Lew Rockwell Institute

Thanks, John Frahm.

Activist Post

 

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Thanks, Gail Appel.

See here.

 

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Thanks, Ginny Garner.

Infowars

 

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Ginny Garner wrote:

Lew,

Catholic Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, exposed the censorship industrial complex constructed under the Biden regime. This complex is comprised of federal bureaucrats, academics, Big Tech, journalists, universities, activists and NGOs. I did not watch the entire hearing but am hoping President Trump’s deportation campaign against those guilty of “antisemitic speech” was discussed

See here.

 

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Two Excellent Cinema Classics Which Explore Poet Rudyard Kipling’s Relationship with British Imperialism and Freemasonry. The Films are Based on Famous Works by Kipling and Feature Actors Portraying Him.

The Man Who Would be King
https://m.ok.ru/video/1104943647412
The Man Who Would Be King (1975) Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer

The film’s director John Huston was the son of actor Walter Huston who portrayed arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes in the 1936 epic Rhodes of Africa.

Kipling, known as the “Poet of the Empire,” was a close admirer and friend of Cecil Rhodes, a prominent figure in the British Empire and founder of the Rhodes Trust and the Rhodes Scholarship. Both were noted Freemasons. Kipling served as a Trustee of the Rhodes Trust.

Two British former soldiers decide to set themselves up as kings in Kafiristan, a land where no white man has set foot since Alexander the Great.

Gunga Din
https://tubitv.com/movies/100021232/gunga-din
Starring: Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks Jr,.Sam Jaffe, Eduardo Ciannelli, and Joan Fontaine

Helped by their valiant water carrier, three British soldiers face off against a Thuggee religious cult on a dangerous mission in 1880s India.

Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717-1927, by Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs

They built some of the first communal structures on the empire’s frontiers. The empire’s most powerful proconsuls sought entrance into their lodges. Their public rituals drew dense crowds from Montreal to Madras. The Ancient Free and Accepted Masons were quintessential builders of empire, argues Jessica Harland-Jacobs. In this first study of the relationship between Freemasonry and British imperialism, Harland-Jacobs takes readers on a journey across two centuries and five continents, demonstrating that from the moment it left Britain’s shores, Freemasonry proved central to the building and cohesion of the British Empire.

The organization formally emerged in 1717 as a fraternity identified with the ideals of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, such as universal brotherhood, sociability, tolerance, and benevolence. As Freemasonry spread to Europe, the Americas, Asia, Australasia, and Africa, the group’s claims of cosmopolitan brotherhood were put to the test. Harland-Jacobs examines the brotherhood’s role in diverse colonial settings and the impact of the empire on the brotherhood; in the process, she addresses issues of globalization, supranational identities, imperial power, fraternalism, and masculinity. By tracking an important, identifiable institution across the wide chronological and geographical expanse of the British Empire, Builders of Empire makes a significant contribution to transnational history as well as the history of the Freemasons and imperial Britain.

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Thanks, David Martin.

This is the Mr Rogers video we just played. Hilarious! https://t.co/IJR7V8g4AR

— Gary McNamara (@garyredeye1) March 27, 2025

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Click Here:

Ben Bartee

 

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Writes Jerome Barber:

Writes 6She has the number of Dark MAGA, Curtis Yarvin and the Dark Enlightenment, JD Vance, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk – and their collective plans to end democracy and install a Monarch/CEO. Sounds like a revolution, no?

See here.

 

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Thanks, W. T. White.

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The history of the welfare state is the history of the state’s savage war of aggrandizement and seizure of authority against civil society.

Whether in Germany, in the United Kingdom, in Australia, in Canada, in Scandinavia, or in the United States, the coercive state systematically destroyed the “voluntary sector” of civil society and those intermediary institutions that protected the individual from the direct contact and control by the state [much as the Church did for nearly all of the previous two millennia].

Within the short space of two or three decades the protective sphere covered by workingmen’s social and other fraternal duties had been stripped to nothing more than drinking associations, with all other matters taken over by the state apparatus. Henceforth, the workingman and much of the middle class reported directly to the bureaucracy of the state’s intrusive regime.

Everything they did was in some way or another regulated, regimented and overseen by the state.

The dire effects of this calculated collectivism was malevolence not benevolence, aggression not altruism, genocide not generosity. Highly recommended as a beginning scholarly examination of this topic is the online Mises Institute article by economist/historian Murray N. Rothbard, Origins of the Welfare State in America.

1. The Origin of the Welfare State in England and Germany, 1850-1914: Social Policies Compared, by E. P. Hennock

Hennock examines the array of independent and only loosely connected Friendly Society health and unemployment [social insurance] regime throughout Britain & Wales. He sees that this motley ‘organization’ of free & voluntary organizations that dealt amazingly well with the delivery of social, medical, or burial services should have been ‘rationalized,’ centralized, & brought under state control.

2. British Social Reform and German Precedents: The Case of Social Insurance 1880-1914, by E. P. Hennock

The title pretty much sums up the contents of this very informative and useful study. The flow of ideas and policies from Germany to England are as important as the slightly later flow of those ideas and policies (as modified by the Brits) from the UK to America. This book also serves, in part, as a foundation and as an introduction to Hennock’s later book, above.

3. No Wealth but Life: Welfare Economics and the Welfare State in Britain, 1880-1945, by Roger E. Backhouse

This is an extraordinary collection; all of the essays are extremely good and helpful towards understanding the first principles and the initial foundation of the welfare state in the UK.

4. Citizen, State, and Social Welfare in Britain 1830-1990, by Geoffrey B. A. M. Finlayson

The state in the UK systematically destroyed the ‘voluntary sector’ and the intermediary institutions that protected the individual from the direct contact and control by the state. Within two or three decades the sphere covered by workingmen’ social and other fraternal duties had been stripped to nothing more than drinking associations.

5. The British Political Tradition: The Rise of Collectivism, by W. H. Greenleaf

This volume establishes the central theme that the most important feature of British political life since the nineteenth century has been the extension of the role of government at all levels. Part of an outstanding three part series.

6. The Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State (Oxford Handbooks), by Francis G. Castles

Described as the authoritative and definitive guide to the contemporary welfare state, consisting of nearly fifty newly-written chapters, a broad range of the world’s leading scholars offer a comprehensive account of the modern welfare state. Divided into eight sections, it opens with three chapters that evaluate the philosophical case for (and against) the welfare state.

7. The Welfare State Reader, by Christopher Pierson

The Welfare State Reader has rapidly established itself as a vital source of outstanding original research.

8. The Servile State, by Hilaire Belloc

Belloc famously predicted the rise of the ‘Servile State,’ along the lines adopted by Parliament as the Welfare State.

9. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age, by Daniel T. Rodgers

While this is a sweeping and substantial study of how the ideas that ultimately created the social welfare state were transferred back and forth between England and the United States, it is an ultimately flawed analysis.

10. Before Beveridge – Welfare Before the Welfare State, (Choice in Welfare 47) by David A. Green

These are three works by David A. Greene (items #10, 11 and 12) which must read together in order to get a properly balanced account of the heyday of the mutual society system of social and medical insurance on the one hand, and on the other hand, the complete strangulation of civil society by the British state.

11. Reinventing Civil Society: Rediscovery of Welfare without Politics (Choice in Welfare), by David G. Green 12. Mutual Aid or Welfare State?: Australia’s Friendly Societies, by David G. Green 13. From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967, by David T. Beito

Just as David Green’s studies above are mainly about the UK, Beito’s study is about the similar story in America. This is a deep and meticulous scholarly study of America’s mutual aid societies and all of the social insurance sorts of personal distresses and misfortunes that often afflicted the workingman and the middle classes [i.e., civil society].

14. Imperialism and social reform: English social-imperial thought 1895-1914, by Bernard Semmel (Studies in society [5]), by Bernard Semmel

The spawning of the welfare state and the warfare state went hand in hand. In particular note the pivotal role of the Fabian Society and race imperialist Viscount Alfred Milner, the force behind Cecil Rhodes’s Round Table movement to consolidate the British Empire (see Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope, and The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden).

15. Fabianism and the Empire A Manifesto by the Fabian Society, by Bernard Shaw

Fabian socialists such as George Bernard Shaw supported both the welfare and warfare state as essential to the survival of the British Empire. It was called “Social Imperialism. Shaw was a prominent eugenicist and imperialist.

16. The British Socialist Ill-Fare State; an Examination of Its Political, Social, Moral, and Economic Consequences, by Cecil Palmer

Palmer details how the Fabian-led British socialists of the Labor Party were destroying Great Britain.

17. The Higher Circles, by G. William Domhoff

Domhoff details the origins of the welfare-warfare state from Otto von Bismarck to Richard T. Ely to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

18. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government, by Robert Higgs

Higgs charts the accelerated growth and development of the welfare-warfare state in war and peace during the 20th century.

19. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition by Charles A Murray

Murray relentlessly destroys the empirical and ideological basis of the modern welfare state

20. The Welfare State We’re in, by James Bartholomew

This is by far the best book on England’s welfare state. It describes how the welfare system operates, day to day, how it punishes both the young and the elderly just for trying to get ahead, or just trying to keep one’s head above water.

21. Welfare As We Knew It: A Political History of the American Welfare State, by Charles Noble

22. Is the Welfare State Justified? by Daniel Shapiro

In this book, Daniel Shapiro argues that the dominant positions in contemporary political philosophy – egalitarianism, positive rights theory, communitarianism, and many forms of liberalism – should converge in a rejection of central welfare state institutions.

23. Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State, by Sheldon Richman

Richman further details the origins of the welfare state in Bismarck’s Prussia and antebellum Civil War pensions in America.

24. A Life of One’s Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State, by David Kelley

The welfare state rests on the assumption that people have rights to food, shelter, health care, retirement income, and other goods provided by the government. Kelley examines the historical origins of that assumption, and the rationale used to support it today.

25. From Poor Law to Welfare State, 6th Edition: A History of Social Welfare in America, by Walter I. Trattner

26. From Warfare State to Welfare State: World War I, Compensatory State Building, and the Limits of the Modern Order, by Marc Allen Eisner

Eisner further outlines the tremendous impact and rationale World War I ‘war collectivism’ played in ushering in FDR’s New Deal welfare state. (see Murray N. Rothbard’s two pivotal essays, ‘War Collectivism in World War I,’ and ‘World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals.’ Both available online.)

27. Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, by Theodore Dalrymple

Dalrymple’s key insight in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims. This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives.

28. Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, by Frances Fox Piven

Marshaling a vast array of research, Piven and Cloward persuasively demonstrate how public relief has been used to avert civil chaos during economic downturns and to exert pressure on the work force during periods of stability.

29. Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, by Jonah Goldberg

Critics such as David Gordon have pointed out its factual flaws in interpretation but Goldberg gets 90% of it brilliantly correct. Not a scholarly treatise but a fast-paced polemic showing the common ideological roots of American progressivism and European fascism, a legacy continuing with today’s welfare-warfare state.

30. As We Go Marching, by John T. Flynn

Flynn’s brilliant expose of the fascist origins of FDR’s New Deal, and its close ideological relationship to Mussolini’s and Hitler’s regimes.

31. Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

Schivelbusch dares compare the collectivist ideology and pragmatic public policy applications of Roosevelt’s New Deal, Mussolini’s Corporate State, and Hitler’s National Socialist Third Reich. Excellent companion volume to Flynn’s As We Go Marching above.

32. Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, by Götz Aly

In this groundbreaking book, historian Götz Aly addresses one of modern history’s greatest conundrums: How did Hitler win the allegiance of ordinary Germans? The answer is as shocking as it is persuasive: by engaging in a campaign of theft on an almost unimaginable scale – and by channeling the proceeds into generous social programs – Hitler literally ‘bought’ his people’s consent.

33. The Third Reich: A New History, by Michael Burleigh

Excellent in documenting the social welfare component of National Socialist Germany under Hitler.

34. The New Totalitarians, by Roland Huntford

Huntsford dissects the fascist model of the social welfare state of Sweden.

35. War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition, by Edwin Black

Eugenics was not new in the Progressive Era, but acquired impetus with the advent of a more expansive government. Expansion of state coercion meant that it became possible to have not only eugenic thought, but also eugenic practice. Millions of ‘the unfit’ were targeted for sterilization and elimination. Weimar and National Socialist Germany looked to the US as a model.

36. Ex America: The 50th Anniversary of the People’s Pottage, by Garet Garrett

Garrett’s classic expose’ of the destructive nature of the welfare-warfare state under presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

37. The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents – The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 2), by F. A. Hayek

Originally published in 1944, this book was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would lead not to a utopia but to the horrors of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

38. The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, by David A. Stockman

A searing look at Washington’s craven response to the recent myriad of financial crises and fiscal cliffs. It counters conventional wisdom with an eighty-year revisionist history of how the American state – especially the Federal Reserve – has fallen prey to the politics of crony capitalism and the ideologies of fiscal stimulus, monetary central planning, and financial bailouts.

39. Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse, by Thomas E. Woods

America is on the brink of financial collapse. Decades of political overpromising and underfunding have created a wave of debt that could swamp our already feeble economy. And the politicians’ favorite tricks – raising taxes, borrowing from foreign governments, and printing more money – will only make it worse. Only one thing might save us: Roll back the government.

40. The Progressive Era, by Murray N. Rothbard

And I saved the best authoritative book for last.

“Rothbard’s posthumous masterpiece is the definitive book on the Progressives. It will soon be the must read study of this dreadful time in our past.”— From the Foreword by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, “The current relationship between the modern state and the economy has its roots in the Progressive Era.”— From the Introduction by Patrick Newman. “Progressivism brought the triumph of institutionalized racism, the disfranchising of blacks in the South, the cutting off of immigration, the building up of trade unions by the federal government into a tripartite big government, big business, big unions alliance, the glorifying of military virtues and conscription, and a drive for American expansion abroad. In short, the Progressive Era ushered the modern American politico-economic system into being.”— From the Preface by Murray N. Rothbard.

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Tucker Carlson

@TuckerCarlson
Obituary for my father.

Richard Warner Carlson died at 84 on March 24, 2025 at home in Boca Grande, Florida after six weeks of illness. He refused all painkillers to the end and left this world with dignity and clarity, holding the hands of his children with his dogs at his feet.

He was born February 10, 1941 at Massachusetts General Hospital to a 15-year-old Swedish-speaking girl and placed in the Home for Little Wanderers in Boston, where he developed rickets from malnutrition. His legs were bent for the rest of his life. After years in foster homes, he was placed with the Carlson family in Norwood, Mass. His adoptive father, a tannery manager, died when he was 12 and he stopped attending school regularly. At 17, he was jailed for car theft, thrown out of high school for the second time, and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps.

In 1962, in search of adventure, he drove to California. He spent a year as a merchant seaman on the SS Washington Bear, transporting cargo to ports in the Orient, and then became a reporter. Over the next decade, he was a copy boy at the LA Times, a wire service reporter for UPI and an investigative reporter and anchor for ABC News, covering the upheaval of the period. He knew virtually every compelling figure of the time, including Jim Jones, Patty Hearst, Eric Hoffer, Jerry Garcia, as well as Mafia leaders and members of the Manson Family. In 1965, he was badly injured reporting from the Watts riots in Los Angeles.

By 1975, he was married with two small boys, when his wife departed for Europe and didn’t return. He threw himself into raising his boys, whom he often brought with him on reporting trips. At home, he educated them during three-hour dinners on topics that ranged from the French Revolution to Bolshevik Russia, PG Wodehouse, the history of the American Indian and, always, the eternal and unchanging nature of people. He was a free thinker and a compulsive book reader, including at red lights. He left a library of thousands of books, most dog-eared and filled with marginalia. His reading and life experiences convinced him that God is real. He had an outlaw spirit tempered by decency.

In 1979, he married the love of his life, Patricia Swanson. They were together for 44 years, all of them happy. She died sixteen months before he did and he mourned her every day.

In 1985, he moved to Washington to work for the Reagan Administration. He spent five years as the director of the Voice of America, and then moved to the Seychelles as the US ambassador. In 1992, he became the CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and later ran a division of King World television.

The last 25 years of his life were spent in work whose details were never completely clear to his family, but that was clearly interesting. He worked in dozens of countries and breakaway republics around the world, and was involved in countless intrigues. He knew a number of colorful national leaders, including Rafic Hariri of Lebanon, Aslan Abashidze of Adjara, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, and whomever runs Somaliland. He was a fundamentally nonjudgmental person who was impossible to shock, and he described them all with amused affection.

He spoke to his sons every day and had lunch with them once a week for thirty years at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, always prefaced by a dice game. Throughout his life he fervently loved dogs.

Richard W. Carlson is survived by his sons, Tucker and Buckley, his beloved daughter-in-law Susie, and five grandchildren. He was the toughest human being anyone in his family ever knew, and also the kindest and most loyal. RIP.

America’s Untold Stories – Who is Dick Carlson?

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Jerome Barber writes:

Excellent post (as always) by James Corbett.

 

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Thanks, Gail Appel.

Greg Lund.

 

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Rhodes of Africa
The 1937 film starring Walter Huston. It is the story of Cecil John Rhodes and the founding of Rhodesia.

Cecil Rhodes, by Apollon Davidson
A Marxist interpretation of the life and legacy of Cecil John Rhodes

Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717-1927, by Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs

They built some of the first communal structures on the empire’s frontiers. The empire’s most powerful proconsuls sought entrance into their lodges. Their public rituals drew dense crowds from Montreal to Madras. The Ancient Free and Accepted Masons were quintessential builders of empire, argues Jessica Harland-Jacobs. In this first study of the relationship between Freemasonry and British imperialism, Harland-Jacobs takes readers on a journey across two centuries and five continents, demonstrating that from the moment it left Britain’s shores, Freemasonry proved central to the building and cohesion of the British Empire.

