Lew Rockwell Institute

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

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

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

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

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

Early Efforts to Control the Money Supply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Effects of Continued Monetary Competition

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

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

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

Asserting State Control over the Private Banks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Central Banks and the Gold Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before National Currencies and the Classical Gold Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving Away from Gold Toward a Monometallic Gold Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why National Governments Wanted the Gold Standard

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

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

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

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

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

The Unfortunate End Game: World War I

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

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

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

A Political Problem, Not an Economic One

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

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

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

—

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

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

3 Ibid., p. 226.

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

5 Ibid.

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

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., p. 6.

9 Ibid., p. 6.

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

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

12 Ibid., p. 54.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

21 Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The Rise of the State and the End of Private Money appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This originally appeared on SchiffGold.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is how he tells the story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

It however leaves many questions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This originally appeared on Sonar21.

The post It Wasn’t a Leak, It was a Devious “Charlie Foxtrot” appeared first on LewRockwell.

“If Trump can disappear them, he can disappear you. The Trump regime is already targeting immigrants who are here legally simply because they expressed opinions that Trump disagreed with. What makes you think he’ll stop there? With no court to verify anything the Trump regime alleges, you could be arrested and sent to a prison in El Salvador for having views the regime dislikes.”—Robert Reich

Imagine this: you’re rounded up in the dead of night by government agents, arrested and sent to a detention center. The arresting agents don’t identify themselves, nor do they provide any documentation indicating why you are being detained. Nevertheless, without your family or friends knowing that you have been taken hostage, without anyone knowing where you are being transported or why, and without any opportunity to defend yourself or proclaim your innocence, you are flown out of the country to a foreign prison in a police state where you will have no rights whatsoever.

There can be no understating the danger.

The war on due process is here.

No trials. No hearings. No rights. Just indefinite detention and secret deportations.

This is the fate that awaits every one of us, not just immigrants (legal or otherwise), if the government’s war on the Constitution remains unchecked.

As historian Timothy Snyder warns, “If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.”

More than two decades after the U.S. government in its post-9/11 frenzy transported individuals, some of whom had not been charged let alone convicted of a crime, to CIA black sites (secret detention centers located outside the U.S. authorized to torture detainees) as a means of sidestepping legal protocols, the Trump Administration is using extraordinary rendition to make those on its so-called “enemies list” disappear.

The first round of arrests and deportations to a mega-prison in El Salvador supposedly targeted members of the infamous Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

“Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act than has happened here,” declared U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett. “Y’all could have put me up on Saturday and thrown me on a plane, thinking I’m a member of Tren de Aragua and giving me no chance to protest it and say somehow it’s a violation of presidential war powers.”

Carried out with little evidence and without court hearings or due process, these roundups reportedly may also have swept up individuals with no apparent connection to gang activity apart from common tattoos (firearms, trains, dice, roses, tigers and jaguars) and other circumstantial evidence.

In a particularly Kafkaesque explanation for why some of the Venezuelan migrants who have no criminal records were targeted for arrest and deportation, government lawyers argued in court that their lack of a criminal record is in itself cause for concern.

In other words, the government is prepared to preemptively arrest and make people disappear, without any regard for legal protocols or due process, based solely on the president’s claim that they could at some point in the future pose a threat to national security.

This takes pre-crime and preemptive arrests to a whole new sinister level of potential abuses.

Are you starting to sense how quickly this could go off the rails?

This is how democracies collapse. This is how rights disappear overnight.

As lawyers challenging the government’s overreach warned, “If the President can designate any group as enemy aliens under the Act, and that designation is unreviewable, then there is no limit on who can be sent to a Salvadoran prison, or any limit on how long they will remain there. At present, the Salvadoran President is saying these men will be there at least a year and that this imprisonment is ‘renewable.’”

Also among those in danger of being made to disappear without any legal record or due process are individuals who have not been charged with or convicted of any crimes.

The most egregious of these incidents involve college students, scientists and doctors, all of them legal permanent residents of the U.S. who, while never having been charged with a crime, are accused of threatening national security by taking part in anti-war protests over the growing death toll in Gaza as a result of the Israeli-Hamas war, or sympathizing with the Palestinians, or being associated with someone who might sympathize with the Palestinians.

When merely exercising one’s right to criticize the government in word, deed or thought is equated to an act of domestic terrorism, we are all in trouble.

Whether those being rounded up and deported have done anything criminally wrong is not the point. That’s what the courts and the Constitution are for: to ensure that justice is served through due process and the right of the accused to have their day in court.

It’s not always a perfect system, but it is better than the alternative, which is outright tyranny.

The mass arrests and roundups thus far have been so haphazard that there is a very real likelihood that innocent individuals have also been swept up and deported.

American citizens could very well be next in line for this kind of treatment.

Native Americans, who are also American citizens, have reported being subjected to racial profiling by ICE agents and targeted because of their race or skin color.

Another American citizen detained and questioned by ICE during an immigration raid of a workplace in New Jersey is a military veteran who “suffered the indignity of having the legitimacy of his military documentation questioned.”

As Foreign Policy magazine warns, “The American people must be clear-eyed about the prison system to which their government is sending deported migrants—which, in the worst-case scenario, could one day hold U.S. citizens, too. Although U.S. law prohibits the deportation of U.S. citizens, the Trump administration has shown a repeated proclivity to flout the rules and ignore judicial orders.”

