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Why are the French different from Americans? One reason, for good or ill, is that in their senior year in high school (called términale) French kids must take a course in philosophy. My daughter has just started reading the Pensées (Thoughts) of Pascal. My response to Pascal and his Pensées is given below in an essay I wrote for myself when I read it more than 35 years ago. But before that consider why I read this old book through the following dialogue from another, very different, French writer Marcel Proust; In the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past (in French À la recherche du temps perdue, In Search of Lost Time) , (translated by Moncrieff, Random House, v.1, p. 20).

“I say!” exclaimed Swann to my grandfather, “what I was going to tell you has more to do than you might think with what you were asking me just now, for in some respects there has been very little change. I came across a passage in Saint-Simon this morning which would have amused you. It is in the volume which covers his mission to Spain; not one of the best, little more in fact than a journal, but at least it is a journal wonderfully well written, which fairly distinguishes it from the devastating (sic) journalism that we feel bound to read these days, morning, noon and night.”

“I do not agree with you: there are some days when I find reading the papers very pleasant indeed!” my aunt Flora broke in, to show Swann that she had read the note about his Corot in the ‘Figaro.’

“Yes,” aunt Celine went one better. “When they write things about people whom we are interested.”

“I don’t deny it,” answered Swann in some bewilderment. “The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it – oh! I don’t know; shall we say Pascal’s ‘Pensees?’”

Even more so today than in Proust’s time, it is important to find the signal in the noise. Get off your Twitter (I should write X) feed and read a great, old book.

On the Pensées of Pascal

“It might seem that about Blaise Pascal, and about the two works on which his fame is founded everything that there is to say had been said. . . . But Pascal is one who must be studied afresh by men in every generation. It is not he who changes, but we who change.”

T. S. Eliot

Upon reading these lines of Eliot, as is my habit, I studied afresh the Pensées of Pascal. The man who was to become one of the great Christian apologists of his age, or any age, I knew only as the man for whom a unit of pressure is named. Here I shall inform you of what little I have learned of his life and my feeling of the Pensées.

Blaise Pascal was born June 19, 1623 in Clermont-Ferrand, France. His mother having died as an infant, his father raised the boy and his sisters, personally undertaking the task of their education. Pascal was a precocious student. At sixteen he published a paper on solid geometry that Descartes could not believe was written by one so young. Pascal collaborated with his father on experiments that proved a vacuum was possible, which once again brought him into contention with Descartes. With these and other inventions and discoveries the great mathematician and physicist was known as the most brilliant man of his time. A celebrity himself, he knew all the best and brightest in Paris.

At the height of his renown on November 23, 1654 Pascal had a religious revelation. He recorded the event in a note that was sewn into the overcoat that he was wearing when he died. While he was always a Christian he came to feel that his religious attitude had not been fervent enough. He left the social life of Paris to join his sister in the Jansenist convent at Port-Royal. On his choice of faith over fame Pascal wrote:

“Vanity is so firmly anchored in man¹s heart that a soldier, a rough, a cook or a porter will boast and expect admirers, and even philosophers want them; those who write against them want to enjoy the prestige of having read them, and perhaps I who wrote this want the same thing, perhaps my readers.” . .

The Jansenists were a Catholic sect, who at that time were at odds with the Jesuits. Pascal wrote the Provincial Letters (1656-57) in defense of the Jansenist cause. This series of anonymous pamphlets is a masterpiece of French prose. Pascal lived his life in religious and scientific reflection until his death in 1662.

Pascal¹s Pensées (thoughts) were published posthumously in 1669. They are a compilation of notes intended for a Christian apology. Pascal intended to make the argument for Christian truths through reason. In spite of the fact that a Christian truth is that faith can not be deduced by reason. “Either God is or he is not.”

“But to which view shall we be inclined? Reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos separates us. At the far end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails. How will you wager? Reason cannot make you choose either, reason cannot prove either wrong.”

Thus, Pascal argues, even if your reason prevents your faith, shouldn¹t

prudential reason move you to search for faith.

Pascal’s fundamental view of the world is of fallen man. That while

“man has god-like qualities he also displays the savageness of a beast. The two truths of the Christian religion are “that there is a God, of whom men are capable, and that there is a corruption in nature which makes them unworthy. It is of equal importance to men to know each of these points: and it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness as to know his own wretchedness without knowing the Redeemer who can cure him. Knowing only one of these points leads either to the arrogance of the philosophers, who have known God but not their own wretchedness, or to the despair of the atheists, who know their own wretchedness without knowing their Redeemer.”

When man acts with the arrogance of a god to remake man or the world the results are disastrous. The French and Russian revolutions are testimonies to this truth. I can testify to the wretchedness of life in this world when God is not known with the example of my mother. Her life has no joy for as we all have failures, sickness and eventually death in our lives, she cannot see the light of the Redeemer which gives hope in the face of despair. Unfortunately I see no way to help her so I can only pray for her and grieve for her.

So what is it of Pascal that I have learned afresh, that I will keep with me for the rest of my days. In the words of Pascal:

“Thus I stretch out my arms to my saviour, who, after being foretold for four thousand years, came on earth to die and suffer for me at the time and the circumstances foretold. By his grace I peaceably await death, in the hope of being eternally united, and meanwhile I live joyfully, whether in the blessings which he is pleased to bestow on me or in the afflictions which he sends me for my own good and taught me how to endure by his example.”

Amen.

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The federal government shutdown in recent weeks has highlighted the full cost of many government programs, including the food stamp program. Many people—especially the kind who don’t spend their time tracking federal spending—have been shocked by the fact that one in eight Americans—12 percent of the population—receives food stamps. That’s about 42 million people. Moreover, most food stamp recipients receive other forms of government “welfare” as well.

For many, these statistics flying around social media and among podcasters have served to highlight the sheer size of the American population that receives government money as a substantial portion of their income.

This raises an important question: if a sizable portion of a person’s income comes from tax dollars, should that person be eligible to vote himself access to even more tax dollars?

Some think not. This woman, for instance, received 64K likes when she stated: “I don’t think these people should vote. Honestly, how can you vote freely, when you’re being bought?”

She’s right.

This is a controversial take, to say the least. Yet, many people who act aghast at the idea would also surely regard it as a bad thing if a politician voted “yes” to awarding a government contract to his own company. This is because many people understand that being in a position to vote to send yourself more taxpayer money involves a conflict of interest. Historically, a member of a city council or legislature has often been expected to refrain from voting when he can personally benefit financially from his own vote. It is understood that anyone voting in this situation is not voting “freely” but is biased in favor of enriching himself at the expense of others.

Yet, few people think twice when a voter casts his ballot for a politician who has promised to give that voter more taxpayer money. Sometimes, at the state level, voters will cast their ballot to directly enrich themselves through ballot initiatives and referenda. This, we are told is all perfectly fine because voting is allegedly some kind of sacred right.

How Many People Live off Taxpayer Funds? 

How many voters—or at least potential voters—are using the taxpayers as their personal piggy banks?

Although recent controversies over food stamps have highlighted that particular program, food stamps are just the tip of the iceberg. The number of Americans who receive monthly taxpayer-funded income goes far beyond the 41 million on food stamps. For example, 72 million Americans receive Social Security, and 65 million of those also receive tax-funded health services through Medicare. Yes, recipients of Social Security like to claim that they “paid in” to the system and now receive their payments out of some kind of imagined trust fund. The reality, of course, is that Social Security and Medicare are 100% funded by current workers. That is, the programs are nothing more than a wealth transfer from workers to retirees. In every way except the rhetoric, Social Security and Medicare are just welfare programs, and every politician knows that his elderly voters expect him to keep ripping off current taxpayers to keep the elderly voters happy.

There are also 70 million Americans on Medicaid. In many cases, Medicaid services amount to the equivalent of thousands of dollars per month for recipients.

We can’t just add these numbers up, however, as there is a lot of overlap in the programs. For example, 78 percent of food stamp recipients are also eligible for Medicaid. Moreover, since we’re talking about all of this in the context of voting, we should remove children—who cannot vote—from the counts.1

Medicare recipients are nearly all on Social Security, so the “Social Security and/or Medicare” group totals about 72 million adults. To this we can add the adult Medicaid recipients who total about 60 percent of total recipients. That’s about 42 million adults. But we must also remove the 12 million Medicaid recipients who are also on Medicare and so are already counted in the Medicare category. That means we can add 30 million adult Medicaid recipients to the 72 million on Social Security. Then, we can add the adult food-stamp recipients who are not already counted under the Medicaid category. That’s another 5.4 million adults. That brings us to a total of about 107 million adult US residents on some form or welfare—and we’re not even counting TANF, rental assistance (Section 8), or other smaller programs here.

Don’t Forget Taxpayer Funded Government Employees and Contractors

Of course, people receiving so-called “social benefits” are not the only people who life off the largesse of the taxpayers. There are at least 10 million others whose paychecks come from the taxpayers. For example, there are 2.2 million federal civilian workers, 1.3 million military “service” members, 400,000 postal workers, 1.8 million workers funded by federal grants, and more than 5 million federal contractors. That latter category, of course, includes those well-paid engineers and white collar workers who make weapons for the Pentagon or “consult” for the departments of Agriculture, State, and other agencies.2

Source: Brookings Institution, (in millions of employees).

Sure, many contractors and federal employees will tell you that they aren’t in the same category as welfare recipients because they “work.” But from the point of view of tax transfers and fiscal policy, there is no difference at all. The issue here isn’t morality or virtue or whether or not someone “deserves” his tax-funded check. We’re simply pointing out the millions of Americans whose income is based on a forcible transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to the recipients’ pocket.

In this, federal contractors and other federal workers are often similar to all recipients of taxpayer money: they all have reasons as to why they have some sort of right to the taxpayer’s dime. Trying to convince these people otherwise is often a lost cause for the reasons that Upton Sinclair suggested long ago: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

But whatever justification is given by the 117 million or so Americans living off the taxpayer’s “generosity,” the fact remains that at least a third of the population in the United States—nearly 45 percent of the adult population—receives a lot of money from the taxpayers. What’s worse, I’m not even including here all the local-government workers funded by federal dollars, students and faculty at federally funded colleges, or the users of smaller federal programs like LIHEAP. And yet we still find nearly half the US population is receiving taxpayer-funded salaries or “benefits.”

When the Bureaucrats/Welfare Recipients/Government Contractors Outnumber the Taxpayers

So, are we to seriously believe that these people would ever vote to substantially cut government spending? Every politician knows the answer to this. He knows that those millions of government contractors and military employees are simply not going to support a candidate who prioritizes any substantial cuts to military spending. Politicians know that opposing Social Security is political suicide. Nowadays, even opposing Medicaid has become a politically dangerous endeavor because so many millions of voters depend on the program’s taxpayer-funded services.

Even if only half of these 116 million taxpayer-funded adults actually vote, that’s a pretty big chunk of the 150 million who voted in the 2024 election. The entire US adult population, after all, is only about 258 million.

This all illustrates why the United States government will never rein in spending or seriously engage the problem of mounting debt and deficits short of an acute sovereign debt crisis or a (probably violent) coup-like event. The hundred-million or so Americans who rely on federal spending for their incomes won’t allow any real reform to ever occur. Runaway debt and spending is now baked into the system. These is no orderly or legal way out of this.

The political dynamic at work was explained by Ludwig von Mises long ago. In his short book Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises examined this problem in the context of government employees. In a section titled “The Bureaucrat as a Voter” Mises explains:

The bureaucrat is not only a government employee. He is, under a democratic constitution, at the same time a voter and as such a part of the sovereign, his employer. He is in a peculiar position: he is both employer and employee. And his pecuniary interest as employee towers above his interest as employer, as he gets much more from the public funds than he contributes to them.

This double relationship becomes more important as the people on the government’s pay roll increase. The bureaucrat as voter is more eager to get a raise than to keep the budget balanced. His main concern is to swell the pay roll.

Mises went on to examine the rise of powerful interest groups in France and Germany in the years before “the fall of their democratic constitutions.” He explained:

There were not only the hosts of public employees, and those employed in the nationalized branches of business (e.g., railroad, post, telegraph, and telephone), there were the receivers of the unemployment dole and of social security benefits, as well as the farmers and some other groups which the government directly or indirectly subsidized. Their main concern was to get more out of the public funds. They did not care for “ideal” issues like liberty, justice, the supremacy of the law, and good government. They asked for more money, that was all. No candidate for parliament, provincial diets, or town councils could risk opposing the appetite of the public employees for a raise. The various political parties were eager to outdo one another in munificence.

Mises concluded:

Representative democracy cannot subsist if a great part of the voters are on the government pay roll. If the members of parliament no longer consider themselves mandatories of the taxpayers but deputies of those receiving salaries, wages, subsidies, doles, and other benefits from the treasury, democracy is done for.

The logic of this position is simple. If the voting taxpayers (specifically, those who actually pay the bills) are outnumbered or outcompeted by the tax receivers, then, inevitably, the economic system will tend more and more toward economic profligacy, leading eventually to bankruptcy.

America is already a long way down this road.

—

1 Various sources show that about 40 percent of Medicaid and food stamp recipients are children. Medicare and Social Security, of course, are directed at elderly voters.

2 One could also argue that we should also include the 2.1 million military retirees to this category along with the 2.6 million retired federal workers who receive federal pensions. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll leave those out since many are already included in the Social Security category.

The post Why Food Stamp Recipients (and Government Contractors) Should Not Be Allowed To Vote appeared first on LewRockwell.

Dick Cheney died this week. He leaves behind a wretched legacy.

Cheney reached the pinnacle of his influence as George W. Bush’s vice president, a position from which he orchestrated the Iraq War and helped bring about one of the most intrusive pieces of legislation ever to have been leveled against the American people.