The organization formally emerged in 1717 as a fraternity identified with the ideals of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, such as universal brotherhood, sociability, tolerance, and benevolence. As Freemasonry spread to Europe, the Americas, Asia, Australasia, and Africa, the group’s claims of cosmopolitan brotherhood were put to the test. Harland-Jacobs examines the brotherhood’s role in diverse colonial settings and the impact of the empire on the brotherhood; in the process, she addresses issues of globalization, supranational identities, imperial power, fraternalism, and masculinity. By tracking an important, identifiable institution across the wide chronological and geographical expanse of the British Empire, Builders of Empire makes a significant contribution to transnational history as well as the history of the Freemasons and imperial Britain.

Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism, by Philip J. Stern

“Brilliant, ambitious, and often surprising. A remarkable contribution to the current global debate about empire.” ―William Dalrymple, author of The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

“Remarkable…The richness of detail and evidence that Stern…brings to his subject is [new]―as is the lucidity with which he organizes his material over six long chapters that stretch from the mid-16th century almost to the present.” ―Linda Colley, Financial Times

“[A] commanding history of British corporate imperialism.” ―Michael Ledger-Lomas, London Review of Books

Across four centuries and multiple continents, British colonialism was above all the business of corporations. Corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. The corporation was well-suited to overseas expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because, like empire itself, it was an elusive contradiction: public and private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous; centralized and diffuse; immortal and precarious; national and cosmopolitan―a legal fiction with very real power.

Breaking from traditional histories in which corporations take a supporting role by doing the dirty work of sovereign states in exchange for commercial monopolies, Philip Stern argues that corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration. And, as Empire, Incorporated makes clear, colonialism’s legacies continue to raise questions about corporate power that are just as relevant today as they were 400 years ago.

Challenging conventional wisdom about where power is held on a global scale, Stern complicates the supposedly firm distinction between private enterprise and the state, offering a new history of the British Empire, as well as a new history of the corporation.

Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, by Niall Ferguson

A bestselling historian shows how the British Empire created the modern world, in a book lauded as “a rattling good tale” (Wall Street Journal) and “popular history at its best” (Washington Post)

The British Empire was the largest in all history: the nearest thing to global domination ever achieved. The world we know today is in large measure the product of Britain’s Age of Empire. The global spread of capitalism, telecommunications, the English language, and institutions of representative government — all these can be traced back to the extraordinary expansion of Britain’s economy, population and culture from the seventeenth century until the mid-twentieth. On a vast and vividly colored canvas, Empire shows how the British Empire acted as midwife to modernity.

Displaying the originality and rigor that have made Niall Ferguson one of the world’s foremost historians, Empire is a dazzling tour de force — a remarkable reappraisal of the prizes and pitfalls of global empire.

The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook, by Niall Ferguson

The instant New York Times bestseller.

A brilliant recasting of the turning points in world history, including the one we’re living through, as a collision between old power hierarchies and new social networks.

“Captivating and compelling.” —The New York Times

“Niall Ferguson has again written a brilliant book…In 400 pages you will have restocked your mind. Do it.” —The Wall Street Journal

“The Square and the Tower, in addition to being provocative history, may prove to be a bellwether work of the Internet Age.” —Christian Science Monitor

“Most history is hierarchical: it’s about popes, presidents, and prime ministers. But what if that’s simply because hierarchies create the historical archives? What if we are missing equally powerful but less visible networks-leaving them to the conspiracy theorists, with their dreams of all-powerful Illuminati? The twenty-first century has been hailed as the Networked Age. But in The Square and the Tower Niall Ferguson argues that social networks are nothing new. From the printers and preachers who made the Reformation to the freemasons who led the American Revolution, it was the networkers who disrupted the old order of popes and kings. Far from being novel, our era is the Second Networked Age, with the personal computer in the role of the printing press. Those looking forward to a utopia of interconnected ‘netizens’ may therefore be disappointed. For networks are prone to clustering, contagions, and even outages. And the conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries already have unnerving parallels today, in the time of Facebook, Islamic State and Trumpworld.”–

The post Cecil Rhodes, Imperialist, Freemason, and the Anglo-American Establishment appeared first on LewRockwell.

In discussions surrounding of the world’s monetary systems today there is usually one thing almost everyone can agree on: that money should be controlled by the organizations we call “states” or “sovereign states.” Nowadays when we say “the US dollar” we mean the currency issued by the US government. When we say “the British pound” we mean the money issued by the regime of the United Kingdom.

This assumed need to have state-issued money has not always been the reality, of course. Indeed, the history of the rise of the state is a history replete with efforts by states to replace private-sector money with state-controlled money.

The reasons for this are numerous. Control of the money supply—usually complemented by intervention in the financial sector—allows states much more flexibility in expanding state spending and state borrowing. Perhaps most importantly, this allows states to spend prodigiously in times of war and other “emergencies.”

As we will see, this struggle between the state and private finance has been a long one. It took many centuries for regimes to secure the sort of legitimacy and regulatory power necessary to claim a monopoly over money. And even today, states are still somewhat constrained by the realities of international competition between currencies. They are also constrained by the continued existence of quasi monies that function as stores of value, such as gold, silver, and cryptocurrencies. Yet it is impossible to deny that the state has made enormous gains in recent centuries when it comes to taking control of money.

The order of these events also reminds us of another important aspect of states and money: the rise of states was not conditional on kings and princes seizing control of the production and regulation of money. Rather, the causation runs in the other direction: as states became more powerful, they used that power to also take control of money.

Early Efforts to Control the Money Supply

In the ancient world, the despotic empires of old—under which we could include the Roman Empire—were careful to mint their own money and to control whatever primitive “financial systems” existed. The Romans famously devalued their currency for long periods of time—most notably under Diocletian—leading to the ruin of many Roman citizens.

According to David Glasner, the “prerogative of the sovereign over the coinage was preserved after the fall of Rome.”1  But this was only in theory. The civil governments of this period were far too weak to enforce a monopoly on money. Martin van Creveld writes, “Given the decentralized nature of the political system and its instability, European Rulers during the Middle Ages were generally in no position to imitate their oriental counterparts” in the Persian, Mongol, and Chinese empires.2

Moreover, there wasn’t that much money to go around in Western Europe. Coins were often in short supply, and the agrarian nature of Western Europe meant much trade was done through bartering.

That began to change in the later Middle Ages as Europe urbanized and began to produce an increasing agricultural surplus. Driven largely by Italian bankers who set up “branch offices” in France, Spain, and the Low Countries, a financial system took shape which included the production of both coins and banknotes.

Yet the monetary system was dominated by the private sector, and Van Creveld reminds us that a sizable amount of money in this period

was produced not by the slowly emerging state but by private institutions. Before 1700, attempts to develop credit systems succeeded only in this places where private banking and commerce were so strong as to virtually exclude royal authority; in other words where merchants were the government…. Common wisdom held that, whereas merchants could be trusted with money, kings could not. Concentrating both economic and coercive power in their own hands, all too often they used it either to debase the coinage or to seize their subjects’ treasure.3

The kings of Europe sought to control the money nonetheless. One of the earliest meaningful attempts materialized in England, where monarchs early on developed a more centralized and cohesive national regime. Thus, after the early date of 1222 in England, according to John Munro, “money-changing and trade in bullion was a strictly enforced royal monopoly exercised by the Royal Exchanger.”4 Enforcement consisted of government officials engaged in acts designed to, as Munro says, “suppress private trade in precious metals, to purchase or confiscate foreign coins, and to deliver them to the Tower of London mint for recoinage.”5

It’s unclear how well this was enforced, but such concerted efforts at national regulation were far more haphazard in much of Europe.

For example, the French state—the largest and most centralized state on the Continent, sought in earnest to take control of the money supply by the sixteenth century. The results were mixed. Efforts to hammer together a national monetary regime began in the late Middle Ages, yet “France was not unified monetarily. Silver circulated in the west after the middle of the sixteenth century—gold coin before—and copper in the east, infiltrating from Germany.”6

In practice, national kings needed to buy off uncooperative nobles with monopoly privileges, rights to tax, and the sale of titles. Kings relied on manpower supplied by nobles to carry out royal prerogatives. As late as the sixteenth century, although, as Charles Kindleberger notes,

in principle, only the king has the right to coin precious metals, in practice he farmed out this privilege, as was also the case in the exploitation of the royal domain and tax collection, because kings, apart from Prussia, had only limited bureaucratic staff. Achieving a central monopoly of the coinage took two centuries. Moreover national borders were porous, and foreign coins circulated freely. A French edict of1557 counted 190 coins of different sovereigns in use in France.7

The lack of national monetary monopolies in most cases did not stop nascent European states from engaging in two centuries of state building. By the sixteenth century, France was already building an absolutist state even in the midst of ongoing currency competition. By the mid-seventeenth century, of course, the state had come into its own, with absolutism gaining ground in France, Spain, Sweden, and other parts of the Continent. In England—although the Stuarts failed to achieve their much-desired absolute monarchy—the state progressed far in the direction of a centralized, consolidated state during this period. Indeed, by the mid-seventeenth century, Europe’s Thirty Years’ War—what might be called Western Europe’s first era of “total war,” ended with the consolidation of the state system throughout Western Europe.

