Aggregatore di feed

Members of Congress still get paid when the government shuts down. They get every bit of their $174,000 salary, plus all the benefits and perks that come with being a member of Congress.

The post The Shutdown Won’t Affect All Government Employees appeared first on LewRockwell.

Brian Dunaway wrote:

In a post in these pages about a week ago I offered a few comments on AI euphoria, as well as a typical example of AI-driven search engine error.

Charles Hugh Smith (CHS) seems to have covered all my “earthly” concerns very well in an article here. (Perhaps my biggest concerns with AI are more metaphysical than physical, but I will not address them here.) CHS enumerates the current primary issues with AI, each of which is enormous.

CHS doesn’t appear to believe that AI is a “nothing” technology (neither do I), but he does characterize it as a con. No doubt there is some of that, but I think the AI euphoria is a genuine case of very poor understanding and judgment, fueled by The Promise of Singularity, and solving all the mysteries of the universe – and, easy money looking for the next big thing.

AI seems to have a lot of promise as a research tool, pointing primary research in directions that might have taken researchers many years to imagine. In this context, the researcher would employ scientific methods to verify the validity of an AI “conclusion.” As such, the AI entity would be part of the trial-and-error scientific process.

This is altogether different from what industry seems to think AI will accomplish: a Unified Field Theory of human endeavor. But at this point, AI just doesn’t seem anywhere near capable of doing what industry is trying to do with it.

A few additional comments, employing CHS’s numbered subheadings:

1. AI revenues are orders of magnitude lighter than the sums being invested 

In a similar vein to the subheading, a rule-of-thumb states that “if you buy stock at a P/E ratio of 15, then it will take 15 years for the company’s earnings to add up to your original purchase price – 15 years to ‘pay you back.’ That’s assuming that the company is already in its ‘mature’ stage, where earnings are constant. [Emphasis mine.]” “Assuming” – that’s the mother of all assumptions.

But, even if one is a “true believer,” even the market indicates AI technology is in its nascent stage. A typical AI large corporate P/E is around 50 (that is, when the “E” isn’t negative!). So, half a century? Sounds about right. That is, IF it ever works as advertised, with profit-making reliability in the distant future, and requiring enormous resources that aren’t even yet available. And a lot can happen in 50 years. This technology should be considered very high risk.

2. AI tools are inherently untrustworthy and lend themselves to generating “going through the motions” slop

CHS offers a very good summary here: AI has a “superficial appearance of value but actually has negative value as it’s incomplete, misleading and/or incoherent. Sorting the wheat from the chaff actually takes more time because AI is so adept at generating a superficial gloss. In other words, AI generates time sinks rather than productivity.” Exactly.

Currently, I would place AI technology at a TRL (Technology Readiness Level, in NASA parlance) of around 4 (of 9) – and that is probably very generous – even at this level it simply seems unproven. At a TRL of 5 (component and/or breadboard validation in relevant environment), it would be pretty difficult to make an argument other than that AI has proven to be unreliable and/or not cost effective at scale.

A few weeks ago Epoch Times penned an article that illustrates well the idea of “time sink” in the context of coding software with AI. One report noted 45% of code samples failed security tests. A programmer and IP attorney commented, “I’m surprised the percentage isn’t higher. AI-generated code, even when it works, tends to have a lot of logical flaws that simply reflect a lack of context and thoughtfulness.”

In the same article, in the context of law, “AI hallucinations have already made headlines for the problems they can create in the workplace. A 2024 study observed LLMs had a ‘hallucination’ rate between 69 percent and 88 percent, based on responses to specific legal queries. [Emphasis mine.]”

3. The rate at which major companies are adopting AI is rolling over

I have nothing to add here, other than to say that apparently larger companies that have the resources to understand the future of AI are pulling back from AI adoption. CHS includes a fascinating graph suggesting that firms with more than 50 souls had a negative AI adoption rate starting this last summer.

4. AI data centers are competing with other users for electricity, water and capital

AI power requirements alone are stratospheric, and as CHS notes, this is having an enormous impact on power bills. That would include the power bills of the most vulnerable – not just economically vulnerable, but cruelly, those whose jobs the overlords want to eliminate.

And regarding “singularity” – as defined – one study I read suggested that all the current power in the world would not be sufficient to achieve it. Added to that little detail are the ridiculous requirements of Green Fantasies like an EV in every driveway and net zero power generation, and all this with a backdrop of failing power infrastructure.