Democrats reflexively abhorred Cheney as veep, but as GOP voters became more averse to foreign intervention, he became a symbol of everything that is wrong with U.S. foreign policy. As Jack Kenny said in 2011, “[Cheney’s] impact on and, to a large extent, direction of foreign policy during the Bush presidency suggests that if he was and is a conservative, his is the kind of conservatism George Will described as believing that ‘government can’t run Amtrak, but it can run the Middle East.’”

Iraq Intervention: Why?

As vice president, Cheney was the loudest voice to advocate the invasion of Iraq. He broadcast the false narrative that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction with great zeal. But that wasn’t his first foray into Iraq, or the first time he led an invasion under a Bush. Cheney oversaw Operation Desert Storm in 1991 as secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush. And in between Bush presidencies, when he wasn’t busy planning invasions into Iraq, Cheney worked as the CEO of Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oil companies.

It just so happens that Iraq is considered one of the top five oil-rich countries. And if it were up to Cheney, American soldiers would’ve been sent into other oil-rich Middle Eastern nations. According to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Cheney had grand plans to deploy American soldiers all over the Middle East. Kenny writes:

In his new book, A Journey: My Political Life, Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recalls that Cheney wanted the United States to go to war not only with Afghanistan and Iraq, but with a number of other countries in the Middle East, as he believed the world must be “made anew.” “He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it — Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.,” Blair wrote. “In other words, [Cheney] thought the world had to be made anew, and that after 11 September, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.”

Journalist and author Robert Parry also suspected these wider ambitions, which had been kept out of earshot of the American public. He wrote:

There have been indications of this larger neoconservative strategy to attack America’s — and Israel’s — “enemies” starting with Iraq and then moving on to Syria and Iran, but rarely has this more expansive plan for regional war been shared explicitly with the American public.

“Agency of the President”

Cheney once said, “Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole? It’s a nice way to operate, actually.” This is related to the common perception that he was more powerful than the president. “At the minimum, Cheney was a co-equal to Bush and is widely understood to be perhaps the most effective vice president in history,” renowned left-wing journalist Seymour Hersh recently wrote. Kenny pointed out that one of the nicknames Cheney acquired as veep was “’Management,’ as in ‘Better check with management first.’” He wrote:

Former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) described the free hand Cheney appeared to have in his dealings with Congress. “Dick could make a deal,” Gramm told [Barton Gellman], author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. “He didn’t have to check with the president, not as far as I could tell. I’m sure at the end of the day, he would fill the president in on what happened. But Dick had the agency of the president.”

CFR Ties

While Cheney is rightly recognized, even by mainstream standards, as a negative influence on American policies, one important element that’s been widely overlooked in his ties to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a subversive foreign-policy think tank that we like to refer to as the “Deep State nervous system.” Cheney was a CFR life member. He served on its board of directors from 1987 to 1989 and again from 1993 to 1995, and was also its director at one point. Interestingly, he mentioned none of this in his 500-plus-page memoir, In My Time. In 2011, the former Wyoming lawmaker admitted during a visit to CFR headquarters that he had intentionally kept his ties to the organization a secret:

It’s good to be back at the Council on Foreign Relations. I’ve been a member for a long time, and was actually a director for some period of time. I never mentioned that when I was campaigning for reelection back home in Wyoming, but it stood me in good stead.

After his death, the CFR posted a warm tribute to him:

A steadfast steward of the Council, Cheney brought to our community the same seriousness of purpose, strategic insight, and commitment to public service that defined his distinguished career in government and the private sector. Cheney’s decades of leadership — as vice president of the United States, secretary of defense, member of Congress, and senior White House official — reflected a lifetime devoted to strengthening the United States’ national security and its role in the world. The Council is grateful to have counted Cheney as a member, director, and friend. We extend our deepest condolences to his family and loved ones.

Many would disagree with the CFR’s characterization. It’s difficult to see how sacrificing thousands of American lives and racking up debt to pay for overseas wars and fueling legislation that allows the government to spy on Americans have made the country stronger. Cheney was a key architect of the post-9/11 response. And as such, he helped finagle congressional approval for the PATRIOT Act, a wholly un-American piece of legislation that has greatly expanded the government’s ability to surveil Americans. He coordinated amendments with administration officials and reconciled the House and Senate versions. His chief of staff,  Scooter Libby, was also involved in high-level meetings about the act.

Helping Trump?

But there might be one contribution by Cheney that is — for now — still considered a plus. As the folks at The Spectator observed, “Cheney was more responsible for [Donald] Trump’s rise than almost anyone else in the Republican establishment.” How so? Explained The Spectator:

Recall that it was during the 2016 South Carolina primary that Trump first showed his real independence from the folderol surrounding the Iraq War. Trump created shock and awe by denouncing it. “The war in Iraq,” he said, “was a big, fat mistake.” Until then, Republicans had marched in lockstep beneath the George W. Bush banner.

But as much as Cheney did for Trump, the president never returned the favor. In fact, he was instrumental in ousting Cheney’s daughter Liz out of Congress. Before she disappeared into the void of irrelevancy, Liz Cheney had essentially become a Democrat. She eventually showed her true colors and endorsed the Uniparty’s empty vessel, Kamala Harris.

The silver lining is that Dick Cheney’s foreign policy was so disastrous that it turned a massive portion of the American people against neoconservatism. The Cheney effect is still playing out today. Donald Trump is taking a lot of fire from his base for for failing to fully deliver on his campaign promises to not get involved in any foreign wars.

Thank you, Dick Cheney, for showing the American people the repulsiveness of meddling in foreign affairs.

This article was originally published on The New American.

The post History Will Not Be Kind to Dick Cheney appeared first on LewRockwell.

The only hope to save ourselves from Trump’s authoritarianism is mass movements. We must build alternative centers of power — including political parties, media, labor unions and universities — to give a voice and agency to those who have been disempowered by our two ruling parties, especially the working class and working poor. We must carry out strikes to cripple and thwart the abuses carried out by the emerging police state. We must champion a radical socialism, which includes slashing the $1 trillion spent on the war industry and ending our suicidal addiction to fossil fuels, and lift up the lives of Americans cast aside in the wreckage of industrialization, declining wages, a decaying infrastructure and crippling austerity programs.

The Democratic Party and its liberal allies decry the consolidation of absolute power by the Trump White House, the repeated constitutional violations, the flagrant corruption and the deformation of federal agencies— including the Justice Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — into attack dogs to persecute Trump’s opponents and dissidents. It warns that time is running out. But at the same time, it steadfastly refuses to call for mass mobilizations that can disrupt the machinery of commerce and state. It treats the handful of Democratic Party politicians who address social inequality and abuses by the billionaire class — including Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani — as lepers. It blithely ignores the concerns and demands of ordinary Democratic Party voters reducing them to disposable props at rallies, town halls and conventions.

The Democratic Party and the liberal class are terrified of mass movements, fearing, correctly, that they too will be swept aside. They delude themselves that they can save us from despotism as they cling to a dead political formula — mounting vapid, corporate indentured candidates such as Kamala Harris or the Democratic Party candidate and formal naval officer running for Governor in New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill. They cling to the vain hope that being against Trump fills the void left by their lack of a vision and abject subservience to the billionaire class.

A Washington Post-ABC News/Ipsos poll, summarized by the Washington Post under the headline, “Voters broadly disapprove of Trump but remain divided on midterms, poll finds” — found that 68 percent of those polled believe the Democrats are out of touch with the aspirations of voters, with 63 percent saying that about Trump.

A “year out from the 2026 midterm elections, there is little evidence that negative impressions of Trump’s performance have accrued to the benefit of the Democratic Party, with voters split almost evenly in their support for Democrats and Republicans,” the Washington Post summary reads.

The liberal class in a capitalist democracy is designed to function as a safety valve. It makes possible incremental reform. But, at the same time, it does not challenge or question the foundations of power. The quid-pro-quo sees the liberal class serve as an attack dog to discredit radical social movements. The liberal class, for this reason, is a useful tool. It gives the system legitimacy. It keeps alive the belief that reform is possible.

The oligarchs and corporations, terrified by the mobilization of the left in the 1960s and 1970s — what political scientist Samuel P. Huntington called America’s “excess of democracy” — set out to build counter-institutions to delegitimize and marginalize critics of capitalism and imperialism. They bought the allegiances of the two ruling political parties. They imposed obedience to neoliberalism within academia, government agencies and the press. They neutered the liberal class and crushed popular movements. They unleashed the FBI on anti-war protestors, the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords and other groups that empowered the disempowered. They broke labor unions, leaving 90 percent of the American workforce without union protections. Critics of capitalism and imperialism, such as Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader, were blacklisted. The campaign, laid out by Lewis F. Powell Jr. in his 1971 memorandum titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” set into motion the creeping corporate coup d’etat, which five decades later, is complete.

The differences between the two ruling parties on substantive issues — such as war, tax cuts, trade deals and austerity — became indistinguishable. Politics was reduced to burlesque, popularity contests between manufactured personalities and acrimonious battles over culture wars. Workers lost protections. Wages stagnated. Debt peonage soared. Constitutional rights were revoked by judicial fiat. The Pentagon consumed half of all discretionary spending.

The liberal class, rather than stand up against the onslaught, retreated into the boutique activism of political correctness. It ignored the vicious class war that would see, under the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton, around one million workers lose their jobs in mass layoffs linked to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), on top of the estimated 32 million jobs lost due to deindustrialization during the 1970s and 1980s. It ignored blanket government surveillance set up in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment. It ignored the kidnapping and torture — “extraordinary rendition” — and imprisoning of terrorism suspects into black sites, along with assassinations, even of U.S. citizens. It ignored the austerity programs that saw social services slashed. It ignored the social inequality that has reached its most extreme levels of disparity in over 200 years, surpassing the rapacious greed of the robber barons.

Clinton’s welfare reform bill, which was signed on Aug. 22, 1996, threw six million people, many of them single mothers, off the welfare rolls within four years. It dumped them onto the streets without child care, rent subsidies and Medicaid coverage. Families were plunged into crisis, struggling to survive on multiple jobs that paid $6 or $7 an hour, or less than $15,000 a year. But they were the lucky ones. In some states, half of those dropped from welfare rolls could not find work. Clinton also slashed Medicare by $115 billion over a five-year period and cut $14 billion in Medicaid funding. The overcrowded prison system handled the influx of the poor, as well as the abandoned mentally ill.

The media, owned by corporations and oligarchs, assured the public it was prudent to entrust life savings to a financial system run by speculators and thieves. In the meltdown of 2008, life savings were gutted. And then these media organizations, catering to corporate advertisers and sponsors, rendered invisible those whose misery, poverty, and grievances should be the principal focus of journalism.

Barack Obama, who raised more than $745 million — much of it corporate money — to run for president, facilitated the looting of the U.S. Treasury by corporations and big banks following the 2008 crash. He turned his back on millions of Americans who lost their homes because of bank repossessions or foreclosures. He expanded the wars begun by his predecessor George W. Bush. He killed the public option — universal health care — and forced the public to buy his defective for-profit ObamaCare — the Affordable Care Act — a bonanza for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.

If the Democratic Party was fighting to defend universal health care during the government shutdown, rather than the half measure of preventing premiums from rising for ObamaCare, millions would take to the streets.

The Democratic Party throws scraps to the serfs. It congratulates itself for allowing unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on for-profit health care policies. It passes a jobs bill that gives tax credits to corporations as a response to an unemployment rate that — if one includes all those who are stuck in part-time or lower skilled jobs but are capable and want to do more — is arguably, closer to 20 percent. It forces taxpayers, one in eight of whom depend on food stamps to eat, to fork over trillions to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and endless war, including the genocide in Gaza.

The defenestration of the liberal class reduced it to courtiers mouthing empty platitudes. The safety valve shut down. The assault on the working class and working poor accelerated. So too did very legitimate rage.

This rage gave us Trump.

The historian Fritz Stern, a refugee from Nazi Germany, wrote that fascism is the bastard child of a bankrupt liberalism. He saw in our spiritual and political alienation — given expression through cultural hatreds, racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, a demonization of immigrants, misogyny and despair — the seeds of an American fascism.

“They attacked liberalism,” Stern wrote of the supporters of German fascists in his book “The Politics of Cultural Despair,” “because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it; the bourgeois life, Manchesterism [laissez-faire capitalism], materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sensed in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.”

Richard Rorty in his last book in 1999, “Achieving Our Country,” also knew where we were headed. He writes:

[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words nigger and kike will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

The democratic tools for change — running for office, campaigning, voting, lobbying and petitions — no longer work. Corporate forces and oligarchs have seized control of our political, educational, media and economic systems. They cannot be removed from within.

The Democratic Party is a hollow appendage.

Our captured institutions, subservient to the rich and the powerful, are capitulating to Trump’s authoritarianism. All we have left is sustained non-violent, disruptive civil disobedience. Mass movements. Radical politics. Rebellion. A socialist vision that counters the poison of unfettered capitalism. This alone can thwart Trump’s police state and rid us of the feckless liberal class that sustains it.

This article was originally published on ScheerPost.

The post Trump’s Greatest Ally Is the Democratic Party appeared first on LewRockwell.

Israel is still blocking humanitarian groups from delivering the aid necessary to alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.

In an article titled “Not enough tents, food reaching Gaza as winter comes, aid agencies say,” Reuters reports that “Far too little aid is reaching Gaza nearly four weeks after a ceasefire” due to Israeli restrictions preventing aid trucks from getting to their destinations, and that according to an OSHA report last week “a tenth of children screened in Gaza were still acutely malnourished.”

A report from the UK’s Channel 4 News shows warehouses full of food that aid groups say isn’t being allowed into Gaza nearly as rapidly as needed.