Indeed, war and state building—two things that were often one and the same—drove efforts to build government revenues through debasements of the coinage. It was war with Scotland that drove Henry VIII to begin a multiyear period of debasing the currency in 1542, which continued into the reign of Edward VI. War drove other monarchs to similar ends, and on the Continent Charles V devalued the gold taler in 1551. In the seventeenth century, European monarchs engaged in “progressive debasement … in anticipation of the Thirty Years’ War.”8 Ultimately, Kindleberger concludes,  “Many princes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did a roaring business in currency depreciation.”9

The Effects of Continued Monetary Competition

Spain, France, and other rising states of the period accomplished all this without establishing true monopolies over the money supply, and currency competition limited what states could get away with. Even if national states had been able to solidify de jure monopoly control of money within their own borders, the sovereign’s money still faced competition from currencies in neighboring states and principalities. Just as dozens of different types of coins circulated within France, it was always possible for merchants, financiers, and more mobile classes of individuals to move their wealth in such a way as to avoid using the more heavily devalued currencies.

Thus, monarchs were cognizant of the risks that devaluation brought. “Too much” debasement of the currency could cause merchants, and even residents, to flee to competing imported or black-market currencies. Practical limitations controlled how much a regime could debase its currency. Thus, when Henry VIII began his campaign of debasement, he combined it with a broader wartime policy of confiscating goods and church property, and compelling loans.10

In the seventeenth century, the ability to escape debased national currencies was further facilitated by the advent of the Bank of Amsterdam. Established by the City of Amsterdam in 1609, the bank—technically a “government bank”—calculated the values of the “no fewer than 341 silver and 505 golden coins” circulating in the Dutch Republic. The bank helped merchants identify which coins were “good” and which were debased.11 The bank then provided credit based on coins’ “real value” regardless of the coins’ claimed nominal values. The bank issued coins known as bank guilders which became the “the world’s most used currency at the time,” or perhaps even a “reserve currency” of a similar status to the US dollar today.12 This was not due to any moral righteousness on the part of Dutch politicians. It is likely that the Dutch regime would have also preferred to manipulate its own currency for gain. But the smallness of the Dutch Republic and its reliance on foreign trade greatly limited the regime in this regard. Thus, the Dutch were essentially forced to be become a reliable, competitive financial center in order to compete with larger states.

Asserting State Control over the Private Banks

Control of the coinage was only one aspect of states’ fights to control money.

After all, much of the money being handled by Europe’s banks during this period was in the form of “bills of exchange,” which facilitated the movement of funds across Europe without the need for physically moving metallic money. These bills began to function as money as well, and even as states were asserting greater control over coinage in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, “private institutions were thus beginning to develop paper money.”13  According to Kindleberger,

Begun early in the thirteenth century, the functions of the bill of exchange expanded in the sixteenth century as it became successively assignable, transferable, negotiable, and from the 1540s, discountable, bridging time and space, serving as private money as distinct from specie[,] which was the money of the prince.14

Banks proved to be essential, providing access to money in many cases, since even as late as the eighteenth century in many places, coinage was in short supply. These shortages may have been especially acute where wage work had replaced subsistence farming and agricultural barter. The new breed of employers needed money of various types.15  Bank-created paper money thus served an important role in providing a medium of exchange when coins were either unreliable or unavailable.

This diminished the dependence on the sovereign’s coinage, and princes came to view these banks as troublesome competitors. Moreover, banks—unlike ordinary consumers—had the knowledge and the means to more carefully evaluate regime money and to accept devalued coins only at a discount.

Unhappy about the fact banks could often do an end run around the king’s coinage, states then sought to compel payments in metals, which the sovereign could more easily control. Glasner writes:

The tension between the state monopoly over coinage and private banking is manifested in legislation that was frequently enacted to restrict the creation of notes and deposits by banks. In the fifteenth century, for example, hostile legislation in the Low Countries … caus[ed] virtually all banking activity to cease.16

The downside of crippling a polity’s banking sector is sizable, so eventually the state abandoned this strategy and learned to love paper money. But getting the public to accept government-issued paper money would be a long uphill battle.

Van Creveld places the first government attempt at paper money in the 1630s, when the Spanish Duke of Olivares, in need for funds—yet again—for the Thirty Years’ War, confiscated silver and provided “interest-bearing letters of credit” in their stead. Given the reputation of princes for debasing the currency by this time, this paper money swiftly depreciated. Only a few years later, Sweden attempted a similar scheme, but this also quickly failed.

It was not until 1694 with the Bank of England—that is, after more than three hundred years of modern state building—that the foundations were laid for a true note-issuing central bank. And even then, the Bank of England did not begin as an institution that creates money and did not have a monopoly on issuing banknotes until 1844. Rather, the Bank of England initially financed the government deficit by issuing shares. These shares, not surprisingly, were very popular given the fact the bank also enjoyed a monopoly on government deposits.17

A national bank in France, the Banque royale, followed in 1718. But like the Bank of England, the Banque royale did not possess a functioning monopoly on issuing banknotes. This did not stop the French bank from printing a great many notes, however, and it did so, sparking a financial crisis in the wake of the Mississippi Bubble.

Central Banks and the Gold Standard

It was not until the nineteenth century that Europe’s states established and wielded the sorts of central banks and money-issuing powers that we now associate with state monopoly powers over monetary systems. According to Van Creveld, “By 1870 or so, not only had [central banks] monopolized the issue of notes in most countries but they were also beginning to regulate other banks.”18

The rise of these central banks throughout much of Europe provided states with unprecedented powers in terms of issuing new debt and financing explosive government spending in times of emergency. The regulatory role of central banks further solidified the regime’s control of their financial systems overall.

Ironically, however, it was also in the nineteenth century that states faced mounting opposition to state monopoly powers in the form of the classical gold standard.

This was a result of the rise of laissez-faire liberalism in the nineteenth century, which was especially notable in Britain, France, and the US. Increasingly in Western Europe, the liberals and the commercial class insisted, according to Glasner, on an “obligation to maintain the convertibility of gold or silver at a fixed parity.”19 These formal definitions of a currency’s value in metals were important in that they made it easier to see the extent and effects of government manipulation of the currency. That’s all to the good, but it offered no challenge to the state’s growing monopoly over money. After all, the gold standard could be—and repeatedly was—suspended for reasons of war.

In other words, it would be a mistake to regard the era of the classical gold standard as a period of state weakness in financial and monetary matters. On the contrary, the classical gold standard was built on a firm foundation of state power limited only by legislation. The legitimacy of the state’s prerogative to ultimately oversee the monetary system was not in question. By the end of the nineteenth century in Britain, and in many other key polities, the days of privately issued banknotes and privately minted coins were over. (The US lagged this trend somewhat, but the outcome was eventually the same.) That is, there were no institutions left that could realistically challenge the state in terms of issuing and creating money.

The nineteenth century did present obstacles to the state’s ability to inflate and debase the currency, but states nonetheless remained very much the victors over private money, private banks, and private mints. It should not surprise us that the classical gold standard was followed by the gold exchange standard, a system thoroughly dominated by state actors. The total abandonment of precious metals soon followed.

The Classical Gold Standard’s Role in sBuilding State Monetary Power. 

This will strike many libertarians and free-market advocates as an odd position to take.

After all, throughout much of the past century, the idea of a gold standard for national currencies has been routinely linked with laissez-faire economics and “classical liberalism”—also known as “libertarianism.” It’s not difficult to see why. During the second half of the nineteenth century—as free-market liberalism was especially influential in much of Western Europe—it was the liberals who pushed for the adoption of the system we now know as the classical gold standard (CGS), which reigned supreme in Europe from approximately 1870 to 1914.

The liberals pushed for this change at the time for several reasons. The liberals believed that the CGS would facilitate globalization and international trade while reducing so-called transaction costs. The CGS also created a more transparent monetary system in the sense that national currencies were explicitly tied to specific amounts of gold. Moreover, the CGS eliminated the alleged inefficiencies of bimetallism.

Today, free-market liberals continue to be linked to the CGS—and to commodity-based money in general—because the CGS potentially limits the degree to which a state regime can debase the currency.

Yet it is also easy to overstate the degree to which the CGS can be described as laissez-faire or as a system that truly works against the interests of state power.

Rather, the classical gold standard was key in solidifying state control over national monetary systems. This was understood by the nationalists of the time, who viewed the gold standard as an instrument of increasing national prestige, sovereignty, and state power.

Although many liberals apparently hoped that the classical gold standard would render national currencies irrelevant in a truly globalized world, this did not happen. Instead, the CGS appears to have in many ways set the stage for what came later: Bretton Woods and floating fiat currencies. These two developments, of course, finalized total state control over national currencies.

