Lew Rockwell Institute

Well, that didn’t take long. As we have expected, the King of Debt is fixing to throw in the towel on the Dem demands for $350 billion in higher ObamaCare spending over the next decade in return for re-opening the government, and he’s getting a surprising “ata boy” from MAGA stalwart Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

“I’d like to see a deal made for great health care,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, responding to questions about Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire at the end of the year.

Rep. Greene was even more explicit in her post on X:

But I’m going to go against everyone on this issue because when the tax credits expire this year my own adult children’s insurance premiums for 2026 are going to DOUBLE, along with all the wonderful families and hard-working people in my district.

For crying out loud. ObamaCare was a fiscal monster from the get-go, and it was made far worse by the pandemic era “enhanced” tax credits which were smuggled into law via “Joe Biden’s” American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) of March 2021. Yet rather than leveling with the American public about the massive, inequitable and unsustainable cost of ObamaCare— with or without the so-called “enhanced” subsidies—the fiscal chicken-hawks in the GOP are whining loudly about a largely phony issue: Namely, that the Dem alternative to their so-called “clean’ CR will give free health care to illegal immigrants.

That’s mostly a red herring, but the problem is that there are so many different categories of legal and illegal immigrants that the Dems will likely dicker with the White House deep into the statutory weeds, claiming that the ObamaCare problem is “fixed” because they closed some or even most of the actual loopholes now contained in their proffered language. Yet these loopholes for true illegal aliens amount to small change at best (i.e. emergency care under Medicaid), and their removal wouldn’t amount to a tinker’s damn compared to extension of the $350 billion cost of the “enhanced” tax credits for upwards of 21 million regular Americans.

That is, the Trumpified GOP will declare a “fair deal” has been reached and re-open the government even as they ignore the massive fiscal elephant in the room. To wit, the ObamaCare tax credits involve an insane amount of free stuff to middle class taxpayers mainly because the underlying reality is that the third-party paid medical insurance system—both private and government run—has inflated the bejesus out of the US health care system.

For want of doubt and relevant background, here is an index of median family income (red line) since 1980, which is up by 400%. Unfortunately, during the same period the CPI medical care index (blue line) is up by 650% or 1.6X more. In other words, the blue line in the graph below has been rising at nearly a 5.0% per annum rate for the past 44 years running—so there is no way that sustainable family incomes can catch-up under the status quo.

Index Of Median Family Income Versus CPI Medical Care, 1980 to 2024

The fundamental evil of ObamaCare enacted in 2010, of course, was that it injected massive new health care buying power into the system complements of the US taxpayers, but did absolutely nothing about the fundamental inflationary drivers already built into the nation’s medical payments system. That is, the third party payment mechanism which basically eliminates both consumer and provider incentives to control the cost and quantity of medical care delivered.

In fact, during the early years of the ObamaCare, health costs skyrocketed. The table below shows the premium cost for a so-called basic or “Silver Plan” under ObamaCare. The latter rose from $12,870 for a family plan in 2014 to $20,670 per year in 2019. That computes to 10.0% per annum increase at a time when median family income increased by only 5.0% per annum.

As a result, the full premium (before tax credit subsidies) for the Silver Plan rose from 24% of median family income in 2014 to 30.1% in 2019. Thereafter, premium cost growth slowed sharply, in part due to the perturbations in the health care system generated by the pandemic and related regulatory interventions. But much of the gain in nominal family income during the period was owing to the 40-year high inflation of 2021-2024, not real gains available to pay for sky-high insurance premiums.

Cost Of ObamaCare Silver Plan Premiums, Median Household Income and Premium % Cost, 2014-2024

Needless to say, the whole idea of ObamaCare was to shift the cost of these huge and rapidly rising premiums from middle class American households to their purportedly rich Uncle Sam. But that was a fiscal sink-hole from the beginning, as shown in the table below for the median income household. By 2014 when ObamaCare (ACA) had been fully phased-in, the tax credit for the median household with $53,657 of annual income was $9,020 or roughly 70% of the premium cost.

In turn, that reduced the out-of-pocket cost of the premium to $3,850 or about $321 per month, thereby lowering the premium from 24% of the median household income to just 7.2%, as shown in the final column.

Of course, here’s the thing: If the median income household was getting $9,020 of free stuff at the get go, who in the hell was going to pay the tab as premiums raced skyward? The so-called rich were already paying upwards of 75% of Federal income taxes. So what ObamaCare was really predicted upon was deficit-finance and the piling of crushing debt on future generations.

Moreover, as medical care costs continued to soar at the aforementioned 10% per annum rate through 2019, the cost of the ACA tax credit, as shown in the third column, rose by +62% to nearly $14,600 per household under the Silver Plan. Again, that kept out-of-pocket costs to $6,087 per year by 2019 and just 8.2% of median household income.

Stated differently, household income grew by 28% or $15,046 per year during 2014 to 2019, but the out-of-pocket expense to the median household rose by just $1,581or10%. So what was happening is that Washington was chasing its own fiscal tail. The massive additional demand funded through Medicaid and the ACA Exchanges under ObamaCare was driving up costs rapidly, but even the median income family barely felt it because tax credit subsidies were rising even faster.

Alas, that was hardly the end of it. Look at the comparison of 2019 with 2021 when the Biden “enhanced” subsidies under the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) kicked in. It doesn’t take much arithmetic to see that Uncle Sam got the short end of the stick. To wit, the two-year change between 2019 and 2021 was as follows:

• Silver Plan Premiums: -$1,038.
• Median Household Income: +$2,081.
• ACA credit: +$1,466.
• Out-of-Pocket: -$2,774.

Holy moly. Talk about a scam! The so-called pandemic became an excuse to cut relatively low out-of-pocket costs by $2,774 per year to median income households, and reduce out-of-pocket expense for ACA insurance from 8.9% of income in 2019 to just 4.8% during the last four years.

Still, another ill that resulted from the Donald’s foolish declaration of the Covid “state of emergency” in March 2020 was an unhinged political climate in Washington, which literally blew the Federal debt sky high. Not only did the three Covid relief bill, including the Biden ARPA, generate $6 trillion of added spending, but the later included an utterly unwarranted increase in the ACA tax credit that now threatens to become permanent. That is, another case of what President Reagan called the eternal life of “temporary” and “emergency” Federal programs.

For want of doubt, we show in the bottom panel of the table, what the ACA tax credits and out of pocket costs would have been during 2021 to 2025 had the ARPA not been enacted. To wit, the out-of pocket cost under the original ObamaCare formulas would have remained at about 8.6% of median household income through 2025!

In a word, the ACA premiums during 2021-2026 relative to income would have been exactly what the Dems authored in 2010 and what they preserved when Trump 1.0 tried to repeal the program in 2017, only to be saved by the war-mongering Senator John McCain.

So the question recurs, if a median income household with $68,703 of income could afford to pay $6,087 8.9% in out-of-pocket cost for their Obama Exchange medical insurance in 2019 why couldn’t they afford to pay $7,308 or 8.6% of income in 2025?

After all, the median income went up by nearly +24% to $85,000 during that six-year period, while the out-of-pocket premium under the original ObamaCare formula would have risen from $6,087 per year to just $7308 or by +20%. That is, the median household would have had $16,297 more income to pay just $1,221 more in out-of-pocket costs for their health insurance. Is that really all that onerous?

In truth, all the anguished complaints about out-of-pocket insurance premiums doubling ain’t that at all. Under the original ObamaCare formula, which will now snap-back into place—as promised back in 2022 when it was extended thru the current year—out-of pocket premiums would have risen by 3.1% per year over 2021 to 2026, while median income would have risen by 3.6% per year.

If the middle class can’t live with that, America will be bankrupt even sooner than suggested by the disastrous path we are already on.

ObamaCare Premiums, Median HH Income, ACA Tax Credits, Out-of-Pocket Costs and % of Income, 2014 to 2024, With And Without Enhanced Subsidies

And this gets us to the remedial math course implicated for MAGA stalwart, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has broken ranks with the GOP position on extending the ObamaCare free stuff under the enhanced tax credits of the ARPA. She says that her two adult daughters Taylor (26) and Lauren (28) will face a doubling of premiums on the Obama Exchanges if Joe Biden’s fiscal folly is not extended.

