeguards, ostensibly to unlock the iPhone of accused San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. The FBI’s legal battle was led by its General Counsel Jim Baker, who later went to work at Twitter.

One flank of FBI strategy involved overhauling Rule 41 of the Rules of Criminal Procedure. The FBI’s idea was that if it received a legal search warrant, it should be granted power to use hacking techniques, if the target is “concealed through technological means.” The Department of Justice by way of the Supreme Court a decade ago issued this recommendation to Congress, which under a law called the Rules Enabling Act would go into force automatically if legislation was not passed to stop it. In 2016, Wyden joined up with Republican congressman Ted Poe to oppose the change, via a bill called the Stopping Mass Hacking Act.

Two factors conspired to kill the effort. First, the FBI had already won its confrontation with Apple, obtaining an order requiring the firm (which said it had no way to break encryption) to write software allowing the Bureau to use “brute force” methods to crack the suspect’s password. While Apple was contesting, the FBI busted the iPhone anyway by hiring a “publicity-shy” Australian firm called Azimuth, which hacked the phone a few months after the attack. The Post, citing another set of “people familiar with the matter,” outed the company’s name years later, in 2021.

The broader issue of whether government should be allowed to use such authority in all cases was at stake with the “Stopping Mass Hacking” bill. It was a problem for the members that the FBI called its own shot in the San Bernardino case, but the fatal blow came on November 29, 2016, when the UK passed the bill invoked last week, called the Investigatory Powers Act. This legal cheat code gave agencies like Britain’s GHCQ power to use hacking techniques (called “equipment interference”) and to employ “bulk” searches using “general” warrants. Instead of concrete individuals, the UK can target a location or a group of people who “share a common purpose”:

THE IPA: Bulk warrants, warrants by location, warrants on groups with “common purpose”

The law was and is broad in a darkly humorous way. It mandates that companies turn over even encrypted data for any of three reasons: to protect national security, to protect the “economic well-being of the UK,” and for the “prevention or detection of serious crime.”

Once the Act passed, American opposition turtled. How to make a stand against FBI hacking when the Bureau’s close partners in England could now make such requests legally and without restriction? The Wyden-Poe gambits were wiped out, and just two days after the IPA went into effect, changes to Rule 41 in America did as well. These granted American authorities wide latitude to break into anything they wanted, provided they had a warrant. As one Senate aide told me this week, “That was a game-over moment.”

Once the British got their shiny new tool, they weren’t shy about using it. The Twitter Files were full of loony “IPA” dramas that underscored just how terrifying these laws can be. In one bizarre episode in August of 2021, Twitter was asked to turn over data on soccer fans to a collection of alphabet soup agencies, including the Home Office and the “Football Policing Unit.” The Football Police informed Twitter that “in the UK… using the ‘N word’ is a criminal offence — not a freedom of speech issue.”

Twitter executives scrambled to explain to football’s cyber-bobbies that many of their suspects were black themselves, and tweets like “RAHEEM STERLING IS DAT NIGGA” were not, in fact, “hateful conduct.” (The idea that British police needed American executives to interpret sports slang is a horror movie in itself.) Accounts like @Itsknockzz and @Wavyboomin never knew how close they came to arrest:

N**** PLEASE: British police invoked the Investigatory Powers Act to get user information about nonwhite football fans

British overuse was obvious, but Twitter elected not to complain. They also kept quiet when American authorities began pushing for the same power. Though the Apple standoff aroused controversy, 50% of Americans still supported the FBI’s original stance against encryption, which seemed to embolden the Bureau. Senior officials began asking for the same virtually unlimited authority their friends in the UK (and soon after, Australia) were asserting. Donald Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, seethed about encryption in a keynote speech at an International Cybersecurity Conference on July 23rd, 2019. The Justice Department was tiring of negotiations with tech companies on the issue, Barr said:

While we remain open to a cooperative approach, the time to achieve that may be limited. Key countries, including important allies, have been moving toward legislative and regulatory solutions. I think it is prudent to anticipate that a major incident may well occur at any time that will galvanize public opinion on these issues.

God knows what he meant about a “major incident” that “may well occur at any time,” but Barr was referring to the Investigatory Powers Act and imitator bills that by 2019 were being drafted by most U.S. intelligence partners.