An analysis of these historical trends brings us to an important conclusion: it is not enough to wax nostalgic about the classical gold standard and seek a return to nothing more than gold-backed national currencies. Rather, the very idea of national currencies must be abandoned altogether, while embracing true currency competition and private commodity money.

The Classical Gold Standard: Better than Fiat Currencies, but Not Ideal

F.A. Hayek identified the central role of the state in the classical gold standard when he wrote in The Denationalisation of Money: “I still believe that, so long as the management of money is in the hands of government, the gold standard with all its imperfections is the only tolerably safe system. But we certainly can do better than that, though not through government.”20

In other words, a gold standard of the classical variety would clearly be an improvement over today’s status quo. But it is ultimately a monetary system that remains “in the hands of the state.”

So what is the ideal? Hayek concludes: “If we want free enterprise and a market economy to survive we have no choice but to replace the governmental currency monopoly and national currency systems by free competition between private banks of issue.”21

In order to understand this contrast between gold-backed national currencies and truly private money, it is helpful to look at the monetary situation that existed before the rise of the classical gold standard. This was not a period absent government intervention, of course. But it was a period during which true currency competition took place, albeit with government competitors thrown into the mix.

Before National Currencies and the Classical Gold Standard

Many of these earlier monetary milieus were very different from the nineteenth-century situation now generally known simply as “the gold standard.” Yet many opponents of fiat money today often fall into the error of labeling any sort of metal-based money as a gold standard.

This is quite typical in explanations of the history of money among both supporters and detractors of the use of commodity money. Consider an “educational” video titled “The Gold Standard Explained in One Minute“ which provides a fairly typical example of the problem. The video follows the usual timeline employed in these summaries of money’s history. It goes like this: thousands of years ago, people began minting gold coins. Then they put those coins in vaults. Then, in 1945, that ended with the Bretton Woods system. Then gold’s link to money was abolished altogether in 1971. Now we use fiat money. The end.

This is imprecise to say the least. Rather, most of monetary history is more accurately described as a decentralized system of competing banknotes and competing coins made of copper, silver, and gold. The issuance of banknotes was predominantly private—a practice pioneered by Italian bankers in the Middle Ages—until the nineteenth century.

As Eric Helleiner describes it, “Before the introduction of the gold standard, countries usually had rather heterogeneous and often quite chaotic monetary systems under which the state exercised only partial control.”22  Historically, coins could be minted by private mints or by mints granted government monopolies. But coins from a wide variety of jurisdictions often circulated freely within each polity. Moreover, the most frequently used coinage was often silver and not gold. In fact, much of the world from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century was closer to being on a silver standard than a gold standard. An important example of this is the silver Mexican dollar which circulated freely in the Americas and in East Asia into the nineteenth century. It was not until the 1870s that the world abandoned Mexican dollars—and other types of silver monies—in order to embrace the emerging gold standard.

The Introduction of National Currencies Defined as a Certain Amount of Precious Metals 

As we saw earlier, there is an important distinction here to be made between a truly private monetary system of competing monies, and the system of national currencies. This is why Hayek just told us above that while the classical gold standard is better than our modern system of fiat currencies, it’s still not a true free market system. Hayek says we must get away from national currencies altogether.

He’s right. And what are these national currencies? They are the currencies we now refer to by their national names. The US dollar. The British Pound. The French Franc. This idea of a national money was central to the system of what we now call the classical gold standard. But, this idea of a national currency was essentially a trick foisted on ordinary people by governments themselves.

The rise of national currencies under the gold standard augmented state power in two ways. First, the CGS system helped accustom the public to using token money. Second, the consolidation of the national monetary systems under a single national currency solidified the power of central banks.

First, let’s look at the rise of token coins. Before the CGS, most coins that circulated were “full weight” coins in which the assigned value of the coin was equivalent to the value of the metals contained in the coin. With the rise of the CGS and national currencies, however, a key change took place. According to Helleiner, this was “the creation of a subsidiary ‘token’ coinage, that is, a coinage where the face value of lower denomination coins no longer derived from their metallic content but from a value assigned by the state vis-à-vis gold. To maintain their value, the supply of the token coins became closely managed by the state.”23

For example, in the year 1905, an American might carry around a ten-dollar gold coin with which he or she could make purchases. This person also might have a silver dollar. That silver dollar, however, was not equal to one-tenth the value of the ten-dollar gold piece in terms of its metal content. The silver dollar was a token money. Its value was assigned by a central bank or regime to correspond to a certain amount of the national currency.

Token coinage enabled the regime to simply create coinage out of metals that were far less valuable than the gold these coins represented. Secondly, the regime no longer had to deal with the problem of undervalued competing currencies being withdrawn from the marketplace, as often happened in the past. This was convenient for nearly everyone, since Europe had long been plagued by shortages of coins for small-scale payments and for the payment of wages. This problem became more acute as more people moved away from agriculture into industrial wage work. The availability of the state’s token coinage thus helped end the use of both foreign coins and full-weight coins.

As this token coinage came into daily usage, the public learned to use coinage in which the metal contents had little to do with the legally defined purchasing power. More importantly, the public learned to trust that the value of these coins—always denominated in national currencies like pounds and dollars—would be reliably managed by the regime.

Meanwhile, central banks began issuing banknotes, which grew increasingly distant from the underlying gold in the minds of most ordinary citizens. Martin van Creveld writes: “In theory any person in any of these countries was free to walk into the bank and exchange his notes for gold; except in London, though, those who had the nerve to try were likely to be sent away empty-handed whenever the sums in question were anything but trivial.”8

This, however, did not lead to runs on banks to convert banknotes into gold. Rather, ordinary people in domestic commerce learned to associate the regime’s paper money with gold, but without insisting on possessing the gold itself. More importantly, it was convenient to use paper money rather than to carry around heavy and bulky metal coins. As the public embraced this easy-to-use paper money, more and more of the gold supply flowed into bank vaults—including the all-important vaults of central banks.

In the early 1860s—during the period of bimetallism—the world’s specie supply was overwhelmingly in private hands.9 But this then began to change. Marc Flandreau writes:

Probably the most radical effect of bimetallism’s replacement by the Gold Standard was that it took the primary responsibility for managing the global monetary system away from private concerns. The uniformization of the monetary base meant that exchange rate stability could now be achieved by correctly behaved monetary authorities. The time was now ripe for central banks to commandeer an ever-increasing proportion of international bullion assets—a trend which accelerated after 1873.24

This increasing control also allowed regimes to put even more power in the hands of central banks Van Creveld writes:

Regardless of whether they were privately or publicly owned, originally each such [central] bank had been one note-issuing institute among many, albeit one that, serving as the sole haven for the state’s own deposits, led a charmed life that could hardly fail to grow at the expense of the rest. By 1870 or so, not only had they monopolized the issue of notes in most countries, but they were also beginning to regulate other banks. Given that the central banks’ reserves easily outstripped those of all the rest, it was inevitable that they should come to be treated as lenders of last resort.25

As central banks took over large-denomination banking, they also sought to even dominate smaller everyday transactions by issuing paper pocket change. This encouraged the public to keep even less gold on hand. Van Creveld continues: “As time went on the [central] banks of various countries vied with each other to see who could print the smallest notes (in Sweden, e.g., one-kroner notes, worth scarcely more than one British shilling, or $0.25, were issued), thus causing even more bullion to disappear into their own vaults.”26

This process of replacing gold and silver with things called shillings and kroner and dollars, by the way, was very important. Murray Rothbard saw this switch for what it was. In his book The Mystery of Banking Rothbard identifies how labeling precious metals as equivalent to some government currency denomination helped national governments pass off government currency as the same thing as gold. Rothbard writes:

[I]f the kings could obtain a monopoly right to print paper tickets, and call them the equivalent of gold coins, then there was an unlimited potential for acquiring wealth. …

If the money unit had remained as a standard unit of weight, such as “gold ounce” or “gold grain,” then getting away with this act of legerdemain would have been far more difficult. But the public had already gotten used to pure name as the currency unit, an habituation that enabled the kings to get away with debasing the definition of the money name.

The next fatal step on the road to chronic inflation was for the government to print paper tickets and, using impressive designs and royal seals, call the cheap paper the gold unit and use it as such. Thus, if the dollar is defined as 1/20 gold ounce, paper money comes into being when the government prints a paper ticket and calls it “a dollar,” treating it as the equivalent of a gold dollar or 1/20 gold ounce.

If the public will accept the paper dollar as equivalent to gold, then the government may become a legalized counterfeiter, and the counterfeiting process comes into play.

Thus, we see the importance of affixing a new government affiliated name to some amount of gold. It has long allowed the state to manipulate money in a way that had not been previously possible.

Moving Away from Gold Toward a Monometallic Gold Standard

This sleight of hand of renaming gold as some other currency unit, unfortunately, went hand-in-hand the system we now know as the classical gold standard.

