Lew Rockwell Institute

This article was written by Brandon Smith and originally published at Birch Gold Group

The underlying strength of economics is that (when approached honestly and with respect to the data) it can give us a relatively accurate measure of progress versus cost. If the rewards outweigh the costs after careful calculation then that economic endeavor will bear fruit. The ability to gauge production, innovation and prosperity with an unbiased eye is essential to true economics.

The problem is that economics is not only a mathematical science, it is also, for lack of a better term, a social science. One has to understand individual psychology and mass psychology. You have to be knowledgeable in the inconsistencies of human emotion and desire as much as you are knowledgeable in the hard realities of supply and demand. Furthermore, not all people that engage in economic study do so for the benefit of humanity.

There is a contingent of financial elitists that seek to use their understanding of the psychological side of economics to socially engineer political outcomes. We’ve heard it said that nuclear science or genetic science offer a power so terrible that they could wipe out civilization if exploited by the wrong hands. I would argue that economic science in the wrong hands outdoes every other competitor because it can be used to enslave humanity forever.

Case in point: What happens when economics is combined with far-left activism and scientific cultism based on fabricated claims? What happens when a group of ultra-wealthy Fabian socialists combine their resources to strangle the free market and manipulate economic outcomes? What do you get when a vast network of international corporations abandon competition and profit for a long term agenda of power and control?

Well, you get insidious programs like ESG and groups like the Council For Inclusive Capitalism. You get direct cooperation between governments and corporations to force a specific way of thinking and living. They present it as philanthropy when it is really a complex form of tyranny.

The globalists want to redefine how we calculate growth according to their illusory metrics. How does one quantify happiness, or fairness, or environmental purity and then add that into GDP? It’s not possible, at least not in an unbiased manner.

Flowery terminology like equity and inclusion have nothing to do with production or economic survival. They do, though, have a lot in common with the social engineering ideals of ESG that most of the west is rejecting. They’re giving “inclusive capitalism” a climate change paint job.

Progressives often condemn the free market profit motive as a “disease” that will destroy our species, but believe me, the worst thing that can possibly happen to the western world today is for corporate moguls to decide they don’t care about money anymore. When groups of mega rich narcopaths discover ideology and start seeing you and I and society as their pet project, the world is in deep trouble.  What is most disturbing is that they scratch and grasp for greater power while pretending as if they’re doing it “for our benefit”.

Will a few of them do good? Sure, that happens at times. But, usually when elites try to influence culture through carrot or stick methods the results are disastrous.

We need to understand this reality first before we can ever understand the motives behind the “net zero” movement. The persistent globalist push for carbon taxation has nothing to do with saving the planet and everything to do with changing the very soil of the economic landscape. Keep in mind that globalism is just a modernized form of feudalism posing as socially conscious governance.

These people don’t actually care about the environment or equality; they care about environmental taxation and “equity”. These are very different things.

And lets not forget that climate scientist claims are based on data derived from the 1880s onward, while they act as if millions of years of the Earth’s temperature history doesn’t exist. Temperatures in the past have been far hotter (and far colder) than they are today, and atmospheric carbon content records going back millions of years show there is no causational relationship between carbon emissions and warming conditions.

The moment you look at the Earth’s climate outside of that tiny sliver of 140 years that climate scientists use for their data, the entire man-made global warming theory falls apart. We barely just exited an ice age and these people are doom mongering about 1.5 degrees Celsius!

Let’s instead consider the short term ramifications of using an equity model for the global economy. What will happen when fairness becomes more important than merit and net zero becomes more important than prosperity?

The more self sufficiency people have, the more free they can be. The more dependency they have on the system, the easier they are to enslave. Carbon controls create an economic environment in which self sufficiency is impossible because they centralize all production into the hands of a select group of self appointed high priests in charge of climate change management. They get to choose the tax burden arbitrarily and they get to choose the conditions of production. Therefore, the elites will control the means of production, all while telling us that those in poverty are the beneficiaries.

The carbon scheme seems to be the last fallback of globalist organizations to create a rationale for wealth redistribution. What will they do if it fails? That’s hard to say. I suppose they will try to start WWIII (I would argue that it’s already started). The point is, much of what the globalists do is a rehashing of old-hat centralization and oligarchy. Call it ESG, call it carbon taxes, call it DEI, the goal is the same – The destruction of the west to make way for a new dark age.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

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There’s a funny scene in the film Smokey and the Bandit when Sheriff Buford T. Justice tells his son “Junior” to hand over his service revolver so that he can use it to shoot the fleeing Bandit’s tires. Junior obeys his father and hands over his pistol, but to Buford’s chagrin, the hammer falls on an empty chamber. When Buford asks why his son’s pistol isn’t loaded, Junior replies, “When I put bullets in it, daddy, it gets too heavy.”

I was reminded of this scene when I saw the news that the Santa Inez Reservoir, supplying backup water to Pacific Palisades, was empty during the fires.

