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Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words

Paddy Chayefsky is the only person in history to have won three Oscars for solo screenwriting efforts, yet today his name goes largely unrecognized. Chayefsky’s oeuvre explores the lives of thunderously dramatic, socially alienated characters—characters who are “mad as hell,” to borrow the words immortalized in his masterpiece Network. The anger and loneliness at the heart of his screenplays were channeled from his life: his experiences as the child of Russian-Jewish immigrants, and the injuries he suffered in WWII. While many of his peers wrote invisibly, merely advancing stories from set piece to set piece, Chayefsky penned bold polemics that were the centerpieces of their films. Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words features an all-star lineup of writers (Aaron Sorkin, Merrill Markoe), actors (Bryan Cranston, Larry David), and directors (Mel Brooks, Judd Apatow), each revealing the mark that Chayefsky’s writing made on them. Those admirers often tear up while quoting his scripts, and their reverence makes it abundantly clear that Chayefsky’s impressive collection of words is well worth revisiting. —David Cohn

Award-Winning Screenplays

Marty (1955): Chayefsky won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for this film, which was based on his own television play.

The Hospital (1971): He also won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for this film about the chaos within a hospital.

Network (1976): His final Oscar win was for the screenplay of this satirical look at the television industry.

Other Notable Films

The Americanization of Emily (1964): A romantic comedy-drama (condemnation of war) that Chayefsky adapted from a novel.

Paint Your Wagon (1969): A musical adaptation, though Chayefsky’s contribution was primarily as an adapter of the existing work.

Altered States (1980): Chayefsky wrote the screenplay for this science fiction horror film, which was based on his own novel.

Middle of the Night (1959): A drama adapted from his stage play, which began as a television play.

The Goddess (1958): Another film based on one of his original stories and screenplays.

The Bachelor Party (1957): Based on his own story and screenplay.

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You can bet the 12 purported geniuses on the FOMC, who today came up with a 25 basis point cut in the essentially phony Fed funds rate, have never looked at the graph below. It shows that for all their wild-ass money printing in recent years, the US index of manufacturing output stands at 101.39, which is nearly 5% below the level reached on the eve of the financial crisis in December 2007.

That’s right. The US manufacturing economy has been shrinking in real physical terms for the past 18 years notwithstanding the fact that during that interval the Fed has printed nearly $6 trillion in brand, spanking new money that it snatched from thin air. So something big and bad happened after the Fed went all in on money-printing in response to the stock market meltdown in the fall of 2008.

After all, during the 28 years between 1972 and 2000 the very opposite occurred. Manufacturing output in the US rose by nearly 150%, which computes to a 3.3% growth rate per annum.

Yet there is no mystery as to why manufacturing output abruptly went flatter than a board after the Financial Crisis: To wit, the mad money-printers in the Eccles Building simply inflated the bejesus out of the US economy at a time when what was urgently needed was a stern deflation of an already inflation-bloated industrial sector.

US Manufacturing Output, 1972 to 2025

Here’s the thing. The price of a Pilates studio session or dentist visit is mainly driven by supply and demand balances in local markets, but with today’s shipping and communications technology the manufacture of durable goods is subject to ferocious global competition. Indeed, when you look at the current fully loaded (for fringes and benefits) wage rates among major foreign suppliers, it is no wonder that output of US manufactured goods has flat-lined.

Average Fully Loaded Manufacturing Wages Per Hour in 2024:

• Vietnam: $3.50.
• India: $4.50.
• Mexico: $5.00.
• China:$6.00.
• S. Korea: $20.50.
• Canada: $22.00.
• Japan:$28.00.
• UK: $30.00.
• EU-27: $32.50.
• USA: $44.25

Well, for crying out loud! What’s the mystery?

The USA has priced itself out of the global manufacturing market, which is exactly why America has been running chronic and massive trade deficits that reached the staggering annual level of $1.2 trillion in 2024. Indeed, the collapse of America’s trade balance has been relentless over the last 30 years—with the deficit rising by 10X, from $10 billion to $100 billion. Per month!

And, no, POTUS, foreign trading partners did not suddenly turn into ever worsening unfair trade cheats in the last three decades. The cause of the plunging line below is domiciled on the banks of the Potomac, not in foriegn capitals.

Average U.S. Monthly Trade Deficit, 1992 to 2024

The vast gap between US manufacturing wages and that of our major trading partners has been building relentlessly since the early 1990s when Greenspan put the Fed in the monetary central planning business. Back then, the fully loaded US manufacturing wage was about $18.50 per hour, meaning that it has risen in nominal terms by 2.4X since then.

However, owing to the Fed’s relentless pro-inflation policies the CPI index has risen by 124%, meaning that in 2024 dollars the 1992 fully loaded manufacturing wage was $41.10 per hour. Accordingly, workers who manged to keep their jobs gained barely 7% over one-third of a century from all of the Fed’s pro-inflation money printing, even as the ever rising level of nominal US wages made blue collar workers a sitting duck in global markets. Again, for want of doubt see the gaping fully loaded international manufacturing wage levels in US dollars shown above.

Of course, the Fed’s fanboys on Wall Street say not to worry—productivity gains will offset the nominal wage gains. That was partially true for a few years during the technology-driven productivity boom of the 1990s, but no more. Since 2007 unit labor costs in US manufacturing have soared by +53%, which exactly coincides with the deep plunge in the US trade deficit in goods after the turn of the century.

Index of US unit labor costs in Manufacturing, 1992 to 2024

In short, what America really needed from the early 1990s onward, as the China export machine and its worldwide supply chain came to life, was zero inflation at worst and ideally a spell of price, wage and cost deflation to offset the vast ballooning of US production costs after Tricky Dick Nixon severed the dollar’s link to gold in August 1971.

Between that date and mid-1992, the general price level in the US rose by 250%, and now stands at 700% above its June 1971 level. Is there any wonder, then, that the US has priced itself out of the global manufacturing market?

Of course, the sheer monetary insanity depicted by the red line in the graph below is justified by the Fed on the grounds that inflation is good for prosperity—-at least to the extent of 2.00% annually, year in and year out.

Except there is not a shred of historic evidence or sound economic logic to justify the Fed’s sacred 2.00% target. It’s just a handy excuse for running the printing presses at rates which please the gamblers on Wall Street and the Spenders in Washington.

700% Inflation Rise Since June 1971

To return to our opening chart, industrial production is the heart of the modern economy and the main source of sustainable gains in real output and living standards. Even a half-assed assessment of the world in 1990 would have told any honest and capable monetary central planner that wringing out some of the 250% increase in the domestic cost and price level that had accumulated since Camp David was imperative if the US was to remain competitive in global markets.

Alas, the Keynesian fools who took over the nation’s central bank under Greenspan’s leadership cooked-up a closed bathtub style model of the US economy, and conferred upon themselves the Keynesian mission of keep “aggregate demand” full to the brim via low interest rates and massive injections of fiat credits into the nation’s financial markets.

That was a drastic error from the get-go, but the money-printing gospel is of such convenience to both ends of the Acela Corridor that this cardinal pro-inflation error rolls forward unquestioned by both wings of the UniParty. Accordingly, with inflation stalled at more than 3.0%, when it should be zero or negative, the Fed again today sung the Einstein Chorus. That is to say, these “insane” apparatchiks seem to believe that doing the same thing over and over again—even after 700% inflation—will finally generate a positive outcome.

It won’t.

Y/Y Change In 16% Trimmed Mean CPI, 2012 to 2025

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post The Eccles Building Inflationistas Strike Yet Again appeared first on LewRockwell.

My friend Matt Ridley today pointed out an interesting demographic fact, and as it happens a fact that Charlie Kirk commented on just weeks before his death: the decline in birth rates seems to be concentrated primarily among progressives, while self-described conservatives have seen a much less significant decline.

We can speculate on why that should be, and obvious explanations appear to present themselves, but this is a fact.

Even so, conservatives’ birth rates still amount to a decline, and we’re going to need something more than just falling more slowly if we’re going to escape the demographic crisis we face.

Kevin Dolan runs a natal conference in Austin, Texas, every year, and it’s urgently necessary that you hear him out.

As he opened one of his conferences, he gave the examples of Japan and South Korea, which show us “what may be the best-case scenario, what it might look like if you could let the air out of the balloon slowly. What that looks like is young people chained to the desk, working ever longer hours for ever lower wages, not only unable to start a family, but increasingly unable to start a family. The countryside and smaller cities abandoned as the tax base evaporates.”

With meticulous planning, Kevin says, those countries can arrange an “orderly tragedy,” and that’s the best case. “But I think Japan and Korea are beautiful places,” he says, “with beautiful people who should go on existing.” Hence his conferences, trying to figure these questions out.

“Places like China, Brazil, Russia, Thailand and Mexico,” Kevin adds, “got old before they got rich. In coming decades, these countries will be totally unable to sustain their elderly populations, even if they could stop the flight of their most productive young people, even if they worked them and taxed them to death.

“Unless something truly dramatic happens, these countries will face humanitarian and political crises on par with the worst of the 20th century.”

What about the U.S.?

We will, says Kevin, probably “be somewhere in the middle. So far, immigration makes US fertility rates look better on paper, but not enough to prevent a de-growth economic collapse and not enough to take care of an aging population. It’s not obvious, in any case, why young immigrant families from poor countries would sign up to support a population of elderly dependents to whom they have no attachment, while their own grandmothers back home are starving.”

“The reason I’m here,” he goes on, “is that I have two girls and four boys. And like a lot of millennials raising kids, when I look around at how few of us manage to start families and how much worse it is for Gen Z, I feel like I caught the last train out. A consistent 95 percent of Americans say they want kids, but it looks like only about 60 percent of millennials will get there.”

Now why are childless people childless? It turns out that being childless is a conscious decision in only 10 percent of cases, with fertility issues accounting for another 10 percent. For the other 80 percent, Kevin explains, it’s “what demographer Stephen Shaw calls unplanned childlessness…. The infrastructure that gets ordinary people educated, employed, paired off and raising kids has just broken down.”