To be sure, both daughters were likely eligible under the ObamaCare strictures for child coverage thru age 26 under Rep Greene’s Federal Employee Health Benefit Plan (FEHBP) since she came to Congress in 2021. Indeed, the actuarial cost of the health plan for Rep. Greene, her spouse and two daughters would have been about $13,000 per year, but due to cushy Congressional compensation arrangements, her out-of-pocket share would have been a scant $2,700 for the entire family. So compared to the much high premiums on the ObamaCare exchanges, we get why Rep. Greene and her no longer grandfathered daughters are bitching.

But set aside Congressional privileged for a moment and look at the data assuming that both daughters had been earning the median household income since 2021 and had been purchasing the Silver family plan. Under the original ObamaCare formulas, their incomes would have been equal to 272% of the Federal Poverty Line (FPL), which would have put them in the 250% to 300% of FPL bracket. Under the original law the cap on out-of pocket costs for ACA premiums was 8.05% of income at 250% and 9.5% of income at 300%, yielding a blended average of 8.688%.

In turn, that would have amounted to a dollar cap of $7,385 or 8.4% of income on out-of-pocket payments toward a premium of $22,234 for 2025. The ACA tax credit, therefore, would have covered the difference or $14,926.

By contrast, here is how the much bigger dollop of free stuff under the “Joe Biden” ARPA would be calculated. At the same break points of 250% and 300% of FPL, the caps would be 4.0% and 6.0%, respectively, yielding a blended average of 4.88% or barely half of the pre-ARPA caps. In dollar terms, the resulting out-of-pocket limit for the median household income would be $4,148 per year after a much higher ACA tax credit of $18,o86. In short, for the median income household Sleepy Joe’s generosity is worth more than $3,160 annually at present. That even beats the $2,000 per person stimmy checks handed out during the pandemic!

Moreover, if you look at the five years covered by the ARPA (2021 to 2025), the cumulative cost of premiums under original ObamaCare would have been $83,304 for a family Silver Plan, which compares to only $68,848 under the ARPA. That is to say, the ballyhooed “enhanced subsidies” have amounted to $14,456 per family during the last five years.

In the hypothetical case where Rep. Greene’s daughters had been purchasing the family Silver Plan and had earned the median household income during the last five years, the Greene family would have netted a windfall of nearly $29,000. No wonder they are squawking about loosing the free stuff!

In any event, the ARPA was a drastic, costly mistake. Had the original ObamaCare formulas stayed in place, the Silver Plan’s out of pocket cost would have been $7,385 this year, or 8.4% of income, and would have risen by 7% to $7,817 in 2026 or 9.0% of income. Yes, a relatively stiff increase, but not the end of the world by any means.

Funny thing, moreover. This 9.0% of income out-of-pocket premium contribution projected by Grok 4 for 2026 is what median income households were paying in 2019, yet no one from the Dem side was shutting down the government in order to force payments down by more than $3,000 per year.

Nor was the Trumpified GOP of 2019 fixing to capitulate on ObamaCare subsidies, as MAGA stalwart Greene and her dear leader in the White House have already done.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Needs Remedial Math on the Fiscal Monster Known as ObamaCare appeared first on LewRockwell.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Law enforcement has criminally charged a left-wing New Jersey man who brought 200 explosives outside of St. Matthew’s Cathedral on Sunday, possibly with a plan to kill Supreme Court justices. The man also expressed anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish sentiments, along with a hatred for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Louis Geri has been charged on eight counts, including the “manufactur[ing] or possession of a weapon of mass destruction in furtherance of a hate crime,” according to the Washington Post. He had several other charges already pending from a prior incident outside the Archdiocese of Washington church.

Geri reportedly planned to target the annual Red Mass, a Catholic tradition meant to celebrate lawyers and judges. The Supreme Court’s new term began this week, and several Supreme Court justices were expected to attend the Mass. “The Red Mass is offered each year on the Sunday before the first Monday in October to mark the opening of the Supreme Court’s term and to invoke God’s blessings on those responsible for the administration of justice as well as on all public officials,” the Archdiocese of Washington explained.

Because of the heightened security, law enforcement was clearing the area ahead of time early on Sunday morning when they saw Geri setting up a tent on the cathedral steps.

“During his arrest, Louis Geri threatened to ignite explosives and handed authorities pages of his notebook that, according to court records, expressed animosity toward the Catholic Church, Supreme Court justices, members of the Jewish faith and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” the Washington Post reported.

Geri and police engaged in a back and forth. At one point, an officer agreed to read what Geri had written.

The notebook “allegedly revealed Geri’s significant animosity towards the Catholic church, members of the Jewish faith, members of SCOTUS and ICE/ ICE facilities,” according to WUSA 9.

He was eventually detained while he stepped away from his tent to urinate, according to the Washington Post. Police seized hundreds of explosives.

As reported by the Washington Post:

Authorities determined some of the vials contained nitromethane – an explosive compound often used in improvised explosive devices, including the ones deployed in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people. Geri described them to authorities as grenades that use rubber bands to secure the fuse, court records show. Others were modified bottle rockets with aluminum foil heads and treated in a pyrotechnic solution, records show. Authorities said in court documents that the devices appeared “fully functional.”

The planned attack comes amidst growing concerns about left-wing political violence, including the assassination of Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk.

Furthermore, the planned attack came just days after a judge sentenced Nicholas Roske to just eight years in prison for planning to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Roske has begun claiming he is a woman, and his family has argued that he should receive a lighter sentence because of that. Other recent attacks have been linked to transgender ideology as well, including the Kirk assassination.

“I take into consideration the conditions of pre-trial confinement and the fact that she [he] is a transgender woman [gender-confused man] and will be sent to a male-only [Bureau of Prisons] facility,” U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman stated during sentencing.

“The judge … said that a lower sentence was warranted because of an executive order issued by President Trump mandating that [gender-confused men] be held at male-only federal facilities, which [he] said could interfere with [his] continuing to receive gender transition [interventions],” the New York Times reported on October 3. As pointed out by Jonathan Van Maren, however, “Roske did not begin identifying as transgender until after his arrest, and if he adopted the identity to shorten his prison sentence, the ploy was successful.”

Roske targeted Kavanaugh at his home in 2022, along with hundreds of other left-wing activists who protested outside the private homes of Supreme Court justices, berating and intimidating them in an effort to get them to change their mind and not reverse Roe v. Wade. At the time, a leaked opinion suggested, correctly, that Roe would be reversed. The protests occurred with the backing of the Biden administration.

Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway suggested there is a clear connection between the sentence and the “Red Mass” situation.

“After left-wing radical judge on Friday greenlit attacks on conservative justices with shockingly short sentence for Kavanaugh assassination attempt, another man appears to target the ‘Red Mass’ attended by judges and justices,” Hemingway wrote on X.

This article was originally published on Lifesite News.

The post Leftist Arrested With Explosives Outside DC Cathedral in Possible Plan To Kill SCOTUS Justices appeared first on LewRockwell.

Johnny Kramer wrote:

It’s funny that this should pop up on my feed tonight, because earlier tonight another video popped up of people shopping at Sears in 1982, and the old people in the comments who could remember that time were going on and on about how much better “everything” was back then and how they wish they could go back.

I saw microwaves for $399; I just looked and that’s about $1,340 today. I bought my current microwave a couple of years ago for $80 — less than 6% of that.

(As another, much more important example, I had no nausea during my chemo last year; some of the older nurses told me that as recently as the late 1990s, people were often puking DURING the treatment!

(And that protocol was only developed in 1974; if my condition happened to me before then, I wouldn’t even be here now to type this.)

Of course we still have plenty of problems today, and I hate almost everything about smartphones and the way people dress today compared to the past.