Read the Whole Article

The post Bipartisan Coalition Finally Tells Europe, and the FBI, To Shove It appeared first on LewRockwell.

If you want to get a sense of what President Kennedy was up against with his Peace Speech at American University a few months before he was taken out, just look at the reaction to President Trump’s friendly overtures toward Russia in the last few days. The mainstream media is up in arms over Trump’s actions. Multiply that reaction by about 1,000 and you’ll get a sense of what Kennedy was facing with his attempt to move America in a similar direction.

The first thing everyone should be aware of is that Russia must always be considered to be America’s premier official enemy. That’s because that’s the principal way to justify not only the enormously large amount of taxpayer-funded largess that flows into the “defense” establishment but, more important, keeps America as a national-security state rather than have its original, founding governmental structure of a limited-government republic restored.

That’s what the entire Cold War racket was all about. When the Nazis were defeated at the end of World War II, the giant military-intelligence establishment that had been formed as part of the war was not about to let go of its power. Without skipping a beat, it immediately converted the Soviet Union (i.e., Russia) from America’s wartime partner and ally into America’s new official enemy.

The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! The Reds were everywhere. North Korea. Vietnam. Cuba. Hollywood. The army. The State Department. Latin America. China. Congress. Martin Luther King. The civil-rights movement. Some even claimed that President Eisenhower was an agent of the Reds.

Through it all, the minds of Americans were imbued with the notion that it was better to be dead than Red. From the first grade in the public (i.e., government) schools to which their parents were forced to send them, American children received deep indoctrination and fear of the worldwide communist conspiracy to take over the world — a conspiracy that was supposedly centered in Moscow. It was an indoctrination that would last a lifetime.

Then along comes John F. Kennedy, who came into office as pretty much a standard Cold Warrior but who then achieved one of the most remarkable breakthroughs in history. Beginning with the Bay of Pigs disaster, followed by Pentagon exhortations to launch a surprise nuclear attack on Russia, followed by Operation Northwoods, and followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy came to the realization that the Cold War was one great big dangerous and deadly racket.

That’s when he committed himself to bringing an end to the deep, ongoing, perpetual anti-Russia mentality with which the American people had been imbued. It was time for America to move in a different direction — one based on peaceful, friendly coexistence with Russia. That’s what JFK’s Peace Speech at American University was all about.

The speech was broadcast all across Russia, the first time that had ever happened. The Russian people were ecstatic to see the distinct possibility of friendly relations between the two nations. I couldn’t help but think about that when I read an article yesterday in the New York Times about a similar reaction among Russian citizens to the possibility of a normalization of relations between Russia and the United States.

As detailed in FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne, who served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board, it was Kennedy’s decision to move America in a different direction from that desired by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA that got him killed. As a result of what the all-powerful military-intelligence establishment viewed as weakness, incompetence, naiveté, treason, and cowardice, Kennedy had become a grave threat to “national security” and, therefore, had to be removed from power before it was too late.

After the Pentagon-CIA regime-change operation in Dallas, everything was restored to “normal.” The Russians and the Reds were, once again, America’s premier official enemy. They were still coming to get us. The Vietnam War got ramped up to keep the dominoes from falling. 58,000 American soldiers were sacrificed for nothing. The indoctrination in the public schools continued. Americans continued hating and fearing Russia.

Then came the great big unexpected shock when the Russians suddenly brought a end to the Cold War from 1989 to 1991. Everyone had figured that the Cold War racket, along with all the anti-Russia indoctrination, would go on forever.

The “defense” industry went into a panic. Suddenly people were talking about a “peace dividend,” which meant a drastic reduction in military-intelligence spending, a possibility that Trump himself recently mentioned. No one was yet talking about a total dismantling of the national-security state and a restoration of a limited-government republic but that almost certainly would have started entering people’s minds before too long.

The Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA embarked on a desperate search for a new official enemy to replace Russia. One of the big things they mentioned was the drug war, which is precisely what they are doing today. That’s why the military and the CIA are becoming so embroiled in Mexico — to justify their existence.

For 11 years, the national-security establishment made Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein America’s new official enemy. Saddam is coming! Saddam is coming! He’s going to hit us with WMDs, just like Russia was going to do during the Cold War. But as scared as Americans became of Saddam, it just wasn’t the same as having Russia as the big official bugaboo.