Indeed, it appears that President Trump is borrowing heavily from the lockdown script used by Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvadora, another police state characterized by arbitrary detentions, systemic violations, brutality, and censorship, which has been under a permanent state of emergency since 2022.

Yet as Amnesty International warns, “‘Security’ at the expense of human rights,” increased militarization, and armed repression coupled with “efforts by state agents to stigmatise human rights organisations and the free press and to thwart their efforts, has fostered a climate of fear and intimidation that stifles civil society and spurs self-censorship.”

Under Bukele, who used a war on gang violence as the pretext for seizing power, constitutional rights have been suspended, with attorneys general fired, judges replaced by loyalists, the legislative and judicial branches coalesced under one party, presidential term limits set aside, innocent individuals swept up in mass arrests, Bitcoin declared legal currency, and friendly overtures made to Russia and China.

Sounds unnervingly familiar, doesn’t it?

This is the danger of allowing any president to use expansive wartime powers to bypass the Constitution’s prohibitions against government overreach and abuse: suddenly, everything that challenges the government’s authority becomes a national security threat and every dispute a national emergency.

Through his use of executive orders, proclamations and so-called national emergencies, President Trump has essentially declared war on the rule of law.

Make no mistake: while immigrants, illegal and legal alike, have largely been the first victims of the Trump administration’s efforts to circumvent the Constitution in order to make them disappear, it’s our very freedoms that are being made to disappear.

At the heart of these freedoms is the right of habeas corpus.

Translated as “you should have the body,” habeas corpus is a legal action by which those imprisoned unlawfully can seek relief from their imprisonment.

Derived from English common law, habeas corpus first appeared in the Magna Carta of 1215 and is the oldest human right in the history of English-speaking civilization. The doctrine of habeas corpus stems from the requirement that a government must either charge a person or let him go free.

Without habeas corpus, other rights become vulnerable to executive overreach.

The Framers of the Constitution, having experienced first-hand what it was like to be labeled enemy combatants, imprisoned indefinitely and not given the opportunity to appear before an impartial judge, were acutely aware of the potential for government tyranny. Thus, they enshrined the writ in Article I, Section IX, of the Constitution, rather than the Bill of Rights, underscoring its fundamental importance as a safeguard against arbitrary detention and ensuring its protection at the federal level.

It has all been downhill since then.

History has shown us the dangers of unchecked executive power. Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War led to mass arrests without trial, setting a dangerous precedent.

Decades later, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II demonstrated how easily fear can be weaponized to justify the imprisonment of innocent people.

Each time habeas corpus has been weakened, it has taken years—sometimes generations—for justice to be restored, if ever.

We cannot afford to repeat these mistakes.

While the Constitution allows the writ of habeas corpus to be suspended in cases of rebellion or invasion when public safety is imperiled, the Trump Administration’s efforts to keep the nation in a permanent state of emergency in order to justify its power grabs leaves “we the people” subject to the kinds of arbitrary mass round-ups, arrests and deportations that have been favored by despots and dictators.

This is usually where the self-righteous defenders of Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional tactics insist that the protections of the Constitution only apply to U.S. citizens.

They are wrong.

At a minimum, as the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed, the rights enshrined in the first ten amendments to the Constitution apply to all people in the United States, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status. Those rights include free speech, peaceful protest and criticism of the government, assembly, religious freedom, equal protection under the law, due process, legal representation, privacy, among others.

Then again, what good are rights if the government doesn’t respect them?

What good are rights if the president is empowered to nullify them whenever he wants?

For that matter, what good is a government that betrays its own citizens?

When not even citizenship is protection against the abuses of an authoritarian regime, it’s time to do what our forefathers did when they finally got fed up with being silenced, censored, searched, frisked, threatened, and arrested: revolt against the tyrant’s fetters.

History has shown us that when governments operate without checks and balances, tyranny follows. The question is not whether mass arrests and indefinite detentions could be expanded to American citizens—it’s how long before they are.

If we allow the erosion of due process, if we accept that a president can unilaterally decide who is a threat without oversight, then we have already lost the freedoms that define us as a nation.

This is not just about immigrants.

It’s about every American who values liberty over unchecked power.

We must demand accountability. We must challenge policies that violate constitutional protections. We must support organizations fighting for civil liberties, educate ourselves on our rights, and refuse to be silenced by fear. Because when the government starts making people disappear, the only way to stop it is by making our voices impossible to ignore.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, freedom does not die in a single act of repression—it dies when the people surrender their rights in exchange for false security.

History will judge how we respond. We must act before it’s too late.

The Constitution can’t protect us if we don’t protect it.

The time to resist is now. Otherwise, if we don’t stand up for freedom while we still can, we may not get another chance.

This originally appeared on The Rutherford Institute.

The post Making Our Rights Disappear: The Authoritarian War on Due Process appeared first on LewRockwell.

When I was a senior in college, one of my professors told me, “If you want to find a good translation of the Bible in English, you can find it in one that contains the word ‘verily.’”  Of course, that was back in 1982, when it would have taken a fair bit of legwork on my part to even identify the various biblical translations that contain the word “verily.” It would have taken even more effort to ascertain whether, individually or collectively, those translations were superior to others.

Jump ahead a few decades, and, thanks to the miracle of search engines, it would be a trifle to pull together a list of Bible translations containing the word “verily.” Nonetheless, I would still have to put in the effort to ascertain the merits of such translations, assuming that I was capable of making such judgments. Nowadays, however, thanks to the emergence of artificial intelligence, I can make a request for both the list and the evaluation of translations with and without “verily” and have all the work done for me in almost no time at all. What progress!