In an article titled “‘Under the Guise of Bureaucracy’ — Israel Blocks Humanitarian Groups From Delivering Essential Aid Despite Calm in Gaza,” Israeli outlet Haaretz reports that “Israel has implemented a new procedure requiring all humanitarian organizations operating in Gaza and the West Bank to reapply for official approval, with many denied, despite the relative calm in Gaza following the cease-fire.”

They’re using bureaucratic red tape and arbitrary restrictions to put as much inertia on the effort to rush aid into Gaza as possible. As Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah put it, Israel has “successfully rebranded its genocide as a ‘ceasefire.’”

❖

Still can’t wrap my head around the fact that internationally renowned activist Greta Thunberg said she was tortured and sexually humiliated by Israeli soldiers when she was abducted for trying to bring aid to starving civilians, and the world just shrugged and moved on.

❖

It’s so silly when US empire apologists cite “the Monroe Doctrine” to defend US warmongering in Latin America, as though “the entire western hemisphere is our property” is a perfectly legitimate policy to have.

The Monroe Doctrine was just American imperialists telling Europe, “You see all these brown people over here south of our border? These are our brown people. You can do whatever you want to those brown people over there in Africa and Asia, but these brown people over here belong to us. Only we get to dominate and exploit them.”

That’s all it has ever been, and people cite it to justify warmongering toward Venezuela or wherever as though saying “yeah well that’s the Monroe Doctrine” is a complete argument in and of itself. It’s bat shit insane nonsense and it should be rejected in its entirety.

US regime change interventionism is reliably disastrous wherever it happens. It always causes immense suffering and instability, it’s always justified by lies, and it never accomplishes what its proponents claim it will accomplish. No amount of bleating the words “Monroe Doctrine” will ever change that.

❖

The US empire backs genocidal Gulf state monarchies like the UAE and Saudi Arabia because if those states were democratically governed their people would prioritize their own interests over the agendas of the west. They wouldn’t permit US military bases on their territory, and they never would have tolerated Israel and its abuses in the region. Fossil fuel policy would be set without regard for western interests. The entire region could long ago have united into a superpower bloc which rivaled or outmuscled the western power structure using its critical resources and trade routes.

That’s why you see the US and its allies preaching about the values of Freedom and Democracy to the public while privately telling these tyrannical monarchies they can do whatever they want and receive the backing of the imperial machine. Not until their pet tyrant fails to sufficiently kowtow to the interests of the empire does the west suddenly get interested in advancing Freedom and Democracy in their nation.

This is one of the major dynamics at play in Sudan. The United Arab Emirates has been backing the genocidal atrocities of the RSF and the US empire is placing no pressure on them to stop, because that’s part of the deal. As long as the UAE plays along with the agendas of the empire, the empire will tolerate or actively facilitate its abuses.

❖

I saw a clip of Joe Rogan telling Elon Musk that AI music is his “favorite music now,” gushing about how soulful and moving it is.

Imagine admitting this about yourself in public. AI art is shallow, vapid sensory stimulation made for shallow, vapid people who don’t have enough depth and dimensionality in their consciousness to be moved by profound arisings from the human spirit. They’re just stimulus-response amoebas.

If you tell me you love AI art I won’t try to convince you, I’ll just side-eye you, because while you may not realize it, you are telling me something very revealing about yourself.

People who think AI art is awesome are the AI art of people.

❖

We’ve all known someone like Israel. Someone who lies and manipulates all the time. Someone who’s always stirring up conflict and acting like the victim. Someone who’s obtained everything they have by stepping on top of others.

Healthy people avoid such individuals like the plague. We have labels that we use to warn others to stay clear of them. Drama queen. Narcissist. Compulsive liar. Sociopath. Manipulator.

Under ordinary circumstances such people gradually find themselves socially alienated by all but the most gullible and malleable codependents, because normal people can’t stand being around them.

Israel is like if everyone was being forced to be that person’s friend at gunpoint. Say nice things to the sociopath and pretend to believe their lies or you’re getting your head blown off.

Nations who oppose Israel’s crimes find themselves in the crosshairs of the imperial war machine. Organizations who oppose Israel’s abuses find themselves smeared, targeted, and proscribed as terrorist groups. Individuals who oppose Israel’s atrocities get fired, slandered, marginalized, censored, and silenced.

The healthy impulse we all have in ourselves to pull away from such loathsome entities is being overridden by brute force. All normal people want to turn against Israel and do whatever is necessary to end its tyranny and abuse, but the imperial institutions are doing everything in their power to coerce them to comply.

That’s the only reason Israel has any remaining support at all. Hopefully someday they won’t even have that.

________________

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The post Israel Is Still Starving Gaza appeared first on LewRockwell.

While the government shutdown continues and health-care reform remains gridlocked, Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) burdens taxpayers with out-of-control costs. For more than a decade, Obamacare has been riddled with systemic fraud that has been denied by Democratic Party bureaucrats, ignored by much of the media, and paid for by weary taxpayers.

Built on lies including “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” Catholics continue to bitterly recall the duplicitous role that Sr. Carol Keehan, CEO of the Catholic Healthcare Association, played in passing Obamacare—despite the pushback by the Catholic bishops because of its inclusion of abortion funding and the contraception mandate. Sr. Keehan’s mendacious shepherding of the health-care program was rewarded with a silver signing pen from President Obama.

Intensifying the pressure today on an already overburdened health-care system, the influx of several million undocumented immigrants has pushed government-funded health care to a breaking point. According to an October 2024 CBO report to Rep. Jodey Arrington, federal and state governments spent $27 billion on Emergency Medicaid for noncitizens ineligible for full Medicaid coverage between 2017 and 2023. In 2023, the estimated cost of health care for undocumented immigrants in the United States was approximately $3.8 billion, specifically for Emergency Medicaid services.

Hospitals are bound by law to provide emergency services to undocumented patients under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), enacted in 1986. This is a federal law that requires hospitals to provide emergency medical care to all individuals, regardless of immigration status or ability to pay. Under EMTALA, any hospital that receives Medicare funding must conduct a medical screening exam for anyone who arrives at the emergency department and must provide stabilizing treatment for emergency medical conditions, including active labor. This mandate applies to undocumented immigrants as well as uninsured citizens and legal residents—and most of us strongly support the provision of this care to all on an emergency basis.

Unfortunately, such care is costly. According to the Trump administration, the estimated cost of emergency health care in 2024—including labor and delivery and postnatal care of the mothers and newborn babies—of undocumented immigrants in the United States rose 142 percent from the year before to an astonishing 9.1 billion dollars of taxpayer funds to pay for the emergency health care of those in the country illegally. Between 2020 to 2024, Medicaid taxpayer health-care dollars provided to illegal immigrants tripled.

Though critics argue that the Trump administration’s numbers are inflated, few challenge the fact that the nation’s hospitals are facing a fiscal crisis. In January 2024, Dr. Donna Lynne, CEO of Denver Health, publicly voiced concern over the financial strain caused by uncompensated care for undocumented individuals. Speaking at a finance and governance committee meeting, she stated, “Where do you think the migrants are getting care? They are getting care at Denver Health…It’s going to break Denver Health in a way that we didn’t even anticipate.” Her remarks highlighted the hospital system’s mounting fiscal challenges, noting that Denver Health treated over 8,000 undocumented immigrants in 2023, accounting for approximately 20,000 visits. Uncompensated care costs surged from $60 million in 2020 to $136 million in 2023.

These expenses will continue to grow even though, according to the enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (Public Law 104-193), eligibility for Medicaid was intended to be limited to “qualified aliens.” That includes lawful permanent residents (also known as green-card holders), asylum seekers, refugees, and people who are paroled into the United States for one year or more. By designating millions of undocumented illegal immigrants as “paroled into the United States,” the Biden administration effectively redefined the legal status of undocumented immigrants, making them eligible for enrollment in the government-sponsored, taxpayer-funded Affordable Care Act. Illegal immigrants with parole status can choose to enroll in ACA Marketplace plans and can receive premium tax credits and cost-sharing reductions if they meet income requirements—all at the taxpayers’ expense.

This latest “illegal” immigrant health-care scam to gain access to taxpayer-funded ACA Marketplace plans follows one that was exposed by Bloomberg in June 2025, which revealed yet another under-reported Obamacare frontier in health-care fraud. This fraud encouraged deceptive ACA enrollments driven by AI-generated deepfakes of celebrities like Taylor Swift, Joe Rogan, and Andrew Tate. The way the scam worked was to use social media to draw on celebrity deepfakes to promote cash giveaways and ACA-related offers on social media simply for “signing up” for Obamacare. Viewers of the ads were invited to call telemarketing centers where commissions were paid on a per-lead model. The centers then redirected callers to insurance brokers who enrolled them in ACA plans, replete with premium tax credits and taxpayer-subsidized health care well beyond emergency room care—often without their consent or understanding.

Enhance Health was one of the largest brokers enrolling consumers in ACA Marketplace plans, reportedly registering over one million individuals in 2023. Many of the callers to Enhance and other such brokers were enrolled in fully subsidized ACA plans without even realizing they were signing up for health care. According to Georgetown University’s “litigation tracker, Turner et al v. Enhance, LLC et al. was a class action complaint alleging that certain fraudulent and misleading practices by insurance call centers to enroll people into Marketplace plans or switch their coverage constituted violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). The fact that many of these “registered” insured individuals did not even exist has recently come to light. A report called “Unpacking the Great Obamacare Enrollment Fraud,” by the Paragon Health Institute, revealed that four to five million fraudulent enrollments occurred in 2024 alone, costing taxpayers $15–26 billion.

As the government shutdown continues, Senate Democrats are using the Working Families Tax Credit and broader Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies as leverage in negotiations. Rejecting stopgap funding bills, the Democrats want a guarantee that the corrupt-ridden ACA health insurance subsidies will be extended—and continue to support the health-care needs of the undocumented immigrants who have been illegally paroled into the country. In contrast, Republicans view the Democrats’ demands as a form of political hostage-taking—holding up government funding in order to push through what they believe are expensive, partisan priorities.  For the Republicans, the recalcitrant Democrats are prioritizing health-care handouts that will deepen the deficit and reward those who refuse to work.

It is clear that the Affordable Care Act is riddled with subsidies, political spin, and outright fraud, but even Republicans acknowledge that the system is cracking. Whether Democrats call it compassion or Republicans call it corruption, the reckoning is here, and reform is no longer a choice—it’s a necessity.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

The post The Fraud That Won’t Die: Obamacare’s Endless Deceptions appeared first on LewRockwell.

Crazed with resentment after Trump’s win last November, they decided nothing less than the term “Nazi” would do. You know who “they” are: The New York Times, The New Yorker, protesters funded by George Soros like Antifa, furious left-wing types, Hollywood lefties, and other such kinds. Enough said about these people. They’re the types who always look unhappy.

The Nazis are referred to as the greatest killers of all time. This is universally acknowledged but factually untrue; they are far down the list of great killers after Mao, Stalin (adored by the left), and a few Mongol chiefs. This is how I picture it in my mind: A roomful of ugly men and very homely women are meeting and are desperate to invent a crime committed by The Donald. “Eureka,” cries out a trans freak, “he’s a Nazi.” The room goes quiet, and then all hell breaks loose. It’s perfect, and everyone agrees that from now on Trump will be referred to as a Nazi. The meeting ends with smiles and congratulations all around.

“The fact that The Donald won an election and both houses plus the popular vote keeps him jolly while the anti-Trumpers seethe.”

Vilified by the left as an Epstein-like monster, but also a Nazi, The Donald does not seem to give a damn. The fact that he won an election and both houses plus the popular vote keeps him jolly while the anti-Trumpers seethe. The Nazi label, however, has worked, especially among those in the media whose dyslexia with originality is well-known. Capitalism has also come under attack, simply because The Donald is the quintessential capitalist. And so they cry and wail that the blond Nazi has reduced our values to financial ones alone. This is news to me, a naive young Greek who all these years believed that America was a socialist haven that became the richest country in the world because it forced people to be equal where wealth was concerned.

Never mind. All this is caused by desperation by those who do not believe in freedom. The fact that Trump won fair and square is unacceptable to them, because they know better, just like Stalin and Lenin and Mao did. All those unfunny but overpaid TV late-night comedians and those dumb gel-haired men and women who read the news over the networks know better than John Q. Public, and they resent that their opinions were ignored by the great unwashed last November. They are those who write editorials in papers like the Times and for the networks that preach to us, the stupid, that a man can become a woman and vice versa. But now we are living in an era of backlash against DEI; thus calling anyone we disagree with a Nazi is starting to feel very old hat. Actually it sounds childish, the kind of thing some black career criminal calls the cop who’s arresting him for mugging and injuring a very old lady. Nazi has become disposable.

But enough said about the lefty media. Normal, Democrat voting folk are flummoxed that The Donald keeps winning when they find his views so despicable. And it’s happening all over the place. Javier Milei has just won big in his midterms down Argentine way, a great surprise after he had squeezed them until they cried, while conservative populists have won in Poland and Czechia. The globalist elite who meet in Davos and Brussels and know that they know better than the rest of us have not only failed to bring prosperity with their programs; they have also failed miserably to invest in cultural harmony among the voters. Poles and Hungarians are proud of their legacy and culture, and resent the fact that the global elite consider them and some Nigerian wife-beater to be one and the same. In rainy old Britain the fact that you can say anything as long as you’re brown or black, but you go straight to the pokey if you say something against the government and you’re white, has the newly formed Reform party under the great Nigel Farage way up in front in the polls. The trouble is there are four years to go before an election, and as the saying goes, two weeks is a long time in politics.

Ever since the 1940s, institutional arrangements were designed to ensure the voters have no say in what they really want. The administrative state knew better, and to hell with those dumb voters. Europe and the European Union started it, and America followed. No longer, thanks to Donald Trump. This is the real reason why so many elites are going bonkers. A dumb blond from Queens with a long red necktie is curtailing their power. What they don’t see or admit is that finally democracy is working, but they’re not about to take it lying down. I’ll keep you posted.