The post John Stossel: The myth of the good old days appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Bill Madden:

This organization, www.mises.org, promotes non-interventionist economic thought.  Because interventionist economics like Keynesian Economics allows our super-rich controllers to more easily loot the masses by having their minions, our politicians, intervene on their behalf in the economy, Keynesian Economics is taught in our universities and is used by the governments of most countries.

We have a managed economy which is subject to mismanagement for the benefit of our controllers.  They help the politicians become millionaires and the politicians help the controllers become billionaires. 

Our economy is predicated on waste and defense spending is very wasteful.  So we have many wars that we fight and/or bankroll for a proxy.  Because we don’t or won’t see the waste, we pay for it in dollars and blood.

See also This.

The post Hayek for the 21st Century: Get Your Free Copy Today! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Reclaim the Net

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Thanks, Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

El Pais

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Writes Pluto9999:

Hi Lew

The faux libertarians supporting the unpredictable, expensive, war-inducing, and economy-destroying tariffs would do well to heed Von Mises insight:

“What generates war is the economic philosophy of nationalism: embargoes, trade and foreign exchange controls, monetary devaluation, etc. The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war.”

Trump has been and will always be a war president.  He wouldn’t stop the bloodshed in Afghanistan, and will not work to stop the bloodshed in Ukraine, Gaza, Africa, and elsewhere where the USA military subsidies continue.  His tariffs are simply war on the citizens of the USA, and on citizens of the world.

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JC wrote:

Taxation is an attribute of Sovereignty. That over which the taxation agent is not sovereign is not an acceptable object to tax. A State cannot tax any federal property nor charge a sales tax for federal purchases. [immune is the word used].

Article IV, Section 4, of the Constitution requires the federal government to “guarantee” a “Republican” form of government to the Sovereign Citizens. The Preamble affirms that mandate. The clause of “Liberty” in the Fifth Amendment has been adjudicated to include the “Right to Pursue a Livelihood” as a Constitutional asset. Such Rights are not subject to taxation or conditions.

The 16th Amendment is written to remove the condition of an excise tax [income tax] to be conditioned upon a privilege being received by the taxed object [Sovereign Citizen]. Basic core Constitutional values cannot be negated by amendment. The 16th Amendment is an effort to overthrow a Constitutional Right to Sovereignty. It is a coup. Enforcement of a coup would be treason. The Amendment cannot be enforced.

The post The Income Tax appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes, Jesse Trentadue:

Patel’s sudden crackdown on FBI agents who spied on Republicans is laughable. For decades, Grassley and the judiciary committee have known about PATCON but chose to  ignore it.  As a consequence, you have Artic Frost, the Whitmer Kidnapping Plot and lord knows how many other similar events that were orchestrated by the DOJ/FBI?

For many years, Grassley and the judiciary committee have known about the Bureau’s Sensitive Informant Program designed to place informants in the media, on staffs of federal judges and members of Congress, the Whitehouse and within other federal agencies, but ignored it.

Now, however, when it is the Republican Senators’ ox that is being gored it is a very big deal.  But when it was the ordinary American who was being abused by the DOJ/FBI, Grassley and the other hypocrites in Congress did not give a damn.

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Click here:

John Leake

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Writes Bill Madden

It’s difficult to call the turning point when the empire stopped growing, leveled off and then began contracting or, in our case, imploding.  The confluence of two major factors was, I feel, the beginning of the end for our country.  The late 1960s was close to the end of the post-war boom that made the USA such a great place to live domestically and a world leader internationally.  In 1965, we were about 90% European ancestry and our controllers felt that we were too White for easy control on their part.  So, we had the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act which drastically reduced White immigration and increased immigration of poor, uneducated people from mostly third-world countries.

In 1965, the few people who realized what was going on claimed that such a stupid immigration policy was bad for the country.  Time has proven them correct.

The post Putin Explains The Fall Of The American Empire appeared first on LewRockwell.

Robert Morrow wrote:

Howdy Folks,

Here is a good thread at the Education Forum that has good information on the complete innocence of Lee Harvey Oswald in the shooting of JFK, the shooting of John Conally, the murder of Officer J.D. Tippit, the attempted shooting of Gen. Edwin Walker on the night of April 10, 1963.

What is the best and most concise evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was framed? – JFK Assassination Debate – The Education Forum

A murdered Oswald got posthumously framed for all of that in the wake of the JFK assassination. I personally think Lyndon Johnson murdered both JFK and then two days later Lee Harvey Oswald using his Dallas connections to procure Jack Ruby for the dirty deed.

The post The Complete Innocence of Lee Harvey Oswald appeared first on LewRockwell.

I suppose that every Royal Rascal that discovers himself to be powerful is tempted by the Devil to create an empire. And usually succumbs.

In the case of the U.S., I’d say that the Spanish-American war in 1898 was the test to see if the U.S. was powerful enough yet for empire. Then, in 1907, President Roosevelt sent the Great White Fleet around the world.

Painted white to signify peace, the fleet was a display of American naval power, showcasing the U.S. as an emerging global force.

So of course, you would expect a dull college president like President Woodrow Wilson to buy into the narrative that the U.S. was “an emerging global force” and jump into World War I in 1917 “to save the world for democracy,” and he did.

And of course, as you’d expect with a college president, Woodrow Wilson botched the peace in the subsequent punitive Treaty of Versailles, which led to the Federal Reserve’s first botched credit crisis in 1929, which led to Literally Hitler.

Then there was World War II, in which the U.S. cast itself in the starring role of not just saving democracy but annihilating Nazism. But, oh no! After World War II the U.S. found that the Communist Soviet Union had occupied half of Europe, so we had to rev the U.S. Empire up into overdrive to save the world from Communism.

No problem, because the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989-91; so the Cold War was won.

Of course, after the defeat of Communism the political and administrative leaders of the U.S. didn’t step up to the mark and wind up the U.S. Empire. Instead, the institutions created to fight the Cold War waddled along into well-fed middle age and dined on the Middle East and then Ukraine. What’s the point of the State Department and the CIA and the whole USAID ecosystem if it isn’t meddling in other countries’ politics and manipulating regime change — to save democracy?

Although well-fed, President Trump is no administrative bureaucrat. He lived his life “in the arena” of risk-taking business. And the rest of the world seems to be waking up to find that in the Trump Era they are not in Kansas anymore.

Here’s Gregory Copley:

U.S. President Donald Trump, during the first year of his second presidency, severely shook strategic relationships with key historical allies in the Anglosphere, the traditionally English-speaking societies of the world.

And the Canadians are really, really offended, so Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is really going to… Well, just wait and see: after all, Mark Carney in his former life was a great and powerful Oz central banker, so there!

Then there’s Aris Roussinos, who feels that the “West” is now paying for blindly following the U.S. into the future of the 1990s: letting manufacturing wither, advocating for human rights, saving the world for climate change, encouraging mass immigration because diversity is our strength.

Now “the West” finds that its blind followership has led to decline and decay. And the U.S. has elected a president who has pulled the plug on its post-WWII imperium. But how are, e.g., the Brits going to dig themselves out of the mess the U.S. led them into?

The old UK regime is dead in office: the time is running out to shape the Britain that will replace it, in anything other than Farage’s image.

Oh no! Not the dreadful Nigel Farage! Yes, Minister, Sir Humphrey Appleby has threatened to resign if Farage becomes Prime Minister.

Don’t worry, says Newt Gingrich. He realized in the 1980s that the Soviet Union was doomed because the “World War II Soviet military was being made obsolete by the information revolution.”

Now the world is changing again in the current technological revolution:

Ukraine will build 4 million drones this year, including autonomous vehicles capable of hitting targets 1,900 miles away.

I wonder if all those plump generals and admirals present at Quantico last week are up to the task. Did they play with toy drones and Minecraft when they were kids?

And I wonder if the rules of empire haven’t changed drastically. Used to be that emperors sent their Hoplites or legionaries or archers or Bluebellies or Doughboys or GIs off to war. So where does the Pentagon get its skilled drone operators and strategy game experts for the next war?