I mention these things to make a point—namely, that not even artificial intelligence can find what is not there. Let me offer an illustration. Our Lord concludes the parable of the wicked tenants with these words: “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom” (Matthew 21:44 NRSVCE)

What happens to those who do not produce fruit in due season? Nothing good. Not even artificial intelligence, scouring all of Sacred Scripture in all translations in all languages, can find a psalm or canticle that praises the fruitless. Nowhere in Scripture, not even with the aid of artificial intelligence, will we find anything like this:

All ye barren branches, praise and exalt Him forever.
All ye orchards without fruit, praise and exalt Him forever.
All ye vines lacking grapes, praise and exalt Him forever.
All ye fig trees bearing no figs, praise and exalt Him forever.
All ye wheat fields producing no harvest, praise and exalt Him forever.
All ye nets with no fish, praise and exalt Him forever.
All ye bridesmaids with lamps but no oil, praise and exalt Him forever.
All ye salt without savor, praise and exalt Him forever.
All ye lights placed beneath a bushel basket, praise and exalt Him forever.
All ye talents buried in the earth, praise and exalt Him forever. 
All ye fruitless, feckless, and witless, to them be highest glory and praise forever.

Instead, such a scriptural search will show that the fruitless are gathered up to be burned (John 15:6). And there are related references to darkness, as well as wailing and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 8:12). What is not fruitful according to the divine mandate does not end well (Matthew 21:18-19).

Such images are on my mind because of recently released data illustrating the demographic collapse of the Catholic Church in the United States. From 1999-2022, the yearly number of adult Catholics coming into the Church in the United States has declined 58 percent. A recent Pew study indicates that for every 100 adults coming into the Church in the United States, 800 people leave.

Now, before we ask, “What can be done about this?” we may have to ask, “Can we even talk about this at all?” After all, denial is deeply rooted in bureaucracies. And let’s not forget McTeigue’s Axiom: “Most institutions would rather die than admit to having made a mistake.” After “the New Springtime” to “the Second Pentecost” to “Renew!” to “the New Evangelization” to “Eucharistic Revival,” and now, most recently, to “Synodality” and the newly mandated “Synodality Forever!” this is where we are. Somewhere out there, at least two Catholic members of the People Who Should Really Know Better Club are looking at these numbers and saying to each other, “I don’t know why this is happening. We had all those meetings!”

Read the Whole Article

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The failure to think clearly about government is one of the greatest sources of tyranny. The history of liberties lost is the history of patterns of abuses ignored and inductions not made.

People talk about the importance of ideas in politics. Often, it is merely the impact of a pretense of ideas. In Washington, fashionable ideas are the intellectual equivalent of lapel pins of the American flag. As long as politicians recite the latest phrase, they are credited with incarnating some grand idea or lofty principle.

Washingtonians become vested in Leviathan the same way that residents of other big cities become vested in their local NFL franchise. Washington logic begins and ends with deference. People genuflect to power and then rationalize their kowtowing by screening out evidence of abuses. The District of Columbia is the land of tautological reasoning by people smarter than the rest of America. Their rules of the intellectual game all favor big government.

Forbidden generalizations 

Why do people trust dishonest politicians to control their own lives? People often soundly judge the character of individual politicians, yet when it comes to judging politicians as a class, the fog banks roll in.

“Political reasoning” is often an oxymoron. Many people’s “political thinking” is little more than Pavlov buttons that rulers masterfully push. This is political thinking akin to a horse eternally balking at leaping over a very low hedge. The person sees the evidence, the trends, and then shudders at making even a little jump. It is as if people fear being lost forever in limbo if their feet leave the ground of safe surmises. Government schools and the mainstream media train citizens not to reach conclusions that condemn the existing political system.

If profound political errors were limited to people who have received little or no higher education, the problem would not be so perilous to democracy. But the errors of average citizens often pale in comparison to the follies of the educated elite. As legendary political scientist E. E. Schattschneider observed in 1960, “It is an outrage to attribute the failures of American democracy to the ignorance and stupidity of the masses. The most disastrous shortcomings of the system have been those of the intellectuals whose concepts of democracy have been amazingly rigid and uninventive.” It was the experts and intellectuals who systematically slanted political thinking and pronouncements in ways that unleashed government.

Faustian intellectuals

The longer intellectuals reside in Washington, the more credence they give to official buncombe. Instead of being revolted by b.s., they use it to fertilize their careers. Intellectuals are exploited to validate Leviathan and the political class, not for any wisdom they might confer.

Few things are rarer in Washington than thinking that goes beyond wrangling about how to best achieve goals decreed by politicians. Such “thinking” is usually little more than asking, “How can we best fulfill our master’s wishes?”

But in reality,  few intellectuals bother thinking. Instead, they strike the poses fashionable in their class that season. Nobel Laureate economist Friedrich Hayek defined intellectuals as “professional secondhand dealers in ideas.” A person is accepted as an intellectual not as a result of a Renaissance-like grasp of many subjects but because of recognized expertise in one subject.  Hayek stressed that intellectuals “judge all issues not by their specific merits but … solely in the light of certain fashionable general ideas.”