The post Will AI Crash the Economy? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Zero Hedge

The post Bondi DOJ Opposes Missouri’s Second Amendment Preservation Act appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

My parents grew up in Minneapolis. My American roots are in southern Minnesota. The poor leadership of the politicians in Minnesota and the Twin Cities has ruined the state.

The post “A Precarious State” Trailer: Documentary Video appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ginny Garner wrote:

Lew,

In the last two years of his life, Charlie Kirk, up until then an unwavering supporter of Israel, began to ask questions about the Netanyahu government. On October 13, 2023 Kirk appeared on Patrick Bet David’s podcast and denounced “bloodthirsty neocons.” He described himself as a 30 year old Millennial tired of no win Middle East wars. “When America is not leading, at least diplomatically, you’ve got serious problems.” A transcript of the podcast and the video:

https://podmarized.com/episodes/pbd-podcast/charlie-kirk-pbd-podcast-ep-314

Kirk asked if Israel stood down on 10/7 (29:00 on video); was opposed to a kinetic war against Iran (at 41:00); revealed how the US’s coup in Iran resulted in radical Islam taking over (44:00). 

The post Charlie Kirk Opposed “Bloodthirsy Neocons” and No Win Middle East Wars appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah.

The post Charlie Kirk’s Death Planned Long Ago (Predictive Programming Shaping Humanity’s Consciousness) appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Bill Madden

vtforeignpolicy.com

The post Kirk assassination – Chris Martenson best analysis of the conspiracy; other theories are wrong, may be plants by the perpetrators appeared first on LewRockwell.

Johnny Kramer.

* not satirical

The Far Left Satirical Ad

The post The Far Left appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah.

iNewParadigm

The post Climate Change – 8 Counter Arguments to Debate Its Claims appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Martin.

Independent

The post Soros-linked NYC money manager arrested on trafficking charges that include ‘sex dungeon’ claim and Playboy models appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post ‘Mediator’ Trump Approves Intel For Deep Strikes Into Russia appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

John Leake

The post No Hercules to Slay the Swamp Hydra appeared first on LewRockwell.

Il manoscritto fornisce un grimaldello al lettore, una chiave di lettura semplificata, del mondo finanziario e non che sembra essere andato fuori controllo negli ultimi quattro anni in particolare. Questa una storia di cartelli, a livello sovrastatale e sovranazionale, la cui pianificazione centrale ha raggiunto un punto in cui deve essere riformata radicalmente e questa riforma radicale non può avvenire senza una dose di dolore economico che potrebbe mettere a repentaglio la loro autorità. Da qui la risposta al Grande Default attraverso il Grande Reset. Questa la storia di un coyote, che quando non riesce a sfamarsi all'esterno ricorre all'autofagocitazione. Lo stesso accaduto ai membri del G7, dove i sei membri restanti hanno iniziato a fagocitare il settimo: gli Stati Uniti.

____________________________________________________________________________________

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/bitcoin-non-gioca-piu-al-gioco-delloro)

Per anni Bitcoin è stato trattato come un asset puramente inerte: un caveau decentralizzato, economicamente passivo nonostante il suo programma di emissione fisso. Eppure oltre $7 miliardi in bitcoin generano già rendimenti nativi on-chain tramite i principali protocolli, quindi la premessa iniziale sta venendo confutata.

La capitalizzazione di mercato dell'oro, pari a circa $23.000 miliardi, rimane per lo più inattiva. Bitcoin, al contrario, ora guadagna on-chain mentre i possessori ne mantengono la custodia.

Man mano che nuovi livelli sbloccano rendimenti, Bitcoin supera una soglia strutturale: da meramente passivo a produttivamente scarso.

Questo cambiamento sta ridefinendo silenziosamente il modo in cui il capitale determina il rischio, il modo in cui le istituzioni allocano le riserve e il modo in cui la teoria del portafoglio tiene conto della sicurezza. La scarsità potrebbe spiegare la stabilità dei prezzi, mentre la produttività spiega perché miner, chi applica strategie di tesoreria e fondi d'investimento ora stanno parcheggiando asset in BTC invece di limitarsi a costruirci attorno.

Un asset custodito in un caveau che genera rendimento non è più oro digitale, ma capitale produttivo.