And this section I need you to read in its entirety:

I view this as fundamentally a conservation project. If the Bengal tiger suddenly and dramatically stopped breeding, we wouldn’t say, “Wow, I’m so glad the tigers are prioritizing their mental health!” Or, “They’re spoiled; they’re just not made of the same stuff as their tiger ancestors.” And we certainly wouldn’t say, “Good, there are too many Bengal tigers! Bengal tigers are ruining everything.”

Instead, we’d look at their environment and try to figure out what changed, what’s disrupting their ability to fulfill this most basic imperative.

And it is a basic imperative. If you’re built to do anything at all, you’re built to fall in love and have children and raise them. And there’s no more punishing verdict, there’s no situation in which a person is more psychologically vulnerable, than when they take a chance on that. You can tell a kid who’s afraid of rejection that it’s not life and death, but it is life and death.

When you ask someone to love you, to marry you, to have a child with you, you’re asking them: do you want my eyes, my nose, my hairline, the way I think, the way I walk and talk? Do you want that to go on into the future or should it go away forever? And for hundreds of millions of men and women, it feels like the whole world is telling them, nope, not you.

For men, it’s usually near the top of the funnel, just getting swiped left 10,000 times at a glance. For women, it often comes later in the form of situationships that can last for months or years and never quite come around to yes, I want you in particular. I want my kids to be like you. I think your thing should go on….

I get why so many people are angry. We’re just not built to be hurt like that over and over again, with no end in sight. And a system where that’s the fate of an ordinary person is a broken system.

Bottom line for me is I don’t want any of that for my kids. I have to think of something better. Yes, there are political and economic dimensions to this issue…. But I’m not trying to have grandkids so they can fund Medicare.

I want my kids to have kids so they can learn that Christmas morning is actually better as a parent than it was as a kid. I want my daughters to have sons and my sons to have daughters, and to care intensely about what happens to them, and watch as that transforms their whole perspective on the opposite sex.

I want them to see all the little imperfections and embarrassing things that they were insecure about as kids in this other person who’s just the best and realized that all of that was completely okay and not a big deal, and it didn’t make them unlovable.

You’re supposed to observe your life again in the third person. You’re supposed to see yourself as a little child through your father’s eyes, your mother’s eyes, maybe through God’s eyes. You’re supposed to see yourself saying and doing things your parents said and did. And you’re either supposed to understand that and forgive it, or you’re supposed to recognize that it was wrong and make it right. Maybe both.

And these are psychological loops that don’t close in any other way. Of course, life isn’t fair. Things don’t always work out. But it should be normal, it should be typical to have these experiences. Parenting is as fundamental to the human life cycle as puberty, and just as transformative.

I believe that the mainstream institutions that used to get people educated, employed, married and supporting a family are in terminal decline and have become hostile to life.

Elon Musk retweeted Kevin’s full address with the comment, “If birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end.”

I get that there are challenges involved with having kids — especially when you’re a dissident like you and me, and you feel like the major institutions of society (the schools, for example, but not just them) are systematically trying to undermine you and your parenting.

I recently led a parenting call for my School of Life community, and we came up with a bunch of topics that would make for good sessions in the future:

–kids and electronics/screens
–discipline
–your kids’ peers
–homeschooling and traditional school
–sleeping issues among young children
–developing a mission statement and statement of values for your family (this was a brilliant idea from one of our members)
–teaching kids about money

and other ideas as well.

We’d all benefit from exchanging ideas with other parents, but good luck doing that nowadays: half the people in any group you’d find are certifiably insane, and they’ll probably think you’re crazy.

In my community nobody has to worry about any of that. We share the same worldview, and we’re normal.

Oh, and another marriage has come out of our community: the soon-to-be bride and groom met inside the School of Life and are getting married next month.

I can sit here and wring my hands in my email newsletter about the challenges we face, or you and I together can try to do something.

I choose the second one:

https://www.ElevenFreebies.com

Never pay for a book again: TomsFreeBooks.com

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Charlie Kirk became well known and helped build his organization Turning Point USA by coming on to college campuses to present views that some students and, often, the people running the colleges did not want aired. In doing so, he helped advance the exercise of free speech at colleges. It was at one of his campus events at which he was discussing and debating issues that Kirk was murdered last week.

If Texas Governor Greg Abbott wanted to honor Kirk, an appropriate action may be to find ways to expand respect for free speech at the Texas state government’s institutions of higher education. However, Abbott has chosen to do the opposite — use Kirk’s murder as a reason to crack down further on free speech at Texas colleges.

On Tuesday, Abbott, via his Twitter page, expressed his demand that one of those Texas colleges expel a student because that student reenacting Kirk being shot. Declared Abbott:

Hey Texas State.
This conduct is not accepted at our schools.
Expel this student immediately.
Mocking assassination must have consequences.

That is a demand from the governor to the people running one of the state’s universities. Abbott is not just expressing his opinion; he is ordering a government action be taken. Not only that, Abbott is calling for the expulsion to take place “immediately.” That means the student who would be expelled would have that serious penalty imposed without a chance to take any responsive action such as explaining his actions, providing greater context, apologizing, or presenting a defense based in law, the university’s policies, ethical principles, or other grounds. “None of that fairness mumbo jumbo,” demands the dictator, “just do now what I say — for Charlie.”

Six hours after Abbott made his demand, Texas State University confirmed the student he demanded be expelled is no longer a student at the university. Ayden Runnels reported at the Texas Tribune:

Six hours after Abbott’s request, Texas State University announced the person in the video had been identified and ‘was no longer a student’ at the university, according to a statement from Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse. It was not immediately clear whether the student was expelled or voluntarily withdrew. In Damphousse’s statement, he called the video “disturbing” and condemned the student’s behavior.

‘I will not tolerate behavior that mocks, trivializes, or promotes violence on our campuses,’ Damphousse said.

It looks like the culture of the people running Texas State University is more that of an ardent censor than that of an educational institution respecting free speech and the exchange of ideas. This speech restrictive culture Kirk opposed. Yet, Abbott is using Kirk’s name and death to advance such in Texas.

This new attack on free speech at Texas colleges builds on one Abbott rolled out in April of last year. Then, Abbott began a major crackdown on campuses that he announced in another post as his Twitter page by stating in part that “Students joining in hate-filled, antisemitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled.” Abbott here was deceptively employing language. He used a peculiar definition of “antisemitism” that includes in its ambit expressions of opposition to actions of the Israel government. He also categorized as ““hate-filled” protesters’ calls for ending the killing and destruction the Israel government has wrought in Gaza and beyond, done with indispensable assistance from the United States government.

Every indication is that Kirk, to whom Abbott is pointing to for support for the newest free speech crackdown at Texas colleges, was becoming in the weeks preceding his death increasingly critical of the Israel government’s military actions. Had Kirk not been killed and begun planning to hold one of his events at a Texas college, might Abbott of worked to prevent the event, categorizing it as “hateful” and “antisemitic”?

Abbott is an enemy of free speech at Texas colleges. That he presents his justifications for suppression through deceptive comments about opposing antisemitism and honoring Kirk provides some reason for optimism. Without the subterfuge, Abbott’s actions may be met with much more widespread and robust opposition. Hopefully, more and more people will see through the deception and start opposing the tyrannical restrictions on free speech.

The post Texas Governor Greg Abbott Expands His Rampage Against Free Speech on College Campuses, Using the Murder of Charlie Kirk as an Excuse appeared first on LewRockwell.

It has been another exciting week in and around Washington. The murder of Charlie Kirk has produced speculation that has resulted in all the loonies and haters coming out from their various hidey-holes. This has inevitably included the chorus of knuckleheads that makes up the Donald Trump cabinet. Since Kirk’s death, Republican conservatives have called for a crackdown on the left, though it is by no means clear that any identifiable left-of-center group was in any way implicated in the killing.

More likely perhaps, is the suggestion that Kirk might have been killed by Israel, which had both motive and means to carry out the assassination. Israel also has an international record for political assassinations that is second to none as the United States always provides it with political cover when it kills someone. This has been the case recently in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran and Qatar. The instantly after-the-fact babbling by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu describing how much he loved Kirk is in itself extremely suspicious as it is clear that the Israelis and their friends in the US were at odds with Kirk over his concerns about the Jewish state’s control over both Trump and US policy.

And no one has yet satisfactorily explained the mysterious departure from a nearby airport on a private jet with its Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), which provides positioning information between the aircraft and air traffic control, deliberately turned off. The plane is owned by Derek Maxfield, a businessman who is wealthy Jewish supporter of local Chabad Lubavich Utah. It might be assumed that the real assassin was being removed from the scene by air. There was in fact a somewhat bizarre distraction at the site of the killing when one George Zinn, who has been identified by some sources as Jewish and by others as Mormon-Zionist, shouted out, falsely, that he was the shooter. His outburst disrupted whatever police investigation was taking place and may have allowed the actual killer to escape. There has also been difficult to explain surveillance video that seems to question the whereabouts and status of the rifle allegedly used in the killing when the suspect who has been arrested was believed to be fleeing. One thing that is certain is that if the investigation does actually implicate Israel in the killing, there will be an organized government cover-up just as there was in the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 that killed 34 American sailors as well as the suspicious assassination of JFK and the equally questionable final report issued on 9/11, both of which might have involved Israel.

Lacking any genuine target for revenge over Kirk, those in charge of the government investigation have been venting their anger against the usual targets, which include the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. A number of employees who vented their dislike of Kirk due to some of the controversial positions he has taken have been punished. Late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel is perhaps most prominent from among a growing number of people across the US who have been fired or sanctioned at their workplaces for comments deemed offensive describing Kirk’s brand of politics. Some of the comments that have been revealed in media coverage have certainly included language that might be considered over the top, but others have not appeared to glorify or celebrate the shooting of Kirk’s death.

Trump’s State Department is also stepping up to the plate to find whom to punish, saying that it would identify non-citizens “on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event” and take appropriate action against them, such as refusing or revoking visas and deporting them if they are already in the US. And Attorney General Pam Bondi has also threatened ordinary American citizens who post the “wrong thing” on social media, saying that the Justice Department would prosecute “hate speech.” Bondi should perhaps check the First Amendment to the Constitution, which she and all the Trumpsters have sworn to uphold and defend. It does not include any “hate speech” clause which would take away one’s right to speak freely on any topic. Bondi has perhaps become confused by her constant citation of “antisemitism,” which includes any criticism of Israel, as “hate speech” which must be combatted and criminalized. Perhaps she should look at a map where she might discover that Israel is not part of the United States even if Congress and the White House are sometimes confused on the issue.