Or have the rules of the game completely changed, so that a great empire no longer sends armies into the field but rather startup entrepreneurs and tech gurus and VC capitalists and “art of the deal” businessmen to conquer the other economy? Today, economic imperialists like Elon Musk find that the kids are lining up at the door begging for a chance to be on the team to Occupy Mars.

Has any academic expert in critical theory researched the difference between Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Mars?

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

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In his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, which is eerily evocative of our current political plight, Gabriel Garcia Marquez described how a Latin American autocrat “discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth, [and] became convinced … that the only livable life was one of show.”

In amassing unchecked power spiced with unimaginable cruelty, that fictional dictator extinguished any flicker of opposition in his imaginary Caribbean country, reducing its elite to a craven set of courtiers. Even though he butchered opponents, plundered the treasury, raped the young, and reduced his nation to penury, “lettered politicians and dauntless adulators… proclaimed him the corrector of earthquakes, eclipses, leap years and other errors of God.” When his slavishly loyal defense minister somehow displeased him, the autocrat had him served up, in full-dress uniform laden with military medals, on a silver platter with a pine-nut garnish to a table full of courtiers, forcing them to dutifully consume their slice of the cooked cadaver.

That macabre banquet presaged a recent luncheon President Donald J. Trump hosted at the White House for this nation’s top tech executives, which became a symphony of shameless sycophancy. Billionaire Bill Gates praised the president’s “incredible leadership,” while Apple CEO Tim Cook said it was “incredible to be among… you and the first lady” before thanking him “for helping American companies around the world.” Other executives there celebrated him for having “unleashed American innovation and creativity… making it possible for America to win” again and making this “the most exciting time in America, ever.” As Trump served up the corpse of American democracy, those tech courtiers, like so many of this country’s elites, downed their slice of the cadaver with ill-concealed gusto.

With Congress compliant, the Supreme Court complicit, and media corporations compromised, President Trump’s vision for America and its place in the world has become the nation’s destiny. Since the inauguration for his second term in office in January 2025, he has launched a radical “America first” foreign policy that seems primed to accelerate the decline of Washington’s international influence and, more seriously and much less obviously, degrade (if not destroy) the liberal international order that the U.S. has sustained since the end of World War II. Largely ignored by a media overwhelmed by daily outrages from the Oval Office, that initiative has some truly serious implications for America’s role in the world.

Trump’s Geopolitical Vision

Amid a torrent of confusing, often contradictory foreign policy pronouncements pouring out of the White House, the design of the president’s dubious geopolitical strategy has taken shape with surprising, even stunning speed. Instead of maintaining longstanding security alliances like NATO, Trump seems to prefer a globe divided into three major regional blocs, each headed by an empowered autocrat like himself — with Russia dominating its European periphery, China paramount in Asia, and the United States controlling North and much of South America (and Greenland).

Reflecting what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called a “loathing of European freeloading” and Vice President JD Vance’s complaint that Europe has abandoned “our shared democratic values,” President Trump is pursuing this tri-continental strategy at the expense of the traditional transatlantic alliance embodied in NATO that has been the foundation for U.S. foreign policy since the start of the Cold War.

Admittedly, Trump’s reach for complete control over North America does lend a certain geopolitical logic to his otherwise quixotic overtures to claim Greenland, reclaim the Panama Canal, and make Canada the 51st state. In Trump’s vision of fortress America, the country’s more compact defense perimeter would encompass the entire Arctic, including Greenland, march down the mid-Atlantic with an anchor at the Panama Canal, and encompass the entire Pacific. Not only does such a strategy carry the high cost of alienating once-close allies Canada and Mexico, but every one of its key components comes laden with a potential for serious conflict, particularly the administration’s plans for the Pacific, which run headlong into China’s ongoing maritime expansion.

Demolishing the Liberal International Order

At a broader level, President Trump’s foreign policy represents a forceful repudiation of the three key attributes of the “liberal international order” that has marked U.S. global hegemony since the end of World War II in 1945: alliances like NATO that treated allies as peer powers, free trade without tariff barriers, and an ironclad assurance of inviolable sovereignty for all nations, large and small. In a matter of months, Trump has crippled NATO by expressing doubt about its critical mutual-defense clause, imposed an escalating roster of punitive tariffs antithetical to free trade, and threatened to expropriate several sovereign states and territories.

Not only is his ongoing demolition of Washington’s world order inflicting a good deal of pain on much of the globe — from Africans and Asians denied the U.S. Agency for International Development’s life-saving medicines (and potentially suffering 14 million deaths) to Eastern Europeans threatened by Russia’s relentless advance — but it also undercuts America’s future position on a post-Trumpian planet. His successor could, of course, try to reconcile with Canada and Mexico, placate an insulted Panamanian leadership, and even repair relations with NATO. But the president’s ongoing demolition of Washington’s world system is guaranteed to do lasting, long-term damage to the country’s international standing in ways that have so far eluded even informed observers.

To grasp the full extent of the harm Trump is inflicting on America’s place on this planet, it’s important to understand that Washington’s “liberal international order” is nothing more than the latest iteration of the “world order” that every global hegemon has created as part of its apparatus of power since the fifteenth century. To understand our own present and future, it’s necessary to explore the nature of those world orders — how they formed, how they functioned, and what their survival and destruction tell us about America’s declining imperial power.

For the past 500 years, every succeeding global hegemon — Spain, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States — has not only amassed wealth and military strength but also used that extraordinary power to propagate a world order that often transcended its narrow national interests. And once the inevitable imperial decline set in, a fading global hegemon often found that its world order could serve as a diplomatic safety net, extending its international influence for years, even decades beyond its moment of imperial glory.

While even the most powerful of history’s empires eventually fall, such world orders entwine themselves in the cultures, commerce, and values of countless societies. They influence the languages people speak, the laws that order their lives, and the ways that so many millions of us work, worship, and even play. World orders might be much less visible than the grandeur of great empires, but they have always proven both more pervasive and more persistent.

By structuring relations among nations and influencing the cultures of the peoples who live in them, world orders can outlast even the powerful empires that created them. Indeed, some 90 empires, major and minor, have come and gone since the start of the age of exploration in the fifteenth century. In those same 500 years, however, there have been just four major world orders — the Iberian age after 1494; the British imperial era that began in 1815; the Soviet system that lasted from 1945 to 1991; and Washington’s liberal international order, launched in 1945, that might, based on present developments, reach its own end somewhere around 2030.

Successful global empires driven by the hard power of guns and money have also required the soft power of cultural and ideological suasion embodied in a world order. Spain’s bloody conquest of Latin America soon segued into three centuries of colonial rule, softened by Catholic conversion, the spread of the Spanish language as a lingua franca, and that continent’s integration into a growing global economy. Once permanent mints were established in Mexico City, Lima, and Potosí during the seventeenth century, Spanish galleons would carry millions of minted silver coins — worth eight reales and thus known as “pieces of eight” — across the globe for nearly three centuries, creating the world’s first common currency and making those silver coins the medium of exchange for everyone from African traders to Virginia planters.

During its century of global hegemony from 1820 to 1920, though it seldom hesitated to use military power when needed, Great Britain would also prove the exemplar par excellence of soft power, espousing an enticing political culture of fair play and free markets that it propagated through the Anglican church, the English language, an enticing literature, authoritative mass media like the global Reuters news service and the British Broadcasting Corporation, and its virtual creation of modern athletics (including cricket, football/soccer, tennis, rugby, and rowing). On a higher plane of principle, Britain’s protracted anti-slavery campaign throughout much of the nineteenth century invested its global hegemony with a certain moral authority.

Similarly, the raw power of U.S. military and economic dominance after 1945 was softened by the appeal of Hollywood films, civic organizations like Rotary International, and popular sports like basketball and baseball. Just as Britain battled the slave trade for nearly a century, so Washington’s advocacy of human rights lent legitimacy to its world order. While Spain espoused Catholicism, and Britain an Anglophone ethos of rights, the United States, at the dawn of its global dominion, courted allies through soft-power programs that promoted democracy, the international rule of law, and economic development.