Politicians perennially defer to existing laws and policies as if they were the codification of all previous wisdom on a subject. Government agencies defer to their previous rulings, the laws, and to their political masters. Judges defer to the bureaucrats, the politicians, and to shelves of court decisions that previously deferred to bureaucrats and politicians. The fact that the U.S. government occasionally loses in its own courts does as little to curb its power as the occasional peasant uprising trammeled the Czar of Russia. The larger the government becomes, the greater the presumption in favor of perpetuating its own power.

Intellectual deference to Leviathan is also cumulative. The more power government amasses, the more homage it receives. There is no need to pay cash on the barrel-head for praise. A single genuflection by politicians is often sufficient to win undying devotion.

Throughout history, intellectuals have tended to understate the danger of political power. There have been brief periods in which they bluntly or accurately reckoned the likelihood that rulers would ravish or repress subjects. As long as court intellectuals were treated royally, they indemnified rulers for any and all abuses of the peasantry. As French philosopher Bertrand Jouvenal noted in 1945, “Authority can never be too despotic for the speculative man, so long as he deludes himself that its arbitrary force will further his plans.”

“Respectable political thought” by definition is incapable of admitting the danger of power. Respectable thought begins by respecting politics — and ends up ignoring government crimes and lies. President George W. Bush could not have so easily suspended habeas corpus if the intellectual elite had not previously convinced Americans that there is no danger of tyranny at home.

The high price of self-evident truths

Right-thinking Washingtonians quickly learn to avoid outlaw inferences. An “outlaw inference” is any induction which would contradict a self-evident truth.

And who determines the self-evident truths? The political establishment.

Outlaw inferences can result in instant banishment from respectable society — and from the jobs and contacts which assure a steady cash flow and plenty of invitations to social events. Washington’s self-evident truths function like an intellectual antivirus program — automatically deleting facts that contradict the verities upon which the political system rests.

At the time of the American Revolution, people recognized that the government’s authority to abuse one citizen put all citizens in peril. Blackstone, the British legal philosopher revered by many of the Founding Fathers, warned in the 1770s that for the government to kill a man or seize his property “without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation.”

The Founding Fathers fought the revolution based on early warning signals. They studied the words of British rulers and recognized the coming perils. But fewer people can hear the political alarm bells with each passing decade. Americans have been trained to view each government abuse in isolation. As long as liberties are snuffed piecemeal, no respectable person can say that there is a trend. Only alarmists worry about government abuses. Lessons drawn from political abuses are almost always isolated: that this particular politician should not have been trusted last time — or that particular policy was not optimal at that specific time.

Leviathan logic 101

The first principle of D.C. logic is that there is never enough evidence to condemn  Leviathan. Conversely, almost any dubious assertion is sufficient to sanctify or expand government power.

The prevailing D.C. rules of evidence rest upon trust in the current regime. According to Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Col.), the key question regarding the 2002 congressional resolution to permit the president to attack Iraq was: “Do you believe in the veracity of the President of the United States?”

The Bush team sneered down any arguments against a rush to war. When Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was asked in February 2002 about evidence that Iraq supplied weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, he replied that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” This was Leviathan logic at its best, but Rumsfeld was applauded for his retort. Childlike wordplay sufficed for a justification to commence bombing foreigners. The fact that Rumsfeld’s standard would permit the United States to attack almost anywhere was irrelevant.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz commented on the eve of the Iraqi government’s release of a twelve-thousand-page report on its weapons: “If [Saddam] flatly denies that he has weapons of mass destruction, that’s good evidence [of his guilt]. If he comes forth with new programs that we didn’t know about, that’s good evidence.” Wolfowitz asserted that Saddam was guilty “until proven otherwise.” In another forum, Wolfowitz explained the “standard” which Saddam must satisfy: “It’s like the judge said about pornography. I can’t define it, but I will know it when I see it.” When the news media continued requesting evidence, Rumsfeld groused to the press corps on February 4, 2003: “The fixation on a smoking gun is fascinating to me. You all … have been watching ‘L.A. Law’ or something too much.” Rumsfeld earlier declared that there was almost nothing worse than a smoking gun: “The last thing we want to see is a smoking gun. A gun smokes after it has been fired. The goal must be to stop such an action before it happens.”

No dearth of evidence could negate the U.S. right to attack Iraq. Charles Hanley, a 30-year veteran Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for the Associated  Press, traveled from suspected weapons site to suspected weapons site with U.N. and U.S. inspectors in Iraq in early 2003. He reported, “No smoking guns  in … almost 400 inspections.”  Hanley said such lines “would be stricken from my copy because it would strike some editors as tendentious, as … some sort of allegation rather than a fact.” The “fact” that Bush administration assertions were groundless was inconceivable — or at least unprintable — to editors.

In July 2003, Americans learned that the Bush team relied on blatantly forged documents on Niger uranium to justify the war. White House press spokesman Ari Fleischer responded to the controversy: “I think the burden is on those people who think [Saddam] didn’t have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.” This was the most creative absolution for the Iraq war.

In November 2005, at a time when more critics were asserting that the Bush administration deceived the United States into war, Vice President Cheney declared it was “not legitimate — and what I will again say is dishonest and reprehensible” to suggest “that the President of the United States or any member of his administration purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence.  The burden of proof was entirely on the dictator of Iraq — not on the U.N. or the United States or anyone else.”

In other words,  the burden of proof rests on anyone the U.S. government wants to attack. And U.S. government officials have the prerogative to dismiss any evidence foreign governments offer in their defense.

Exoneration via groupthink

There is a dearth of honest thinking about government in Washington in part because the conclusions are largely preordained. Anyone who reaches the wrong conclusions is likely to be ignored.