La scarsità è importante, ma la produttività è fondamentale

Il DNA economico di Bitcoin non è cambiato: la sua offerta rimane limitata a 21 milioni, il programma di emissione è trasparente e nessuna autorità centrale può gonfiarlo o censurarlo. Scarsità, verificabilità e resistenza alla manipolazione hanno sempre contraddistinto Bitcoin, ma nel 2025 questi fattori distintivi e unici hanno iniziato a significare qualcosa di più.

Con il tasso di emissione bloccato, e nonostante i nuovi livelli di protocollo consentano a BTC di generare rendimenti on-chain, esso sta guadagnando terreno grazie alle sue potenzialità. Una nuova serie di strumenti offre ai possessori la possibilità di ottenere rendimenti reali senza rinunciare alla custodia, senza affidarsi a piattaforme centralizzate e, soprattutto, senza modificare il protocollo di base. Lasciare intatti i meccanismi fondamentali di Bitcoin, ma cambiare il modo in cui il capitale interagisce con l'asset.

Stiamo già vedendo questo effetto nella pratica. Bitcoin è l'unica crittovaluta ufficialmente detenuta in riserve sovrane: El Salvador continua ad allocare BTC nelle sue casse nazionali e un ordine esecutivo statunitense del 2025 ha riconosciuto Bitcoin come asset di riserva strategica per le infrastrutture critiche. Nel frattempo gli exchange-traded fund (ETF) spot detengono ora oltre 1,26 milioni di BTC, ovvero oltre il 6% dell'offerta totale.

Anche sul fronte del mining, i miner non si affrettano più a vendere. Al contrario, una quota crescente alloca BTC in strategie di staking e rendimento sintetico per migliorare i rendimenti a lungo termine.

Sta diventando evidente che la proposta di valore originale si è evoluta in modo sottile nella progettazione, ma profondamente nei risultati. Ciò che un tempo rendeva Bitcoin affidabile ora lo rende anche potente: un asset un tempo passivo sta diventando un asset che produce rendimento. Questo getta le basi per ciò che verrà dopo: una curva dei rendimenti nativa che si forma attorno a Bitcoin stesso, per non parlare degli asset a esso collegati.

Bitcoin guadagna senza rinunciare al controllo

Fino a poco tempo fa l'idea di ottenere un rendimento dalle crittovalute sembrava irraggiungibile. Nel caso di Bitcoin, era difficile trovare un rendimento non-custodial, almeno non senza compromettere la sua neutralità di base. Ma questa ipotesi non è più valida: oggi nuovi livelli di protocollo consentono ai possessori di utilizzare BTC in modi un tempo riservati alle piattaforme centralizzate.

Alcune piattaforme consentono ai possessori a lungo termine di puntare BTC nativi per proteggere la rete e generare rendimenti, senza dover “wrappare” l'asset o spostarlo tra le blockchain. A loro volta altre consentono agli utenti di utilizzare i propri bitcoin in app di finanza decentralizzata, guadagnando commissioni da swap e prestiti senza cederne la proprietà. Nessuno di questi sistemi richiede la consegna delle chiavi a terzi e nessuno si basa su quel tipo di giochi di rendimento poco trasparenti che hanno causato problemi in passato.

A questo punto è chiaro che non si tratta più di un progetto pilota. Inoltre strategie orientate ai miner stanno lentamente guadagnando terreno tra quelle aziende che applicano soluzioni di tesoreria senza abbandonare l'ecosistema Bitcoin. Di conseguenza sta iniziando a delinearsi una curva dei rendimenti nativa di Bitcoin e basata sulla trasparenza.

Una volta che il rendimento di Bitcoin diventa accessibile e auto-custodito, emerge un altro problema: come misurarlo? Se i protocolli diventano disponibili e accessibili, manca chiarezza. Perché senza uno standard che descriva i guadagni di BTC, investitori, chi applica strategie di tesoreria e miner si ritrovano a prendere decisioni al buio.

È il momento di confrontare il rendimento di Bitcoin

Se Bitcoin può generare un rendimento, il passo logico successivo è un modo semplice per misurarlo.

Al momento non esiste uno standard. Alcuni investitori considerano BTC come capitale di copertura; altri lo sfruttano e ne incassano i rendimenti. Tuttavia ci sono incongruenze su quale dovrebbe essere il benchmark effettivo per misurare Bitcoin, poiché non esistono asset realmente comparabili. Ad esempio, un team potrebbe bloccare le coin per una settimana ma non avere un modo semplice per spiegarne il rischio, oppure un miner potrebbe incanalare le coinbase in una strategia di rendimento ma trattarla comunque come una diversificazione del bilancio.