And then the 9/11 attacks occurred as retaliation for the killings that the Pentagon and the CIA were wreaking in the Middle East. The national-security establishment was off to the races again, this time with a new official enemy — terrorism and, to a certain extent, Muslims and Islam. The terrorists are coming! The terrorists are coming! The centuries-old quest to establish a worldwide Islamic caliphate is upon us! Sharia law! The USA Patriot Act. Mass secret surveillance. Don’t be scared! We are keeping you safe!

But the national-security establishment was never willing to let go of Russia as America’s premier official enemy. The anti-Russia animus had been a big, perpetual cash cow for the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, and their ever-growing army of well-heeled “defense” contractors.

Thus, they began using NATO, the old Cold War dinosaur that had remained in existence after the end of the Cold War to restore Russia to its proper place as America’s premier official enemy. While NATO should have been put out to pasture with the end of the Cold War, it was instead used to begin absorbing former members of the Warsaw Pact, in violation of express promises that U.S. officials had made to Russia not to do that.

Knowing full-well what Russia’s reaction would be to such provocations, the Pentagon and the CIA kept NATO moving inexorably closer to Russia’s border. When they finally threatened to absorb Ukraine, they were certain that Russia would invade, just as the U.S. would invade Cuba if Russia were to re-install nuclear weapons in that nation. The U.S. provocations brought to mind National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s confession of having provoked Russia into invading Afghanistan in 1979 to give Russia its “own Vietnam.”

When Russia did invade Ukraine, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA had their premier official enemy back. The Russians are coming, again! The Russians are coming, again! The fierce anti-Russia animus was back. The Russians were going to conquer Europe and then the world — sometime after they conquered Ukraine. The anti-Russia indoctrination in the public schools was restored. Everything was like it was before. The national-security state was back in control and the “defense” industry was back in high cotton with tons of taxpayer-funded largess flowing into their coffers.

Ever since, the U.S. mainstream media been exclaiming against Russia’s “unprovoked” war of aggression while, at the same time, remaining silent or supportive of the U.S. national-security establishment’s deadly and destructive invasion and unprovoked and undeclared war of aggression against the people of Iraq. No big deal. “Thank you for your service!”

And then along comes Trump, who is threatening to bring an end to the renewed Cold War racket. The mainstream media, which undoubtedly is still populated by Operation Mockingbird assets of the national-security establishment, is up in arms — the same way it was when Kennedy was moving America in a direction of ending the Cold War.

The question is: If Trump does attempt to move American in the same direction that JFK was moving America, will the national-security establishment let him get away with it? If it does take him out, like it did with Kennedy, it will be much more difficult to hide its role, given the fact that so many Americans have figured out that they took out Kennedy for doing the same thing.

But the Pentagon and the CIA also know that if they do take out Trump, there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it, just as there was nothing that anyone could do about it when they took out Kennedy.

One thing is certain though: If they do succeed in taking out Trump, the mainstream media will participate in the official cover-up as quickly and completely as they did with the Kennedy assassination.

For more on the U.S. national-security establishment’s regime-change operation in 1963, read:

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James K. Douglass

The Kennedy Autopsy by Jacob G. Hornberger

Inside the Assassination Records Review Board by Douglas P. Horne

JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas P. Horne

An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story by Jacob G. Hornberger

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post Is Trump Risking His Life With Russia and Ukraine? appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Donald Trump gets a lot of things wrong. Chief among them is his crazy plan to ethnically cleanse two million Palestinians from the smoking ruins of Gaza.

But he also gets some very important things very right.

Trump managed to end the longest war in US history, Afghanistan, by cutting off the money that fueled this absurd conflict. Without Trump’s forceful intervention, this conflict could have dragged on for another decade and cost yet another $2 trillion. None of the generals or politicians involved had the guts or sense to end this pointless war.

Now, it appears that Trump may be doing it again in the other pointless war, Ukraine. The US has lavished at least $175 billion fueling the Ukraine War. Given that some of the US aid is hidden or obscured, the true figure may be over $200 billion – this by the US which is deep in hock with a monster debt of $36 trillion which it can’t pay back.