In the summer of 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued its first report on the Iraq war. Committee chairman Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) announced that “the intelligence community was suffering from what we call a collective  groupthink” and that the groupthink “also extended to our allies and to the United Nations.” The “groupthink” verdict allowed the political herd to absolve its own stampede and helped defuse Bush’s biggest liability in his reelection campaign. The Senate committee postponed the release of a separate report on the administration’s deceitful use of the classified intelligence until after Bush was reelected.

“Groupthink” is not a problem: it is a career path for aspiring Washingtonians. An erroneous opinion is exonerated if it is shared by more than 80 percent of the experts. “Herd-certified” is the ultimate intellectual safety net.

The flip side of “groupthink” is the reflexive derision toward people foolish enough not to follow their betters. “Guilt by association” has a starring role in D.C. debates. The only grounds needed to make evidence inadmissible is that wackos believe such things.

In 2007, Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly declared that at the beginning of the war in Iraq,  “everybody in the country [was] behind it, except the kooks.” Thus, O’Reilly was justified in disregarding all opposition of the invasion. The fact that war opponents were kooks made irrelevant the bothersome fact that they were right. The “kooks” included U.N. weapons inspectors, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, many foreign governments, and journalists whose articles were too controversial for print.

Though the evidence for attacking Iraq was empirically flawed, the logic remained politically impeccable. The New Yorker reported in late 2006 that some White House officials had concluded, regarding Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, that “the lack of evidence means they must have it.” President Bush declared in August 2007 that “it’s up to Iran to prove to the world that they’re a stabilizing force as opposed to a destabilizing force.” Regardless of his own paltry record as a “stabilizing force,” Bush’s assertion failed to generate ridicule.

The fact that ideas often appear to drive public policy is no evidence that sound reasoning propels  the ideas. Politicians use ideas to consecrate their pursuit of power. Logic often has no more sway in political disputes than it does in fraternity drinking contests. As long as the ruling class has vast benefits to distribute, intellectual servility will continue to be lavishly rewarded.

This article was originally published in the March 2025 issue of Future of Freedom.

The post Leviathan Logic Versus Individual Liberty appeared first on LewRockwell.

California’s decline has grown so stark that even steadfast Democratic allies can no longer deny the truth: the state’s extreme left-wing policies have plunged it into chaos.

Aaron Levie, founder and CEO of Box, has joined the chorus of voices condemning the Democratic Party’s mismanagement of California, asserting that the party’s entire political apparatus demands a complete overhaul. Levie, who endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, made the pointed remarks during an interview with co-founder and former Lattice CEO, Jack Altman.

“We live in California. It should be like the greatest place on Earth on every dimension. How do you beat this weather? You’ve completely created the atmosphere of every major tech company,” Levie explained. You have Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech. You have institutions and all the venture capital. You’re sitting on this incredible asset and then literally you can’t make it affordable to live here. That’s just insane.”

.@levie to @jaltma: Democrats Are To Blame For California’s ‘Insane’ Affordability Crisis

“We live in California. It should be like the greatest place on Earth on every dimension. How do you beat this weather? You’ve completely created the atmosphere of every major tech… pic.twitter.com/WYPgRAjCVt

— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) March 25, 2025

“That’s totally insane and that is 100% due to the bureaucracy of our state. That’s basically a Democrat problem,” the Box CEO added. “Democrats can’t out message that with their policy views because their policy views are in many cases just the wrong policy views. You actually just have to build and you have to create an environment where you can build things.”

Levie concluded his critique by urging a “reset” for the Democrats.

California’s affordability crisis has reached a critical juncture, with soaring housing costs, stagnant wages, and rising living expenses pushing many residents to the brink.

In major cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, median home prices have skyrocketed beyond $1 million—Redfin reports $1.35 million in San Francisco and $1.05 million in Los Angeles as of February 2025—far outpacing the national average of $371,200 according to Zillow, while rents consume a disproportionate share of income for working families, with the California Budget and Policy Center noting over 50% of renters spend more than 30% of their income on housing.

Coupled with high taxes (the Tax Foundation pegs California’s tax burden at 11.5% of income in 2025), steep utility rates (CPUC data shows electricity at 30 cents per kWh), and grocery prices outstripping inflation (a USDA report cites a 19% rise since 2020), the state has become a challenging place for all but the wealthiest to thrive.

This economic squeeze has fueled an exodus of middle- and low-income households—the U.S. Census Bureau recorded a net loss of 500,000 residents from 2020–2024—exacerbating labor shortages and straining local economies, as the Public Policy Institute of California highlights in its 2025 labor market analysis.

Levie’s sober talk about the Democrats aligns with growing voter dissatisfaction, as many within the party are unhappy with it’s direction since President Donald Trump’s reelection to the White House.

A plurality of voters (40%) believe the Democratic Party has no clear strategy for countering Trump, according to a survey by the liberal firm Blueprint, first reported by POLITICO. Another 24% said the party does have an ineffective plan.

If only Californians could convince their governor-turned-podcaster Gavin Newsom to do something about it.

Reprinted with permission from Zero Hedge.

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America’s military budget is more than just numbers on a page—it’s a reflection of the priorities that shape our society. Right now, that nearly trillion dollar budget is bloated, inefficient, and far removed from the needs of everyday Americans. We’ve identified six simple yet effective ways to cut at least $100 billion from the Pentagon’s budget—without sacrificing even the most hawkish of war hawk’s sense of national security. Ready to take the scissors to that excess spending? Here’s how we can do it.