This article was originally published on Taki’s Magazine.

The post Like It or Nazi appeared first on LewRockwell.

As we related in our book, The Courage to Face COVID-19, just before Dr. McCullough departed to Washington D.C. for his Senate testimony on November 19, 2020, he had a disturbing conversation with his church pastor, Andrew Forrest.

“We don’t understand what’s happening in our world,” McCullough explained. “My YouTube videos about early treatment were taken down, and then my planned WebEx conference with an Australian MP about treatment was hacked. Now my hospital administrators are acting like I’m out of line for accepting a U.S. Senator’s invitation to testify about the disease. It’s as though, for the first time in history, our medical system is opposed to caring for the sick. What on earth is going on?”

Andrew wasn’t at all surprised.

“There are times when evil prevails over good in a large way,” he said. “We know from the dark periods of history that this has happened before, and now it’s happening again. What you describe is Satan working in the hearts and minds of people, sowing fear, confusion, and anger. All you can do is keep trying to do good until it turns the tide. For your Senate speech, your message must be joyous and happy and clear, uncluttered by negative emotion. That way you will let the light of God shine forth in this darkness.

At the time Dr. McCullough told me this story, I thought that Pastor Forrest was being melodramatic. Surely, I thought, what he was describing was ordinary human fear and stupidity, and not the work of a supernatural being—a malevolent spirit called “Satan.”

Since then, I have been increasingly drawn to the conclusion that Pastor Forrest was onto something.

Even if one rejects the idea of the devil as a supernatural spirit that actually exists, a rational and impartial observer will still marvel at how large masses of humans will suddenly—as if infected with a spiritual contagion—participate in an irrational and highly destructive enterprise.

In researching my forthcoming book, Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions, I examined how the “Devil” has been depicted in literature going back to the Bible.

The Greek word for devil, diábolos, means “the one who divides.” The English word “diabolic” comes from the Greek verb diabollein, which means “to tear apart.”

In addition to “tearing apart,” the devil is also often portrayed as a “destroyer.” In Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles famously introduces himself as follows:

Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint!
Und das mit Recht; denn alles was entsteht
Ist werth daß es zu Grunde geht;

I am the spirit that constantly negates!
And rightly so; for everything that comes into being,
Deserves to be destroyed;

This morning, I thought of this famous German play when I read the news that Germany has rejected Russia’s offer of a non-aggression guarantee for EU & NATO. The German government wants to escalate.

In recent years, ranking members of the U.S. and E.U. governments have asserted that Russian President Vladimir Putin is hellbent on reconstituting something like the old Soviet empire in Eastern and Central Europe. We are told that Putin aspires to occupy Berlin just like the Red Army did with the fall of the Third Reich in 1945.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov refuted this claim last week at the Third Minsk International Conference in Belarus. He stated that Russia would be happy to enter into a non-aggression pact. As he put it.

We have repeatedly said that we had, and have, no intention to attack any current NATO or EU member. We are ready to enshrine this position in future security guarantees for this part of Eurasia.

Germany rejected Lavrov’s offer out of hand. This was in keeping with NATO’s rejection in the fall of 2021 of Russia’s proposal for a Ukrainian neutrality deal. As NATO secretary Jens Stoltenberg told the EU Parliament in a video-recorded statement.

In the autumn of 2021, Russia actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what they sent us, and that was a precondition for not invading Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.

Given the resounding success of the Austrian neutrality deal of 1955, which resulted in Red Army withdrawing from the country and respecting Austrian neutrality ever since, it was obvious to me that an Austrian-style neutrality deal was by far the best arrangement for Ukraine.

I know about Austrian neutrality because I lived in the country for a total of fifteen years. Neutrality has been an enormous blessing for Austria and was a key reason for Vienna’s cosmopolitan, open, laid back atmosphere until 2020, when the Austrian government was captured by the globalist gangsters who ran the pandemic response.

If the West had accepted the Russian proposal for a Ukrainian neutrality deal, and the Russians subsequently violated it, then the West would have had a clear casus belli. Consider the extreme irrationality of what was implied in the rejection of Ukrainian neutrality, which can be expressed as follows.

We cannot accept Russia’s proposal for Ukrainian neutrality because if Russia later violates it, we will have to go to war with Russia. It’s better to go to war with Russia now instead of risking the possibility of having to go to war with Russia later.

This was the same diabolic “logic” that was applied during the pandemic, when hospitalized COVID-19 patients were denied ivermectin because—according to hospital administrators—taking ivermectin could be “dangerous.” As one brave nurse put it in a video about this atrocity,

How could trying ivermectin be worse than dying of COVID-19?

The assertion “Vladimir Putin aspires to conquer Europe” resembles the following false and contradictory propositions that have long been a feature of public discourse in the West.

• The Earth is burning up from human induced climate change, even though there is much evidence that the earth has, at various times in the past, been much hotter than it is today. After insisting for decades that the earth would become uninhabitable due to human-induced climate change, Bill Gates recently proclaimed that it wouldn’t. This may have something to do with the fact that he is going to need a hell of a lot more electrical power to get a return on his recent, massive investments in A.I.
• Race is an essential feature of one’s identity, and racism is systemic. This became evident to millions during the U.S. presidency of Barack Obama, a black man who somehow persuaded racist America to elect him president.
• White Nationalists pose a major threat to American society, even though though they have no money and occupy no notable positions in the government, military, media, education, the entertainment industry, or the financial industry.
• American society contains many minority victim groups. Individuals who identify with these groups should be given preferential treatment and be promoted to positions of power so that the powerful people who appointed them can signal their virtue.
• Sexual ‘orientation’ is an essential feature of one’s identity, and one should express this in public—unless one is ‘cisgender’ and ‘heteronormative’ in one’s sexual ‘orientation.’
• Donald Trump is a fascist in league with Vladimir Putin. A U.S. president must seek war with Russia instead of seeking peaceful and cooperative endeavors that would benefit both the American and Russian people. Peace is war.
• SARS-CoV-2 must be contained with lockdowns, masks, and social distancing, even though—as Sweden’s state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell correctly pointed out in March 2020—the virus had already spread far beyond being contained.
• Early treatment for COVID-19 must be suppressed at all costs. It’s better for patients to die in hospital instead of taking FDA-approved drugs for early home treatment to avoid dying in hospital.
• Policemen are agents of systemic racism; George Floyd was martyred by one. Everyone must stay at home to prevent the spread of Covid unless they wish to participate in a BLM riot.
• Everyone must get the COVID-19 vaccine, even if they have already had the illness, and even though the vaccine doesn’t stop infection and transmission. Adolescent males are not at a significant risk of vaccine-induced myocarditis, even though thousands have been diagnosed with vaccine-induced myocarditis—a side effect officially acknowledged by the CDC.
• Gender dysphoria is common among minors and should be medically treated with hormones and surgery, even though it is has long been generally recognized that minors do not have sufficient awareness and judgement to make major irrevocable decisions, and are not allowed to consume alcohol until they are 21-years old.
• Though modern medicine can ‘transition’ or ‘reassign’ a human from one sex to the other, there is no such thing as ‘biological’ sex. That said, ‘transitioning’ from one’s ‘assigned’ sex to the other requires receiving high doses of hormones and surgeries that cost millions of dollars.

All of the above assertions—which are Articles of Faith among tens of millions in the West—are false. In my forthcoming book Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions—I examine the origins of these false propositions and the powerful people who have propagated them.

In the case of Russia, it is the U.S. government that has sought a military confrontation, and not the other way around. While the U.S. government continues to insist it is forbidden for Russia to deploy military forces against Ukraine to protect Russian national security, the U.S. government is currently preparing for possible military action against Venezuela on the grounds that the Venezuelan government is injuring U.S. national security.

This kind of conduct recalls the famous rhetorical question, “Why do you look at the splinter in your brother’s eye, but fail to notice the plank in your own eye?”

Since 2014 at the latest, U.S. military-intelligence complex has systematically baited Russia to invade Ukraine with the aspiration that Russia would sink into an Afghanistan-style quagmire. As Hillary Clinton put it in a Feb. 2022 MSNBC interview with Rachel Maddow.

Remember, the Russians invaded Afghanistan back in 1980. It didn’t end well for the Russians…but the fact is, that a very motivated, and then funded, and armed insurgency basically drove the Russians out of Afghanistan.

Clinton didn’t stop to think that the collateral damage to the Ukrainian people would be astronomical. She also didn’t stop to think that the U.S. funded and armed Mujahideen—guys like Osama bin Laden who didn’t serve the U.S. very well after their adventure in Afghanistan.

As for what would happen to the Ukrainian people and Ukrainian soldiers, it was clear from Clinton’s interview that she hadn’t given them the slightest thought. Her affect and statements reminded me of how Edmund Burke characterized the Jacobins in his essay, Reflections on the Revolution in France:

They have perverted in themselves and in those who listen to them all the well-placed sympathies of the human breast.

The hard-hearted lunatics who run U.S. and E.U. foreign policy are delighted for the Ukrainians to fight Russia to the death of every Ukrainian man. Some Ukrainian soldiers have realized that this is happening, and they have recorded videos of themselves expressing despair as they are sent to a certain death on the front. Yesterday I saw such a video and it instantly brought me to tears.

Another conspicuous feature of the guys who run the U.S. and E.U. is their habit of accusing people of doing what they themselves are doing and aspiring to do. Psychologists call this “projection,” and it is a common habit among psychopaths.

A historical irony—perhaps even a paradox—lies at the heart of our current state of affairs in the West. When I was in graduate school I read a lot of literature about Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Dostoevsky’s Demons and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita depict the devil visiting Russia and possessing its spirit. The latter novel inspired Mick Jagger to write “Sympathy for the Devil,” with the sinister lines.

Stuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change
Killed the Tsar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain

I rode a tank, held a general’s rank
When the blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank

I wonder if, after destroying Russia between 1917-1991, the Devil departed that ruined country and took up residence in the West, which he found easy to possess because our Cold War victory resulted in us becoming arrogant, ignorant, and complacent.

We in the West have long been in the habit of assuming that we are the good guys, but are we really?

Is it possible that—for all their faults—the Russians are now the defenders of Western Civilization, while our leaders in the West are its destroyers?

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post Are the U.S. and E.U. Governments Satanic? appeared first on LewRockwell.

On the surface Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York supports my contention that American democracy  has become  riven with faction and left-wing ideology and has become dysfunctional.  See this.

Mamdani’s agenda of rent freezes, city-run non-profit grocery stores, more taxes on the rich, free subways, reduced police presence, and the rest of his promised handouts to the unproductive brings the redistributive character of US democracy to the breaking point at which the productive leave a city where public safety is declining along with the rewards to work and responsible behavior.

Will we see “Escape from New York” or on the other hand, perhaps Mamdani is just a political opportunist riding the rise of the woke era to personal riches from the kickbacks from the New York building trades’ profits from building his affordable public housing to fill the role of private-supplied housing blocked by Mamdani’s rent controls.

America’s founding fathers were aware of the dangers of faction that democracy brings, and they were aware of the tendency of mobs to seize property and of the tendency of females to make emotive instead of rational decisions.  To hinder and to delay the impact of these destabilizing tendencies, the founding fathers restricted democracy to the judgment of male property owners.

As years passed the protective shields that made democracy functional were removed.  The appointment of US senators by state legislators to insure that the senators represented their states and not the interests of national lobbies that provide campaign funds was removed, and the Senate, like the House, became subject to demagogic elections often determined by slander, fraud, and vote-buying.  Weak men gave in and bestowed the vote on women.  It made little difference for a long time, because men still predominated in societal institutions.  But as Helen Andrews reports, in the US all societal institutions have now been feminized. See here.

The goal of excluding “toxic males” from societal decision-making has largely succeeded.  The replacement of men by women has dramatically reduced the birth rate in all Western societies. As women choose career over motherhood, calls intensify for more non-white immigration to fill the gap from the declining white birth rate.  If this trend continues, white ethnicities will disappear, as Jean Raspail predicted they would.  It seems that my generation and perhaps the one that followed are the last to experience life in the context of Western civilization.

Over the course of my life I have watched the decline in the legal protections of defendants, and I have watched the rise of status-based privileges push aside equality under law.  See, for example, my books, The Tyranny of Good Intentions and The New Color Line.  These books had enthusiastic reviews from the right people and places, but failed to slow down, much less halt, the collapse of American society into disunity and status-based law.

New York, once the financial capital of the world, has fallen, according to the narrative, to the communist agenda of an immigrant-invader from Kampala, Uganda.  But perhaps that is only Mamdani’s pose assumed in our woke era to gain  access to wealth that comes from the political award of contracts.  Regardless, the electorate’s choice of Mamdani shows a complete change in outlook and a Democrat Party that has moved outside the American tradition.

I remember when the Democrats’ political constituency consisted of the poor and the working class, now disparaged as “the Trump deplorables.”  Today the Democrats’ political constituency is college-educated women and weak men who have accepted their subordination in the interest of a career.  Whereas once Democrats focused on confiscating income and wealth from the successful (who were referred to as “fortunate”) and redistributing it to the unsuccessful (called “less fortunate”), they now confiscate the earnings and wealth of citizens to support immigrant-invaders.   This and other such word tricks pushed the questions of merit and citizenship out of the picture.  For women the issue was one of the caring against the hard-hearted. See here. 

Today Democrat political constituencies are focused on redistributing the incomes of American citizens to illegal aliens.  Not only do Americans who support themselves also support 42 million Americans who do not or who are gaming the system, they also support the 14 million immigrant-invaders that the Obama and Biden regimes policy of open borders imported into America.