The fact is that CIA and State Department mounted a coup costing $5 billion (according to the senior State Department official, Victoria Nuland who organized it) that overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Moscow regime. It’s worth recalling that Ukraine was an integral part of Russia for hundreds of years – longer than Virginia has been part of the USA. Many Ukrainians want full independence from Moscow – others, particularly Russian-speakers, do not. The conflict in Ukraine is a civil war fueled by the western powers in an effort to fragment the Russian Federation and Balkanize its parts.

For Washington’s pro-war neoconservatives, further shattering the former Soviet Union is the ideal strategy. But the neocons and armchair amateurs who led the Biden administration were so blinded by their hatred of Russia and world power ambitions that they utterly failed to see how they were bringing Russia and the US to the edge of war. In fact, the US and some European allies were waging economic and military warfare against Russia that could have gone nuclear at any time.

Fortunately, Russian president Vlad Putin’s iron nerves kept the crisis mostly under control. By contrast, the addlepated Biden kept playing with matches instead of calming down this very dangerous crisis. The west’s mighty propaganda machine kept the war alive. Too many people believed Kiev’s propaganda that Ukraine was actually winning this war. Meanwhile, Ukraine was raking in huge sums of cash. I’ve done business in Ukraine and know how deeply corrupt it is – almost as bad as Detroit or Jersey City.

This foolish war not only brought us to the edge of nuclear war but also laid open the deep dementia of Washington’s war party and fanatical anti-communist fringes. Trump is right when he warns of the ‘deep state.’
We recall the heroic young man, Edward Snowden, who publicly revealed how much the National Security had been violating the law by bugging Americans.

During the long years of the Cold War, America’s eighteen national security agencies became choc-a-bloc with ardent anti-Soviet/Russian senior employees. This included CIA, National Security Agency, Pentagon agencies, offices at State, Treasury, new anti-terrorism outfits, and all across our vast security bureaucracy. They are waging a rear-guard action to thwart reforms and/or reductions. They have repeatedly claimed that Trump was somehow being compromised by Russia.

These deep state minions don’t want peace. They want sharp-edged confrontation with Russia and China, safeguarding the billions in Pentagon and intelligence budgets, and protecting their own careers. We saw how cabals of pro-war officials drove France and Britain into two world wars. This is why the idiotic war in Afghanistan lasted for two decades.

As the great Benjamin Franklin said, ‘no good war; no bad peace.’

Reprinted with permission from EricMargolis.com.

The post Fire the Washington War Party appeared first on LewRockwell.

Rothbardian libertarianism upholds liberty as an ethical and moral standard, and for this reason it is often criticized for being idealistic and utopian. Addressing this critique, Duncan Whitmore argues that the mere fact that we live in a statist society, in which all our liberties are under siege does not mean the fight for liberty is a lost cause. His point is that “the seeming remoteness of victory today does not mean that victory will never arrive.” Despite the growing power of the state, the cause of liberty is still worth continually striving towards. Whitmore quotes T.S. Eliot to substantiate this argument, Eliot’s point being that a worthwhile cause may never be entirely won but it must be kept alive:

If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that it will triumph.

Similarly, in his 1908 book, The Philosophy of Loyalty, Josiah Royce argues that: “Loyalty to lost causes is, then, not only a possible thing, but one of the most potent influences of human history. In such cases, the cause comes to be idealized through its very failure to win temporary and visible success.” The cause being lost does not mean that it will, or should, be abandoned—on the contrary, its supporters continually rally their energies to the defense of the cause. The same is true in defending liberty, including wars fought to defend life, property, hearth, and home. Murray Rothbard wrote that he only considered two American wars to be just wars—the Revolutionary War and the War for Southern Independence. He saw both of these as wars fought in defense of liberty, and expressed his certainty that “the South shall rise again.” To Rothbardians, this defense of liberty (where liberty is understood as an emanation of self-ownership and property rights) is the only circumstance in which war is justified.

The South losing their bid for independence is widely characterized by critics of the South as a “lost cause,” but they do not mean this in the hopeful sense described by Eliot and Royce. Rather, critics of the South use the phrase “lost cause” as a term of derision—they mean that the cause was never worth fighting for in the first place. They deploy the phrase “lost case myth” to signify that the Southern cause never had any merit in the first place. In referring to the Southern cause as a “lost cause,” they do not simply mean that the South lost the war—after all, losing the war is an undoubted fact, but unless we are to assume that might always makes right, we can understand that the side which has the just cause will not necessarily triumph. A just cause may be defeated by a bully with greater firepower.