The next step was in defining these new currencies strictly in terms of gold, and abandoning the remaining elements of bimetallic (that is, gold and silver) money standards. David Glasner explains:

Although ancient currencies were made of precious metals, the concept of a formal monetary standard was an innovation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before 1816 the pound had never been legally defined by Parliament as a specific weight of either gold or silver. From 1717 England had been on a de facto gold standard, but that standard was due to the undervaluation of gold relative to silver at the mint decreed by Sir Isaac Newton. This gold standard not due to a legal definition of the pound in terms of gold.27

Consequently, the British government discontinued free silver coinage in 1798 and adopted an exclusive de jure gold standard with 1816’s coinage act.

On the Continent, regimes gradually abandoned silver and bimetallism due to a series of market events and government interventions. Thanks to the relatively new practice of governments imposing a fixed ratio for the prices of gold and silver—as opposed to embracing free-floating market prices—this meant that either gold or silver was undervalued in relation to the other. The undervalued metal would then be hoarded rather than used as a general medium of exchange. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, a relatively high level of silver production, combined with a fixed ratio, meant gold was legally undervalued. Gold then disappeared into hoards and France, for instance, entered a de facto silver standard. But after the middle of the century, thanks in part to gold discoveries in Alaska and Australia, gold coins become both more numerous and relatively overvalued. This meant gold became the preferred medium of exchange and silver was hoarded or switched to nonmoney purposes. Many of the world’s regimes thus moved more rapidly toward a gold standard.

Embracing a gold standard was also useful in facilitating trade with Great Britain, the world’s economic powerhouse at the time. Residents of countries on a gold standard could more readily and easily trade with residents from other countries that were also on a gold standard.

By the 1860s, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, and France formed a common currency bloc and moved increasingly toward a gold standard. In 1871, Germany switched to a gold standard as well, beginning the era of the classical gold standard throughout most of Europe. (The United States would follow suit in 1894.)

In this process, national governments were themselves very much involved. These regimes were able to manipulate the relative prices of gold and silver through policies governing the free minting of silver, while working to avoid situations that would result in large exports of gold.

Why National Governments Wanted the Gold Standard

The most important factor of this move to a gold standard lies less in the fact it was an embrace of gold per se, and more in the fact it constituted an embrace of a monometallic standard. In the political debate over monetary policy, both nationalists and liberals in the regime could see the benefits of this since, as Helleiner contends, “moving onto the gold standard was often seen as the key monetary reform that could lead to a more unified and homogeneous monetary order controlled by the state.”28

For the liberals, this meant simplifying economic calculation for bankers, merchants, and government agents. Under a monometallic gold standard it would not be necessary to deal with the potential confusion that comes with calculating real values in terms of both silver and gold. This also simplified international trade. Many liberals hoped this would move the world’s regimes toward a truly international monetary unit that abandoned national currencies altogether.

This internationalist view is key to understanding the liberal views on the value of the classical gold standard. But the nationalists and state builders took a view more connected to domestic politics. Helleiner writes: “Although economic liberals saw the gold standard in primarily economic and internationalist terms, nationalists saw it in a more domestic and political manner as useful for their goals of strengthening state power. And its control over the economy, cultivating a sense of collective national identity, and consolidating the internal economic coherence of the nation.”29

And then there were the advantages of the gold standard to the regime itself. The old order of competing currencies created uncertainties and higher transaction costs for the state in terms of tax collections and state surveillance of economic activity. The consolidated monetary order of the new gold standard reduced these costs for both the general public and the regime.

But, this system was fundamentally a system that relied on states to regulate matters and make monetary standards uniform. While attempting to create an efficient monetary system for the market economy, the free-market liberals ended up calling on the state to ensure the system facilitated market exchange. As a result, Flandreau concludes: “[T]he emergence of the Gold Standard really paved the way for the nationalization of money. This may explain why the Gold Standard was, with respect to the history of western capitalism, such a brief experiment, bound soon to give way to managed currency.”30

The Unfortunate End Game: World War I

The ordinary consumer, of course, had no way of guessing where all this was headed: toward the end of gold convertibility in the face of the First World War. It was then that the gold-standard regimes realized they could cash in on all that trust they had gained during the period of the CGS. Once the war broke out, the façade of regime devotion to “sound money” immediately melted away. The gold standard had succeeded in growing state power over the issuance of banknotes, over coinage, and over physical control of specie. During the war, states became very interested in using that power to enrich themselves. Van Creveld concludes:

Within a matter of days [of the outbreak of war] all belligerents showed what they really thought of their own paper by taking it off gold, thus leaving their citizens essentially empty handed. Draconian laws were pushed through, requiring those who happened to own gold coins or bullion to surrender them. Next the printing presses were put to work and started turning out their product in previously unimaginable quantities.31

After fewer than forty-five years of Europe’s classical gold standard, the result was the seizure of gold, the empowerment of central banks, and money printing on a never-before-seen scale. These measures, of course, were all sold as “temporary,” and they were indeed temporary in the short term. But it all became permanent as the former regimes of the gold standard switched to the debauched “gold exchange standard” and then to the Bretton Woods system. It’s significant that when Franklin Roosevelt outlawed the private possession of gold in 1933 he relied on 1917 wartime legislation passed to severely limit the private use of gold.

A Political Problem, Not an Economic One

It is important to note, however, that the adoption of the CGA was a boon in terms of offering stable, reliable money that enhanced international trade. As Joseph Salerno has shown, attempts to blame the classical gold standard for depressions and economic calamities are baseless. Such were the economics of the move to a gold standard in the nineteenth-century that it coincided with “a century of unprecedented material progress and peaceful relations between nations.”

Yet, as Hayek understood, the CGS represented a step away from true market competition in currency and toward currency nationalization and manipulation.  When viewed through the lens of state building, we find many reasons why, in spite of ostensible limits placed by the gold standard on regime power, the ultimate effect of the CGS was state growth. The new state powers extended over the monetary system were justified by economic liberals and by economists on the grounds that these measures increased efficiency and standardization while reducing transaction costs. The ultimate outcome, however, has been anything but efficient.

The movement toward state controlled money over the past century is just part of a larger process of the state monopolization of  money. For the past 500 years, states have become increasingly bold in asserting total control over the money supply and the financial system in general. The classical gold standard was part of this process, although one that was certainly less than optimal from the state’s perspective. In the century since the decline of the gold standard, however, states have managed to gain almost total control of money, and this is not a power states will give up easily.

—

1 David Glasner, “An Evolutionary Theory of State Monopoly over Money,” in Money and the Nation State: The Financial Revolution, Government and the World Monetary System, ed. Kevin Dowd and Richard H. Timberlake Jr. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998), pp. 21–46, esp. p. 27.

2 Martin Van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 226.

3 Ibid., p. 226.

4 John H. Munro, “The Medieval Origins of the Financial Revolution: Usury, Rentes, and Negotiability” in International History Review 25, no. 3 (September 2003): 505–62, esp. 548.

5 Ibid.

6 Charles P. Kindleberger, “Economic and Financial Crises and Transformations in Sixteenth-Century Europe,” in Essays in History: Financial, Economic, Personal (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 72–94, esp. p. 75.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., p. 6.

9 Ibid., p. 6.

10 Kindleberger, “Economic and Financial Crises and Transformation in Sixteenth-Century Europe,” p. 76.

11 Jan Sytze Mosselaar, A Concise Financial History of Europe (Rotterdam: Robeco, 2018), p. 53.

12 Ibid., p. 54.

13 Van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State, p. 226.

14 Kindleberger, “Economic and Financial Crises and Transformations in Sixteenth-Century Europe,” p. 87.

15 T.S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution: 1760–1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964,) pp. 69–70.

16 Glasner, “An Evolutionary Theory of State Monopoly over Money,” p. 28.

17 The bank was created as a result of the financial crisis of 1672 during which—in spite of the advantages of the state’s longtime monopoly on coinage—Charles II suspended altogether the payment of coins to his creditors. He eventually paid his debts, but the episode raised calls for the creation of a “public” bank that would lower risk and guarantee the payment of the government’s debts.

18 Van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State, p. 233.

19 Glasner, “An Evolutionary Theory of State Monopoly over Money,” p. 38.

20 F.A. Hayek, The Denationalisation of Money—the Argument Refined (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1976), p. 131.

21 Ibid.

22 Eric Helleiner, “Denationalising Money? Economic Liberalism and the ‘National Question’ in Currency Affairs,” in Nation-States and Money: The Past, Present and Future of National Currencies, ed. Emily Gilbert and Eric Helleiner (Oxford: Routledge, 1999), p. 140.

23 Helleiner, ”Denationalising Money?,” p. 142.

24 Marc Flandreau, The Glitter of Gold: France, Bimetallism, and the Emergence of the International Gold Standard, 1848–1873 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 214.

25 Martin van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 233.

26 Van Creveld, Rise and Decline of the State, p. 233.

27 David Glasner, “An Evolutionary Theory of State Monopoly over Money,” in Money and the Nation State: The Financial Revolution, Government and the World Monetary System, ed. Kevin Dowd and Richard H. Timberlake Jr. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998), p. 38.