While these devastating trends were developing, Wall Street and corporate executives exported American manufacturing jobs to Asia and Mexico, thereby dismantling the ladders of upward mobility that had made the US an opportunity society.  Today the focus of the Democrat Party is on opportunity for immigrant-invaders.  Democrats fight tooth and nail to prevent the federal government from deporting illegals.  Indeed, Democrats want illegals to have voting rights, and Democrat judges have ruled that proof of citizenship is unnecessary in order to vote.  Essentially, Democrats have no conception of the United States as a nation.  Indeed, they are hostile to those who think that citizenship and the US Constitution have meaning, dismissing both as tools of white supremacists.

Where liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and leftists went horribly wrong was in assuming that government was an independent institution.  The liberal-left imagined government as a moral institution that redistributed ill-gotten wealth from those who stole it to the deserving poor from whom it was stolen.  The conservative-libertarian contingent saw government as a threat to private property, merit, and individual freedom.  No one saw if for what it is:  an instrument for political and material interests to use to further their agendas and their fortunes.

The “public interest” is a false narrative.  No one serves any such interest.  Government is a privatized institution that serves private interests.  It is fought over because it can bestow on favored factions the incomes of others.  The Party in control gets to hand out the money.  That is the only important issue.

Today in America the welfare class supported by the work force is 25% of the size of the work force. If the Democrats win the battle over illegals, and Obama and Biden’s 14 million illegals are added to the 42 million welfare class, those dependent on the incomes of the work force rise to one-third the size of the work force.

With the advent of AI and robotics, the outlook for working Americans seems bleak.  If the unemployment from AI predicted by experts is accurate, most of the US work force will be without jobs.  Who then supports the welfare class enlarged by illegal immigration?

Elon Musk said that the advent of AI brings with it communism as the earnings of AI will have to be redistributed to the population in order that people will have the money to sustain their lives by purchasing the products of AI produced goods and services.

What we seem to be facing is a social revolution brought by technology.  There is very little awareness and discussion of this massive challenge to human society.  If it comes upon unprepared populations, the result will be chaotic, especially in the Western World where white ethnicities are demonized as racists and exploiters of people of color.  The white populations will be the first to be exterminated in order to reduce the claim on resources.

In the Democrat mind, freedom today means the suppression of freedom.  Freedom of speech is racist and hurtful. Freedom of protest and association is a plot for insurrection if it is done by aversive racists.  Family values are suppressive of women.  Citizenship is non-inclusive.  A common language, mores, and history are suppressive of multiculturalism and diversity.  Nothing that once defined an American is acceptable in the era of wokeness.

For all practical purposes, the USA is being erased.

The post The Times They Are a-Changin appeared first on LewRockwell.

The American people are being misled into believing that:

• Everyone in the world hates us
• Major powers such as Russia and China want to defeat us militarily

And

• The answer is to create an autarkic state and maintain a military capable of intervening decisively almost anywhere in the world.

To this end our government has adopted an unsustainable policy of massive military spending, interventions all over the world, and erecting trade barriers with the rest of the world, even our friends and allies. Not only is this policy unsustainable (it is bankrupting the nation), but it is unnecessary and even harmful.

First of all, the world is not hostile to us. The rest of the world, including Russia, China, and even Iran, admire us. But they do not want us to interfere in their affairs. In other words, they do not want us to judge right and wrong for their actions, as if we were wise Solomons and paragons of virtue ourselves. And they do not want us to try to rig the world’s financial and economic relationships to garner spoils for ourselves and to punish those who deign to object. A good example is the destruction of Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline that I have no doubt was planned if not executed by our security forces. The rationale is that we do not want our allies to become dependent upon cheap Russian energy. They want us to believe that the fact that making these self-same allies dependent upon our much more expensive liquefied natural gas is just a coincidence.

Secondly, we are told that any economic success by China is just a plan to defeat us. For example, becoming a leader in rare earth metals extraction and processing, an industry that takes a decade or more to build, is just a giant plot to make us dependent upon the Chinese so that they can blackmail us by threatening to “cut us off” unless we do their bidding. Supposedly it isn’t possible that the Chinese are better at foreseeing future demand and taking the steps to meet that demand. The same with robotics, microchips, you name it. Furthermore, we are told that it is wise to build a strong military that can project power anywhere in the world, but the Chinese are warmongers when they attempt to expand their military capabilities to protect their homeland. In other words, if we do something it’s simply a wise precaution. If the Chinese do the same it’s another example of their march to conquest.

Thirdly, in just a few short months of his presidency, President Trump has abandoned eighty years of enlightened trade policy that sought to lower and even eliminate barriers to world trade. The free trade rationale, still the mainstream consensus among economists, is that trade mitigates war and makes everyone wealthier. Frederick Bastiat’s dictum that “When goods don’t cross borders, armies will” has been brushed aside as another example of countries trying to defeat us by providing us with goods we wish to buy. This economic fallacy is reinforced by another; i.e., that when a nation sells more to us than we sell to them, the resulting trade deficit somehow harms us and must be countered by high tariffs. This is economic nonsense and is leading the world to another, perhaps even more destructive, Great Depression, and, per Bastiat, possibly war.

A Better Policy

The solution is simple but requires convincing the electorate. (Forget trying to convince the elite political class. Their sole purpose is to reward big business and big labor in order to maintain their lock on power, whether Democrats of Republicans.) First of all the US does not need a huge military empire. This does not mean that the US is abandoning its allies. Rather, our military empire foments tensions unnecessarily, actually making us and our allies less safe. Furthermore, it creates moral hazard, an economic term that can be applied to international security guarantees; i.e., that nations who believe that the US will backstop them for every petty and not so petty disagreement with their neighbors are less likely to listen to their neighbors’ perhaps legitimate complaints and negotiate to lower tensions. Disputes are elevated to major crises, often with the now tired claim that the “other side” is just like the Nazis in 1938 and must be opposed with maximum military force NOW!

The world needs economic leadership to reduce trade barriers, which will unite the peoples of the world rather than isolate them. Free markets allow the wonders of specialization to improve the lives of all the peoples of the world, just as specialization improves the lives of individuals. Few of us grow our own food, weave cloth to make our own clothes, or construct, plumb, electrify, etc. our own homes. Likewise, the US should not rig the economy to force us to buy more expensive, lower quality goods locally rather than internationally.

The Enabling Role of Fiat Money

The mechanism which enables governments to spend beyond their citizen’s means is fiat money; i.e., money that is unanchored to gold and can be produced in vast quantities at the click of a Federal Reserve Bank computer button. Were the dollar anchored to gold, increased spending would have to be funded from increased taxes or borrowing honestly in the bond market. The bond market would force up interest rates, denying business needed capital funds. The alternative is very unpopular tax increases. Of course, governments propagandize the electorate that monetary expansion is not only necessary but beneficial! “Why, money printing provides the capital funds required by business!” But a quick retort is that to believe that nonsense one must believe that counterfeiters provide the same beneficial liquidity to the economy as Fed money expansion. Counterfeiters manufacture money out of thin air, just like the Fed. Why prosecute the former and lionize the latter?

The Four Pillars of a Prosperous Economy

1. Sound money
2. Reduced government spending
3. Reduced regulation of all manner of life
4. Lower taxes

This was the Republic Party platform in 1980. Vice Presidential candidate George Herbert Walker Bush explained the benefits of this policy at a campaign address on the steps of the Capitol Building in Springfield, Illinois. I was there. This well articulated policy must be presented again to the American people as a legitimate alternative to the warfare/welfare state.

The post An Alternative American Creed appeared first on LewRockwell.

The recognizable ancestor of the Israel Defense Forces is not the Marquis De Sade, a mere sexual deviant, but your common serial killer with added pathological paraphilia, and the ability to industrialize the scale of his crimes. ~ ilana

As I had remarked before, patterns of arousal—the commingling of serial killing and sex—are tied to psychopathy. The psychopathic fusion of lust and murder appears endemic among Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers.

Honed in rendition torture camps, sexual violence has become the coin of the Greater Israel realm. A glimpse into Sde Teiman, a torture rendition camp in Israel proper, revealed to the world that Israel has de facto systemized the practice of anally rupturing the bowels of Palestinian prisoners, most detained without charge.

Marquis de Sade, whose name is used to denote things sexually bent, was no murderer. The recognizable ancestor of the IDF is not the Marquis De Sade, a mere sexual deviant, but your common serial killer with added pathological paraphilia, and the ability to industrialize the scale of his crimes.

Paraphiliacs are said to enjoy exhibitionism or masochism or sadism, “in which sexual gratification is derived from activities or fantasies that are generally regarded as atypical or deviant. A paraphilic disorder is present when it causes … “actual or potential harm to others.”

After de Sade came out in Sde Teiman, “rape in the name of God” had become part of the settler and soldier lexicon of crime. From the West Bank, legendary British journalist Peter Oborne has filed detailed dispatches exposing Israel’s torture camps, into which thousands of young Palestinian men are disappearing, only to emerge unrecognized, physically deformed and mentally damaged. (Watch “EXPOSED: Israel’s Secret Torture Camps.”) “Nukhba” prisoners, the Israeli devils dub them.

The habitual infliction of rectal rape on Palestinian men has joined the crimes of genocide, the making and mass-marketing of online snuff films featuring murdered Palestinians, and the commission of extra-judicial assassination the globe over. These practices are de facto legal in what passes for law in the Israeli thugocracy.

As televised vignettes at July’s end showed, the Israelis, a “bizarre specimen of moral laxity”—the 1728 words of Southern gentleman William Byrd—had been openly rationalizing the need to codify in law the rape of Palestinian hostages. From Knesset members to the distinguishably dumb panelists who festoon that country’s tv networks, “Israeli media’s coverage of the rape of Palestinian [hostages] shows support for sexual violence in service of genocide.”

By the Middle East Monitor’s telling, “A Gaza detainee allegedly sexually abused by Israeli soldiers at Sde Teiman … suffered ‘a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs’ as a result of the immense torture he was subjected to by Israeli occupation soldiers. …One of the nine Israeli soldiers arrested for abusing him was released without charge. Deliberations about the other eight are continuing.” As far as I know, none has been charged.

Like Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the rape in Sde Teiman was captured on camera. Watch! Have an emesis dish close by.

According to Truthout.org, the Knesset, at July’s end—Israel’s lawmakers, no less—was debating whether or not sexual abuse à la de Sade Teiman was a legitimate tactic for Israeli soldiers. (International law considers sexual violence by soldiers to be a war crime.) Members of the Israeli government have also defended the soldiers, claiming it is wrong for the government to charge the [rapist] reservists.

To its patsy press, the AP, “The Israeli military had said, in July of 2024, that “it was holding nine soldiers for questioning following allegations of ‘substantial abuse’ of a detainee at a shadowy facility where Israel has detained thousands of Palestinians since Oct. 7.”

Next, via Democracy Now’s account, “A right-wing mob, including members of the Knesset, broke into two Israeli military bases in an effort to prevent Israeli military police from detaining the nine soldiers who were under investigation for gang raping a Palestinian prisoner at the notorious Sde Teiman facility.”

When they are not fantasizing and embellishing about mass rape by their enemies (read Ali Abunimah’s “Debunking ‘Screams Before Silence,’ Sheryl Sandberg’s 7 Oct. ‘mass rape’ film”), and raping Palestinian prisoners—the Israel Defense Forces, and Israel’s other policing agencies, in conjunction with the societal structures that support them, are striving to codify their de facto daily criminal conduct in law.

In both word and deed, Israelis have systematically and systemically agitated for the legal right to gravely mistreat their enemies, justifying the twisted sensibilities of their military and a plurality of their countrymen.

The canvassing I conducted in May of 2024, “The Jewish State Is Genocidal, But Is Israeli Society Sick, Too?”, was seconded by Oren Ziv of the +972 Magazine (“A riot for impunity shows Israel’s proud embrace of its crimes“). Ziv correctly elucidates that “the support of Israeli political leaders, including some members of the Knesset who participated in the [pro-rape] riots, and the apathy of the military police, all indicate that those protesting against the soldiers’ [rape] charges are ‘the face of the state,’ expressing what are ‘mainstream’ views in Israeli society.”

Mainstream approval in Israel of genocide, rape, and snuff-film production explains why one of the reservist rape perpetrators, like so many members of the Israeli security establishment, proudly pleads his case on a YouTube video. In Israel, he is a patriot. Crime is SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for the Israeli army. Yes, do not dub a first-degree felony a “war crime.” A crime is a crime is a crime. A criminal is a criminal. A serial killer, state or lone actor, must be stopped (although it’s too late for that) and punished.

Across the occupied territories, the Israel Security State summarily detains people absent due process, often deploying rape as a weapon to shame traditional men and women, and it loots and demolishes their homes. You see, Lockean homesteading principles, by which Palestinians have come to own ancient land, flouts the Israeli Administrative State. The Israel security forces commonly also steal Palestinian money at checkpoints, as Middle East Eye editor Daniel Hearst has attested in conversation with award-winning journalist Chris Hedges. Both veteran reporters vouch for the veracity of the shakedown routines.

Silver-tongued Israelis and their Hasbara office at Foggy Bottom (The US Department of State), continue to deny this existential Palestinian reality, framing it as outlier cases. The “most moral military in the world” will investigate … itself.

But Israel is a lattice of lies.

A deception embedded deep in this lattice of lies is that, contrary to most criminal enterprises and individuals, a spectacular democracy like Israel has the absolute ability to investigate itself. Indeed, a report authored by the aforementioned +972 Magazine, “for the human rights group Yesh Din, shows how the main role of Israel’s military law-enforcement system is to maintain the appearance of internal accountability in order to shield itself from external criticism.” (“How Israel plans to whitewash its war crimes in Gaza“)

In this case, the greater goal of Israel’s legal apparatus and jurisprudence is to fend off charges of genocide and war-crimes in international courts of law. Be mindful, then, that any investigation ever launched or any arrests made by Israeli authorities are symbolic, cursory and inconsequential, part of a well-established strategy to safeguard the greater criminal enterprise.