Such world orders are not the mere imaginings of historians trying, decades or centuries later, to impose their own logic on a chaotic past. In each era, the dominant power of the day worked to reorder its world for generations to come through formal agreements — with the Treaty of Tordesillas dividing much of the globe between Spain and Portugal in 1494; the 1815 Congress of Vienna (convened to resolve the Napoleonic wars) launching a full century of British global dominion; the San Francisco Conference in 1945 drafting the U.N. charter and so beginning Washington’s liberal international order; and the Moscow meeting in 1957 assembling 64 communist parties at the Kremlin for a shared commitment to socialist struggle and putting the Soviet Union atop its own global order.

Just as the British imperial system was far more pervasive than its Iberian predecessor, so Washington’s world order went beyond both of them and the Soviet Russian system, too, to become deeply embedded on an essentially global scale. While the 1815 Congress of Vienna was an ephemeral gathering of two dozen diplomats whose influence faded within a decade or two, the San Francisco conference of 1945 formed the United Nations, which now has 193 member states with broad international responsibilities. By the start of the twenty-first century, moreover, there were nearly 40,000 “U.N.-recognized international nongovernmental organizations” like the Catholic Relief Services, operating “in the remotest corners of the globe.”

But the similarities were perhaps more important. Note as well that both victorious powers, Great Britain and the United States, used those peace conferences to launch world orders that militated successfully against major wars among the great powers, with the pax Britannica lasting nearly a century (1815-1914) and the pax Americana persisting for 80 years and still counting.

Empires Fade but World Orders Persist

If world orders are so pervasive and persistent, why don’t they last forever? Each transition from one to the next has occurred when a massively destructive cataclysm has coincided with major social or political change. The rise of the Iberian age of exploration was preceded by a century of epidemics, known as the Black Death, which killed 60% of the populations of Europe and China, devastating their respective worlds. Similarly, the British imperial era emerged when the ravages of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe coincided with the dynamism of the industrial revolution launched in England, unleashing the power of coal-fired steam energy and formal colonial rule to change the face of the globe.

After the unprecedented devastation of World War II, Washington’s leadership in rebuilding and reordering a damaged planet established the current liberal international order. By the middle decades of our present century, if not before, global warming caused by fossil-fuel emissions will likely equal or surpass those earlier catastrophes on a universal scale of “disaster magnitude,” with the potential to precipitate the eclipse of Washington’s world order. Compounding the damage, President Trump’s sustained, systematic attack on America’s “liberal international order” — its alliances, free trade, and institutions like the U.N. — is only serving to accelerate the decline of a system that has served the world and this country reasonably well since 1945.

After the Fall

Even if the empire that created it suffers a complete collapse, a deeply rooted world order can usually survive that fall, while serving as a kind of diplomatic safety net for a fading power. The Iberian empires had lost their preeminence by the seventeenth century, but even today Latin America is deeply Catholic and Spanish remains the main language for much of the continent.

Understanding its limits as a small island nation with a vast global empire, Great Britain conducted a relatively careful imperial retreat that enfolded former colonies into the British Commonwealth, preserved the City of London’s financial clout, retained international influence as Washington’s strategic partner, and maintained its global cultural authority through civil institutions (the Anglican Communion, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and leading universities). Today, a full 50 years after the end of its empire, Great Britain still plays a role in world affairs far beyond its small size as a nation of just 70 million people living in a country no bigger than the state of Oregon.

Even though it’s been 35 years since the Soviet empire collapsed with spectacular speed, testifying eloquently to the crude coercion and economic exploitation that lay at its heart, Moscow still maintains considerable diplomatic influence across much of the old Soviet sphere in Eurasia.

Without Donald Trump’s systemic subversion of the liberal international order and its chief creation, the United Nations, the United States might have retained sufficient international influence to lead the world toward a shared governance of a global commons on a planet whose environment is sorely threatened — its seas depleted, water evaporating, storms raging, heat waves soaring, and its Arctic wildly warming. Instead, the United States has fully ceded leadership of the campaign against climate change to China, while not only denying its reality but blocking the development of alternative energy projects critical not only for the planet but for America’s global competitiveness. While China is already leading the world in efficient electric vehicles and low-cost solar and wind power, Trump’s America remains firmly wedded to an economy based on high-cost carbon energy that will, in the fullness of time, render its output grossly overpriced, its industries uncompetitive, and the planet a disaster zone.

Back in 2011, six years before Trump first entered the Oval Office, political scientist G. John Ikenberry argued that, while the U.S. ability to shape world politics would decline as its raw power retreated, its “liberal international order will survive and thrive,” including its emphasis on multilateral governance, open markets, free global trade, human rights, and respect for sovereignty. With Trump having essentially demolished the U.S. Agency for International Development’s global humanitarian work and sent a “wrecking ball” toward the United Nations, while condemning it in a recent speech to its General Assembly — “I ended seven wars … and never even received a phone call from the United Nations” — it would be difficult to make such a sanguine argument today.

Instead, Mark Twain’s classic futuristic assessment of American world power seems more appropriate. “It was impossible to save the Great Republic. It was rotten to the heart. Lust for conquest had long ago done its work,” he wrote in an imagined history of this country from a far-off future. “Trampling upon the helpless abroad,” he added, “had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.” After watching the U.S. occupation of the Philippines in 1898 descend into a bloodstained pacification program replete with torture and atrocities, Twain suggested that empire abroad would, sooner or later, bring autocracy at home — an insight Trump confirms with his every tweet, every speech, every executive order.

Whether the United States will emulate Britain in a managed global retreat with minimal domestic damage or fulfill Mark Twain’s dismal vision by continuing to attack its own world order, diminishing if not destroying its legacy, is something for future historians to decide. For now, listening to Trump’s recent rant at the U.N. complaining about a stalled escalator and condemning climate-change science as a “green scam” and “the greatest con job ever perpetrated,” ordinary Americans should have received a clear sign that their president’s autocratic aspirations are subverting their country’s claims to world leadership, both now and in the future.

The post In the Autumn of America’s Empire appeared first on LewRockwell.

By now, it’s a very well known historical narrative: during the Middle Ages, kings were all powerful over their subjects. They ruled with a divine right, and therefore could raise taxes at will. After all, as God’s chosen rulers on earth, who would contradict them? Certainly not the king’s subject who, with the help of the Church, were all utterly cowed by the idea that to disobey the king was to risk eternal damnation.

But then came the Renaissance, the narrative tells us, and people discovered the idea that they had rights and that political rulers ought to be restrained by the law. These novel ideas were then magnified by the “Enlightenment” which further overturned the old despotism of the Middles Ages and the “will of the people” prevailed.

This narrative, however, is largely based on myth. It was not the case that the princes and kings of the Middle Ages could raise taxes with impunity or that they ruled with untrammeled power. Nor is it the case that the subjects of the medieval lords meekly accepted abuses of power. Moreover, the Church opposed the medieval rulers’ prerogatives at least as much as the Church supported them. Churchmen like Thomas Aquinas, for example, condemned tax increases as “sinful” while the general public condemned the Lords’ taxes as threats to well established property rights.

It was not the Renaissance or the Enlightenment that gave us ideas about limiting state power, opposing taxes, or protecting private property. Indeed, the best political ideas of the Renaissance—those that called for limits on political power—were holdovers from earlier medieval thought. In contrast, the late Renaissance is more characterized by innovations in political thought that asserted taxation is a good thing, and that kings ought to be able to raise taxes more easily for the good of a new thing we now call the sovereign state. It’s not a coincidence—as Rothbard points out—that absolutism in Europe comes on the heels of the late Renaissance.

Rather, during the Middle Ages, taxation was considered to be appropriate only as an extreme measure in times of emergency, and as a last resort. Kings were expected to subsist on revenues from their own private property, and to respect the private property of others. Importantly, public opinion often held to the idea that taxation was both unjust and parasitic. Modern post-Enlightenment notions, holding taxation to be a reflection of the “will of the people” would strike a great many medieval farmers, burghers, and nobleman as a very odd idea indeed.