28 Helleiner, “Denationalising Money?,” p. 140.

29 Helleiner, ”Denationalising Money?,” p. 145.

30 Flandreau, The Glitter of Gold, p. 214.

31 Van Creveld, Rise and Decline of the State, p. 234.

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It has been another exciting week here in the Land of Oz, formerly known as the United States of America, which is currently going through an apparently overdue purging that will replace the rule of law with a whimsical process whereby the Chief Executive is empowered to decide everything in a new nation that will likely be renamed Trumpland. The transition has not been pretty, as part of the process is to deport all undesirables. As a result, countries that have been reckoned to be friends to the American people and government including Britain and Germany are now warning their citizens that they might want to reconsider plans to travel to the US as they might be detained by one or more of America’s law enforcement authorities even if their travel status is fully legal and they have not committed anything that might be considered a crime in the real world. Germany this week said it was investigating the cases of three of its citizens being denied entry and placed in detention when they tried to enter through the US southern border and Britain similarly was looking into the rejection of a citizen also trying to enter by way of Mexico. That adds to the list of nations seeking to distance themselves from policies coming out of Washington and which are preparing themselves to strike back against punitive tariffs, sanctions and arbitrary detentions, to include “Fifty-first state” Canada, Mexico, Panama and Greenland.

The European Foreign Ministries are no doubt basing their advice in part on the case of a French scientist who was arbitrarily denied entry to the United States this month over messages reported to be critical of President Trump’s administration’s research policies. Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister for higher education, shared how “he had learned with concern that a French academic who was going to a conference in Houston was denied entry before being deported” back to Europe. The academic, who was not named, was on assignment for France’s National Center for Scientific Research. Baptise explained “This measure was apparently taken by the American authorities because this researcher’s phone contained exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration’s research policy. Freedom of opinion, free research and academic freedom are values ​​that we will continue to proudly uphold. I will defend the possibility for all French researchers to be faithful to them, in compliance with the law.”

And America’s universities, which are being particularly targeted as they are hotbeds of the only capital crime that really matters currently, anti-semitism, are rolling over to escape the wrath of Jehovah’s Anointed in Washington by expelling students and faculty and even stripping graduates of their degrees after the fact. Focal points for pro-Palestinian demonstrations like Columbia University in New York City and the University of California in Los Angeles are demonstrating their loyalty to the new order just as fast as they can, clearly recognizing that allowing someone to speak up against the genocide of the Palestinians is to identify ipso facto by White House think as a terrorist. Columbia is, for example, allowing Homeland Security agents to come on to campus and, without a warrant or any claim of criminal activity, interrogating and detaining students in dorms and classrooms. Interestingly, however, there is payback developing from the students. One report suggests that students accepted for the incoming Columbia freshman class in September are changing their minds and canceling their attendance in large numbers.

The most prominent victim of the Trump Administration’s witch hunt continues to be Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate and a prominent organizer during last spring’s Gaza protests. He was arrested by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in front of his pregnant wife, who pleaded with the agents to explain what the charges against him were. Khalil was a permanent resident with a current green card, but it was revoked by the federal government along with his student visa. The Trump administration moved to have Khalil immediately deported, but the effort was initially blocked by a federal judge in New York. No one knew where Khalil was for an extended period of time, but it was eventually learned that he was being held in a detention facility in Louisiana. At his first court hearing, one learned that his attorneys had not been able to communicate with him.

The Trump team immediately celebrated Khalil’s ordeal. “This is the first arrest of many to come,” wrote the president in a Truth Social post. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked a 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act “Red scare” bit of legislation that authorized the government to target and remove “An alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable grounds to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”

Last week two more Columbia students were targeted for deportation. A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) press release announced that Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman from the West Bank, was arrested in Newark, New Jersey by ICE agents for allegedly overstaying her F-1 student visa. She is currently being held at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. Kordia reportedly participated in last spring’s Gaza protests at the university. Also, Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian national and Fulbright Scholar at Columbia, fled the US over fears that she would be detained. She’s been in the United States for nearly ten years. “Having my visa revoked and then losing my student status has upended my life and future — not because of any wrongdoing, but because I exercised my right to free speech,” she explained to CNN in a statement.

A student at Cornell who challenged the Trump executive order calling for deportations is Momodou Taal, a Ph.D. student in Africana Studies. Taal filed the suit on March 15th hoping to prevent the administration from detaining or deporting him and others who have participated in pro-Palestinian protests but DHS has indicated that he will be detained. And there is also Dr. Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow in peace and conflict studies at Georgetown University, who was detained by Department of Homeland Security agents on his way home from teaching an evening class on March 17. Suri, an Indian citizen, is a fellow at the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, an interfaith research center housed at Georgetown’s Washington DC campus. DHS agents later detained him near his home in Arlington, Virginia, and informed him that the US government had revoked his J-1 visa—a non-immigrant visa for foreign nationals participating in educational and cultural exchange programs. Suri was then transferred to an ICE detention facility in Virginia before he was transferred again to a facility in Louisiana, where he is currently being held. Since then, neither family nor lawyers have been allowed to speak with him.

There have been a number of other deportations from universities as well as denial of re-entry to the US if one has traveled outside the country. In a particularly bizarre case, the Department of Homeland Security admitted on March 17th that it had deported a Brown University professor and doctor with a valid visa because they said she attended a Hezbollah leader’s funeral in February during a trip to Lebanon. When questioned by Customs and Border Protection officers upon her return to the United States, Dr. Rasha Alawieh, who is Lebanese, had been detained at Boston Logan International Airport on the previous Thursday. “A visa is a privilege not a right,” the spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement to The New York Times. “Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied. This is common-sense security.”

Even agreeing with a viewpoint expressed on social media can get one in serious trouble with DHS. After Khalil’s arrest Columbia adjunct professor Stuart Karle called on students to refrain from posting about Palestine. “If you have a social media page, make sure it is not filled with commentary on the Middle East,” he told them. When a Palestinian student objected to the idea of Columbia promoting censorship and bowing to the demands of the Trump administration, the journalism school’s dean, Jelani Cobb, was even more direct. “Nobody can protect you,” Cobb told the student. “These are dangerous times.”

A curious aspect of the crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrators is the presumption that the demonstrations are not only disruptive, which they are intended to be, and represent more than that, some kind of threat directed against both US foreign policy and American Jews. This has meant that violence perpetrated by pro-Israel groups in both New York City and Los Angeles to penetrate and attack the generally nonviolent student protester encampments has been treated like a non-issue. In New York peaceful demonstrators were infiltrated by former Israeli soldiers possibly led and funded by Israeli consulate officials, who infiltrated into groups of demonstrators and then released toxic “skunk bombs” which wound up sending many demonstrators to hospital. Skunk bombs are a “weapon” formulated in Israel which are generally used by Israeli army and police against protesting Arabs.

In Los Angeles a mob of hundreds violently attacked the pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA, beating protesters without any intervention from the ranks of policemen nearby. The Israelis were identified in both cities and nothing appears to have been done to them apart from their being banned from campus, unlike what peaceful pro-Palestine demonstrators have experienced at the hands of police and college administrations. Nor are groups of extremist Jews like Betar-USA that openly call for deporting and/or killing Palestinians under any kind of surveillance or threat of arrest. That is the power of the Israel Lobby at all levels in the United States – use violence to injure and suppress peaceful demonstrators protesting a genocide while the cause you support is carrying out that genocide with no objection from the US government at any level.

Perhaps the Trump administrations campaign to rid the United States of what it calls antisemites while also collaborating with the Israeli government’s desire to completely ethnically cleansing Palestinians should be examined through the lens of Israel’s power in the US due to the effective operation of that domestic lobby. Israel’s “friends” are everywhere. It was recently revealed that the woman behind the clampdown on pro-Palestine demonstrators at Columbia University is a former Israeli intelligence officer and it has long been known that the “censors” and “fact checkers” on many US social media sites are actually former Israeli intelligence officers from the notorious Unit 8200 secret cyber warfare snooper outfit. In the current revelation, Dr. Keren Yarhi-Milo, head of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, is a former Israeli military intelligence officer and an ex-official at Israel’s Mission to the United Nations. She is married to the head of that Mission. Yarhi-Milo played a significant role in drumming up public concern about a supposed “wave of intolerable anti-Semitism sweeping over the campus,” thereby laying the groundwork for the extensive crackdown on civil liberties that has sought to suppress the protests. This should surprise no one as it is exactly how Israel and its American allies operate across the board. Use “donations” to institutions and individual power brokers to pry open the door and then staff the targeted entities with your own people who will do your bidding. In any event, the United States is now paying the price for its love affair with Israel however it was contrived. Free speech and association are already flying out the open window and one can only wonder what will be coming next.