Speaking of which, the usual crowd of Israel Firsters have been active on all fronts in their effort to make Israel’s ongoing slaughter of the Palestinians appear to be the right thing to do. Congressman Brian Mast of Florida, who served in the Israeli Army and who sometimes wears that uniform when present in the House Office Building, has introduced a bill that would have authorized the Secretary of State to revoke the passports of any American whom he decides has provided “material support” to terrorists. The “terrorists” in question are, of course, Hamas and the other Palestinian resistance groups, and the bill would mean that anyone writing something on social media defending the Gazans could have his passport taken away. Fortunately, Mast withdrew his bill due to powerful response from numerous civil liberties groups that had warned last week that the bill endangered the right to travel freely and that it essentially granted to the Secretary of State “thought police” power.

But, inevitably, when one yo-yo head in Congress takes a step back on the Israel issue, there is someone else ready to step forward, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York state has presented legislation that would prevent future New York City officials from arresting Benjamin Netanyahu when he visits the US. Stefanik describes her bill as intended to “protect American sovereignty and prohibit radicals like Zohran Mamdani from illegally arresting the leader of our democratic ally Israel.” The legislation would block state and local law enforcement officers from arresting Netanyahu on a visit to New York City, where the United Nations is headquartered.

Zohran Mamdani is a New York state representative and the current Democratic nominee for New York City mayor who is leading in the polls. There is an active arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court based on Israel’s war crimes and its genocide which the US government has refused to recognize. Mamdani supports an international boycott of Israel, has condemned the genocide taking place, and has suggested that he would serve it if Netanyahu arrives in town! That is why he is being targeted by folks like Stefanik.

The Kirk furor has perhaps opened the gates to still more behavior by the Trump regime that borders on insanity. Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio has been in Israel crawling in front of Netanyahu to “guarantee” Israel’s security after the obligatory prayer session at the so-called wailing wall. He and the oddly designated US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee donned their kippah small hats and demonstrated their obedience to a higher power, which is clearly the Jewish state’s government and America’s domestic Israel Lobby. One wonders if Netanyahu, who will be in Washington next week, will be required to reciprocate by dropping in for a prayer session at the National Cathedral when he is in town.

And as a final item, a little happy news. It is clear that Israel knows how to reward its few defenders, in this case Donald Trump, whom Netanyahu describes as his country’s best friend ever among the US presidents. Bezalel Smotrich, the extreme right winger Israel finance minister has revealed that plans for the redevelopment of Gaza once it is cleansed of Palestinians is moving right along. He has described the project as a “Real Estate Bonanza” and has indicated that the Jewish state is in talks with the United States regarding dividing Gaza’s land between the two countries. Smotrich observed that Israel is now finishing up the “demolition phase” for rebuilding Gaza, and negotiations are now underway with the US regarding a business plan for redevelopment. He added that the reconstruction plan is “on President Trump’s desk.” The Trump Riviera dream is becoming a reality, it appears, and there have been reports that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has been active recently both in Israel and in several Gulf Arab States pursuing development projects.

Some might churlishly observe that Donald Trump plays fast and loose with enriching his family through opportunities presented to him while he is serving as president of the United States of America. He has initiated personal lawsuits against news outlets that he perceives as having insulted or defamed him, the latest of which is last week’s announcement by Trump on Truth Social: “Today, I have the Great Honor of bringing a $15 Billion Dollar Defamation and Libel Lawsuit against The New York Times. I am PROUD to hold this once respected ‘rag’ responsible, as we are doing with the Fake News Networks.” Trump has also sued the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion and ABC and CBS news, both of which settled in court for $16 and $15 million respectively. Should this kind of personal litigation on the part of a head of state be allowed? Trump has declared that as president “he can do whatever he wants to do.” Many Americans might disagree with that!

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

The post More Turmoil from Washington appeared first on LewRockwell.

The current director of the FBI may be taking more bad guys off the streets, but he’s also taking a lot of heat for doing nothing to help expose the powerful people Jeffrey Epstein probably trafficked minors to.

A small number of legislators are trying to fill the gap and do what FBI Director Kash Patel and other law enforcement agencies won’t. Among the most determined is Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. On Wednesday, during the House Judiciary Committee hearing on oversight of the FBI, he dropped the name of one alleged Epstein client and indicated he knew the identities of 19 more.

Thomas Massie Questions Kash Patel

Massie began by dispelling Patel’s incredible claim that Epstein didn’t traffic minors to anyone but himself. As we noted in previous reporting, this flies in the face of hours of sworn victim testimony, piles of court filings, and thousands of pages of investigative findings. Patel’s attempt to convince the public that Epstein trafficked over a thousand underage girls only to satiate his deviant appetite is an audacious gaslighting campaign that has eroded loyalty and trust of the Trump administration among some of his most hitherto devoted supporters. Within a matter of months, high-ranking Trump officials went from announcing the Epstein files were on their desk to insisting there was nothing more to see.

Patel has aligned all public comments over the last few months to fit within the conclusions of the June 7 FBI memo that said there is no client list, Epstein never blackmailed anyone, and he really did commit suicide.

On Wednesday, Massie scrutinized what Patel said during the previous day’s Senate testimony. Patel had said the problem with further disclosure stems from the original 2006 Epstein case filed in Florida. That case “involved a very limited search warrant or set of search warrants and didn’t take as much investigatory material as it should’ve seized.” He also said the case was built in a way that sealed the material behind court orders and “barred future prosecutions for those involved at that time.”

Massie Not Buying It

But Massie wasn’t buying it. First, he said, the constraints Patel cited “only applied to the Southern District of Florida,” where that agreement was struck. There are piles of information elsewhere, he added:

They do not apply to the Southern District of New York [SDNY], the location of the 2019 sex trafficking indictment, which produced many things, including a series of FD-302 documents, according to victims who cooperated with the FBI in that investigation.

Massie reminded Patel that the FBI has these documents. They are “in your possession,” he emphasized. The documents in SDNY include information of at least 20 men “Jeffrey Epstein trafficked victims to including minors,” according to the congressman. One of the men who allegedly assaulted minors was Jes Staley (formerly CEO of Barclays and a top investor at J.P. Morgan), according to Massie. Then he hinted at the identities of another 19 suspected pedophiles:

One Hollywood producer worth a few hundred million dollars, one royal prince, one high-profile individual in the music industry, one very prominent banker, one high-profile government official, one high-profile former politician, one owner of a car company in Italy, one rock star, one magician, at least six billionaires, including a billionaire from Canada.

All these people are listed in FBI files, “files that you control,” Massie told Patel. The lawmaker then asked Patel if he’s launched any investigations into any of the people identified by the victims. The FBI director essentially said the FBI doesn’t consider those testimonies credible:

I have asked my FBI agents to review the entirety of the Epstein files and bring forth any credible information. And we’re working with Congress not only to divulge that information and produce it to you, but any investigations that arise from any credible investigation will be brought. There have been no new materials brought to me launching a new indictment.

Patel added that this is what two different U.S. attorney’s offices, over three administrations, who investigated those very documents, concluded. Massie pressed him whether he looked over those documents himself. Patel said he hadn’t but the FBI did. Massie asked Patel if he’d meet with the victims. He sidestepped around committing and said the FBI will.

In today’s hearing, I told FBI Director Kash Patel that we know FBI still has unreleased documents which contain 20 names of rich and politically connected men who Epstein trafficked girls and young women to.

FBI needs to release the Epstein files and investigate these men. pic.twitter.com/xe2Fy9s2Ow

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) September 17, 2025

Links to Intel

Massie also asked Patel if he was told to carry out the Justice Department’s September 2, 33,000-page Epstein document dump intentionally on the same day the congressman filed his discharge petition for all the files. That dump included unredacted names of victims, Massie said. They were not happy about that. Patel said he didn’t know the day Massie was referring to and then denied he was instructed to do so.

Massie introduced a number of news articles into the record, including one in which U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Southern Florida Alex Acosta says that he was told that Epstein belonged to intelligence and to “leave it alone”; a second article insinuating Epstein had CIA connections; a third reporting that Epstein’s calendar indicated he met with Barack Obama’s CIA chief; and a fourth article that says Epstein met with former Israeli prime minister and intelligence head Ehud Barak 36 times.

A horde of independent investigative journalists who’ve delved into this case have linked Epstein to intel agencies, including the CIA and Mossad. A report by Alan MacLeod is one of the most recent.

Jes Staley

As for Jes Staley, court documents linked him to Epstein years ago. The Virgin Islands sued J.P. Morgan, Staley’s former employer and Epstein’s former bank, and accused Staley himself of funneling Epstein’s money. The lawsuit revealed emails between the two that “suggest that Staley may have been involved in Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation,” according to reports about the suit.

Court documents said Epstein shared photos of young women with Staley. The two had a discussion that appeared to use Disney characters as code. According to a New York Post report:

“That was fun. Say hi to Snow White,” Staley emailed Epstein in July 2010, according to filings on Wednesday with the US District Court in Manhattan. “What character would you like next?” Epstein replied. “Beauty and the Beast,” Staley allegedly responded, to which Epstein replied: “Well one side is available,” according to the filing.

Staley and Epstein sent each other about 1,200 emails. Staley called his relationship with the pedophile “profound,” according to the lawsuit.

Forced Out Over Epstein

Staley has never been charged with sexual crimes but he was nevertheless “forced out at Barclays in 2021 as the Financial Conduct Authority, the UK-equivalent of the Securities and Exchange Commission, launched an investigation into allegations that Staley misled the agency and the Barclays board about his dealings with Epstein,” according to reports.

A report from March of this year noted that Staley wanted to get back into investing. He testified that he didn’t know about Epstein’s pedophilia, yet admitted to having sex with one of Epstein’s assistants. He said it was consensual but “the age of the assistant was not revealed,” reports say.

As for the Virgin Islands lawsuit, it accused J.P. Morgan of facilitating and turning a blind eye to Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation. The suit alleged that “J.P. Morgan knowingly, negligently, and unlawfully provided and pulled the levers through which recruiters and victims were paid and was indispensable to the operation and concealment of the Epstein trafficking enterprise.”