1. Halt the F-35 Program (Save $12B+ per year)

The F-35 is the poster child for military mismanagement. It’s a fighter jet that was supposed to revolutionize our military—except it’s plagued by cost overruns, delays, and underperformance. Despite a projected lifetime cost of over $2 trillion, this aircraft only meets mission requirements about 30% of the time. If we ended or paused the F-35 program now, we’d free up $12 billion annually. The military-industrial complex can afford a few less fancy jets that destroy land and lives, especially when they don’t even do their job right.

2. Reassess Long-Range Missile Defense (Save $9.3B+ per year)

For over half a century, we’ve sunk an eye-watering $400 billion into long-range missile defense systems that have never delivered. The cold, hard truth is these systems are ineffective against real-world threats. In fact, no missile defense technology has ever proven capable of neutralizing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) attack. Cutting back on these programs would save us $9.3 billion per year—money that could be better spent on diplomacy initiatives that actually work.

3. Cut the Sentinel ICBM Program (Save $3.7B+ per year)

ICBMs were once the crown jewels of our nuclear deterrence strategy, but they’re outdated in today’s geopolitical climate. With more reliable and flexible platforms like submarines, bombers, and emerging hypersonic technologies, maintaining an expensive, high-risk ICBM arsenal makes little sense. Ending the Sentinel ICBM program would save taxpayers $3.7 billion annually, and even more in the long run, with total savings over its lifespan estimated at $310 billion. It’s time to face facts: we don’t need to keep pouring money into a strategy that no longer aligns with modern defense needs. Especially when the best nuclear deterrence system is ending nuclear weapons programs to begin with.

4. Cease Procurement of Aircraft Carriers (Save $2.3B+ per year)

Aircraft carriers are relics of a bygone era, costing billions to build and maintain, while becoming increasingly vulnerable to modern missile technology. These floating cities are no longer the symbols of naval power they once were. By halting new aircraft carrier procurements, we can save $2.3 billion a year—money that could be better allocated to ways that actually keep us safe in the 21st century like housing, healthcare or climate justice.

5. Cut Redundant Contracts by 15% (Save $26B per year)

The Pentagon’s bureaucracy is a cash cow for contractors—more than 500,000 private sector workers are paid to do redundant and often wasteful work. Many contracts overlap or go toward projects that are, frankly, unnecessary. Cutting back just 15% on these contracts would save $26 billion annually. That’s a massive chunk of change that could be reallocated to more efficient and effective defense projects. Want a starting point? Look no further than SpaceX’s lucrative contracts—it’s time we hold these companies accountable.Maybe DOGE knows a guy there?

6. Prioritize Diplomacy (Save $50B+ per year)

The best way to avoid unnecessary military spending is to prevent conflicts from happening in the first place. By focusing on diplomatic solutions instead of military interventions, we can scale back expensive overseas bases, reduce troop deployments, and use reserves and National Guard units more effectively. This shift could save up to $50 billion a year—and possibly as much as $100 billion in the long term. It’s about time we put our resources into creating peaceful solutions rather than preparing for endless wars.

What Could We Do with the $100 Billion in Savings?

The possibilities are endless when we take a more practical approach to national security spending. What could we do with the $100 billion we save? Here’s a snapshot of just some of the incredible investments we could make in American society:

• 787,255 Registered Nurses: Filling critical healthcare gaps nationwide.

• 10.39 million Public Housing Units: Making affordable housing a reality for families across the country.

• 2.29 million Jobs at $15/hour: Providing good jobs with benefits, boosting the economy.

• 1.03 million Elementary School Teachers: Giving our children the education they deserve.

• 579,999 Clean Energy Jobs: Building a sustainable, green future for the next generation.

• 7.81 million Head Start Slots: Giving young children a foundation for lifelong success.

• 5.88 million Military Veterans receiving VA medical care: Ensuring those who served our country receive the care they earned.

The Bottom Line?

Cutting $100 billion from the Pentagon budget isn’t just a pipe dream—it’s a tangible, achievable plan that could deliver real benefits to everyday Americans. While it’s just a starting point, this reduction would allow us to prioritize what truly matters: healthcare, education, infrastructure, and the well-being of our people. If we’re going to spend taxpayer dollars, let’s make sure they go toward initiatives that directly benefit the lives of the citizens who fund them.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post Dear DOGE: Here’s How to Cut the Pentagon Budget by $100 Billion in Six Easy Steps appeared first on LewRockwell.

Over the last week, one of the legacy media’s chief talking points is that the Trump administration is precipitating a “constitutional crisis” by, among other things, criticizing federal judges. It’s ok to criticize judges. Just ask Justice Elena Kagan, who says we should criticize the Supreme Court if we don’t like their decisions. Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson have not hesitated to harshly criticize the Court’s conservative majority in speeches and interviews. There is a long history of elected officials criticizing judges, and that shouldn’t surprise us, because judges and elected officials are all part of the unending struggle for political power to bend the state apparatus to the will of the party that won the last round.