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

The post America’s New Free Speech Enemies List Is Getting Longer appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last week Peter appeared on Fox Business with Liz Claman and co-panelist Scott Sperling to react to last week’s FOMC decision to hold rates steady. Peter, Liz, and Scott discuss Jerome Powell’s remarks from the decision, recent movement in gold and the equity market, and how economic growth may be able to offset some of the Federal Reserve’s inflation.

Reiterating how backwards the Fed’s thinking is, Peter argues the United States is already in recession territory, thanks in large part to the last two decades of monetary policy:

The Federal Reserve created an enormous inflation problem. Current monetary policy is still way too loose. They aborted the hiking prematurely. Rates need to be a lot higher than they are right now. And look, the economy is weak. I think we’re in recession! I think we’ve been in a recession for quite some time. That’s why Donald Trump was elected president, but unfortunately that recession is going to have to get a lot worse to put the inflation genie that the Fed deliberately released back in that bottle.

Scott offers a glimmer of hope; if generative AI and other innovations can boost productivity significantly, the economy may be able to withstand some of the consequences of inflation. Peter agrees, but points out there’s still a long road ahead, and monetary inflation continues to increase:

I think productivity can offset some of the damage that the Fed has created by expanding the money supply to the degree that it did both with their first three rounds of quantitative easing and then during COVID. We still haven’t felt all the consequences on consumer prices from the inflation the Fed created in the past, but they’re continuing to create more inflation. Credit has expanded the entire time that they were supposedly hiking rates. So it was too little too late.

This originally appeared on SchiffGold.com.

The post Real Inflation Isn’t Stopping appeared first on LewRockwell.

There are several curious aspects of this ‘leak’ of internal communication of high ranking members of the Trump administration:

Top national security officials for President Donald Trump, including his defense secretary, texted war plans for upcoming military strikes in Yemen to a group chat in a secure messaging app that included the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic, the magazine reported in a story posted online Monday. The National Security Council said the text chain “appears to be authentic.”
…
The material in the text chain “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Iran-backed Houthi-rebels in Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg reported.

The Atlantic is the worst magazine in America. Its editor in chief, ..

.. Jeffrey Goldberg, dropped out of an Ivy League University to volunteer to be an IDF prison guard during the first Palestinian Intifada. In his memoirs, Goldberg revealed that he helped cover up serious prisoner abuse.

Goldberg is a neo-conservative who has yet to see a U.S. instigated war he dislikes. To trust his reporting is dangerous.

Here is how he tells the story:

On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser.
…
I accepted the connection request, hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter.

Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”
…
At 8:05 a.m. on Friday, March 14, “Michael Waltz” texted the group: “Team, you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the Presidents guidance this morning in your high side inboxes.” (High side, in government parlance, refers to classified computer and communications systems.)
…
At this point, a fascinating policy discussion commenced. The account labeled “JD Vance” responded at 8:16: “Team, I am out for the day doing an economic event in Michigan. But I think we are making a mistake.” (Vance was indeed in Michigan that day.) The Vance account goes on to state, “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”

During the discussion CIA head John Ratcliff, Secretary of Defense Hegseth and the deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller join in. Despite the reluctance of Vance the bombing campaign in Yemen is ready to go:

At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.
…
According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.

I went back to the Signal channel. At 1:48, “Michael Waltz” had provided the group an update. Again, I won’t quote from this text, except to note that he described the operation as an “amazing job.” A few minutes later, “John Ratcliffe” wrote, “A good start.” Not long after, Waltz responded with three emoji: a fist, an American flag, and fire. Others soon joined in, including “MAR,” who wrote, “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” and “Susie Wiles,” who texted, “Kudos to all – most particularly those in theater and CENTCOM! Really great. God bless.” “Steve Witkoff” responded with five emoji: two hands-praying, a flexed bicep, and two American flags. “TG” responded, “Great work and effects!” The after-action discussion included assessments of damage done, including the likely death of a specific individual. The Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry reported that at least 53 people were killed in the strikes, a number that has not been independently verified.

The juvenile behavior of the participants all but confirms that the characters are genuine.

It however leaves many questions:

Why did Michael Waltz, a former advisor to Dick Cheney, seek to add war-pimp and anti-Trumper Jeffrey Goldberg to his contact list? What did he plan to leak to him?

Signal is an encrypted chat application which, until recently, was financed by the U.S. government. That is in itself a good reason to not trust it. There have also been reports that several foreign entities are trying to crack it. Why would high administration officials, who have access to more secure communication systems, use Signal to chat with each other?

Why are Vance and others implying that ‘freedom of navigation’ in the Red Sea is for the good of Europe and that it should pay for it? That framing does not fit.

The reason for the Houthi blockade of the Red Sea is the Zionist genocide in Gaza. Israel is the country most hurt by the stop of sea traffic to its harbors. The closure of the Red Sea has increased ocean transport cost for a container from $2,000 to $8,000 for everyone, including the U.S., because the transport around Africa takes longer and has led to a shortage of container ships.

This lambasting of Europe to press it for money is part of Trump’s general program. To ‘leak’ this as part of a chat, which hardly mentions Israel or Gaza, is reinforcing that message. This is the main reason why I find this ‘leak’ suspicious.

The use of Signal and the sending of confidential war plans over it of course a breach of several laws and regulations.

There are rumors that national security advisor Waltz will be punished for this. But I do not expect any firing or other consequences from it.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Was This ‘Leak’ Accidental or Is It Pro-War Psyops? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Charlie Foxtrot is a polite euphemism for a crude military term — Clusterfu*k. That describes the first scandal of the Trump Administration. Somehow, whether deliberate or accidentally, a Zionist journalist by the name of Jeffrey Goldberg was added to a Signal chat by Trump’s National Security Advisor, Michael Waltz, or by someone who worked for Waltz. Goldberg suddenly found himself part of a group chat of Trump’s top defense, diplomatic and intelligence officials. The group included CIA Director Ratcliffe, DNI’s Tulsi Gabbard, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, among other luminaries.

If you are not familiar with Signal, you create a group chat by naming a group and then adding members from your list of contacts. This tells us that Goldberg was part of Waltz’s list of contacts. Goldberg is a particularly slimy character, not because he published portions of the chat, but because he behaved as a political hack instead of a journalist. A journalist with that unexpected access, would have written an immediate story announcing that the US was going to start bombing Yemen just to make an example of it. What did Goldberg do? He waited till the bombing happened and then hoisted the Trump gang on its own petard. He made the story about Charlie Foxtrot, which he published on Monday in The Atlantic magazine.

This was not a leak. This was a gift to Goldberg. While the contents of the chat are not officially classified, the information being discussed was operationally sensitive. The chat exposed most of the Trump team as shallow and dismissive of the military and diplomatic implications of the decision to start bombing Yemen.

If Waltz and company wanted to discuss the pros and cons of bombing Yemen, he should have convened a Secure Video Conference, aka SVTC (pronounced, CIVITS).

Pete Hegseth’s remarks to the press, responding to the Goldberg article, makes a solid case that he is not qualified to serve as Secretary of Defense. Instead of admitting that this was a fu*kup on the part of Waltz, he decided to attack Goldberg. Moreover, he pretends that the US was hitting hardened, military targets. That is a lie:

While I agree with Hegseth that Goldberg is a partisan hack, Goldberg did not insinuate himself into the chat or steal the material. Waltz, or one of his staff, did that. We will have to wait and see if the Trump team has learned anything from this debacle. I suspect Signal will no longer be used for sensitive topics.

The portion of the chat that Goldberg published shows that JD Vance is not a Zionist crazy. He at least had reservations about the plan to bomb Yemen. The same cannot be said for the others — Pete Hegseth in particular. The following snippets from Goldberg’s article makes it clear that the decision to bomb was not based on some actual provocation or attack by Yemen. Nope, it was a malevolent symbolic gesture:

The account labeled “JD Vance” responded at 8:16: “Team, I am out for the day doing an economic event in Michigan. But I think we are making a mistake.” (Vance was indeed in Michigan that day.) The Vance account goes on to state, “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”

The Vance account then goes on to make a noteworthy statement, considering that the vice president has not deviated publicly from Trump’s position on virtually any issue. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”

The account identified as “JD Vance” addressed a message at 8:45 to @Pete Hegseth: “if you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.”

“I will say a prayer for victory,” Vance wrote. . . .

Hegseth’s counter to Vance’s concern that the American public won’t understand why were bombing the shit out of another faraway country is this:

“Nobody [in America] knows who the Houthis are, so [we can just say] Biden failed and Iran funded them.”

Well, guess what, boys and girls? Trump failed, just like Biden. The bombings over the last nine days have not deterred the Houthis from renewing their attacks on ships and Israel. And it has put US naval vessels in harm’s way without a good reason. Hegseth gives the game away… this is about blaming Iran.

It is incumbent on Goldberg to release the entire electronic conversation. Maybe I am being too harsh. Maybe Tulsi Gabbard or John Ratcliffe or the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency raised some objections. But it appears that everyone was supportive of the proposed operation. Shameful.

This originally appeared on Sonar21.

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