Coincidentally, last April I attended a garden party in Pacific Palisades. The back patio of the magnificent (and now incinerated) home commanded a sweeping view of the hills, including the reservoir, and I noticed that the 117-million-gallon water storage facility was empty.

Note the cover in the above photograph from 2022. The rationale for the cover—the construction of which was completed in 2012—was to comply with EPA regulations.

Does it really take almost a year to repair a water tank’s cover? Or—following the same weird logic that Junior applied to leaving his revolver unloaded—did whoever is in charge of LA’s auxiliary water supply conclude that filling the reservoir would make the structure too wet?

As was just reported in the Los Angeles Times:

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday ordered an independent investigation of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power over the loss of water pressure and the empty Santa Ynez Reservoir, calling it “deeply troubling.”

“We need answers to how that happened,” Newsom said in a letter to leaders of DWP and L.A. County Public Works.

DWP spokesperson Ellen Cheng said, “We appreciate the Governor’s letter and believe that an investigation will help identify any new needed capabilities for water systems to support fighting wildfires.”

Today I had a long conversation with a man who installs fire sprinkler systems in buildings. Having worked in fire suppression for forty years, he is a walking encyclopedia about fire, how to prevent it, and how to put it out if one flares up. As he explained:

The vast majority of people—including sophisticated people with valuable properties in places with high fire risk—have no understanding of this risk. They believe that big fires that destroy entire neighborhoods are a thing of the past, and they therefore see no compelling reason to invest in fire prevention—neither in the private nor in the public spheres. I can take one look at a property or a neighborhood and spot the risks, but most people don’t believe me when I point them out. Sadly, it seems that people only learn through loss.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

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President Joe Biden awarded the so-called Presidential Medal of Freedom to Pope Francis on Saturday. The award, according to the White House, is allegedly reserved to “individuals who have made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, world peace, or other significant societal, public or private endeavors.”

It’s unclear what the Pope Francis—who is well known for a kneejerk loathing of American Catholics—has ever contributed to American civilization or society. Indeed, Francis recently signaled his contempt for American victims of sexual abuse by appointing Robert McElroy as the next archbishop of Washington, DC. McElroy has spent most of his career as a longtime defender, ally, and confidant of known criminal pederast Theodore McCarrick and his toady Archbishop Donald Wuerl.

But, who can be surprised by such theater from the Biden White House? It is no different from any other administration of recent decades which dole out these awards to important fundraisers and political allies. In many other cases, presidents just hand out these awards to people the presidents would like to meet and would like to be photographed with. Many of these “great” Americans are just actors and pro athletes, people who do nothing of consequence beyond performing various entertainments on TV screens.

To be sure, the entertainers are at least morally neutral ephemera. Far more unfortunate are the awards given out to and endless parade of warmongers and political operatives who receive the “Medal of Freedom” as means of rewarding service to the ruling class.

For example, recall Donald Trump’s handing out the award to Miriam Adelson, an Israeli citizen whose “contribution” to society extends little beyond being a wealthy donor to the Trump campaigns. Adelson, and her late husband Sheldon Adelson, are well known for their advocacy for endless US intervention in the Middle East and the continual fleecing of American taxpayers to subsidize the State of Israel.

In this respect, Adelson is a typical recipient. As James Bovard showed in a mises.org article in 2021, the recipients of the Medal of Freedom area “who’s who” of war criminals and degenerate technocrats. He writes:

Presidential Medals of Freedom have long been far more squalid than the Washington Post recognizes—in part because the Post cheered the wars that spurred many of the most tainted awards.

President Lyndon Johnson distributed a bucket of Medals of Freedom to his Vietnam War architects and enablers, including Ellsworth Bunker, Dean Acheson, Dean Rusk, Clark Clifford, Averell Harriman, Cyrus Vance, Walt Rostow, and McGeorge Bundy. When he gave the award to Defense secretary Robert McNamara, he declared, “You have understood that while freedom depends on strength, strength itself depends on the determination of free people.” In reality, Johnson treasured McNamara for his ability to help deceive Americans about how the US was failing in Vietnam. McNamara’s lies helped vastly expand an unnecessary conflict and cost more than a million American and Vietnamese lives. The Washington Post editorial page didn’t complain about those awards, because the Post avidly supported that war. (After exiting the Pentagon, McNamara joined the Post’s board of directors.)

President Richard Nixon inherited the Vietnam War and expanded and intensified US bombing of Indochina. Nixon gave Medals of Freedom to Pentagon chief Melvin Laird (who helped shroud the war’s continuing failure) and his secretary of state, William Rogers. President Gerald Ford gave the Medal of Freedom to his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, and his chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld—two persons notorious for tarnishing the honor of the United States in foreign affairs. The Post didn’t denounce the Medal of Freedom for Kissinger; instead, they made the Great Deceiver a columnist.

President George H.W. Bush blanketed Medals of Freedom on top officials involved with the first Gulf War, including Norman Schwarzkopf, Colin Powell, James Baker, Dick Cheney, and Brent Scowcroft. The Post didn’t complain about those awards, because that was another war that the Post editorial page whooped up all the way.