Democrats have been lambasting the Supreme Court for years without concern about the separation of powers or fear of fomenting a constitutional crisis. Joe Biden urged sweeping constitutional changes to mandate term limits for Supreme Court Justices, whose decisions he characterized as “extreme opinions,” and a “code of ethics” to give their opponents opportunities to force them off decisions or impeach them. Democrats, now parading as defenders of the separation of powers, have demanded they obtain a such a code to give them leverage over Justices who stray from their preferred interpretations of law. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer threatened Justices by name in front of the Supreme Court building during oral arguments. When Justices don’t follow the Democratic Party line, Democrats denounce them as “extreme” and “far-right,” forgetting the tender place in their hearts for the separation of powers.

Presidents criticizing the courts and even questioning their authority is nothing new. In fact, it has happened repeatedly throughout American history. In Marbury v. Madison (1803), the case that established the principle of judicial review, Secretary of State James Madison refused to present his case to the Court, being convinced that the Supreme Court lacked the authority to make him deliver a commission to Petitioner William Marbury to serve as a D.C. Justice of the Peace. Chief Justice John Marshall, Madison’s predecessor as Secretary of State and his political opponent, managed to strengthen the power of the judiciary with the principle of judicial review and avoid ordering Madison to deliver the commission, which Madison and President Thomas Jefferson would certainly have refused to do. In Georgia v. Worcester (1832), President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce a judgment of the Marshall Court that the State of Georgia could not imprison Vermont missionary Samuel Worcester for going onto Cherokee territory, where he had preached and encouraged the Cherokee to seek legal relief from efforts to expel them from Georgia. “John Marshall has made his decision,” Jackson is reputed to have said. “Now let him enforce it.” Abraham Lincoln, in response to Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which held in part that the federal government could not regulate slavery in the territories, attacked judicial review as antithetical to republican government and signed into law a statute that banned slavery in the territories, ignoring the Court’s Dred Scott decision. Lincoln also disregarded the Court’s decision in Ex parte Merryman (1861) that only Congress could suspend the writ of habeas corpus, attacking the Court in his 1861 address to a Special Session of Congress, where Merryman’s and Dred Scott’s author Chief Justice Taney was present: “would not the official oath be broken if the Government should be overthrown when it was believed that disregarding the single law would tend to preserve it?” Theodore Roosevelt invoked Lincoln’s rejection of judicial supremacy in attacking Supreme Court decisions that rejected Progressive encroachments on limited government and freedom of contract.  In perhaps the most well-known of these incidents, Franklin Roosevelt presented to the public and Congress a plan to pack the Supreme Court with new Justices who would support his New Deal policies, suggesting that the current Court suffered from a “hardening of the judicial arteries” and was out of touch with the country’s needs. This plan was abandoned after Justice Owen Roberts changed his vote in an important case that opened the way for much of Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation.

Alexander Hamilton famously suggested that the judiciary would be the “least dangerous” branch of government under the Constitution, meaning that courts would not have the policy making role reserved for the elected branches. This is one prediction about the Constitution that has not aged well. The courts have acquired a policy making role, and it is for this reason that we should expect to see conflict between the elected branches and the courts during periods of high political tension. The examples from American political history make clear that this has happened repeatedly, so it is reasonable to hypothesize that we will see it in times of severe political conflict. Furthermore, research has made clear that the ideology and policy preferences of judges exert a powerful influence over their decisions, so it is not an idle claim that judges may have done so in a particular case. The left wants you to believe that President Trump’s criticism of the courts means that a unique and perilous “constitutional crisis” is looming. They are hoping that you have forgotten about their recent attacks on the Supreme Court and historical examples of presidents criticizing the courts and questioning their authority in periods of high political tension.

It is a myth that judges are apolitical arbiters of sacrosanct legal principles. Judges are policymakers who seek to get results they want in cases and to establish legal principles and policies they prefer. They are fully part of the struggle for power that is the essence of politics. Their decisions are fair game for criticism, and they always have been.

The post A Phony Crisis appeared first on LewRockwell.

According to the United Nations, “Climate change is a global emergency that goes beyond national borders.” From the World Economic Forum, “Urgent global action must be taken to reduce emissions and safeguard human health from the multi-pronged negative impacts of climate change globally.”

From every multinational institution in the world, we hear the same message. From the World Bank, “The world is battling a perfect storm of climate, conflict, economic, and nature crises.” From the World Health Organization, “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat.”

A major problem with all this unanimity over this “emergency” is the fact that for at least half of all people living in Western nations in 2025, the UN, WEF, WHO, and World Bank have no credibility. We don’t want to “own nothing and be happy” as our middle class is crushed. We don’t want the only politically acceptable way to maintain national economic growth to rely on population replacement. And with only the slightest numeracy, we see apocalyptic proclamations as lacking substance.

For example, while 250,000 “additional deaths per year” is tragic, worldwide estimates of total deaths are not quite 70 million per year. These “additional deaths” constitute a 0.36 percent increase over that baseline, just over one-third of one percent. Not even a rounding error.

Similarly, an alarmist prediction from NASA is that “Antarctica is losing ice mass (melting) at an average rate of about 150 billion tons per year, and Greenland is losing about 270 billion tons per year, adding to sea level rise.” Let’s unpack that a bit. A billion tons is a gigaton, equivalent in volume to one cubic kilometer. So Antarctica is losing 150 cubic kilometers of ice per year. But Antarctica has an estimated total ice mass of 30 million cubic kilometers. Which means Antarctica is losing about one twenty-thousandth of one percent of its total ice mass per year. That is well below the accuracy of measurement. It is an estimate, and the conclusion it suggests is of no significance.