In the end, J.P. Morgan threw enough money to avoid discovery. The banking giant reached a $75 million settlement with the Virgin Islands and Staley. The terms of the bank’s settlement with Staley are secret.

This article was originally published on The New American.

The post Massie Accuses Former Banking CEO of Being an Epstein Client; Hints at 19 Others appeared first on LewRockwell.

Friends, you are not going to believe this.

In this first extended interview he’s just done with Crux Now, Leo XIV has basically said that the Church’s teaching on sexual morality could change. He actually even went there and implied that he could – in his words – “change the Church’s teaching” on women’s ordination.

Take a listen to what he said first on sexual morality. This is what he says after having been talking about LGBT issues for a while:

People want the Church doctrine to change, want attitudes to change. I think we have to change attitudes before we ever change doctrine.

That’s right, he’s strongly implying – well, he’s saying – that Church teaching could shift, if attitudes change first.

Might that be why we’ve had so much LGBT stuff in Rome lately, from Father James Martin to the LGBT pilgrimage? Are they trying to get our “attitudes to change”?

And what do you think the so-called “LGBT Catholics” are hearing when they hear Leo saying such a thing? It’s a very clear invitation and instruction: work to change attitudes, then we can change the teaching. Wow.

And rather than stating such changes were impossible, Leo said he thought it was unlikely that it would happen soon:

I find it highly unlikely, certainly in the immediate future, that the Church’s doctrine in terms of what the Church teaches about sexuality, what the Church teaches about marriage [will change].

Later, instead of stating that the Church’s teaching could not change, he merely said that he thought that it would remain the same:

I think that the Church’s teaching will continue as it is, and that’s what I have to say about that for right now.

You think it’s going to continue as it is? Aren’t you supposed to be the Pope – the one responsible for making sure that it continues as it is?

Look friends, this is just stunning. Catholic teaching on sexual morality – including the sinfulness of homosexual acts, as well as fornication, adultery and others – aren’t matters of probabilities or personal conjecture, or contingent and waiting to be changed.

They’re definitive, grounded in both the natural law and divine revelation – and so they’re incapable of being changed.

Reason alone tells us that sexual activity outside marriage – and thus, obviously, all sexual activity between two same sex couples – is contrary to the natural law.

This is also and separately a dogma – divinely revealed in Scripture and proposed by the universal ordinary magisterium of the Church.

Vatican I taught that such truths which are to be believed with divine and Catholic faith.

Female ordination

Leo also talked about the possibility of the ordination of women to the diaconate in similar terms:

What the synod had spoken about specifically was the ordination, perhaps, of women deacons, which has been a question that’s been studied for many years now. There’ve been different commissions appointed by different popes to say, what can we do about this? I think that will continue to be an issue.

Ok, so in the early Church, there was indeed an office of “deaconess” – but everyone knows that these women were not ordained to any sacramental holy order of the diaconate.

But Leo calls even this into question by equating the female diaconate with that of the permanent diaconate established after the Second Vatican Council. He gives a long anecdote about meeting deacons and their wives in Rome before concluding:

[T]here are parts of the world that never really promoted the permanent deaconate, and that itself became a question: Why would we talk about ordaining women to the diaconate if the diaconate itself is not yet properly understood and properly developed and promoted within the church?

He also expressed his willingness for study and debate on the matter to continue, saying he was “certainly willing to continue to listen to people,” and pointing to the study groups in Rome on the subject. “We’ll walk with that and see what comes,” he said.

But do you know what’s even more shocking? Leo said this:

I at the moment don’t have an intention of changing the teaching of the Church on the topic.

Friends, if you say a thing like that, it’s clear what you think. You’re saying you do have the power to “change the teaching of the Church.”

Read the Whole Article

The post Pope Leo on LGBTQ: ‘We Have To Change Attitudes Before We Ever Change Doctrine’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

It looks like Donald Trump, with his European lackeys in tow, is telling Egypt to screw off. After painstaking negotiations, Egypt brokered an agreement between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is now known as the Cairo Agreement. This is a technical accord reached on September 9, 2025, in Cairo between Iran and the IAEA, which allows the IAEA to inspect Iranian nuclear facilities.

Here are the main provisions of the Cairo Agreement:

• Resumption of Inspections: Iran agreed to resume cooperation with the IAEA, reopening the way for technical verification at its nuclear facilities and increased transparency measures.
• Special Reporting: Iran is required to prepare a report detailing locations and conditions of nuclear material, including highly enriched uranium, especially after incidents affecting those sites.
• Framework for Trust: The agreement lays the groundwork for rebuilding trust between Iran and the IAEA and is intended as a first step toward restarting broader nuclear negotiations.
• Regional Diplomacy: Egypt played a central role as mediator, with its foreign minister leading negotiations that started in June amid heightened regional tensions

My initial reaction was that Iran is crazy to entertain such an agreement in light of evidence that the IAEA used its previous inspections to gather intelligence on Iranian scientists who were murdered by Israel during the 12-Day War. Upon further reflection, I think I understand why Iran is taking this step: Iran is trying to play by the international rules in order to avoid the snapback sanctions under the JCPOA. Despite the Western narrative that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a lawless, terrorist state, Iran is taking the high-road by taking a concrete action to show that it is not enriching uranium to build a nuclear bomb. Unfortunately, the West does not care… It is hellbent on destroying the Islamic Republic. I think Iran is taking this step so that its BRICS partners will be able to ignore the UN sanctions and continue to do business with Iran because of the deceit of the UK, France and Germany, who failed to uphold the JCPOA by lifting sanctions on Iran ten years ago.

Let’s begin by reviewing the original JCPOA:

Overview of the JCPOA and Snapback Sanctions

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed in 2015 between Iran and the P5+1 (United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, and Germany), is an agreement aimed at limiting Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. It was endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231 (UNSCR 2231), which terminated six prior UN sanctions resolutions (1696 (2006), 1737 (2006), 1747 (2007), 1803 (2008), 1835 (2008), and 1929 (2010) but included a “snapback” mechanism to reimpose them if Iran engages in “significant non-performance” of its commitments. This mechanism, detailed in Article 36-37 of the JCPOA and operational paragraphs 10-19 of UNSCR 2231, is a veto-proof process designed to ensure compliance without requiring new Security Council action, which could be blocked by permanent members.

The snapback is one of the JCPOA’s key enforcement tools and is set to expire on October 18, 2025 (“Termination Day”), after which the UN’s consideration of Iran’s nuclear file ends and the mechanism lapses. Only current JCPOA participants (France, UK, Germany, China, Russia; the US withdrew in 2018 and lost standing) can trigger it. As of August 28, 2025, the E3 (France, UK, Germany) initiated the process, citing Iran’s uranium enrichment and non-compliance, starting a 30-day countdown unless resolved.

How the Snapback Mechanism Works

The process is structured to automatically restore sanctions if not halted by consensus:

1. Notification of Non-Performance: Any JCPOA participant notifies the UN Security Council (via the President) of Iran’s “significant non-performance,” such as exceeding uranium enrichment limits or blocking IAEA inspections. This locks in the complaint for 15 days, during which the Joint Commission (JCPOA parties) can try to resolve it.
2. Referral to the Security Council: If unresolved, the complaint is referred to the Council. Within 10 days, the Council President must circulate a draft resolution to “continue” the sanctions termination (i.e., maintain relief under the JCPOA).
3. 30-Day Voting Period: The Council has 30 days to adopt the continuation resolution. Adoption requires nine affirmative votes with no vetoes from permanent members (P5: US, UK, France, Russia, China). If the resolution fails (e.g., due to a veto by the triggering state or lack of votes), sanctions automatically “snap back” without further action.
4. Irreversibility: Once triggered, the process cannot be easily reversed; even a veto accelerates snapback. The restored sanctions are indefinite until a new Council resolution lifts them.

This design, proposed by Russia during negotiations, bypasses traditional vetoes on new sanctions, making it a powerful deterrent.

Sanctions Reimposed by Snapback

Snapback restores all provisions from the six pre-JCPOA UN resolutions, focusing on Iran’s nuclear, missile, and proliferation activities. These include:

• Nuclear Program Restrictions:
  • Prohibition on uranium enrichment, reprocessing, and heavy-water reactor activities beyond JCPOA limits.
  • Ban on new nuclear facilities and transfers of nuclear-related materials, equipment, or technology to Iran.
  • Requirement for IAEA monitoring; Iran must comply with safeguards.
• Missile and Arms Embargo:
  • Ban on activities involving ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons (includes transfers, testing, and procurement).
  • Restrictions on conventional arms transfers to or from Iran (though some expired in 2020; snapback would reinstate broader prohibitions).
  • Limits on dual-use items for missiles.
• Financial and Economic Sanctions:
  • Asset freezes on designated Iranian individuals, entities, and bodies (e.g., Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), nuclear scientists, and proliferation networks; over 80 entities and 200+ individuals).
  • Prohibition on financial services, banking transactions, and insurance related to prohibited activities.
  • Vigilance requirements for states to prevent Iranian use of their financial systems for nuclear/missile purposes.
• Travel Bans and Designations:
  • Travel restrictions on listed individuals.
  • Re-designation of entities connected to Iran’s nuclear, missile, or support programs.
• Monitoring and Enforcement:
  • Revival of the UN Panel of Experts to investigate violations, report on compliance, and recommend enforcement.
  • States must seize and inspect prohibited cargo and report to the Council.

These UN sanctions apply globally but do not automatically restore US or EU national sanctions (e.g., US secondary sanctions on oil exports remain separate). However, they signal international isolation, deterring business with Iran and potentially amplifying unilateral measures.

According to a report from Al Mayadeen, if the European states activate the snapback mechanism, then Iran will nullify the Cairo Agreement and shut the door on cooperation between the IAEA and Tehran, and bar inspections.” Not surprisingly, French President Emmanuel Macron told a reporter today that snapback sanctions against Iran are a ‘done deal’, and WILL be implemented regardless of the Iran-IAEA agreement that was signed in Cairo. So much for diplomacy. As I intimated at the outset, the West is determined to destroy the current government in Iran.