But when critics describe the Southern cause as a “lost cause myth,” their claim is that the Southern cause was not, in fact, just. They claim that Southerners fabricated a fictitious just cause in the years after the war, purely in order to mollify their injured feelings over losing the war. Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, editors of a book titled The Myth of The Lost Cause and Civil War History, are an example of critics who believe the Southern cause to be a myth, a “caricature of the truth.” Clyde Wilson describes their book as follows:

The “Lost Cause,” presumably a belief that the Confederates had a few points on their side of the argument, was something, according to Nolan and Gallagher, invented after the war by Southerners to rationalize their evil, destructive, and failed actions. In support of this conclusion [Gallagher and Nolan] present a history of the development of this false and pernicious “Lost Cause Myth,” beginning with the postwar writings of Edward A. Pollard and Jubal A. Early. These writings, the authors claim, foisted on an unsuspecting world false and deceptive notions such as the admirable character of Robert E. Lee, the skill and heroism of Confederate soldiers against heavy odds, and the honorableness of Southerners in their cause.

Purveyors of the view that the Southern cause is nothing but “lost cause mythology” argue that the South, in fact, fought purely, or primarily, to defend slavery—which is as far from being a just cause as a Rothbardian could imagine—and that the cause had nothing to do with independence or liberty. This is a question of great concern to Rothbardians. In defending the Southern cause as just, was Rothbard also purveying “lost cause mythology”? To understand the context of Rothbard’s defense of the Southern cause, it is important to note that he sees this war as being fought on the same grounds as the American Revolution, which he sees as a just war:

It is plainly evident that the American Revolution, using my definition, was a just war, a war of peoples forming an independent nation and casting off the bonds of another people insisting on perpetuating their rule over them. Obviously, the Americans, while welcoming French or other support, were prepared to take on the daunting task of overthrowing the rule of the most powerful empire on earth, and to do it alone if necessary.

Rothbard draws upon libertarian principles in forming the view that the Revolutionary cause was just: “The Americans were steeped in the natural-law philosophy of John Locke and the Scholastics, and in the classical republicanism of Greece and Rome.” He adds that sovereignty vests ultimately in the people: “sovereignty originated not in the king but in the people, but that the people had delegated their powers and rights to the king.” Indeed, as Rothbard points out, this was the only principled basis on which American revolutionaries could break their bonds of loyalty to King George III while maintaining their integrity and honor:

The American revolutionaries, in separating themselves from Great Britain and forming their new nation, adopted the Lockean doctrine. In fact, if they hadn’t done so, they would not have been able to form their new nation. It is well known that the biggest moral and psychological problem the Americans had, and could only bring themselves to overcome after a full year of bloody war, was to violate their oaths of allegiance to the British king.

Rothbard sees the secession of the Southern states in exactly the same light: “In 1861, the Southern states, believing correctly that their cherished institutions were under grave threat and assault from the federal government, decided to exercise their natural, contractual, and constitutional right to withdraw, to ‘secede’ from that Union.”

The parallels between the Revolutionary War and the War for Southern Independence are not only drawn by Rothbard; it is a view well-represented in historical literature during and after the war. For example, in 1902 Charles Francis Adams compared George Washington and Robert E. Lee, arguing that we may view Lee with the same regard as that held for Washington:

Washington furnishes a precedent at every point. A Virginian like Lee, he was also a British subject; he had fought under the British flag, as Lee had fought under that of the United States; when, in 1776, Virginia seceded from the British Empire, he “went with his State,” just as Lee went with it eighty-five years later; subsequently Washington commanded armies in the field designated by those opposed to them as “rebels,” and whose descendants now glorify them as “the rebels of ’76,” much as Lee later commanded, and at last surrendered, much larger armies, also designated “rebels” by those they confronted. Except in their outcome, the cases were, therefore, precisely alike; and logic is logic. It consequently appears to follow, that, if Lee was a traitor, Washington was also.

The post Just War and Lost Cause Mythology appeared first on LewRockwell.

Since at least 2014 The United Kingdom has been a major participant in NATO’s proxy war against Russia. During the hot phase of the war it has directed a drone and missile campaign in the Black Sea. It is likely responsible for current attacks against Russia related sea transport. It is developing new naval drones for further assaults on Russia.