Consideriamo un'organizzazione autonoma decentralizzata di medie dimensioni con 1.200 BTC e sei mesi di stipendi da pagare. Deposita metà del capitale in un caveau a 30 giorni su un protocollo protetto da Bitcoin e ne ricava un rendimento. Senza una base di riferimento, però, il team non può dire se si tratti di una mossa cauta o rischiosa. La stessa scelta potrebbe essere elogiata come un'abile strategia di tesoreria, o criticata come una ricerca di rendimento, a seconda di chi analizza l'approccio.

Ciò di cui Bitcoin ha bisogno è un benchmark. Non un “tasso privo di rischio” nel senso del mercato obbligazionario, ma una base di riferimento: un rendimento ripetibile, autocustodito e on-chain che possa essere generato nativamente su Bitcoin, al netto delle commissioni, e raggruppato per durata (sette giorni, 30, 90 giorni). Una struttura sufficiente a trasformare il rendimento da una supposizione in qualcosa a cui fare riferimento e che possa essere utilizzato come benchmark.

Una volta che ciò esiste, è possibile costruire politiche, informative e strategie di tesoreria attorno a esso, e tutto ciò che supera una tale base può essere valutato per quello che è: un rischio che vale la pena correre oppure no.

Ed è qui che Bitcoin si scrolla di dosso la metafora dell'oro. Il metallo giallo non vi paga, ma un bitcoin produttivo sì. Più a lungo le strategie di tesoreria trattano BTC come un tesoro nascosto senza alcun ritorno, più è facile capire chi vuol trarre profitto dal capitale e chi lo vuole solamente conservare.

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

Supporta Francesco Simoncelli's Freedonia lasciando una mancia in satoshi di bitcoin scannerizzando il QR seguente.

Background

For the past 100+ years, the Middle East has been plagued by western-initiated conflicts and wars no end. The purpose is to dominate one of the world’s largest energy resources. Other energy-rich countries are Russia and Venezuela. Both are in the crosshairs for US-western domination. Venezuela is being aggressed, as I speak, by President Trump’s US Navy. However, China sends her Navy to President Maduro’s rescue. It is clear the plates of world dominion are shifting away from the west.

Russia is in the forefront of US and western aggression for her resources and vast territory, and has been for over hundred years, with two world wars directed to subdue Russia. To no avail. Today, Russia’s alliance with China is stronger than ever, and after the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit of 31 August-1 September 2025, the Global South under the leadership of the BRICS-plus is no longer looking up to the west – but is calling the shots to the detriment of the gradually “extinguishing” importance of the western “Empire”.

Just a few impressive figures: The Global South accounts for about 85% of the world population and close to 50% of the world’s GDP; compare this with the fading G7’s 40% of world GDP.

Similar with China, her success story during the last 76 years, unmatched by any country in recent history, cannot be simply accepted but must be dominated by the west. “China is a danger for western hegemony” … is the going slogan, although China’s non-aggressive, peaceful behavior with the rest of the world is legendary proof for the contrary.

The west will not be able to subdue China either. Far from it. China is said to be the second largest world economy. However, in terms that really count for the living economy, in Purchasing Power Parity or PPP, China is and has been the world’s number one economy for the last at least five years.

China represents peace – peace is light, and light will overcome darkness. Darkness and confusion is what we are living today.

Let us hope the Middle East saga – aggression by the same self-styled empire and the Zionist forces behind the US empire, as well as its European vassals – will make a turn towards the light and peace, lest they may fail and fall too.

Now to the Middle East – Or Rather Western Asia

It would appear fair to say that one of the first “disturbances” in Western Asia was the Zionist-initiated Balfour Declaration, a public statement issued by the British Prime Minister Arthur James Balfour in 1917, during the First World War which eventually led to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, in what was known for hundreds, actually thousands of years as Palestinian territory.

The Balfour Declaration was initiated in a letter from then self-nominated Zionist Chief, United Kingdom (UK) Lord Rothschild, to then British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour.

The UK Government submitted this proposal to the newly created United Nations (1944) with then only some 51 member-states, almost all western-oriented. The UN approved the British proposal. Israel was created within Palestine in 1948. This was a major “declaration of aggression” for Palestine and for the Arab world.

Tensions between the Jewish and Arab populations began already in 1925 and deepened when the UK agreed in principle to the establishment of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine. Before 1948, Palestine was a land of bustling cities like Jaffa and Haifa, serene villages, ancient olive groves, and a deep cultural and artistic heritage. Images from this era provide a window into Palestine often absent from modern history textbooks.