But Iran is not in this battle alone. The Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, Major General Musavi, met in Moscow with Russian Energy Minister Sergey Tsivilyov. Musavi stated that Russia’s positions at the UN and IAEA regarding Israel’s attack on Iran were “firm and positive.” He emphasized that Iran has never started a war, considering diplomacy the priority path, but in response to aggression delivered a “harsh and crushing blow” to the USA and Israel.

Russian Energy Minister Tsivilyov expressed condolences over the deaths of Iranian commanders and scientists, supported the idea of deepening joint commissions, and called to elevate Moscow and Tehran’s economic and defense cooperation to the highest level. If there are new attacks on Iran, Moscow is likely to actively assist Iran in defending itself.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is working overtime to sabotage any initiatives by the IAEA to reduce the possibility of attacks on nuclear facilities. The IAEA member states will vote on Thursday on a ban against attacking or threatening to attack any nuclear facilities under the agency’s safeguards.

The draft resolution strongly condemned the deliberate and unlawful attacks on nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards in the Islamic Republic of Iran, stating that these attacks constitute a clear violation of international law, including the UN Charter and the IAEA’s own statute.

It reiterated that all nations must refrain from attacking or threatening to attack the peaceful nuclear facilities of other countries.

It also reaffirmed the necessity of the full and effective realization of the inalienable right of all Member States for the development of research, production, and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, without discrimination, and further affirmed that any legitimate matters arising in this context shall be settled exclusively through peaceful means, through dialogue and diplomacy, being the only viable course of action, in addition to the decision to consider taking further action, as and when deemed necessary.

The draft resolution will be submitted by Iran along with China, Russia, Belarus, Nicaragua, and Venezuela at the 69th IAEA General Conference in Vienna, Austria. Washington reportedly has warned the majority of member states not to vote in favor of a resolution banning strikes on nuclear facilities. I interpret this as the US wanting to maintain the option to bomb Iranian facilities again.

This article was originally published on Sonar21.

The post Why Is Iran Willing To Make an Agreement With the IAEA? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Over the last decade China developed the longest railway in the world running more than 8,000 miles from the east coast of China to Spain.

bigger

The line crosses China, Russia, Belarus and Poland before splitting up into various European connections.

Over the last year the railway has carried goods between China and Europe at a value of about $25 billion.

The line is now blocked:

Poland’s decision to close its border with Belarus in response to thequadrennial Zapad-2025 military exercises and Russian drone incursion on September 10 has abruptly severed one of the fastest-growing trade arteries between China and the EU.
…
The impact of the closure of the Belarusian border is significant. The land corridor already represents 3.7% of all EU–China trade, up from 2.1% a year earlier. While that share remains small compared to seaborne shipments, its importance lies in speed and reliability.
…
Poland’s government underlined that the decision was driven by security imperatives rather than economics. Warsaw stated that “the logic of trade” was being replaced by “the logic of security,” underscoring the geopolitical risks attached to the Belt and Road corridors.

The Zapad-2025 military exercises is long over but Poland continues to block the railroad.

Its government is taking Europe’s trade with China as hostage to press China to change its policy towards Russia:

Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski has said that during his meeting with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in a suburb of Warsaw on Monday 15 September, he will insist that China put pressure on Russia to stop “a hybrid operation” on Poland’s eastern border, which has led to the closure of Beijing’s key trade route to Europe.
…
Tensions escalated in May last year, when a Polish border guard was attacked and killed by a migrant.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk accused Belarus and Russia of weaponising migration.

Last year, Warsaw threatened to block the export route to the European Union to secure China’s help. Polish then-president Andrzej Duda raised the border tensions issue during his visit to Beijing, which “helped for a few months”, Sikorski said.

“But unfortunately, this hybrid operation has intensified again. So, we need to talk again,” he added.

Interestingly the Chinese reporting on the meeting between Wang Ye and Sikorski did not mention the blocking:

At the 4th meeting of Poland-China Intergovernmental Committee on Monday, the two parties exchanged views on the importance of developing effective and economically competitive Eurasian transport corridors and the pivotal role of Poland in this process.  The two sides recognized the benefits of providing mutually beneficial services for volumes of goods transported by railway, maritime and air means and of consolidating the existing and potential routes and logistical chains. Both sides expressed their willingness to ensure the safety and accessibility of the China-Europe Railway Express.

I suspect that, behind the scene, less polite words were used by Wang Yi to express the Chinese view on Poland’s attempt the hinder the freedom of global trade.

The migrants do not ride on Chinese freight trains. Blocking the railroad connection between China and Europe to prevent migrants from coming through Belarus is a very crude form of blackmail that will hit back.

Should the blockade continue Poland will have to bury all hope of any future investment from China.

Western European companies who depend on the railroad connection for their trade will also become more hostile to Poland.

The coming defeat of NATO in Ukraine will contribute to the end of the military alliance.

Poland’s outrageous behavior makes it more likely that the defeat in Ukraine will also help to break up the European Union.

Poland is currently the recipient of the largest EU’s agricultural subsidies. Why should Germany and others continue to pay for those when Poland is impeding their trade?

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Poland’s Attempt To Blackmail China Will Hurt Itself Most appeared first on LewRockwell.

In this video production, Michel Chossudovsky and Drago Bosnic focus on a detailed plan to commit genocide against the People of Palestine under the guise of a fake “responsibility to protect” humanitarian mandate. 

In a recent July 2025 statement (see below), in a controversial AI video production, Gila Gamliel, who was Israel’s Minister of Intelligence in 2023-24 (appointed by Netanyahu on January 2, 2023), confirmed the adoption of a so-called “Voluntary Immigration Plan” by the Netanyahu Cabinet on October 13, 2023.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post Secret Plan To Commit Genocide Against the People of Palestine appeared first on LewRockwell.

Comments open on YouTube

The post America After Charlie Kirk appeared first on LewRockwell.

If there is ever any indication that I am talking to either a low-IQ person or a well-indoctrinated person, it is when I say the words, “Martin Luther” (10 November 1483 — 18 February 1546) in a serious conversation about world history and I then receive in knee-jerk response to that, the following three words, either “Martin Luther King?” (January 15, 1929 — April 4, 1968) or “Martin Luther King!”

The Realities Of Indoctrination

I can see the programming kick in. But that moment when programming kicks in, is the moment when a thinking person can choose to intervene, which does not happen in these moments. So, not only can I see the programming kicking in, but I can also see another painful to watch layer of disadvantage: the lack of knowledge about basic matters of culture. I witness, at its most basic level, how the individual is unable to counteract the programming because of that absence of knowledge.

Some people know they shouldn’t say, “Martin Luther King?” they just seem to know that it is an entirely different person, but they have nothing else valuable to say, so they just say that. Try this conversation enough, and ask people about it, and this thought process will likely become as clear as day to you too.

It is a sad testament on the condition of our society, because it demonstrates how effective some indoctrination has been. It is understandable why those who want to indoctrinate have come for the schools and for the modes of entertainment, for they are such powerful forces in controlling man’s mind.

Two Different Orders Of Magnitude Separate Martin Luther From Martin Luther King

One of those figures (Luther) is among the most impactful people in global history in the last 1,000 years. The other (Martin Luther King) is only one of the 200 most important people in American history over the last 100 years. Love MLK or hate MLK, the reality is that he has not stood the test of time for it has only been half-a-century since his passing and his ideas have been resolutely disregarded, especially in intellectual circles that claim to operate in his name. Love Martin Luther or hate Martin Luther, his work has stood the test of time and has been impactful to this day.

The two are not the same. Not only are they not the same, but they are entirely different orders of magnitude.

And I do not come to denounce Martin Luther King, nor to praise Martin Luther. I come to point to the realities of time. We have no idea what the people of tomorrow will think of the actions of today, let alone what the people of 500 years from now will think of the actions of today.

As such, it is entirely possible that Martin Luther King may fade into the background, especially since his most widely regarded disciples have such an unfaithful interpretation of his life’s work. He has become a name to throw around for politically expedient wins, and little more. At the same time, it is entirely possible that someone like Charlie Kirk will rise in prominence with the passing of time.

The Once Disregarded And Forgotten Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940), a century ago this spring, released what is widely regarded as the finest work of American literature over the past hundred years: The Great Gatsby. That is despite the fact that he died believing himself a literary failure, as did many of his age. He was far more prominently overshadowed by literary names that not 1 in 20 readers of this would recognize.

Similarly, William Shakespeare (circa 23 April 1564  – 23 April 1616) is widely regarded the finest writer in the English language, yet for a fairly long period of time, his work had been virtually forgotten. It is hard to predict what will last the test of time. It would not be strange for someone who is a household name today, to be entirely lost to history a few decades from now, or that an entirely obscure person be a household name a few decades from now.

Charlie Kirk Did Something Very Different With His Political Activism

Charlie Kirk (October 14, 1993 – September 10, 2025) fell at a time when America needed a hero. Prior to the time of his death, Kirk was one of the one hundred single most impactful political figures of the century, to date. While Charlie Kirk was a Donald Trump supporter, he understood so well, that America does not need Trump, as much as America needs Jesus. Kirk, 31, ran one of the most influential political organizations in the country and used politics not as the end goal, but as a pathway to bring Americans closer to Jesus.

In doing so, he has been part of a counter-cultural coup to return America and Americans to God. From The Mayflower Compact to the founding of California, we are a land, and a people founded in the name of God.

This places Kirk in an entirely different category from King and a different category than any widely known politico of our day.

Kirk’s impact on the world may grow, or it may wane. His recognition may increase, or he may fade into history. Time will tell, but I think some factors are in his favor on this matter.

The Disciples Of Charlie Kirk

Ben Shapiro has announced his intention to continue the work of Charlie Kirk, “We’re going to pick up that blood stained microphone where Charlie left it.” Such words are likely meant to encourage others.

While Mr. Shapiro is no doubt a very intelligent person. And I recognize that what Charlie Kirk did looked like constant intellectual jousting, again, what it really was, was constantly challenging people to have a deeper relationship with God.

Charlie had the shine of Jesus on him. Mr. Shapiro, unfortunately, does not, yet, at this time have that same shine. He could go out and do the things Charlie Kirk did, but he would not actually be doing the things Charlie Kirk did. Kirk shone like a person who spent a great deal of time in the Bible and in prayer.