Britain had initiated and run massive public relation campaigns blaming Russia for various outrages which, in fact, never had happened. Consider the Skripal Affair, the MI6’s Steele dossier used to launch Russiagate and other operations launched through the anti-Russian Integrity Initiative run by the UK government’s Institute of Statecraft.

It was the Brits who, during the war in Ukraine, directed the Black Sea Attack Network (BSAN) to push the Russian fleet out of Sevastopol in Crimea. British Storm Shadow missile were fired against various ships. Directed by British signal intelligence seagoing drones,  made in Britain, attacked Russian transports as well as the Kerch Bridge.

As the Armchair Warlord explained:

The BSAN sea drone program scored a number of successes and hair-raising near-misses over the course of 2023 and early 2024, most notably sinking the Tarantul-class missile boat Ivanovets with what was likely some loss of life on February 1st, 2024. At that point I suspect that the Russian Navy decided that something had to be done and, having carefully studied their foe, put a plan into action to destroy what was to them the most concerning part of the BSAN – the maritime drone program.

Using a few rusty old ships as bait the Russian command observed the signal activities during Ukrainian attacks, uncovered the British run network, and finally killed it:

Deployed without support in the Kerch Strait during a large-scale (albeit unsuccessful) aerial drone raid, the Kotov attracted the attention of Ukrainian sea drones heading for another round with the Kerch Bridge. Video from the battle again suggests only a modest defensive effort with small arms, with subsequent reports that the ship was abandoned quickly (with few to no Russian casualties) and basically allowed to sink. It’s noteworthy that the remaining drones were, again, easily mopped up by rescuers. And here, after this engagement, the Black Sea Attack Network was undone.

You see, congratulations were in order. Zelensky wanted to personally pin medals on the men who were destroying the hated Russian Black Sea Fleet. So, two days later, the personnel of the Black Sea Attack Network – the drone operators, the planners, the technicians, the officers, bosses and bosses’ bosses, and likely a gaggle of foreign advisors – assembled in a hangar in Odessa to receive accolades from their nation’s leader. Zelensky arrived (with the Greek Prime Minister in tow, apparently, perhaps sending a message to a significant maritime player), pinned medals on chests, shook hands, and departed.

His motorcade was a block away when a Russian Iskander ballistic missile sliced through that hangar’s roof and wiped out the assembled personnel of the Ukrainian sea drone network. It was probably launched the instant he walked out the door.

There were reports of a large number of NATO helicopters flying into Odessa in the strike’s aftermath, and shrieking from the usual suspects that the Russians had “tried” to assassinate Zelensky, as though they couldn’t kill him any time they wanted. Meanwhile, the Russian MoD put out a dry statement that they’d struck a target in Odessa associated with the Ukrainian drone campaign.

There have been no noticeable Black Sea sea drone attacks since.

There is however a new maritime campaign under way against all ships, not only Russian ones, which have recently visited Russian ports:

A spate of blasts recorded across the Mediterranean on tankers that have recently called at Russian ports has security analysts concerned about a new form of attack targeting merchant shipping.

Two Thenamaris aframax tankers – the Seajewel and the Seacharm – have both reported explosions onboard in the past month in the Mediterranean, while the Grace Ferrum product tanker has also been badly hit off Libya, all suffering similar damage – holes in hulls below the waterline, leading to some security analysts to suggest the vessels were targeted with limpet mines.

In late December, the Russian Ursa Major general cargo ship sank in the Mediterranean between Spain and Algeria after an explosion.

Away from the Mediterranean, the Turkish-owned Koala tanker, laden with 130,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil, was about to set off from the Russian port of Ust-Luga when three explosions ripped through the rear of the ship on February 9, forcing the crew to evacuate.

Those are five ships so far that have been sunk or damaged by limpet mines attached to the ships after they had  visited Russian ports. This is an intimidation campaign to deter ship owners and operators from servicing anything Russian.

I doubt that the Ukrainian military intelligence, the GRU under the terrorist General Budanov, has the network and divers needed to attack Russia related shipping throughout the Mediterranean. The Brits though, through their various commercial and military activities – ship classification societies, ship insurances, crewing agencies etc. – do have the necessary information and access to ports.

That is why I suspect them to be deeply involved in the current campaign.