One may wonder about Greenland, with “only” 2.9 million cubic kilometers of ice, melting at an estimated rate of 270 gigatons per year. But that still yields a rate of loss of less than one one-hundredth of one percent per year, which is almost certainly below the ability to actually gauge total ice mass and total annual ice loss.

What about sea level rise? Here again, basic math yields underwhelming conclusions. The total surface area of the world’s oceans is 361 million square kilometers. If you spread 420 gigatons over that surface (Greenland and Antarctica’s melting combined), you get a sea level rise of not quite 1.2 millimeters per year. This is, again, so insignificant that it is below the threshold of our ability to measure.

These fundamental facts will turn anyone willing to do even basic fact-checking into a cynic. What’s really going on? We get at least a glimpse of truth from the above quotation from the World Bank, where they ascribe the challenges of humanity to several causes: “climate, conflict, economic, and nature crises.” There’s value in the distinctions they make. They list “nature crisis” as distinct from “climate,” and at least explicitly, they don’t even cite “climate” as resulting from some anthropogenically generated trend of increasing temperatures and increasingly extreme weather. They just say “climate.”

Which brings us to the point: Conflict and economic crises are far bigger sources of human misery, and we face serious environmental challenges that have little to do with climate change and more to do with how we manage our industry, our wilderness, and our natural resources. And we are face “climate” challenges even when catastrophic climate events have nothing to do with any alleged “climate crisis.”

A perfect example of how the climate “crisis” narrative is falsely applied when, in fact, the climate-related catastrophe would have happened anyway is found in the disastrous floods that devastated Pakistan in 2022. Despite the doomsday spin from PBS (etc.), these floods were not abnormal because of “climate change.” They were an abnormal catastrophe because in just 60 years, the population of that nation has grown from 45 million to 240 million people. They’ve channelized their rivers, built dense new settlements onto what were once floodplains and other marginal land, they’ve denuded their forests, which took away the capacity to absorb runoff, and they’ve paved thousands of square miles, creating impervious surfaces where water can’t percolate. Of course, a big storm made a mess. The weather didn’t change. The nation changed.

The disaster story repeats everywhere. Contrary to the narrative, the primary cause is not “climate change.” Bigger tsunamis? Maybe it’s because coastal aquifers were overdrafted, which caused land subsidence, or because previously uninhabited tidelands were settled because the population quintupled in less than two generations, and because coastal mangrove forests were destroyed, which used to attenuate big waves. What about deforestation? Perhaps because these nations have been denied the ability to develop natural gas and hydroelectric power, they’re stripping away the forests for fuel to cook their food. In some cases, they’re burning their forests to make room for biofuel plantations, in a towering display of irony and corruption.

Read the Whole Article

The post Challenging the Climate Crisis Narrative appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Tim McGraw:

Hi Ed,   Do You Think You’ll Ever Know? Ed Curtin

I enjoyed reading your latest article on LRC. Yeah, you got it all right. Well done! It is very frustrating how the media, government, religion, or any other institution never tells us the truth. We only get images, sound bites, half the story, or less. As you say, no conclusions are drawn—well, unless the conclusion is a lie, e.g., CO2 causes global warming or Bin Laden organized the 9/11 attacks (the passport from a hijacker found in the street under the towers proves it.)

You are right about movies, too. Every movie I’ve seen, well, almost every one, since 2002, has a subtle message or ten telling me to believe in the state and not to believe in individuals or the family. In almost every TV show, the father is absent, an idiot, or the killer.

I rarely read articles on the internet anymore. Yours are always an exception. I enjoy your observations and writings. I still read books, if slowly. I am currently reading “Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere” by Poe Ballantine. It’s a good non-fiction book set in Chadron, Nebraska of all places. The characters are interesting, and there is a murder on the prairie. I haven’t finished the book, but I don’t think the murder has ever been solved.

The bad guys do get away with murder. I see it in the news every day. That’s a fact.

 

The post Do You Think You’ll Ever Know? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Obituary for my father.

Richard Warner Carlson died at 84 on March 24, 2025 at home in Boca Grande, Florida after six weeks of illness. He refused all painkillers to the end and left this world with dignity and clarity, holding the hands of his children with his dogs at his… pic.twitter.com/4lMygMkSIT

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 26, 2025

The post Tucker Carlson’s Obit for His Father appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ginny Garner wrote:

Lew,

It is difficult for some people to understand why so many others, even family members and friends, do not understand the seriousness of the circumstances we find ourselves in in America and throughout the world. Archbishop Fulton Sheen had very prescient, indeed timeless, words that explain why this is so.

pic.twitter.com/J0UEgJMOVZ

— Sanoj Thomas (@Sanothomas) March 26, 2025

 

The post Why Are So Many Blind to Reality? Archbishop Fulton Sheen Explains appeared first on LewRockwell.

David Martin wrote:

“The Kennedys tried to fix the problem.”  –  Alice Irby

The post The JFK Israel Connection by Candace Owens appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Adam Garrie

 

The post Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Marty Makary Confirmed to Lead NIH and FDA, Respectively appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post US Intel: Iran Is NOT Building A Nuclear Weapon (So Why Are We Threatening Them?) appeared first on LewRockwell.

Dom Armentano writes:

Despite the Trump Administration’s nonsense claim that the alleged “drone” activity in New Jersey and elsewhere was “FAA authorized”, the actual UFO mystery continues and becomes even more mysterious. 

See this latest summary of events.

 

The post The “Drone” Mystery Continues appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Gold Coast Bulletin

 

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