Milo Yianopolous, too, has announced an interest in picking up where Charlie Kirk left off, as have others. “You killed the nice guy. So I guess you get me.”  Even Gavin Newsom has stepped in ready to eulogize Charlie Kirk and has expressed an interest to fill Kirk’s shoes.

Glenn Beck, had no such presumption that man would fill his shoes, simply stating, “Rest in peace, Charlie. God will take it from here.” Nick Fuentes echoed that Kirk’s shoes cannot be filled. Candace Owens vowed to destroy the person who seeks to co-opt Kirk’s legacy.

In all likelihood, the change in mass communication, may make it unlikely that any one human will be able to control the reputation of Charlie Kirk.

If Kirk’s reputation can be kept true to the words of Kirk, and my guess is that it can be, for his videos are so prevalent and there is so much room for open public debate about who he is, then he will not become a diluted figure the way Martin Luther King has become. Time will tell.

King Fit His Era, But Kirk Fits The Entire 400-Year History Of America

While Martin Luther King may have been a fitting figure for a period, Kirk is a better long-term fit for America. King was a man who used the Bible to effect political change. Kirk was a man who used politics to bring people to the Bible.

Even his time on college campuses with a mic open to anyone who disagreed about the divisive political issues of our day, even that was often just a cover to be able to talk about Jesus. Everything I saw him do for years pointed back to Jesus.

Charlie Kirk Looks Smug, To A Confused America

Some found him smug and unlikeable. I get that. I understand how the world has gotten unfamiliar seeing a man who knows what he is about. I understand how the world has gotten used to: easily triggered, constantly emotional, incredibly confused, people being the norm in society. It was not always that way in America. It was not always that way anywhere in the West. There was a time when Christian faith was normal. There was a time where every individual knew some basic truths that he could easily state in his life. To one so un-used to encountering a person who understands truth, I could see how it would come across as smug.

Political Expediency Has Made Martin Luther King’s Name Of Little Value, Will The Same Happen To Charlie Kirk?

Martin Luther King has become a name most uttered by the least knowledgeable. Seldom is he faithfully quoted. Seldom have those quoting him taken the time to engage with his work and his many contradictions. He would likely be horrified at what America has become. So much of it has become that way through an ignorant obedience to those who speak his name for the purpose of inducing guilt and shortcutting mental capacity.

While Kirk and King have similarities in their lives, the practice of using King’s name has become the opposite of what Kirk’s life was about.

The political expediency that King’s name gets used to achieve is the same behavior that has destroyed King’s name. If Kirk’s disciples can avoid using his name for political expediency and can instead seek to maintain a faithfulness to his ideals, Kirk is likely to avoid the same fate as King.

King’s Legacy Has Become A Fairly Un-American Legacy, While Kirk Has Stood Up For The Founding Values Of The Country

Kirk raised up an army of free speech warriors, that will usher in a renewed era of American thought. It will not be his work singlehandedly, but his impact will be immeasurable.

King has been used to give rise to special privilege, division, that is outside of the founding intent of America, and aberrant in the context of American culture. This trend may represent a permanent shift in American culture.

What is more likely to happen is that America will return to being a Christian nation. If it does not, the American dream is over and America is not long for this world. King’s work as widely understood today, and the work of Kirk are on polar opposite ends.

Is The American Experiment Over, Or Are It’s Brightest Days Ahead? That Will Determine If King Remains Better Known Or If Kirk Becomes More Known

I have no idea which of those paths will be followed. I have no idea if good or evil wins. There are some one hundred countries on the planet already much like what King’s name is being used to turn America into, while there is only one America. There is likely to be revival in the land. America’s brightest days are likely ahead. The American experiment is not over.

That portends a bright future for the legacy of Charlie Kirk.

That means one day, when Americans look around at the world, it is entirely possible, children will page through books about world history and will ask their parents a question. They will likely know who Martin Luther was. They will likely know who Charlie Kirk was. And they might find themselves asking, “Who was Martin Luther KING?”

And the answer might be, “He was kind of like the Charlie Kirk of his day. People rallied around him and then he was killed by powerful people who felt threatened by what he had to say, but it was blamed on someone else entirely until we got to the bottom of it all.”

Imagine the society that it takes to have that reference point, instead of the society we today live in. But I believe that is exactly where we are headed.

The Likely Outcome

Some people find it controversial to say that Charlie Kirk is the Martin Luther King of this era. It is likely that there will be a time when King has faded into the background and Kirk has risen in prominence — again, only time will tell. But it is entirely possible that the less well known Martin Luther King will be described as “The Charlie Kirk of his day.”

The post Why Martin Luther King Will One Day Be Referred to as ‘The Charlie Kirk of His Era’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

While America is known as a “capitalistic’ society with “free markets,” the reality is far different. A nation that once had a very limited government now has the biggest government in the history of mankind. Money is counterfeited by the trillions and the price-fixing of interest rates is policy. Government “regulators” are staffed by people who go through a “revolving door” from the “regulated” corporation to the government. In fact, that is the greatest danger that America — and the rest of the world faces — there merger of corporation and state; the fusion of power and money. That’s a far better description of modern America; not “capitalism” or “free markets.”

The post President Trump’s Corporate State: (Intel Edition) appeared first on LewRockwell.

Joseph  Morabito wrote:

“Why do they think that just because you have a Tonight Show that you must deal in serious issues? It’s a danger. It’s a real danger. Once you start that, you start to get that self-important feeling that what you say has great import. And you know? Strangely enough, you could use that show as a forum. You could sway people. And I don’t think you should as an entertainer.”

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Click Here:

Reuters

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Readers often ask me why Dr. McCullough and I are not more critical of President Trump’s “give Benjamin Netanyahu whatever he wants” policy.

Before I respond to this question, I’d like to give a bit of background on this issue. For over thirty years, Dr. McCullough and I have been acutely aware the State of Israel’s outsized influence over U.S. foreign policy since the Johnson administration. Moreover, Dr. McCullough’s wife is a Palestinian Christian who is extremely distraught about the plight of the Christian congregation in Gaza and all innocent civilians in Gaza.

We believe that the United States government should heed President Washington’s exhortation —stated in his Farewell Address (a foundational document)—that the U.S. Republic should avoid foreign entanglements and alliances. However, we must also recognize that there has been ZERO support for this policy in America’s monied class for over a century.

Though I (a freelance scribbler) am a man of modest means, I grew up in an affluent Waspy community in Dallas in which there is ZERO support for or even awareness of the foreign policy prescriptions that President Washington articulated.

If they took the time to read the Address, most would likely regard Washington’s ideas as quaint, 18th century notions with little application today. I wrote about this subject a few weeks ago (“Avoid Political Alliance”) and the post got little engagement.

Generally speaking, gentile Americans have little knowledge of or interest in foreign policy, which is why they are easily manipulated into endorsing war whenever their government invokes the specter of a foreign bogeyman.

On the other hand, many Jewish Americans—including those with substantial resources—are keenly interested in foreign policy and the plight of Israel, which they regard as their ancestral homeland. This community in the United States is extremely educated, engaged, and organized. They stick together, support each other, and make generous campaign contributions to candidates who support their objectives.

During the George W. Bush years, I never heard a single monied, self-professing Christian—including major supporters of Bush—express the slightest concern about what was happening to the ancient Christian community in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was removed by the U.S. military. I suspect that few of these guys even knew about this congregation. Few were aware that Hussein and Assad of Syria protected the ancient Christian congregations in their territories. And while I don’t know any fervent Jewish Zionists, I know several monied Christian Zionists.

Because I believe that the growing risk of a direct war with Russia would likely have catastrophic consequences for the American people, I have repeatedly used this newsletter to protest the U.S. government’s insane proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. However, even these posts have been met with more hostility than support.

Until the American monied class starts supporting an “America First” foreign policy, the U.S. government will continue pursuing an “America Last” foreign policy when it comes to the interests and security of ordinary American citizens. American politicians will continue shipping hundreds of billions of cash and weapons to their cronies abroad while the American homeland continues its downward slide into a debt-ridden and divided dystopia.

Charlie Kirk was a sharp critic of the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine, and I am currently evaluating reports that he drew the hostility of Ukrainian nationalist fanatics—i.e., one of the most aggressive and unhinged groups of guys one could ever have the misfortune of meeting.

There is also evidence that Kirk was becoming increasingly concerned about President Trump’s “give Netanyahu whatever he wants” policy and even articulating his concerns. Paradoxically, given the Left’s unhinged, apoplectic hatred of Charlie Kirk, he was probably our best hope for (slowly but surely) cultivating a more balanced foreign policy. With the exception of a few lunatics who seem to think his murder was faked, we all know what happened to him.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

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The precise causes of the Great Depression remain a subject of debate, although, as economist Richard Timberlake observed in 2005, “Virtually all present-day economists . . . deny that a capitalist free-market economy in any way caused” it.

At the time, however, the free market was blamed, with much of the ire directed at bankers and speculators. Financiers were seen as having wrecked the economy through reckless speculation. President Hoover came to be viewed as a laissez-faire ideologue who did nothing while the economy fell deeper and deeper into depression, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s interventionist policies under the New Deal were credited with rescuing us from disaster.

Americans came to conclude that the basic problem was the free market and the solution was government oversight and restraint of financiers and financial markets. It’s a view that the public, unaware of the consensus of modern economists, continues to embrace.

But the conventional story ignores the elephant in the room: the Federal Reserve. To place the blame for the Great Depression on a free financial system is like placing the blame for the fall of Rome on credit default swaps: you can’t fault something that didn’t exist. And by the time of the Great Depression, America’s financial system was controlled by the Fed.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this fact. The Federal Reserve isn’t just any old government agency controlling any old industry. It controls the supply of money, and money plays a role in every economic transaction in the economy. If the government takes over the shoe industry, we might end up with nothing but Uggs and Crocs. But when the government messes with money, it can mess up the entire economy.

The two deadly monetary foes are inflation and deflation. We tend to think of inflation as generally rising prices and deflation as generally falling prices. But not all price inflation or price deflation is malignant — and not all price stability is benign. What matters is the relationship between the supply of money and the demand for money — between people’s desire to hold cash balances and the availability of cash.