More naval warfare will be coming as a new British sea-drone campaign is about to commence:

New British naval drones in testing for Ukraine, ukdj, Feb 6 2025

The Ministry of Defence is putting two newly developed uncrewed maritime systems—Snapper and Wasp—through final testing.

During a Written Question session on 30 January 2025, Luke Akehurst (Labour – North Durham) asked about progress on both systems, referencing remarks from the Defence Secretary’s speech at the ADS Annual Dinner on 28 January 2025.

In response, Maria Eagle, Minister of State at the Ministry of Defence, stated that both Snapper and Wasp are “new uncrewed maritime system[s], which [have] been rapidly developed specifically to support Ukraine.” She added that “The system is currently undergoing final testing and further details will be set out in due course.”

A third British sea-drone system is still under development:

Recently, we reported that the Ministry of Defence (MOD) had announced a Project COOKSON Challenge Session back in January. The event invited industry partners from NATO, Ukraine, and Five-Eyes countries to help shape the development of a versatile, fast, and low-observable maritime system designed for operations in Ukraine and beyond.
…
The MOD described the system as follows:

“A COOKSON system consists of a small, fast, vessel with low observability, with >2 one-way effectors mounted on it, including relevant launch system and support equipment. A COOKSON system should be able to travel to Ukraine via Ground Lines of Communication (GLOC) [and] must fit onto a 40 foot flatbed, ideally a 20 foot flatbed.”

The Snapper and Wasp sea-going drones may appear in the Black Sea within the next few months. Cookson systems will still take a year to be ready for action.

From their work against the first wave of Black Sea drones the Russian naval forces have learned that it is more efficient to destroy the network behind a series of attacks than to defend against each of them.

One wonders how deeply the British Ministry of Defense has thought about that.

This originally appeared on Moon of Alabama.

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In his latest podcast from Wednesday night, Peter addresses the renewed buzz surrounding Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Peter argues that no matter how many cuts are made, the government’s nature ensures that fraud and abuse will persist. Without market forces exerting pressure on bureaucrats, the state has to reason to spend and allocate resources wisely.

To kick off the show, Peter details the bold moves made by the DOGE team operating out of the White House, arguing that their progress—while impressive—is still insufficient for the fiscal challenges ahead:

The representatives of Doge actually have authority granted to them by the president to go through various agencies and departments and try to eliminate what they can without congressional approval, spending that is determined to be wasteful, fraudulent, abusive– and they’re actually making quite a bit of progress. Now, while I think that they are going to be able to make some cuts far more than anything that we saw with the Grace Commission, I don’t think it’s going to be nearly enough to get us out of jail as far as paying for the tax cuts.

Peter then turns his attention to the very nature of government, arguing that waste, fraud, and abuse are inevitable when bureaucrats have no real incentive to be efficient:

They are going to find waste, fraud, and abuse. I mean, anybody who believes that that’s not there is completely naive and doesn’t understand government. … That’s why you want to minimize the amount of government you have, because anything the government decides to do is going to be subject to waste, fraud, and abuse. That’s why it’s a very inefficient process. That’s why you want to completely limit what the government does, because so much is going to be wasted, so much is going to be stolen, there’s going to be so much graft and kickbacks. That is the nature of government. There’s nothing you can do about it.

Peter also discusses mounting evidence of recessionary pressures, including households struggling with debt. He warns that record-high delinquencies in credit card payments are a harbinger of economic distress:

I just read again that delinquencies now are at a 13 or 14-year high. The last time they were this high, we were in a great recession. So normally, in order to get to a point where people can’t make their credit card payments, you’re in a recession. Now, I think we are in a recession, and that’s why people can’t make their payments. But if we’re not in a recession now, just imagine how much worse it’s going to be.

Connecting Fed policy to the fraud DOGE has uncovered, he points out that the current low-interest regime is essentially a giveaway that fuels wasteful borrowing and inflation:

If they’re going to say, ‘Hey, borrow money at 4% and pay it back when inflation is 5%,’ I’m getting free money. There’s no real cost to borrowing. So more people are going to borrow if the government’s going to pay you to borrow. What they need to do is ratchet up interest rates to make borrowing expensive. So fewer people will do it. But they don’t have the guts to actually choke off all that debt-fueled consumption because they know that it will produce a recession and they don’t want that. 