Essentially, expect the Jewish State’s stooges to be trotted out to huff and puff indignantly at the very notion that a manifestly lawless thug of a state, whose justice system is complicit in minting maniacal laws in support of unfathomable thuggery and cruelty, is incapable of investigating itself. Antisemitism.

Ultimately, Israel has become adept at narrative, at manufacturing mantras about its unsurpassed morality, this, as it is mired in illegality and criminality. (Read my own analysis of how Israel and its courts “CO-OPT HUMAN-RIGHTS LAW,” in the essay, “Defending Gaza (II): Israel Engaged In The Mother Of All Performative Contradictions: Denying Genocide, While Committing Genocide, Effectively Asserting A Right To Genocide”.)

The post Rape of Palestinian Men By IDF & Israeli Security Forces: Habitual appeared first on LewRockwell.

La traduzione in italiano dell'opera scritta da Wendy McElroy esplora Bitcoin a 360°, un compendio della sua storia fino ad adesso e la direzione che molto ptobabilmente prenderà la sua evoluzione nel futuro prossimo. Si parte dalla teoria, soprattutto quella libertaria e Austriaca, e si sonda come essa interagisce con la realtà. Niente utopie, solo la logica esposizione di una tecnologia che si sviluppa insieme alle azioni degli esseri umani. Per questo motivo vengono inserite nell'analisi diversi punti di vista: sociologico, economico, giudiziario, filosofico, politico, psicologico e altri. Una visione e trattazione di Bitcoin come non l'avete mai vista finora, per un asset che non solo promette di rinnovare l'ambito monetario ma che, soprattutto, apre alla possibilità concreta di avere, per la prima volta nella storia umana, una società profondamente e completamente modificabile dal basso verso l'alto.

____________________________________________________________________________________

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/bitcoin-e-costruito-per-durare-come)

Bitcoin è uno dei sistemi distribuiti più robusti nella storia dell'umanità. Per sedici anni ha funzionato blocco dopo blocco, con solo due interruzioni nei primi anni, gestite con grande rapidità dagli sviluppatori, reattivi non appena si sono manifestate. A parte questo, ha continuato a funzionare producendo un blocco circa ogni dieci minuti senza interruzioni.

Questa affidabilità ha fissato un punto di riferimento per gli utenti di Bitcoin, incoraggiandoli a considerarlo un sistema completamente inarrestabile. Per molti, Bitcoin ha già vinto, e il mondo si sta rendendo conto di questa realtà. “Bitcoin è inevitabile”, come direbbero molti.

Questo non significa che sia letteralmente inarrestabile, ma ci sono possibili eventi che potrebbero causare danni ingenti o interruzioni alla rete, se si verificassero. Oggi analizzeremo alcuni di questi esempi e vedremo come potrebbero svilupparsi.

Intervento dello stato

Bitcoin rappresenta un serio enigma per i governi di tutto il mondo sotto diversi aspetti. Innanzitutto funziona come un sistema che consente ai pagamenti mondiali di fluire da un utente all'altro, indipendentemente dai confini o dai controlli finanziari.

Ma sebbene gli stati non possano impedire al sistema Bitcoin nel suo complesso di continuare a funzionare, possono introdurre normative che influiscano sui suoi partecipanti. Per interrompere realmente la rete Bitcoin stessa, gli stati dovrebbero perseguire i miner che aggiungono nuovi blocchi alla blockchain per far progredire il sistema.

Ciò era già accaduto nel 2021, quando il governo cinese aveva vietato il mining di Bitcoin. Quasi il 50% dell'hashrate era andato offline, mentre i miner cinesi iniziavano a migrare verso il resto del mondo.

La rete continuava a funzionare.

Nello scenario peggiore, il governo cinese avrebbe potuto imporre la confisca dell'hardware di mining. Ciò avrebbe permesso al PCC di controllare tutti quei miner, i quali avrebbero potuto essere impiegati per sferrare un attacco del 51% alla rete. Ma ciò non è accaduto. Anche se fosse stato adottato l'approccio confiscatorio, anziché limitarsi a imporre un divieto al mining, sarebbe stato altamente improbabile riuscire ad attaccare la rete, data la complessità del coordinamento tra i collaboratori.

Ad esempio, uno dei luoghi in cui sono migrate grandi quantità di hashrate è stato l'Iran. All'epoca circolavano molte voci su miner che corrompevano funzionari militari iraniani per far passare le loro macchine alla dogana e farle entrare nel Paese.

Se gli stati tentassero di sequestrare attrezzature di mining e chiudessero le frontiere impedendone la spedizione a livello internazionale, la possibilità di corrompere funzionari governativi o di contrabbandarle illegalmente sarebbe molto concreta, dato l'incentivo finanziario a farlo. Affinché un simile sequestro rappresenti un rischio esistenziale per la rete stessa, uno stato dovrebbe essere in grado di sequestrare oltre il 51% dell'hashrate attivo della rete. Basterebbe che una percentuale sufficientemente piccola riuscisse a superare i confini per garantire che ciò che resta da sequestrare non superi la soglia del 51% e che la rete rimanga sicura.

Con l'ulteriore decentralizzazione dell'hashrate in tutto il mondo, la possibilità che un'azione del genere possa rappresentare un rischio per Bitcoin stesso continua a ridursi. Sebbene rimanga una possibilità, più stati sarebbero tenuti a cooperare per realizzare una simile mossa, minore è la probabilità che un evento del genere si verifichi. La resilienza di Bitcoin continua a risplendere, come dimostrato empiricamente dalle azioni del PCC nel 2021.

Guasti nella rete elettrica

I miner di Bitcoin non possono funzionare senza elettricità. In fin dei conti sono dei computer, quindi questa è una realtà ovvia. Questo rappresenta un grosso rischio per i miner che dipendono dalle infrastrutture di produzione e distribuzione di energia.

Molti disastri naturali possono causare interruzioni di corrente e problemi alla rete. Uragani, incendi boschivi, eventi meteorologici estremi come le ondate di freddo possono interrompere l'infrastruttura elettrica. Un esempio lampante di tali eventi che hanno avuto un impatto sull'hashrate si è verificato in Texas durante la tempesta invernale Uri nel 2021. La portata di questi eventi non rappresenta un rischio sistemico diretto per la rete Bitcoin. L'interruzione dell'energia elettrica in Texas, anche con circa il 30% dell'hashrate della rete localizzato all'interno dello stato, non causerebbe l'interruzione o la distruzione della rete Bitcoin.

Come dimostrato nel 2021, durante il divieto cinese al mining, nonostante circa il 50% dell'hashrate della rete fosse andato offline in un lasso di tempo incredibilmente breve, la rete ha continuato a funzionare. Certo, l'intervallo di tempo tra i blocchi è aumentato drasticamente e ha causato un forte aumento delle commissioni di transazione per confermarle rapidamente, ma la rete stessa ha continuato a funzionare ed elaborarle senza interruzioni.

Anche se immaginassimo un evento di portata molto più ampia, come una massiccia tempesta solare che interrompesse l'erogazione di energia elettrica a metà del pianeta, l'altra metà continuerebbe a funzionare. I miner situati in quella metà del globo continuerebbero ad andare avanti, a confermare le transazioni e la rete continuerebbe a funzionare senza problemi per metà del pianeta. Anche le persone nella metà del globo senza elettricità, purché abbiano conservato un backup fisico della loro seed phrase, avranno comunque accesso ai propri fondi ogni volta che l'elettricità verrà ripristinata, o potranno raggiungere un luogo con una rete elettrica funzionante.

Per uccidere Bitcoin bisognerebbe togliere l'energia elettrica praticamente a tutto il pianeta, altrimenti continuerà a spuntare fuori da qualche parte finché non verrà ripristinata l'alimentazione e potrà “rigenerarsi” espandendosi di nuovo in tutto il mondo.

Interruzioni di Internet

Sebbene Internet sia composto da protocolli decentralizzati in modo simile a Bitcoin, l'infrastruttura alla base è di proprietà principalmente di grandi multinazionali e stati (di nuovo, in modo simile all'infrastruttura di Bitcoin, come i miner). La proprietà di questa infrastruttura è ancora relativamente distribuita tra molti attori a livello mondiale, ma non ha lo stesso grado di distribuzione di un sistema altamente decentralizzato come una rete mesh.

Esistono ancora punti di strozzatura e colli di bottiglia piuttosto ampi che, se interrotti o attaccati, possono causare un grave degrado dell'affidabilità e della funzionalità. Quasi tutti si connettono a Internet tramite un Internet Service Provider (ISP); questo mercato è dominato nella maggior parte del mondo da una manciata di grandi provider in ogni regione. Non c'è molta scelta tra i provider e questo rappresenta un grosso punto di strozzatura per le persone che interagiscono con Internet. Se un ISP filtra o nega l'accesso e non c'è un altro provider tra cui scegliere, siete nei guai.

Allo stesso modo la possibilità di parlare con qualcuno dall'altra parte del mondo è dovuta alle grandi reti “dorsali” gestite dalle grandi aziende e ai cavi in ​​fibra ottica sottomarini lungo i fondali oceanici. Questi cavi rappresentano punti di strozzatura altamente centralizzati per le comunicazioni tra diversi Paesi e continenti. Se gli operatori iniziassero a filtrare le informazioni che li attraversano, o se qualcuno dovesse fisicamente recidere i cavi stessi, ciò potrebbe causare un'enorme interruzione del traffico internet mondiale.

Cosa si potrebbe fare concretamente se si verificasse una di queste due situazioni? Se un ISP iniziasse a filtrare il traffico Bitcoin verso gli utenti, i nodi di questi ultimi verrebbero disconnessi dalla rete. La trasmissione delle transazioni potrebbe essere impossibile, a seconda di quanto l'ISP filtri il traffico, ma il resto della rete continuerebbe a funzionare. Servizi come il feed satellitare di Blockstream esistono e una transazione Bitcoin è un dato così piccolo che qualsiasi connessione momentanea a una rete non filtrata sarebbe sufficiente per trasmettere i pagamenti.

Anche interruzioni su larga scala delle connessioni tra Paesi o regioni equivalgono a una semplice irritazione nel grande schema delle cose. Supponiamo che un Paese come la Russia abbia la connessione Internet con il mondo esterno completamente interrotta. Se i miner russi non chiudessero a loro volta, la blockchain si dividerebbe in due catene separate perché i miner all'interno e all'esterno della Russia non riceverebbero i blocchi degli altri. Ogni volta che quella connessione venisse ripristinata, il gruppo di miner che aveva minato una catena più lunga “sovrascriverebbe” quella più corta, cancellando le transazioni avvenute sull'altra catena più corta.

Esiste anche un'alta probabilità che un chainsplit del genere non si verifichi nemmeno in una situazione come quella descritta. Il servizio satellitare di Blockstream offre un modo per gli utenti, anche senza connessione Internet, di continuare a ricevere blocchi in tempo reale dal resto della rete. Questo, in combinazione con gli uplink satellitari (che non sono così semplici da bloccare), o persino con i ripetitori radio, potrebbe consentire ai miner russi di continuare a minare una singola blockchain con il resto della rete anche in caso di interruzione.

Ancora una volta, la resilienza di Bitcoin può trovare una via d'uscita.

Conclusione

Bitcoin non è invincibile, o inarrestabile, ma è incredibilmente resiliente di fronte a interruzioni o attacchi avversari alla rete. È stato letteralmente progettato per funzionare in questo modo. L'obiettivo principale delle reti decentralizzate è quello di essere robuste di fronte a minacce e interruzioni, e Bitcoin ha raggiunto sorprendentemente questo obiettivo progettuale.

Il mondo ha assistito, e continuerà ad assistere, a eventi distruttivi di incredibile portata. Che si tratti di eventi meteorologici o cosmici, atti di sabotaggio, guerre intenzionali, o semplicemente di regolamentazioni governative, Bitcoin è già sopravvissuto a molti di questi eventi. Molto probabilmente continuerà a sopravvivere a tutto ciò che gli verrà scagliato contro in futuro.

Non è invincibile, ma è resiliente. Il tipo di evento, o disastro, che servirebbe per mandare Bitcoin offline in modo permanente sarebbe di una portata talmente distruttiva che, nell'improbabile eventualità che ciò accada, ci troveremmo tutti di fronte a problemi ben più gravi della semplice cessazione del funzionamento di Bitcoin.

[*] traduzione di Francesco Simoncelli: https://www.francescosimoncelli.com/

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The post How To Become Competent, Confident, and Dangerous, with guest Doug Casey appeared first on LewRockwell.

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di Michael Peterson

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/cosa-ho-visto-nellargentina-di-milei)

Il recente accordo di swap da $20 miliardi tra Argentina e Stati Uniti sottolinea il delicato equilibrio tra riforme economiche e la vitale necessità di liberalizzazione. Il mese scorso si è verificata un'improvvisa corsa al pèso argentino, alimentata da una serie di battute d'arresto politiche, tra cui le elezioni provinciali di Buenos Aires in cui i peronisti hanno vinto molti seggi al Congresso. A seguito di questo tumulto, la Banca Centrale Argentina ha bruciato oltre $1 miliardo in soli due giorni per mantenere il tasso di cambio entro la fascia di oscillazione sostenuta dal governo federale.

Poco dopo il presidente Javier Milei si trovava a New York per concludere un accordo con il Segretario al Tesoro statunitense, Scott Bessent, per quello che si sarebbe rivelato un efficace piano di salvataggio, volto a prevenire l'improvvisa impennata del pèso. Sebbene i critici considerino la richiesta di sostegno di Milei un punto debole, stabilizzare il pèso argentino è essenziale per far avanzare il suo programma di austerità nella seconda metà del suo mandato.