Economic problems emerge when the supply of money does not match the demand for money, i.e., when there is what economists call monetary disequilibrium. Inflation, on this approach, refers to a situation where the supply of money is greater than the public’s demand to hold money balances at the current price level. Deflation refers to a situation where the supply of money is less than necessary to meet the public’s demand to hold money balances at the current price level.

In a free banking system, as George Selgin has argued, market forces work to keep inflation and deflation in check, i.e., there is a tendency toward monetary equilibrium. Not so when the government controls the money supply. Like all attempts at central planning, centrally planning an economy’s monetary system has to fail: a central bank has neither the knowledge nor the incentive to match the supply and demand for money. And so what we find when the government meddles in money are periods where the government creates far too much money (leading to price inflation or artificial booms and busts) or far too little money (leading to deflationary contractions).

And it turns out there are strong reasons to think that the Great Depression was mainly the result of the Federal Reserve making both mistakes.

The goal here is not to give a definitive, blow-by-blow account of the Depression. It’s to see in broad strokes the way in which government regulation was the sine qua non of the Depression. The free market didn’t fail: government intervention failed. The Great Depression doesn’t prove that the financial system needs regulation to ensure its stability — instead it reveals just how unstable the financial system can become when the government intervenes.

Creating the Boom

Was the stock market crash of 1929 rooted in stock market speculation fueled by people borrowing money to buy stock “on margin,” as those who blamed the bankers for the Great Depression claimed? Few economists today think so. As economist Gene Smiley observes:

There was already a long history of margin lending on stock exchanges, and margin requirements — the share of the purchase price paid in cash — were no lower in the late twenties than in the early twenties or in previous decades. In fact, in the fall of 1928 margin requirements began to rise, and borrowers were required to pay a larger share of the purchase price of the stocks.

For my money, the most persuasive account of the initial boom/bust that set off the crisis places the blame, not on speculators, but on central bankers.

Prior to the publication of John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory in 1936, the most influential account of the cause of the Great Depression was the Austrian business cycle theory pioneered by Ludwig von Mises and further developed by Friedrich Hayek. The Austrians, in fact, were among the few who predicted the crisis (though not its depth).

What follows is a highly simplified account of the Austrian theory. For a more in depth treatment, see Lawrence H. White’s uniformly excellent book The Clash of Economic Ideas, which summarizes the Austrian theory and its account of the Great Depression. For a detailed theoretical explanation of the Austrian theory of the business cycle see Roger W. Garrison’s Time and Money: The Macroeconomics of Capital Structure.

The Austrian theory, in the briefest terms, says that when a central bank creates too much money and expands the supply of credit in the economy, it can spark an artificial boom that ultimately has to lead to a bust.

It’s a pretty technical story, so let’s start with a simple analogy. Imagine you are planning a dinner party, and you’re an organized person, so you keep an inventory of all the items in your kitchen. But the night before your party, some prankster decides to sneak in and rewrite the list so that it shows you have double the ingredients you actually have.

The next morning you wake up and check your inventory list. With so many ingredients available, you decide to invite a few more friends to the dinner. Meanwhile, your kid unexpectedly comes home from college and decides to make herself a large breakfast — but it’s no big deal. According to your inventory, you have more than enough eggs and butter to finish your recipe.  Of course, your inventory is wrong, and half an hour before your guests arrive, you realize you’re short what you need to finish the meal. The dinner is a bust.

Well, something like that happens when the government artificially expands the supply of credit in the economy. It causes everyone to think they’re richer than they are and, just like someone planning a meal with an inaccurate inventory list, they end up making decisions — about what to produce and how much to consume — that wouldn’t have made sense had they known how many resources were actually available to carry out their plans.

Under the Austrian theory, the key mistake is for the central bank to inject new money into the economic system, typically by creating additional bank reserves.* Bank reserves are a bank’s cash balance. Just as your cash balance consists of the money you have in your wallet and in your checking account, so a bank’s cash balance consists of the cash it has in its vault and in the deposit account it maintains with the central bank.

When a central bank creates additional bank reserves, it encourages the banks to lend out the new money at interest, rather than sit on a pile of cash that isn’t earning a return. To attract borrowers for this additional money, the banks will lower the interest rate they charge on loans, leading entrepreneurs to invest in plans that would not have been profitable at the previous, higher interest rate.

This is a big problem. In a free market, interest rates coordinate the plans of savers and investors. Investment in productive enterprises requires that real resources be set aside rather than consumed immediately. If people decide to spend less today and save more for the future, there are more resources available to fund things like new businesses or construction projects, and that will be reflected in a lower rate of interest.

But when the central bank pushes down interest rates by creating new money, the lower interest rate does not reflect an increase in genuine savings by the public. It is artificially low — the prankster has falsified the inventory list. The result is unsustainable boom. The increased business activity is using up resources while at the same time people start consuming more thanks to cheaper consumer credit and a lower return on savings — there is what economist Lawrence H. White calls “a tug-of-war for resources between longer processes of production (investment for consumption in the relatively distant future) and shorter processes (consumption today and in the near future).”

Eventually prices and interest rates start to rise, and entrepreneurs find that they cannot profitably complete the projects they started. The unsustainable boom leads inevitably to a bust. As Mises writes in his 1936 article “The ‘Austrian’ Theory of the Trade Cycle,” once

a brake is thus put on the boom, it will quickly be seen that the false impression of “profitability” created by the credit expansion has led to unjustified investments. Many enterprises or business endeavors which had been launched thanks to the artificial lowering of the interest rate, and which had been sustained thanks to the equally artificial increase of prices, no longer appear profitable. Some enterprises cut back their scale of operation, others close down or fail. Prices collapse; crisis and depression follow the boom. The crisis and the ensuing period of depression are the culmination of the period of unjustified investment brought about by the extension of credit. The projects which owe their existence to the fact that they once appeared “profitable” in the artificial conditions created on the market by the extension of credit and the increase in prices which resulted from it, have ceased to be “profitable.” The capital invested in these enterprises is lost to the extent that it is locked in. The economy must adapt itself to these losses and to the situation that they bring about.

This, the Austrians argued, was precisely what happened in the lead up to the 1929 crash. (Two economists, Barry Eichengreen and Kris Mitchener, who are not part of the Austrian school and who by their own admission “have vested interests . . . emphasizing other factors in the Depression,” nevertheless found that the empirical record is consistent with the Austrian story.)

The Federal Reserve during the late 1920s held interest rates artificially low, helping spark a boom — notably in the stock market, which saw prices rise by 50 percent in 1928 and 27 percent in the first 10 months of 1929. Starting in August of 1929, the Fed tried to cool what it saw as an overheated stock market by tightening credit. The boom came to an end on October 29.

Magnifying the Bust

When the government sparks an inflationary boom, the boom has to end eventually. One way it can end is that the government can try to keep it going, ever-more rapidly expanding the money supply until price inflation wipes out the value of the currency, as happened in Germany during the 1920s.

The other way is for the central bank to stop expanding credit and allow the boom to turn into a bust. Some businesses go out of business, some people lose their jobs, investments lose their value: the market purges itself of the mistakes that were made during the boom period.

That adjustment process is painful but necessary. But what isn’t necessary is for there to be an economy-wide contraction in spending — a deflationary contraction. A deflationary contraction occurs when the central bank allows the money supply to artificially contract, thus not allowing the demand for money to be met. As people scramble to build up their cash balances, they cut back on their spending, which sends ripple waves through the economy. In economist Steven Horwitz’s words:

As everyone reduces spending, firms see sales fall. This reduction in their income means that they and their employees may have less to spend, which in turn leads them to reduce their expenditures, which leads to another set of sellers seeing lower income, and so on. All these spending reductions leave firms with unsold inventories because they expected more sales than they made. Until firms recognize that this reduction in expenditures is going to be economy-wide and ongoing, they may be reluctant to lower their prices, both because they don’t realize what is going on and because they fear they will not see a reduction in their costs, which would mean losses. In general, it may take time until the downward pressure on prices caused by slackening demand is strong enough to force prices down. During the period in which prices remain too high, we will see the continuation of unsold inventories as well as rising unemployment, since wages also remain too high and declining sales reduce the demand for labor. Thus monetary deflations will produce a period, perhaps of several months or more, in which business declines and unemployment rises. Unemployment may linger longer as firms will try to sell off their accumulated inventories before they rehire labor to produce new goods. If such a deflation is also a period of recovery from an inflation-generated boom, these problems are magnified as the normal adjustments in labor and capital that are required to eliminate the errors of the boom get added on top of the deflation-generated idling of resources.

In short, a deflationary contraction can unleash a much more severe and widespread drop in prices, wages, and output and a much more severe and widespread rise in unemployment than is necessary to correct the mistakes of an artificial boom.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened during the Great Depression. Three factors were particularly important in explaining the extreme deflationary contraction that occurred during the 1930s.

1. Bank failures

In my last post, I discussed how government regulation of banking made banks more fragile. In particular, I noted that government regulations prevented banks from branching, making them far less robust in the face of economic downturns.

That remained true throughout the 1920s and ’30s, leaving U.S. banks vulnerable in a way that Canadian banks, which could and did branch, were not. Not a single Canadian bank failed during the Depression. In the United States, 9,000 banks failed between 1930 and 1933 (roughly 40 percent of all U.S. banks), destroying the credit these banks supplied and so further contracting the money supply.

A report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis describes it this way:

Starting in 1930, a series of banking panics rocked the U.S. financial system. As depositors pulled funds out of banks, banks lost reserves and had to contract their loans and deposits, which reduced the nation’s money stock. The monetary contraction, as well as the financial chaos associated with the failure of large numbers of banks, caused the economy to collapse.

Less money and increased borrowing costs reduced spending on goods and services, which caused firms to cut back on production, cut prices and lay off workers. Falling prices and incomes, in turn, led to even more economic distress. Deflation increased the real burden of debt and left many firms and households with too little income to repay their loans. Bankruptcies and defaults increased, which caused thousands of banks to fail.