Finally, Peter argues that DOGE should be commended for exposing the character of most politicians and bureaucrats. Even if DOGE won’t sufficiently cut waste, it’ll open many Americans’ eyes to the truth of government:

What’s great about it is a lot of people don’t know this. A lot of people don’t realize how bad the government is. They’re finding out. They’re finally getting their eyes open to the corruption, the criminality that is involved in government. I’ve always said the worst people, the most corrupt people go to government. They’re attracted to government. Even if they’re not corrupt when they go, they get corrupted while they’re there. That’s the only reason they can stay there because if you’re not corrupt, you’re not going to stay in Washington. 

This originally appeared on SchiffGold.com.

The post Thank You, DOGE! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Dear Kash,

I read that you are sending 1,500 FBI bad apples from DC into the states.  Please keep them out of red states.

Perhaps you are hoping they will resign.  Otherwise it is a bad idea.  The FBI are the Democrats’ secret police. They frame red state politicians, sheriffs, and attorneys general in order to advance Democrat power. The FBI even tried to frame President Trump and it seems to assassinate him. FBI agents have no integrity, Kash. If the FBI had any integrity, how could we have had eight years of the FBI’s efforts to destroy Donald Trump?

Please don’t send any to Florida.  If you have any in Florida, please take them out.  We would prefer you keep them all in DC where you can keep an eye on them.  Their presence in states and localities will pollute sheriff departments and local police with FBI corrupt practices.

Do you remember some years ago when it came to light that the FBI crime lab concocted whatever “evidence” prosecutors needed to convict defendants regardless of innocence or guilt?  Have you forgot all the fake “Muslim terrorist” cases the FBI created as proof that Muslim terrorism was loose in America?  The FBI would seek out demented individuals and groups and entice them to participate in a FBI concocted terrorist act and then arrest them prior to committing the act.  Some of these victims are still in prison.  The orchestrated arrests produced the headlines that kept the “war on terror” — actually a war for Greater Israel — going in the Middle East.

Please Kash, spare MAGA America from FBI agents.  Keep them locked up in Washington shuffling papers in bureaucratic tasks that go nowhere.  When they retire or die, don’t replace them.  Let the FBI dwindle away.  We don’t need it.

The post Kash Patel Banishes 1,500 FBI Agents from Washington appeared first on LewRockwell.

The following chart plots America’s bizarre obsession with racism, which germinated around 2010, shortly after Barack Obama was elected POTUS. Note that this obsession became a social contagion long after racism ceased being a socially acceptable belief or sentiment.

This is reminiscent of Tocqueville’s observation that bourgeois hatred for the French Ancient Regime fanned into revolutionary fanaticism after the Ancient Regime began giving up its privileges and making concessions to the burgeoning urban middle class. As Tocqueville remarked, the trouble wasn’t lack of favorable change, but that change didn’t happen fast enough to meet growing expectations.

America’s unhinged obsession with racism since 2010 reminds me of an eyewitness account of the infamous Witch Trials in Trier, Germany in the 1580s

In as much as it was popularly believed that the continued sterility of many years was caused by witches through the malice of the Devil, the whole country rose to exterminate the witches. This movement was promoted by many in office, who hoped for wealth from the persecution. And so, from court to court throughout the towns and villages of all the diocese, scurried special accusers, inquisitors, notaries, jurors, judges, constables, dragging to trial and torture human beings of both sexes and burning them in great numbers.

Scarcely any of those who were accused escaped punishment or were there spared even the leading men in the city of Trier. For the Judge, 2 with two Burgomasters, several Councilors and Associate Judges, canons of sundry collegiate churches, parish priests, rural deans, were swept away in this ruin. So far, at length, did the madness of the furious populace and of the courts go in this thirst for blood and booty that there was scarcely anybody who was not smirched some suspicion of this crime.

Note the observer’s remark that “this movement was promoted by many in office, who hoped for wealth from the persecution.”

As the economist Thomas Sowell has often pointed out over the years, the chief beneficiaries of America’s witch hunt for racism have been the self-anointed leaders of the black community who have promised to expunge racism from our society. The trouble is, just as the American military-industrial complex needs the Russian Bogeyman to stick around, leaders of the witch hunt against racism need racism to stick around. What would they do without it?

Perhaps MSNBC’s decision to cancel Joy Reid’s show signals the beginning of the end of the racism witch hunt.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

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