.

Crates of Jaffa oranges being ferried to a waiting freighter for export, circa 1930 (Public Domain)

.

The UK-sponsored preparation for the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine may have laid the cornerstone for future conflicts in the Middle East.

The expansion of Israel beyond Palestine, taking over Lebanon, Syria, and now attempting to capture also Iran, Iraq and parts of Saudi Arabia, with Jordan an easy annexation, is the long Zionist-planned realization of Greater Israel. It does not bode well for peace.

In the Israel-Palestine conflict, what the world is witnessing today is genocide, ethnic cleansing, outright expulsion of Gazans from their land, of unheard-of proportions, carried out on a once autonomous nation Palestine, by a western-implanted nation, Israel, and its US-Zionist backing, which the irresponsible vassalic non-union, the so-called European Union, whole-heartedly supports.

In Gaza, an additional reason for western aggression and Israel’s expansion may be enormous gas reserves offshore of Gaza – of an estimated worth of US$ one trillion, possibly more.

It is like a red line through the myriads of wars and aggressions – all western-initiated and perpetuated, often through specially for this purpose created terror groups, like ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), later shortened to IS (Islamic State), and more are prime examples.

They were created by the infamous triad of the Israeli Mossad, the UK MI6, and the US CIA. Likewise, Hamas (Gaza) and Hezbollah (Lebanon) are western Secret Services creations, similar to Al-Qaeda, created by the US in Pakistan in 1988.

Such “counter-terrorist” groups are required to justify the West’s armed intervention in countries they want to overthrow, take over and dominate. The reason for domination is their wealth – mainly their hydrocarbon wealth, their strategic geographic position, their anti-US political position, or their alliance with a perceived US enemy.

A globalist hegemony cannot tolerate independent, sovereign states with resources sustaining their autonomy and sovereignty.

*

As history evolves in dynamic ways, the wars in the Middle East – alias Western Asia — has recently been expanded by a new one. On 13 June 2025, Israel –  unprovoked –launched dozens of airstrikes against Iran targeting Iran’s nuclear program, military facilities and killing Iran’s top commanders and nuclear scientists in a devastating large-scale attack that pushed the Middle East into a new war.

Russia Today (see this) reports that while armed conflicts are a constant presence in West Asia, this time the stakes are higher. Israel has found itself in direct confrontation not with a proxy or insurgent group, but with Iran – its principal geopolitical adversary and a likely future nuclear power and not only a member of the BRICS, therefore a key member of the Global South, but also newly a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Not to forget, Israel has nuclear warheads since the 1960s. Nobody officially talks about them and Israel has never signed the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). However, Iran did sign the treaty (NPT).

The Israel-Iran war started already in 2024, when the two countries exchanged direct strikes as far back as April 2024. For decades before that, they waged what is commonly known as a “shadow war,” primarily through intelligence operations, cyberattacks, and support for regional proxies. But now, at Israel’s initiative, the conflict has escalated into open warfare.

Be sure, Israel attacks Iran only with the consent of the US.

On his Truth Social platform, US President Donald Trump warned, or you may call it “blackmailed,” Tehran, saying that the next “already planned attacks” on her would be “even more brutal”, adding that “Iran must make a deal [on its nuclear enrichment program], before there is nothing left (of Iran].”

Strangly, lately it has been quiet around the topic of Iran’s alleged enrichment program.

After the US Air Force and Navy attacked three Iranian nuclear sites: Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, in an operation called “Midnight Hammer”, President Trump says Iran’s nuclear program is over; there is no more need for Israel to keep bombing Iran – “Iran is finished.” That is what Trump says. But by now the world knows that Trump lies. He promised he would within days of his taking the Presidency end all wars. He is now almost eight months in office and wars are raging like never before.

Iran is far from finished; Iran being a member of the Chinese Strategy Center, the SCO, as well as of BRICS.

Is this leading to or is it already the beginning of WWIII?

Let us meditate it is not – and peace will prevail.

Read the Whole Article

The post Peace in the Middle East – An Engine of Growth Towards a Shared Future for Mankind appeared first on LewRockwell.

Kiev is planning a false-flag operation in the EU involving the deployment of a sabotage group to Poland posing as Russian and Belarusian special forces, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has said.