(The banking panics of 1932, it should be noted, were at least in part the result of fears that incoming president FDR would seize Americans’ gold and take the nation off the gold standard — which he ultimately did. Another contributing factor was the protectionist Smoot-Hawley tariff passed in 1930, which, among many other negative impacts on the economy, devastated the agricultural sector and many of the unit banks dependent on it.)

Thanks to these massive bank failures, the U.S. was being crippled by a severe deflation, and yet the Federal Reserve — which, despite being on a pseudo-gold standard, could have stepped in did nothing.

2. The check tax

Also contributing to the collapse of the money supply was the check tax, part of the Revenue Act of 1932, signed into law by Hoover. The Act raised taxes in an effort to balance the budget, which was bad enough in the midst of a deflationary crisis. But the worst damage was done by the check tax. This measure placed a 2-cent tax (40 cents today) on bank checks, prompting Americans to flee from checks to cash, thereby removing badly needed cash from the banks. The result, economists William Lastrapes and George Selgin argue, was to reduce the money supply by an additional 12 percent.

3. Hoover’s high wage policy

The net result of the bank failures and the check tax was a credit-driven deflation the likes of which the U.S. had never seen. As Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz explain in their landmark Monetary History of the United States:

The contraction from 1929 to 1933 was by far the most severe business-cycle contraction during the near-century of U.S. history we cover, and it may well have been the most severe in the whole of U.S. history. . . . U.S. net national product in constant prices fell by more than one-third. . . . From the cyclical peak in August 1929 to the cyclical trough in March 1933, the stock of money fell by over a third.

Why is a deflationary contraction so devastating? A major reason is because prices don’t adjust uniformly and automatically, which can lead to what scholars call economic dis-coordination. In particular, if wages don’t fall in line with other prices, this effectively raises the cost of labor, leading to — among other damaging consequences — unemployment. And during the Great Depression, although most prices fell sharply, wage rates did not.

One explanation is that wages are what economists call “sticky downward”: people don’t like seeing the number on their paychecks go down, regardless of whether economists are assuring them that their purchasing power won’t change. The idea of sticky prices is somewhat controversial, however — in earlier downturns, after all, wages fell substantially, limiting unemployment.

What is certainly true is that government intervention kept wages from falling — particularly the actions of President Hoover and, later, President Roosevelt.

Hoover believed in what was called the “high wage doctrine,” a popular notion in the early part of the 20th century. The high wage doctrine said that keeping wages high helped cure economic downturns by putting money into the pockets of workers who would spend that money, thereby stimulating the economy.

When the Depression hit and prices began falling, Hoover urged business leaders not to cut wages. And the evidence suggests that they listened (whether at Hoover’s urging or simply because they too accepted the high wage doctrine). According to economists John Taylor and George Selgin:

Average hourly nominal wage rates paid to 25 manufacturing industries were 59.3 cents in October 1929, and 59.5 cents by April 1930. Wage rates had fallen only to 59.1 cents by September 1930, despite substantially reduced output prices and profits. Compare this to the 20 percent decline in nominal wage rates during the 1920-21 depression. During the first year of the Great Depression the average wage rate fell less than four-tenths of one percent.

Hoover would go on to put teeth into his request for high wages, signing into law the Davis-Bacon Act in 1931 and the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932, both of which used government power to prop up wages. FDR would later go on to implement policies motivated by the high wage doctrine, including the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, and the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act.

The problem is that the high wage doctrine was false — propping up wages only meant that labor became increasingly expensive at the same time that demand for labor was falling. The result was mass unemployment.

The Aftermath

It’s worth repeating: this is far from a full account of the Great Depression. It’s not even a full account of the ways the Federal Reserve contributed to the Great Depression (many scholars fault it for the so-called Roosevelt Recession of 1937-38). What we have seen is that there are strong reasons to doubt the high school textbook story of the Great Depression that indicts free markets and Wall Street.

We’ve also started to see a pattern that recurs throughout history: government controls create problems, but the response is almost never to get rid of the problematic controls. Instead, it’s to pile new controls on top of old ones, which inevitably creates even more problems.

And that’s what happened with the Great Depression.

Did we abolish the Fed? No.

Did we return to the pre-World War I classical gold standard? No.

Did we abolish branch banking restrictions? No.

Instead, we created a vast new army of regulatory bodies and regulatory acts, which would spawn future problems and crises: above all, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which separated investment and commercial banking and inaugurated federal deposit insurance. I’ll turn to that in the next post.

* How central banks go about conducting monetary policy has varied throughout history. Richard Timberlake explains the process as it took places during the 1920s and 1930s. George Selgin describes the process in more recent times, both prior to the 2008 financial crisis and since.

This article was originally published on MadgeWaggy.blogspot.com.

The post How Government Caused the Great Depression appeared first on LewRockwell.

International Man: Donald Trump has already deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles and Washington, DC, and threatened to send them into more cities.

Is this a legitimate use of executive power, or a dangerous escalation?

Doug Casey: Once upon a time, that wouldn’t even have been a question, because the Posse Comitatus Act used to be taken seriously. It basically holds that the US military can’t be used for domestic law enforcement. But the government has violated the tradition of not using the military at home from time to time.

For instance, in 1932, the Bonus Marchers—thousands of World War I veterans—came to Washington, D.C., asking for the bonus that had been promised because of their service. Herbert Hoover called out the army under Douglas MacArthur to disperse them. Then, in 1957, Dwight Eisenhower called out the National Guard in Little Rock to integrate the schools.

My understanding of the law is that the president only has the power to use the National Guard in Washington, D.C., since it is not a state but an entity the president directly controls. So Trump’s calling out the Guard in D.C. is different from his doing so elsewhere.

It’s a question of states’ rights versus those of the federal government, and what happens when those powers overlap. This was a major issue in the War Between the States.

States’ rights is one more issue making the US a tinderbox; the governments of blue states and cities can be relied on to resist Trump for any and every reason. Across the country, red people and blue people are barely able to talk to each other. Some really hate each other. The enthusiasm many Wokesters and leftists showed for the assassination of Charlie Kirk was evidence of that. As was the media’s suppression of Iryna Zarutska’s murder in Charlotte by a black career criminal who was released by an affirmative action female judge. It tells me we are on the cusp of something like a civil war in the US. I’ve been talking about it for 10 years, but now it’s starting to feel real.

International Man: In your view, what does Trump’s decision signal about the balance of power between Washington and local governments?

Doug Casey: Clearly, Donald revels in controlling the apparatus of the State. I think he’s acting in a very autocratic manner for two reasons. One, he believes—probably correctly—that if he doesn’t break the back of Marxism, Wokeism, and domestic anti-Americanism now, that whatever’s left of the idea of America is dead. Two, he knows that if he doesn’t totally defang his enemies now, come 2028, they’re going to bankrupt and likely imprison him.

This is the way things work in Banana Republics. Or countries on the cusp of real crises. The cat’s out of the bag. The US is transforming, for many reasons, and it’s not going back to the good old days anytime soon.

This is not the first time that a president has made himself into a “strong man.”  Lincoln did it from 1861 to 1865. Wilson did it with WW1. When F.D.R. took the reins in 1933, he became a veritable dictator in many ways—setting up numerous permanent authoritarian bureaucracies, confiscating gold, closing thousands of banks, and much more. I think Donald sees himself as a reincarnation of those presidents. Donald’s sticking his nose into everything and his authoritarian attitudes are not unprecedented in US history.

His tariffs are a lot more dangerous than most people think, however. The War Between the States is said to have been about slavery. But that was mostly an issue between intellectuals and moralists. Lincoln himself said many times that his aim was to maintain the Union, not abolish slavery. The big issue wasn’t slavery itself, but limiting its expansion. Tariffs affected the southern states vastly more than the northern states.

Tariffs covered most of the government’s expenses, which meant the South was paying most of the cost of the US government. Tariffs practically forced them to buy inferior, costlier Northern goods, as opposed to those from Europe. In addition, the tariffs reduced the amounts Europeans could afford to buy from the South. What I’m saying is that the South wanted out of the Union for real economic reasons, not ideological ones.

My feeling is that, for similar reasons, we’re going to see movements toward secession. Sanctuary cities are a step in that direction, where local laws supersede national laws. Washington is, of course, opposed to that.

International Man: Some argue the National Guard is protecting “public safety,” while others say it tramples on the liberty of American citizens. How do you weigh security against individual rights in this situation?

Doug Casey: Law enforcement has traditionally been left to local police and sheriffs in the US. It’s not, with a few exceptions, a Constitutional mandate of the federal government. So, using the National Guard to enforce law and order is going over a line.

This really started in earnest after Vietnam and subsequent wars. Loads of spare military equipment were dispensed to police forces. SWAT units, especially, have been up-armored to US military standards.

Police forces prefer hiring ex-military personnel, as well, which is another ominous trend. The military is trained and psychologically oriented to interact differently with the public than police forces. We’re moving into the world of Robocop.

International Man: When leaders in other countries deploy national troops domestically, it’s often seen as a step toward militarization of politics. Do you think the US has now crossed that line?

Doug Casey: The US government is increasingly out of control, with more laws regulating everything at every level. The State has become cancerous. And Trump is accelerating that trend by using it for “good” reasons; the next administration will accelerate the state’s growth for equally “good” reasons, but against different parts of the population. As the federal government becomes more involved in people’s lives, more people will push back against it.

Using the National Guard and perhaps even the US military domestically is very dangerous. They’re State employees. They must follow orders, both because they’ve taken an oath to do so and because they want to collect their salary.

Cops and guardsmen have mortgages, car payments, student loans, credit card debt, and expenses. They can’t afford to lose their jobs. So they’ll pretty much do as they’re told, which is a dangerous and unfortunate situation.

International Man: What is the ultimate sociopolitical trend at play here, where is it heading, and what can people do about it?

Doug Casey: People have forgotten that “America” isn’t a country, so much as an idea. An excellent and unique idea, based on free thought, free speech, and free markets. It took root here 250 years ago.

Unfortunately, the essence of America has been greatly degraded and weakened over the years.

What can you do about it? Trying to change the world at large doesn’t make much sense. Instead, remember that charity begins at home. Make sure your own character, abilities, and finances are in order before you get involved in slaying dragons. That’s why I wrote The Preparation (link) with Matt Smith.

But that’s another story…

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

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