The Prince’s Revenues and Scholastic Opposition to Taxes 

In the Middle Ages in Western Europe—and especially where feudalism remained widespread—taxes were not considered to be the ordinary means by which a prince or lord could obtain revenue. Historian Martin Wolfe states that:

The prince’s revenues … were not what we would call taxes but rather were rents, tolls, seigneurial dues, and a host of other items conceived of partly as the ruler’s family property and partly as God’s method of providing princes with what they needed to fulfill their proper functions.1

This type of self-funded civil government was also the assumed normative method of collecting revenue according to medieval churchmen who were influential on the matter. For example, Thomas Aquinas, answers the question of the prince’s revenues this way:

You asked whether it is licit for you to make exactions from your Christian subjects. In regard to this, you ought to consider that the princes of the earth were instituted by God not to seek their own gain, but to look after the common utility of the people… For this reason the revenues of certain lands were established for princes, that, living on them, they might abstain from the despoiling of their subjects…

For Aquinas, and for the Scholastics overall, taxation could be necessary as an extraordinary measure to keep the peace of for some other measure that is judged to be for the “common good.” (In medieval thinking, “common” necessarily means something that it literally good for everyone, such as the punishment of highwaymen.)

Jacob Viner further explains the Scholastic position this way:

To understand the Scholastic treatment of taxes one must bear in mind that taxation, as we now know it—namely, as a routine, normal, and respectable method of providing for the financial needs of government—is a comparatively modern phenomenon. In feudal times, on the other hand, rulers derived their revenues mainly from personal estates, customary tributes and dues paid by their vassals, tolls on strangers and on traffic on roads and rivers, war booty, rapine and piracy, and, in times of special need, from ‘‘aids,’” subventions, donations, etc., … All of St. Thomas’ references to taxation that I know of treat it as a more or less extraordinary act of a ruler which is as likely as not to be morally illicit.2

After all, with so many routes of access to riches other than taxation, why should any good steward of resources need to resort to taxation?

This idea was further reflected in “In Coena Domini” (article 5), a recurrent papal bull between 1363 and 1770, first written by Urban V and modified by later popes until Pope Urban VIII. The text reads “All who shall establish in their lands new taxes, or shall take it upon them to increase those already exiting, except in cases provided for by the last in the event of obtaining the express permission of the Holy See.”

That is, taxation could be licit, but rare enough that the levying of new taxes ought to require a nod from the Pope.

Public Opposition to Taxes 

Wolfe notes that from the Middle Ages into the early Renaissance, a general bias against taxation remained well established, and continued into the sixteenth century. Contrary to more modern views contending that tax revenues can strengthen economic prosperity and address the needs “of the people,” the medieval assumption was that taxes represented a net loss for society. Wolfe notes that

[F]rom the late thirteenth century until well into the Renaissance [the tax debate] reflects the prevailing view that regular national taxing—that is, annual royal revenue beyond traditional domainial income and occasional emergency aid—could have only bad effects on the economy. As late as Jean Bodin (around 1576) going theory held that as far as taxes were concerned the prince’s gain had to be the people’s loss. A favorite Renaissance metaphor was that the fisc was a parasite (le rat au corps), growing fat and sleek as its host grew thin and lifeless.3

The view of the secular activists and theorists on taxation was even less forgiving than that of the Scholastics. In his commentary on French views of taxation in the Middle Ages, Wolfe notes that among the French commentators

There were two associated pivots about which swung all late medieval and early Renaissance arguments on wealth and taxes: the inviolability of private property and the importance of restricting the royal fisc to its sources of traditional revenue. In the middle ages the ideal prince was an armed judge-a force useful to society primarily as an arbiter and as a protector of feudal, natural, and divine law. Therefore the men of this era did not regard royal revenues as contributions by participants in a commonwealth to expenditures that would increase the well-being of the people. They thought of the fisc as a householding operation, intended to support the royal family in proper style and to provide a small surplus which, when husbanded as it should be, would provide funds for emergency military affairs. The prince’s revenues, mainly, were not what we would call taxes but rather were rents, tolls, seigneurial dues, and a host of other items conceived of partly as the ruler’s family property and partly as God’s method of providing princes with what they needed to fulfill their proper functions.4

As is usually the case, then as now, the needs of warfare impelled many princes to press for ever larger tax revenues. In the Middle Ages, taxpayers in many cases responded with additional calls for respecting both private property and customary law under which taxes were largely fixed in place and not increased with ease. Moreover, dissenters contended that those who abused the people with tax increases would face dire spiritual consequences:

The new national taxes, the bruising fiscal expedients, and the hordes of new tax officials brought in by fourteenth-century kings trod painfully on important toes and on established ideas about property. Moralist writers then and in the early Renaissance took up and elaborated Aquinas’ findings that private property is itself part of God’s dispensation, the very basis of family life and public order, and as important as ruler- ship itself. They taught that any prince who fleeced his subjects so that he might live in pomp or gratify his lust for conquest was com- mitting a deadly sin; the sweat and the blood his subjects needed to produce this taxed wealth would stand as a permanent and vengeful witness against him until the final day of judgment. Another strand of hostility to the rising tax power of the Crown came from the “feudalists,” mainly legal experts working for great barons, who emphasized customary law for its importance in protecting each man in the fruits of his labor, his property, and his rights.5

Notably, the taxpayers were not fooled by monetary debasement either, and saw it as the form of taxation that it was. Wolfe continues:

This is why, when late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century kings were pushed by their higher expenditures to debasing the coinage and to imposing national taxes, they were scolded so often by being reminded of the good king Saint Louis-apart from his “crusader tithes,” this ruler was supposed to have managed very well on his traditional revenues alone. The belief that a well-ordered state should be funded without taxing, therefore, was an important part of medieval political views…6

But even in places where taxes were tolerated, taxation was often believed to be appropriate only to the loftier classes. For example, In England where the Commons had pushed new taxes in the early fourteenth century, few taxes were hated as much as what George Holmes called the “disastrous aberration of the poll taxes.” from 1377 to 1381.7 This tax, implemented by Parliament, violated “principles of taxation according to property and taxation only of the more prosperous…”8 The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 brought the taxes to an end.

The lack of public support for taxes stemmed in part from the fact that there was, at the time, no clear acceptance of the idea of the civil government as a “public” institution. There was the prince and his domains, and the prince performed necessary services as a condition of his wealth and high status. If the prince levied taxes, this was largely seen as the prince seeking to enrich himself and his close associates, family members, and allies.

Is the King a Man or an Institution? 

At the time, Europeans had not yet fully developed the modern rationalization that tax revenues, once collected, were somehow the property of the “public” or held by the sovereign who functioned as a representative of “the people.” The evolution of this idea is described by Marco Bassani and Carlo Lottieri who note the that the civil government was not simply the ruler himself, but some sort of public institution. They write:

separation between the king as a person and the king as a function originated in the medieval age and immediately had some consequences for forms of ownership and resource extraction by the public apparatus.9 

Nonetheless, in most of Europe, it was not until the early modern period that national monarchs were able to fully establish themselves as the accepted head of a state organization that collected and spent taxes as part of a “common utility.” For most of that period, kings and princes were forced to largely rely on their own private funds and

“… For a long time, using [Ernst] Kantorowicz’s words, “the distinction between what pertains ad coronam and what may be held de rege” … was not crucial. Such a political order impeded a modern and strong presence of state power in society. When a ruler was basically a person and not a function or a role, it was almost impossible to build a sovereign order based on the supremacy of the state.10

Along these lines, Wolfe shows that one means of opposing taxation was to preserve a sharp distinction between the king’s property and everyone else’s. This helped to emphasize that the king did not represent a “public interest,” and thus the public’s wealth was not the king’s:

For the feudalists, a king’s property had to be delineated sharply from that of his people; when the king needed funds beyond his traditional revenues he had to request them from the French, both those living in the royal domain and those in the remaining fiefs.11

Another cultural foundation behind medieval opposition to taxation may have been a long-established aversion to taxation from the late Roman Empire when taxation was high but brought few benefits. This would have been especially true in the periphery of the old Empire where Roman tax officials, as late as the fifth century were strong enough to collect taxes, but the Roman state was not strong enough to actually protect farmers from criminals. As historian Paul Freedman has noted, for peasants, the shift from the Roman state to early feudalism not at all necessarily a step down from the late Roman Empire: “you weren’t worse off in the eighth century than you would have been in the fourth century,” Freedman says, “In fact, you might be better off because the taxation infrastructure wasn’t there” As the Roman bureaucrats disappeared from the lives of European peasants, “there was, in a way, more violence, but less state violence.” And the absence of Roman bureaucracy also meant the disappearance of countless Roman regulations that limited the freedom of peasants: “fewer rules, fewer repressions on the ability of ordinary people to do things like hunting or keeping their own produce or making arrangements among their own communities.”