Infatti l'Argentina è sull'orlo della trasformazione, spinta dalle coraggiose riforme del suo presidente libertario Javier Milei. Non era dai primi anni '90 che la nazione assisteva a cambiamenti politici così rapidi. Dopo aver trascorso quasi un mese in Argentina quest'estate, ho osservato un Paese pieno di potenziale, ma appesantito dai suoi fardelli storici.

Il partito La Libertad Avanza di Milei ha portato avanti importanti riforme di mercato, ottenendo risultati sorprendenti. L'inflazione annuale, che era salita al 289% quando è entrato in carica, è scesa sotto il 40%. All'inizio del 2025 l'Argentina ha fatto registrare il suo primo surplus fiscale in 14 anni e i tassi di povertà sono scesi dal 53% di inizio 2024 al 31,6% entro la metà del 2025. Questi risultati segnano un netto distacco da decenni di cattiva gestione economica.

Tuttavia il progresso dell'Argentina è ostacolato da un retaggio di politiche peròniste alimentate dal controllo burocratico e da interessi particolari. Gli sforzi di Milei per liberalizzare l'economia incontrano una forte resistenza da parte dei sindacati e dei burocrati, i quali considerano le sue riforme una minaccia alla loro esistenza. La liberalizzazione del mercato, come ho fatto notare in precedenza, è molto più facile in teoria che in pratica. Storie di successo come Polonia e Cile, che si sono trasformate in fiorenti economie di mercato, sono eccezioni. Ci sono riusciti ristrutturando le istituzioni per proteggere i diritti di proprietà e liberare il potenziale umano. L'Argentina, nonostante la sua ricchezza di talenti e risorse, fatica a seguire l'esempio.

Le università del Paese, tra le migliori dell'America Latina, producono laureati altamente qualificati in grado di trainare la crescita economica. Ciononostante una fitta rete di normative ne soffoca il potenziale e limita il capitale umano, spina dorsale della prosperità. In città come Córdoba, dove ho trascorso gran parte del mio tempo, questa tensione è palpabile. L'industria dei taxi, ad esempio, ha fatto pressioni per vietare servizi di ride-sharing come Uber, eppure gli autisti operano in violazione di queste leggi. Questa ricerca di rendita, radicata nelle politiche di Perón di metà Novecento, continua a soffocare l'innovazione e l'imprenditorialità.

La crescente pressione dei dipendenti pubblici per rafforzare il finanziamento delle pensioni ha raggiunto un punto di svolta. Dopo la sconfitta del Partito Libertario alle elezioni provinciali del mese scorso, il Presidente Milei ha ceduto, approvando una legge per aumentare gli stanziamenti per pensioni, invalidità, sanità e istruzione. Sebbene i compromessi politici siano inevitabili, gruppi di interesse radicati continuano a esercitare un'influenza sproporzionata sulla politica elettorale argentina. Per contrastare questo fenomeno, gli argentini devono dare priorità alle riforme di base, partendo dal livello locale ed estendendosi alla governance provinciale. I leader di ogni schieramento dovrebbero promuovere una cultura di apertura e libera impresa per guidare un cambiamento significativo.

Ad aggravare le difficoltà di Milei, un recente scandalo ha gettato un'ombra sulla sua amministrazione. Presunte fughe di notizie audio coinvolgono sua sorella e principale collaboratrice, Karina Milei, in un sistema di corruzione che vedrebbe centinaia di migliaia di dollari pagati per contratti farmaceutici. Le accuse, legate a Diego Spagnuolo, ex-capo dell'Agenzia Nazionale Argentina per la Disabilità, hanno fornito agli oppositori di Milei – in particolare al partito perónista Fuerza Patria – argomenti per spingere per un ritorno alle politiche di spesa elevata che hanno alimentato l'inflazione oltre un decennio fa.

Nel suo libro del 1981, Structure and Change in Economic History, il premio Nobel Douglass North introduce il ruolo dell'ideologia nella trasformazione economica. North sosteneva che gli individui modificano le proprie prospettive ideologiche quando le esperienze contraddicono le proprie convinzioni. Affinché l'Argentina abbracci mercati più liberi, le sue istituzioni – governo, industrie e società civile – devono impegnarsi in modo credibile a proteggere i diritti di proprietà e a promuovere la libertà individuale. Senza questi ingredienti, le riforme rischiano di rimanere superficiali.

Le sfide dell'Argentina riflettono la domanda centrale di North: come possono le nazioni passare dalla stagnazione economica alla prosperità? L'amministrazione Milei non deve solo approvare riforme, ma anche garantire che le istituzioni in tutta la società riflettano un impegno per la libertà. La resistenza dell'industria dei taxi a Córdoba è solo un esempio di come gruppi di interesse radicati ostacolino il progresso. Questi gruppi – che spaziano dall'agricoltura all'energia, dai trasporti all'istruzione – perpetuano un sistema che privilegia il clientelismo rispetto alla concorrenza.

Come sottolinea Nikolai Wenzel nel suo saggio sulla storia economica dell'Argentina, gli alti e bassi del Paese sono legati alle sue istituzioni. Dall'ascesa di Perón negli anni '40, il coinvolgimento del governo è cresciuto, soffocando l'iniziativa privata. L'elezione di Milei, alimentata da un'ondata di sentimento liberale classico, ha rappresentato un guanto di sfida per questo status quo. Eppure, come sottolineano economisti come North, Joel Mokyr e Deirdre McCloskey, la riforma istituzionale non consiste solo nell'emanare leggi, ma nel creare una cultura che premi l'imprenditorialità e dia potere agli individui.

I risultati di Milei sono significativi, ma un cambiamento duraturo richiede più che semplici vittorie politiche. L'Argentina ha bisogno di una svolta sociale verso l'innovazione e la deregolamentazione, dove gli individui siano liberi di perseguire le proprie ambizioni. La McCloskey dimostra che la prosperità economica vive quando le società abbracciano il “duplice cambiamento etico di dignità e libertà” per le persone comuni. Il futuro dell'Argentina dipende dall'integrazione di questi valori oltre la sfera politica.

Le accuse di corruzione contro Karina Milei minacciano di indebolire questa visione. Difendendo la sorella, Milei rischia di erodere la sua credibilità come riformatore. Se vuole consolidare la sua eredità, affrontare queste accuse con decisione – potenzialmente rimuovendo Karina dal suo ruolo privilegiato – dimostrerebbe il suo impegno per le riforme e la trasparenza. Senza un'azione del genere, l'opposizione potrebbe guadagnare terreno, vanificando i progressi compiuti.

L'enorme potenziale dell'Argentina è frenato dal suo passato perònista. Le riforme di Milei gettano solide fondamenta, ma il percorso verso un'economia di mercato fiorente richiede un'azione incessante da parte di tutta la società, dalla base alla Casa Rosada. L'Argentina deve abbracciare una più ampia cultura di innovazione e iniziativa individuale, abbattendo le barriere che impediscono la crescita. Solo allora la nazione abbandonerà la strada verso la schiavitù e imboccherà la strada verso la prosperità. 

[*] traduzione di Francesco Simoncelli: https://www.francescosimoncelli.com/

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Since the beginning of the Progressive Era (1900-1920) the dominate ideology or world view of the professional managerial class of court intellectuals, opinion leaders and editorial directors of the elite mainstream regime media, bureaucratic functionaries and staff of the administrative state, the federal judiciary, members of Congress, and those persons who comprise the top echelon of the military industrial complex and the deep state, has been a synthesis of what has been described as corporate liberalism or proponents of the welfare-warfare state.

The outstanding economist/historian Murray N. Rothbard used the term “corporate liberalism” in his works, particularly in his historical analyses of the Progressive Era and the New Deal, to describe a political-economic system involving a collusive partnership between Big Business and Big Government. 

A key source for this concept in Rothbard’s work is his posthumously published book The Progressive Era (2017), and the idea is also discussed in The Betrayal of the American Right and his essay “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty”. 

Key Points of Rothbard’s View on Corporate Liberalism:

Definition: Rothbard defined “corporate liberalism” as an ideology and movement, championed by certain big business leaders, to establish a strong, centralized state that would regulate the economy in a manner that served their interests, in contrast to a genuine free market.

Historical Context: He argued that during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, corporate elites, in the name of “reform” and “anti-corruption,” sought to cartelize industries and gain state power and perquisites.

Mechanism: This was achieved through government regulations, appointed committees, and centralization of power, which restricted competition and increased the power of insulated bureaucrats and special interests allied with big business.

Ideological Deception: Rothbard contended that this system was deceptively presented under the ideology of “free enterprise,” while in reality, it was a form of state capitalism.

The “Establishment” Consensus: He viewed the post-WWII consensus, including Cold War interventionism, as the triumph of “corporate liberalism”. 

The Progressive Era saw the birth of the cult of efficiency, with the new administrative state’s apolitical credentialed experts gingerly guiding public-policy instead of the archaic rule of political bosses and their ethnic urban political machines. Or, at least that was what was supposed to happen according to Progressives such as Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, Robert LaFollette, Jane Addams, Richard Ely, Lincoln Steffens, Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson.

The insightful attorney and political analyst Robert Barnes in a recent “daily brief” at VivaBarnesLaw.Locals.com brilliantly encapsulated this reality of elite rule in America.

“Charles Murray’s Coming Apart was like a sequel to the brilliant book The Big Sort. Lived experience now varies as widely and wildly as ever: working class Americans see, feel, and remember a very different narrative of life than the professional-managerial upper middle class who govern us. Who is this class? Those with certifications or licensures, college or more degrees, in a job that manages others. They dominate those with a post-college degree especially. They claim the right to govern others due to those degrees and certifications and licenses, as the credentialed class claims credibility from those credentials.

“Consider what is typical or atypical of this professional managerial class. Most spent their lives amongst other upper middle-class professionals. Quite literally. Their neighborhoods were professional class dominated neighborhoods. No risk of a Mr. Rogers’ or Mr. Robinson’s neighbor. Their schools were professional class dominated institutions. Their churches or organizations are professional class dominated. Their cultural outings are usually professional class dominated. Their parents and siblings and cousins were professional class dominant. They often never lived in a small town. They often never employed in a working-class occupation involving physical labor. They often never served in the grunt units of the military. They know few firemen, cops, or frontline workers. They never experienced poverty or dramatic loss of status. They don’t own guns, smoke or dip tobacco, or even ever walked on a factory floor or construction site. Evangelicals are freaks to them. Swamp people means neither DC nor the excellent reality series; it’s those folks who live in the scary backwoods.

“They see their status as deserved, as they define deserts by professional class standards: approval from teachers in school, and approval from authority figures in life, measured by grades, degrees, credentials, licenses, and public acclaim from approved authority figures. Their over-achieving, teacher-pet mindset surrounded themselves often with like-minded individuals, often not even knowing the kids for whom school was not a match.

“Now, add to that surrounding themselves with other professional class sources of information: medical “experts” approved by the state, judges in courts of law, professional politicians in representative government, professionalized credentialed journalists in big institutional media, and teachers of themselves and their children. Of the professional class, by the professional class, for the professional class. Then add to that censorship of dissident opinions, deplatforming dissidents, taking away their licenses, removing their credentials, defaming their reputation, and picking friends by political alliance and allegiance.

“Middle America ain’t like these folks. For many in the professional class, all of the following is absent: Pickup trucks, cheap beer, old school action films, proud patriotism, all kinds of fishing and hunting, chain restaurants, the local Kiwanis or Awanas more than art galleries and lefty parades, riding the dog, dream vacations to Dollyworld or Branson still await, folks smoke (and not just weed), work that might require a uniform, friends and family in protective services at the grunt level of police, fire, medical, or military.

“In other words, we are governed by an insular elite acculturated and educated to intellectually incestuous intersectionalism at the moral and practical effect of disastrous public policy. Any platform of change must do all it can to reallocate political capital from the professional managerial class to the people as broadly as achievable. Populism provides part of that answer to any problem: reallocate power to the people whenever and wherever you can.

The post The Elite Who Governs Us appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Ginny Garner:

Lew,

Attorney Baron Coleman broke the story about all the Google searches of people and places associated with the Charlie Kirk assassination from IP addresses in Israel and Washington DC months before the TPUSA founder was murdered, indicating foreknowledge of the tragic future event. Coleman is effective because not only is he smart and accurate but he presents his case in a humorous manner. Watch Coleman in 10 minutes demolish the official narrative claiming lone tranny-loving gunman Tyler Robinson killed Kirk.

The post The Charile Kirk Assassination FBI Official Narrative Demolished in 10 Minutes appeared first on LewRockwell.

Lew,

Vice President JD Vance confirmed Charlie Kirk tried to persuade him (and President Trump) to stay out of a war with Iran or anywhere in the Middle East. Note the poster here on X has an avatar with a black and white photo likeness of a young Murray Rothbard and that’s his username as well as the year of the American Revolution. 

We now have confirmation from JD Vance that Charlie Kirk was contacting the White House to push against the US getting drawn into a protracted war in the Middle East against Iran [on behalf of Israel]. I know a lot of people who wouldn’t have liked that. pic.twitter.com/6o6Oph26GB

— Murray (@Rothbard1776) October 30, 2025

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All of us here know that taxation is theft. The government takes part of what you earn and gives it to other people. If this isn’t theft, what is? Murray Rothbard showed this better than anyone, as I explained in my column a short time ago. In brief, ““For there is one crucially important power inherent in the nature of the State apparatus. All other persons and groups in society (except for acknowledged and sporadic criminals such as thieves and bank robbers) obtain their income voluntarily: either by selling goods and services to the consuming public, or by voluntary gift (e.g., membership in a club or association, bequest, or inheritance). Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as ‘taxation,’ although in less regularized epochs it was often known as ‘tribute.’ Taxation is theft, purely and simply, even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.”