The war on terror made Presidential Medals of Freedom even more shameless. Retired colonel Andrew Bacevich observed, “After 9/11, the Medal of Freedom went from being irrelevant to somewhere between whimsical and fraudulent. Any correlation with freedom as such, never more than tenuous in the first place, dissolved altogether.” After he deceived America into supporting an attack on Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush conferred Medals of Freedom on his Iraq war team, including CIA chief George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, Iraq viceroy Paul Bremer, General Peter Pace, General Richard Myers, and General Tommy Franks, as well as prowar foreign lackeys such as Australian former prime minister John Howard and British former prime minister Tony Blair. The Post was outraged, because—no, wait, the Post editorial page thunderously supported that war, too.

The real function of the Medal is overwhelmingly propagandistic. Its intent is to communicate that those who receive the award are somehow great men and women, who have achieved something wonderful in the service of the American people. This service to “the people” usually just means service to the state.

Functionally, there is no difference at all between the US’s Medal of Freedom ceremonies and the pomp surrounding the Order of Lenin awards handed out by the old Soviet Union. Like the Medal of Freedom, the Order of Lenin was the highest civilian award bestowed by the Soviet State. It was given out to those who made the Soviet state look good and those who pleased the Politburo in some way. As with the Medal of Freedom, the Soviets liked to give their “top award” to former heads of state for their “service” and to entertainers.

In reality, of course, it was all just pure propaganda. Bovard adds:

Presidential Medals of Freedom encourage Americans to view their personal freedom as the result of government intervention—if not as a bequest from the commander in chief. Ironically, the individual who poses the greatest potential threat to freedom has sole discretion to designate the purported best friends of freedom. The media usually provides gushing coverage of the award ceremonies, never mentioning that the arbitrary power of the Supreme Leader was why the Founding Fathers fought a revolution.

Indeed, one could argue that the very idea of chief executives handing out awards runs counter to the idea of “republican simplicity” that was supposedly once at the core of American republicanism. The great libertarian nineteenth-century anti-imperialist William Graham Sumner apparently believed as much. Sumner wrote on how the early Americans had once sought to create something that was different from the European absolutism and state-mongering of old. Speaking of the first Americans, he writes:

They went out into a wilderness, it is true, but they took with them all the art, science, and literature which, up to that time, civilization had produced. They could not, it is true, strip their minds of the ideas which they had inherited, but in time, as they lived on in the new world, they sifted and selected these ideas, retaining what they chose. Of the old-world institutions also they selected and adopted what they chose and threw aside the rest. It was a grand opportunity to be thus able to strip off all the follies and errors which they had inherited, so far as they chose to do so.

They had unlimited land with no feudal restrictions to hinder them in the use of it. Their idea was that they would never allow any of the social and political abuses of the old world to grow up here. There should be no manors, no barons, no ranks, no prelates, no idle classes, no paupers, no disinherited ones except the vicious. There were to be no armies except a militia, which would have no functions but those of police. They would have no court and no pomp; no orders, or ribbons, or decorations, or titles. (Emphasis added.)

Writing in the wake of the Spanish-American war, Sumner was describing how the old idea of the republic was being destroyed from within by the American desire to participate in the “great game” of imperialism and global intervention. Sumner was right, of course. By the turn of the twentieth century, the idea of freedom had become but a small afterthought in Washington DC. The old laissez-faire parties were gone, and the the ruling class was permitted to turn its attention to recreating the so-called “greatness” of the old world on American shores. This meant all the expense pushed by the great powers who put national prestige and “reasons of state” ahead of freedom. This new scheme replaced the old ideal of a frugal, parsimonious regime reined in from pursuing its international ambitions.

A century later, in the Washington of today, presidents fall all over themselves to hand out ribbons, decorations, and titles to their favored allies. All the while they are surrounded by the vulgar pomp of the ruling class as it congratulates itself and feasts at lavish junkets funded by the labors of those who actually work for a living.

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Writes David Martin:

2 Days After Pledging Shelter for Rich LA Libs, Biden Boots 3,000 NC Families Into Streets During Snow Storm

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Writes Ginny Garner:

Lew,

Amos Miller’s attorney Robert Barnes announces the Amish farmer can continue to make his food available to customers outside the state. Meanwhile, a lawsuit by the state of Pennsylvania  is moving through the courts. It was this government harassment of Miller that played a key role in the 2020 election. The case became high profile in the state and throughout the US among Trump supporters. Trump election activity and organizer Scott Presler led a monumentally successful effort to register 180,000 Amish to vote for the first time. 

See here.

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Writes Gail Appel:

Gotta love him

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Writes Tim McGraw:

The fire must have been very hot to bend steel girders. The trees are all burnt, and the leaves are gone. This is a helluva view for a firefighter doing a cleanup. There are no checkpoints like Lahaina, which still has them, this time. I wonder why…

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