In other words, the disappearance of the Roman state and Roman taxes (in the West) was hardly the end of the world for many Europeans, and this reality may have become engrained in European ideas about the alleged necessity of tax-financed states in later centuries.

Moreover, Chris Wickham notes that Roman taxes in the later days of the empire were not exactly well appreciated, writing that “Roman taxation was perceived as heavy, Complaints about its weight are endless; whole rhetorical systems were developed to characterize its oppressive nature.”12

Tax collectors in this period – the fifth century- were described as “tyrants” and “brigands.” These taxes were accompanied by “ferocious imperial laws” and the end result was “a world in which pretty much everybody, from the top to the bottom, was oppressed by the tax system.” Nor was the magnitude of the tax burden simply a matter of the Roman subjects’ imagination. Taxes were “genuinely high” under the Romans in the late empire, Wickham tells us, much of it imposed as a land tax on farmers.

The End of the Middle Ages and the Rise of Absolutism

While much of the anti-tax sentiment of the Middle Ages survived into the Renaissance—now called the “early modern period”—these ideas were slowly replaced by more modern ideas that laid the foundation for mercantilism and absolutism. As Murray Rothbard shows in his history of economic thought, Niccolò Machiavelli played an important role in this by de-Christianizing political theory and replacing it with amoral, consequentialist, technocratic thinking on the potential “benefits” of taxation. The morally privileged place of private property—recognized by Scholastics and many others of the Middle Ages—was reduced to merely one consideration among many. It was replaced by new theories, and under Bodin and other absolutists, taxes came to be seen as a means of forging a prosperous society through a strong state.

The absolutists, however, were unable to expunge from the minds of European taxpayers the notion that there remained a critical distinction between the king’s property—and thus the state’s property—and private property. It was perhaps Rousseau who dealt the greatest blow against the solicitous and resilient idea that the state and its taxes are not “ours.” With Rousseau, however—the most influential theorist inspiring the French Revolution—it could be said that everything the king or his state expropriated from the taxpayers remained “ours.” In the Rousseauean conception, everything the state does is a reflection of “the general will” and thus the distinction between property, tax, and state is essentially eliminated.

Yet, today, the common historical narrative on these matters tells us that it was the medieval mind that favored and actualized untrammeled state power while later proponents of absolutism, mercantilism, and a centralized state were somehow the ones who favored greater freedom. That version of history is problematic, to say the least.

Image credit: Medieval French manuscript illustration depicting three classes of medieval society: clergy, peasants, and the warrior class. Via Wikimedia.

—

1 Matin Wolfe, “French Views on Wealth and Taxes from the Middle Ages to the Old Regime,” The Journal of Economic History 26,No. 4 (Dec. 1966), p. 467-8.

2 Jacob Viner, Religious Thought and Economic Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978) p. 104-5.

3 Wolfe, “French Views,” p. 467.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid., p. 469-470.

6 Ibid., p. 469.

7 George Holmes, The Later Middle Ages, 1272-1485 (Edinburgh, UK: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd, 1962) p. 228.

8 Ibid.

9 Luigi Marco Bassani and Carlo Lottieri, “Taxation and Forced Labor: “The Two Bodies of the Citizen in Modern Political Theology,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 27, No. 1 (2023): 226.

10 Ibid.

11 Wolfe, “French Views,” p. 470.

12 See Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800, (Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 2005).

The post Why Taxes Were So Hated in the Middle Ages appeared first on LewRockwell.

In ancient Rome, interregnum was the term given to the period between stable governments when anything untoward might occur, and sometimes did – civil unrest, warfare between warlords, power vacuums and, finally, succession wars. But eventually the dust would settle and the victors, whoever they might be, would at some point restabilise the empire, often with a new map, showing the latest lines of geographic possession.

In 1929, the Italian Antonio Gramsci was in a fascist prison, writing about what he considered to be a new interregnum – a Europe that was tearing itself apart. He anticipated civil unrest, war between nations and repeated changes in the lines of geographic possession.

At that time, he was attributed as saying, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

And, of course, looking back from our vantage point in the twenty-first century, we have no difficulty in confirming that he was correct in his prognosis. The world war that followed brought forward the worst traits in mankind. The sociopaths of the world came centre-stage. By the time the dust had settled, tens of millions were dead.

What we do have difficulty with is recognizing that the same pattern is again with us. National leaders and their advisors are spoiling for war, building up weaponry, creating senseless proxy wars in other nations’ backyards and playing a dangerous game of “chicken” with other major powers.

This will not end well. It never does. Once the shoving-match has begun, it only escalates. At some point, whether it’s the false-flag assassination of an Archduke, as in World War I, or the false flag attack on Germany by Poland, as in World War II, we can always count on some excuse being created to justify diving headlong into war.

It’s also true that, when empires get into economic trouble that’s too far gone for any viable solution, a trick that’s always employed by political leaders to keep the citizens from removing them from their seats of power, is to start a war. A people will, if they believe their homeland is in peril, accept the “temporary” removal of their freedoms.

Even in the United States, the famed “Land of the Free,” political leaders have routinely imprisoned dissidents in times of warfare. People tend to get behind their leaders in wartime, no matter how undeserved that loyalty might be.

And so, now is the time of monsters, as Mr. Gramsci rightly stated. A time of uncertainty, when countries are in turmoil and would-be leaders are jostling for power with existing leaders. An interregnum.

Troubled times tend to bring out all the crazies – all the sociopathic-types that would find it hard to succeed in stable, prosperous times.

In such times, the average person becomes worried that things are not going to turn out well. That’s perfectly understandable. Unfortunately, most people lack both the imagination and the courage to cope with how the times are impacting their lives. They instead rely on others to provide a torch that might help them escape from the darkness.

Not surprising then, that every snake-oil salesman in town sees an opportunity to offer big promises – promises that he has neither the ability nor the inclination to fulfill.

At such times, the people of a country tend to become polarized, placing their faith in one political party or another, hoping that their party will “make the bad stuff go away.”

In the US we see, on the liberal side, promises for “free health care for all,” a guaranteed basic income, housing for those who cannot afford it, and an endless stream of promises that, if the government were to implement them all, they will not be able to pay for them, even with 100% taxation from those who presently pay tax.

On the conservative side, we see promises such as “Make America Great Again,” with tax rebates that do not rejuvenate the economy, breaks for firms that have expatriated, but do not fool them into returning, claims to cut budgets, only to increase them, and promises to eliminate debt, only to expand it.

To be sure, the problem begins at the top. But it doesn’t end there. It sifts down to the proletariat, who, unable to come up with constructive solutions, create their own monsters, trashing the shops and burning the cars of people who had no hand in creating the problem.

But surely this is just a one-off phase, in which the best and brightest are temporarily pushed offstage, but will soon return, yes?

Well, unfortunately, no. Historically, a period such as this one is followed by one of increased madness. Historically, the next step is societal breakdown. Riots, secessions and revolutions become commonplace, accompanied by economic collapse.

Out of these events come the worst monsters of all. It’s in the wake of such developments that the people of any country then turn away from those that made the empty promises and toward those who promise revenge against an ill-defined group who are characterized as having caused the problems.

That’s when the Robespierres, the Lenins, the Hitlers – the greatest monsters – are swept into power. They invariably deliver the same message – that they’ll seek out the aristocracy, the gentry, the patricians, and strip them of their positions and possessions.