Unfortunately, there are “court intellectuals” who think that theft is all right, and in this week’s column I’d like to discuss some of the drivel they put out. When you hear these ideas, you will probably think that nobody could take such stuff seriously, but these people are in deadly earnest. Here is what Rothbard says about the court intellectuals: ““It is instructive to inquire why it is that the State, in contrast to the highwayman, invariably surrounds itself with an ideology of legitimacy, why it must indulge in all these hypocrisies. The reason is that the highwayman is not a visible, permanent, legal, or legitimate member of society, let alone a member with exalted status. He is always on the run from his victims or from the State itself. But the State, in contrast to a band of highwaymen, is not considered a criminal organization; on the contrary, its minions have generally held the positions of highest status in society. It is a status that allows the State to feed off its victims while making at least most of them support, or at least be resigned to, this exploitative process. In fact, it is precisely the function of the State’s ideological minions and allies to explain to the public that the Emperor does indeed have a fine set of clothes. In brief, the ideologists must explain that, while theft by one or more persons or groups is bad and criminal, that when the State engages in such acts, it is not theft, but the legitimate and even sanctified act called ‘taxation.’”

One of these arguments is from the most influential political philosopher of the past century, John Rawls. He says that equality is the default position. Everybody should have the same income. However, he soon modifies this. He realizes that we respond to incentives. If unequal incomes are allowed, this might turn out to be to everybody’s advantage. To insist on absolute equality, even if this left everyone worse off, would be cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Rawls proposes his famous difference principle, which says that all inequalities must be to the advantage of the least well-off group. Suppose that someone objects that the difference principle is unfair. “If I am talented and am able to earn more than most people, why should my income be limited to what turns out to be best for the worst off? Don’t I have the right to benefit from my superior talents?” Rawls’s theory does not rule out the competitive pursuit of excellence. But he believes individuals cannot justifiably complain if they don’t get all the benefits from their superior achievement.

Rawls says that people don’t deserve to get the rewards of these talents. Aaron Judge earns millions of dollars because he is a great baseball player. Yet his abilities do not stem from any special virtue on his part. He was just lucky that, by some combination of heredity and environment, he ended up with superior skills.

Rawls has ignored something that should be obvious. It’s obvious to those of us here. This is that people have a natural right to what they earn. Even if Rawls is right about people being lucky, it doesn’t follow that the government can take away part of what you earn and give it to the poor. (And of course, he’s wrong that people don’t deserve what they earn. If you have talent, you still have to work hard to earn a lot of money. If that isn’t desert, what is?) If you choose to help the poor, you’re free to do so, but it’s up to you. The best defense of natural rights is Murray Rothbard’s great book The Ethics of Liberty.

I’d now like to turn to another attempt to justify taxation and show you how to answer it. These leftists don’t say, as most leftists do, that property rights aren’t absolute: you don’t have the right to keep all that you own, if the government’s exactions are devoted to a good purpose. Quite the contrary, they adopt a much more radical stance. You are not giving away anything at all to the government when you pay taxes, since you own only what the law says you do.

They are very direct on this point. Here is what they say: “If there is a dominant theme that runs through our discussion, it is this: Private property is a legal convention, defined in part by the tax system; therefore, the tax system cannot be evaluated by looking at its impact on private property, conceived as something that has independent existence and validity. Taxes must be evaluated as part of the overall system of property rights that they help to create. . .. The conventional nature of property rights is both perfectly obvious and remarkably easy to forget . . . We cannot start by taking as given . . . some initial allocation of possessions— what people own, what is theirs, prior to government interference.”

An example quickly discloses the authors’ fallacy. Suppose that the government banned free speech. Against those who claimed that this violates people’s rights, advocates of the  ban replied in this way: “Don’t you see the obvious conceptual error that underlies your protest? ‘Free speech’ is a legal category. People have no independent liberty of speech, apart from what a particular legal system grants them. Your opposition is absurd.”

They admit that there is a strong objection to their position, namely that it makes us all slaves of the government. They admit that their view “is likely to arouse strong resistance” because it “sounds too much like the claim that the entire social product really belongs to the government, and that all after-tax income should be seen as a kind of dole that each of us receives from the government, if it chooses to look on us with favor.”

They shrink from the full implications of their position, because they know people won’t stand for the outright assertion that they are slaves of the state. How is this tension in their presentation to be resolved? I suspect that in practice they would not deviate very far from the total subordination of property rights to the state. They consider endowment taxation, in which people are taxed, not just on their income, but rather on their potential to generate revenue. Someone who abandoned a multi-million-dollar business career in order to become a Trappist monk might on the endowment account be taxed as if he continued to receive his former high income.  They wind up rejecting this monstrous proposal, though not on the grounds that it compels people to work.

To reject the proposal because it compelled people to work would put them suspiciously close to a famous argument, advanced very effectively by Robert Nozick, that income taxes are like forced labor. Of course they cannot accept this libertarian view; They say that “we may assume that this argument is not dispositive against taxation of earnings.” Since taxation is acceptable—this we know a priori—no argument that holds it illegitimate is right. But then we cannot reject endowment taxation if we reason in a way that would also condemn the income tax. “[T]here is no intrinsic moral objection to taxing people who don’t earn wages.” We can maintain that endowment taxation is “too radical” to put into effect because the public won’t accept it; but we cannot reject it in principle. Let’s do everything we can to remind people that taxation is theft and get rid of the income tax!

The post Defenders of Theft appeared first on LewRockwell.

It is an absolute fact that the American Dream is denied American Workers because a bribed, corrupt, and terrified Congress gave the resources to the Zionist Jewish Lobby aka Deep State aka Parasitic Super-Rich Ruling Class. The Zionist Jewish lobby is the acknowledged leader of the associated criminal groups. Our economic problem is that our public resources are spent on unconstitutional Communist programs, Foreign Aid, and Foreign Deployment of troops and unconstitutional functions. These produce nothing positive and are inflationary. The unconstitutional Federal Reserve Bank prints the unlawful Fiat Currency out of thin air.

Members of Congress are the most despicable of all criminals because they took a solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, and sold out the Republic for money. I have written several times that the solution to our problems is simple. The United States can’t be invaded because of our oceans. We can only be defeated by Weapons of Mass Destruction or from within. Therefore, we have no legitimate security interest in any country but our own. All of our foreign expenses produce only wars, death and hatred of the United States. Of course the Jewish lobby et al. gets rich at our expense.

We should terminate all Foreign Aid and Foreign Deployment of Troops. NATO is a scam on America because Europe can’t defend us with reciprocal defense from possible invasions. Giving Foreign Aid to Israel is a scam because it is not an ally to support with resources for a common benefit; there is none. Performing regime changes in foreign countries is always a loser for everyone except the Deep State, et al.

The savings from the termination of Foreign Aid, Foreign Deployment of Troops, Regime Change agendas, and the Private Federal Reserve Bank, when added to savings from following the Constitution, will fund the American Dream for working Americans and put us on track for a really great unheard-of lifestyle.

As an economist, at this time I don’t have the numbers to prove what an Economic Miracle would occur if you more than doubled the real income of citizens, which I believe would be the minimum result of these advocated changes.

The Democrats are a Communist party and their every effort is  focused to convert us into a country of Brainwashed Slaves surviving in dangerous sub- standard Stack-and-Pack Housing, dependent on public transportation, receiving little education, minimum wages, and a diet with poor health care. Why else would they bring in over 20 million Illegal Invaders to destroy us, knowing they destroyed Europe? At a minimum, the Illegal Invaders, if not deported, would give Democrats (aka Communists) political control of the United States and a Revolutionary Army with a Minimum ten-to-one numerical advantage over the United States Military. Can you say Draft?

The Democrat’s Illegal Invaders are Parasites on our people. CIS estimated that 69% benefit from one or more welfare programs. A bankrupting 39% used Medicaid. Illegal Invaders reduce available resources for citizens, increase political control of Democrats, and participate in Insurrections leading to Civil War.

President Trump has an active program with ICE to round up and deport Illegals, but it is not comprehensive enough and has deported less than 10% of Illegals, which means they will destroy our country. Democrats are using the Illegals to start a Civil War, and it has already started.

I have always been a supporter of President Trump, but that will no longer be true if he refuses to end Foreign Aid, Foreign Deployment of Troops, Regime Change objectives, and the Private Federal Reserve Bank. Of course, he must also follow the Constitution and use Deadly Force to counteract Deadly Force used by Communist Insurgents. He must stop insurrections and arrest the organizing funders before it morphs into Civil War. The American people will not long tolerate Communist-directed attacks without shooting back.

The post Workers Don’t Have the American Dream Because Congress Gave it to the Zionist Jewish Lobby et al. appeared first on LewRockwell.

“In spite of all the rhetoric, we will go deeper in debt, the Fed will print more money, and the value of the dollar will continue to plummet.” – Ron Paul

Never in history have the economic and political structures been so manipulated by those who are responsible for their safekeeping; never has so much been at stake, in so many countries, and facing collapse, all at the same time.

The great majority of people in the First World recognise that the world is passing through an economic crisis. However, most are under the impression that there are some pretty smart fellows running the show and all they need to do is tweak the system a bit more and we’ll return to happy days.

Not so. The “smart fellows” who are in charge of fixing the problem are in fact the very same people who created it.

Understandably, this a hard concept for most people to even consider, let alone accept, as the very idea that those in charge of the system might consciously collapse it seems preposterous. So, we might wish to back up a bit here and present a very brief history of the system itself, in order to understand that the eventual collapse of the economic system was baked in the cake from the very beginning.

Creating a Central Bank

From the very earliest days of the formation of the American republic, bankers (along with inside help from George Washington’s secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton) sought to create a banking monopoly that would create the country’s currency and become the central banking system.

The first attempt at a central bank was a failure, and strong opponents, including Thomas Jefferson, prevented a second central bank for a time. Later, further attempts were made by bankers and their political cronies, and each central bank was either short-lived or defeated in its planning stages.

Then, in 1913, the heads of the largest banks met clandestinely on Jekyll Island, Georgia, to make another try. Having recently lost yet another bid to create a central bank, due to the public’s understandable concern that the big bankers were already too powerful, a new spin was placed on the idea. This time, they decided to present the idea as a government body that would be decentralised and would have the responsibility of restricting the power of the banks.

However, the new bill was in fact the same old bill, with a new title and some minor changes in wording. But this time, it would be presented by the new president, who was a liberal.

The president, Woodrow Wilson, had in fact been handpicked by the banks. The banks then scuttled their own conservative party’s candidate, got the Democrat Wilson elected, then installed a secretary of the Treasury whose job it would be to ensure that the Federal Reserve was created.

The bill was widely supported by the public, even though, in truth, it was not a federal agency, but a privately owned conglomerate, controlled by the banks. Neither was it a reserve. It was never intended to store money; it was intended to give the biggest bankers control of the economy. They followed the central principle of uber-banker Mayer Rothschild: “Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.”

From the start, the new institution peddled itself as the protector of the people’s interests, but it was quite the opposite. Its purpose from its inception was to control the economy and the government by controlling the issuance of the currency. In addition, it was to be a system of taxation.

Typically, a population accepts a certain amount of direct taxation but has its limits of tolerance. Yet, the bankers understood that a less direct method of taxation was infinitely more profitable and infinitely safer from criticism.

Inflation as a Profit System

Inflation was not always the norm. At one time, prices were relatively static from one generation to the next. But the Federal Reserve touted the idea that “controlled” inflation was in fact necessary for a prosperous economy.

Of course, the greater the debasement of the currency through inflation, the more the central bankers profited. But at some point, the currency would have lost virtually all its value and it would be time for a reset. The currency would need to collapse and a new one created.

And so, the Fed set about its hundred-year programme of continuous inflation. Although there have been periods of lower inflation (and even deflation), the programme stayed more or less on course, and now, its hundred-year life has all but ended: the dollar has been devalued almost 100%.

And so, we find ourselves at the day of reckoning. The economic crisis we are now facing (not only in the US; it will be felt, to a greater or lesser extent, worldwide) is not a mere anomaly that we need to “push past”. It’s a systemic crisis. It’s been created by design and the system must collapse.

Of course, the central banks are in the process of protecting their interests, to make sure that, whilst this will be a major economic calamity, they themselves will continue to profit. The damage will be borne by the general public.

This began in earnest in 1999, with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, allowing banks to create a massive, reckless mortgage spree. It was backed by the government’s “too big to fail” policy that guaranteed that, when the banks predictably became insolvent as a result of the loans, government would bail them out. (And by “government” we mean “the taxpayer”; it was he who picked up the bill for the banks’ recklessness.)

The next step in getting ready for the collapse is an all-out effort to confiscate the wealth of the public. This can be seen in the effort to push investors away from solid forms of wealth protection such as gold and silver and into stocks, bonds and bank deposits. More recently, we’ve seen the emergence of an effort to end the use of safe deposit boxes and a push to end the use of paper currency in making transactions.

The end objective is to force as much money as possible into deposits in banks, then take it. The US, EU and a few other countries have passed confiscation legislation, allowing the banks carte blanche to confiscate and/or refuse to release deposits.

Of course a reset of these proportions will not be without its fallout. The public will be horrified at the outcome, at the realisation that the very institutions they thought had been created to protect them had never been intended to serve their interests at all.

Once they realise that the world’s greatest Ponzi scheme has been foisted on them, they will be hopping mad and justifiably so. Those who had not had the foresight to internationalise themselves, to remove themselves as much as possible from the system, will most certainly want to get even in some way.

And this makes clear why governments, particularly that of the US, are working so hard to create a police state. Unless a totalitarian state can be created, those who are presently taking the wealth may not be able to fully realise their objectives.

The coming train wreck is no accident. It has long been planned. That the “smart fellows in charge” will somehow save the day is therefore a vain hope indeed.

It’s still possible to back out of the system, but it’s getting more difficult every day. The window is closing.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

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