Invariably the way that this shakes out is not that the average man rises up, taking his “fair share” of the spoils. Instead, the leaders take the spoils and the proletariat are reduced to an equality of poverty.

Our friend Mr. Gramsci found himself imprisoned by Benito Mussolini and died from illnesses incurred in prison. Unfortunately, his approach was to complain, but remain, as his country deteriorated around him. This proved, for him, to be the worst of choices.

And, so it is today.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post ‘Now Is the Time of Monsters’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

During the weeks ahead, I will be watching Israel and Iran like a hawk.  Prior to the 12 day war between Israel and Iran earlier this year, it was clear that something was up.  Now we are witnessing similar signs, and many experts are concerned that the very fragile ceasefire that was agreed to at the end of the 12 day war could soon collapse.  Iran is rebuilding their nuclear sites and is telling western countries that there will be no more negotiations.  On the other side, the U.S. and Israel have both pledged that Iran will not be allowed to rebuild their nuclear program.  In fact, on Sunday President Trump publicly threatened to bomb Iran again…

“They were going to have a nuclear weapon within a month,” Trump said. “And now they can start the operation all over again, but I hope they don’t because we’ll have to take care of that too if they do, I let them know that. You want to do that, it’s fine, but we’re going to take care of that and we’re not going to wait so long.”

Of course President Trump knows very well that Iranian officials have repeatedly stated that they will never give up their nuclear program, and satellite images prove that Iran has been conducting construction work at two very important enrichment facilities…

Three months after US and Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, new satellite images show signs of construction work at two of its key enrichment facilities.

An analysis of high-resolution satellite imagery captured by Maxar Technologies on 18 September reveals work on a new perimeter and tunnel south of the Natanz enrichment complex.

Multiple construction vehicles are visible in an area south of the complex while digging work appears to be underway. Images also show work to extend a perimeter around that same area.

The Iranians responded to Trump’s threat of more bombing on Monday.

They called the U.S. “a law-breaking country”, and they made it clear that there will be no negotiations…

Iran’s foreign ministry on Monday branded the United States a “law-breaking” country, rejecting any prospect of talks with Washington after US President Donald Trump warned he would again bomb Iran if it resumes nuclear activities.

Trump’s public remarks amounted to an admission of “a criminal and illegal act” that only reinforced America’s image as a violator of international law, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Esmail Baghaei said during his weekly briefing.

“It will be clear to the international community and to the Iranian nation that the United States is a law-breaking country,” Baghaei added. “We have no plan for negotiations.”

The Iranians have clearly made their choice.

So how long will Trump wait before he pulls the trigger again?

We were surprised by Trump’s timing during the 12 day war, and we may be surprised the next time it happens too.

If we bomb Iran, one of the first places that Iran will hit will be our base in Qatar.

Interestingly, President Trump recently signed an order that makes any attack on Qatar a “threat to the peace and security of the United States”…

President Donald Trump signed an order Monday offering a U.S. guarantee for Qatar’s security — a significant commitment for the rising non-NATO Arab ally.

“The United States shall regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty, or critical infrastructure of the State of Qatar as a threat to the peace and security of the United States,” the order, made public Wednesday, read in no uncertain terms.

“In the event of such an attack, the United States shall take all lawful and appropriate measures — including diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military — to defend the interests of the United States and of the State of Qatar and to restore peace and stability.”

Recently, the U.S. military sent a whole bunch of air tankers to our base in Qatar, and that created quite a stir.

Because the last time we witnessed a deployment of air tankers of this magnitude, Iran got bombed…

Behnam Taleblu, senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tells the Daily Mail, while ‘correlation is not causation’, he can’t help but think of the last time there was a mass tanker deployment by the United States.

‘Soon after that something went boom in the Middle East. Critically, in Operation Midnight Hammer, the Trump administration executed a decoy or deception effort to mask the flight of the B-2 bombers to Iran,’ Taleblu said, emphasizing that he is the only US president in two decades to deploy over military force against Iranian nuclear facilities.

‘Big military movements on his watch are something to keep an eye on,’ Taleblu added.

Of course it is also possible that those tankers may have been deployed to assist Israel in new strikes against Iran.

As I discussed in a previous article, Iranian forces have already been put on high alert because Iranian leaders are extremely concerned that new attacks could happen at any moment.

And the Institute for the Study of War has come to the conclusion that those running Iran “believe that the ceasefire with Israel will collapse”…

Officials in Iran believe that the ceasefire with Israel will collapse and that conflict will resume in the future, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

The assessment by the Washington, DC think tank outlined how Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SCNC) had directed military and civilian officials to designate successors in the event of leadership disruption to ensure continuation in the event of war.

If at some point the Iranians are convinced that an Israeli strike is imminent, could they actually choose to strike first in order to get the upper hand?

Israeli politician Avigdor Liberman is convinced that this is the case, and he is urging Israeli citizens to “be careful and close to protected spaces” during Sukkot…

He urged Israelis to celebrate cautiously on the coming Sukkot, which starts Monday night and lasts for seven days: “Spend time with family and friends, but be careful and close to protected spaces.”

This year, the first day of Sukkot runs from the evening of October 6th to the evening of October 7th.

Needless to say, October 7th is a very significant date for Israel.

Two years ago, the war in the Middle East started when Hamas terrorists came pouring across the border.

It looks like the conflict in Gaza may be wrapping up, but things with Iran are a long way from being resolved.

Before Israeli leaders sign a comprehensive Middle East peace agreement, they want the threat that Iran poses to be completely neutralized.

So I think that we will soon see major events occur in the Middle East, and when that happens the entire globe will be shocked.

Reprinted with permission from The Economic Collapse.

The post Trump Is Threatening To Bomb Iran Again, But Israel May Beat Him To It appeared first on LewRockwell.

Everything before October 7 explains why October 7 happened, and so does everything that’s happened since.

Look at what happened before October 7 and you’ll see year after year of murder, oppression and abuse.

Look at everything that’s happened since October 7 and you’ll understand the kind of sadistic, psychopathic regime the Palestinians have been living under this entire time.

Israel supporters don’t want you looking at what happened before October 7, and they don’t want you looking at anything that’s happened since. They just want you to pretend history began and ended with a bunch of Hitlerite savages attacking innocent Jews for no reason.

Never forget October 7th 2023, that fateful day when Israelis were brutally massacred by Israeli tanks and Israeli helicopters and Israeli drones and Israeli soldiers and Israeli bullets, and also by Hamas a bit. pic.twitter.com/bwjdARVQ0p

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 7, 2025

And they don’t even want you looking at the day of October 7 too closely, either. Looking too closely at the events of that day bring up inconvenient questions about the Hannibal Directive and what percentage of the death toll was actually caused by the IDF firing on their own people. Inconvenient questions about the suspicious stock trading in the lead-up to the attack and the mountains upon mountains upon mountains of evidence that high-level Israeli officials allowed the attack to proceed undefended in order to advance the genocidal land grab we’re seeing advanced now.

They only want you looking at the parts of October 7 that make Israel look like an innocent little lamb who was attacked completely out of the blue and had no choice but to reluctantly respond with military force.

Forget the scorched earth incineration of the Gaza Strip.

Forget the bombed-out hospitals and methodically dismantled healthcare system.

Forget the hundreds upon hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza who’ve been deliberately starved to death.

Forget the fact that every relevant human rights institution on earth has determined that Israel is committing genocide, and that zero comparable humanitarian institutions have said it isn’t.

Forget the fact that human rights experts had been describing Gaza as a giant concentration camp or open-air prison for years prior to October 7.

Forget the fact that Israel had been routinely murdering Palestinian children and other civilians in the months prior to the Hamas attack.

Don’t look at any of that stuff. Just look at the stuff that makes Israel look like the victim.

That’s the story, anyway. Luckily, fewer and fewer people are buying into it.

The longer this genocide goes on for, the more the world has come to view October 7 as Israel reaping what it had long been sowing.

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The post Everything Before and After October 7 Explains Why October 7 Happened appeared first on LewRockwell.