Earlier this month, Warsaw claimed that 19 Russian drones had entered the Polish airspace and called the incident a deliberate provocation by Moscow intended to test NATO’s response. Similar claims of a drone incursion were later made by Romania.

The SVR said in a statement on Tuesday that the drone incursions into the EU were part of continued efforts by Ukraine, which is losing on the battlefield, aimed at “drawing European NATO countries into armed conflict with Moscow.”

“Another provocation is currently being worked out” by the government of Vladimir Zelensky, the statement read. It would revolve around “a sabotage and reconnaissance group deployed into Polish territory and allegedly consisting of special forces servicemen from Russia and Belarus,” it added.

Members of the unit have already been selected from the ranks of the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Belarusian Kastus Kalinouski Regiment, which have been fighting for Kiev in the Ukraine conflict, the agency said.

According to the scenario being prepared by Ukraine’s military intelligence (GUR) together with Polish spy agencies, after “the ‘detection and neutralization’ of the group by the security forces of Poland, its members are expected to appear before the media and give confessions, implicating Russia and Belarus in attempts to destabilize the situation in Poland,” the SVR stressed.

The belief in Ukraine is that, following the drone incursions, “such an event should leave no doubt in the minds of the Poles and other ordinary Europeans that Moscow and Minsk stand behind all the hostile actions,” it said.

“Kiev expects to prompt European countries to respond to Russia as harshly as possible, preferably in a military manner,” the SVR warned.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk claimed on Monday that the Ukraine conflict was “our war” and urged Western Europe to mobilize against Russia.

Speaking at the UN General assembly last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stressed that Moscow has no aggressive plans against NATO, but warned that any aggression against the country would be met with “a resolute response.”

This article was originally published on RT News.

The post Ukraine Plotting False Flag in EU – Moscow appeared first on LewRockwell.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the former “Fox and Friends” cohost, claims to be obsessed with making the Pentagon and the military services about “the warfighter.” His main approach to doing so is a deeply misguided campaign to reduce “distractions” like commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion (the dreaded “DEI”). No matter that the purpose of DEI is to combat White supremacist attitudes, misogyny, and anti-gay and anti-trans violence in the ranks.

All such forms of discrimination are, in fact, already present in the U.S. military, and the way to build a cohesive defense force is certainly not by allowing them to run wild and be seen as acceptable or “normal” behavior. The best way to build a stronger, more unified military would, of course, be to make people feel welcome regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, or gender identification. That would, in fact, be the only way to build a military that reflects the nation it’s charged with defending. DEI, after all, is not an irritating slogan. It’s an attempt to right historic wrongs in the service of a more effective military and a more unified populace. And it’s one thing to suggest that current approaches could be made more effective, but quite another to demonize them in the name of forging “better” warfighters.

In short, the Hegseth method is bound to prove destructive. Count on this, in fact: it will only weaken our military, not strengthen it. The result, if Hegseth’s efforts succeed, will indeed be a Whiter, more aggressive armed forces, and quite likely one significantly more loyal to the current occupant of the Oval Office than to the Constitution.

Ex-Warriors for Peace

Thankfully, Hegseth’s vision is not shared by many of the veterans of America’s disastrous post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. The eye-opening documentary What I Want You to Know presents the views of just such veterans about their service and about the meaning of the conflicts they fought in. Almost to a person (no, not “a man”!), they said the following four things:

– They don’t know why they were sent to the places where they fought

– They did not believe the U.S. could win the war they were sent to fight

– Their government lied to them

– They were forced to do things that will haunt them for the rest of their lives

It took courage for such veterans to go on camera and offer the unvarnished truth about the disastrous wars they helped to fight. They are, of course, far from alone, but as one of the producers of the film told me, many veterans are reluctant to discuss such feelings and insights publicly. Some don’t want to reflect on the idea that the wars they fought in were disastrously misguided and didn’t end in anything resembling an American victory. Others fear political retribution. Still others prefer to keep such conversations among their fellow vets, in large part because they feel that people who haven’t served can’t fully understand what they went through.

It’s little wonder that many vets keep their feelings about their long years in service within a close circle of friends and other veterans. But whether they choose to speak out publicly or not, a striking number of them are now either antiwar or “war skeptical,” questioning whether some of our recent conflicts were faintly worth fighting in the first place.

Don’t misunderstand me on this. There are indeed veterans speaking out against such unnecessary, unjust wars (past or future). Fifteen of them, for instance, contributed chapters to Paths of Dissent, a volume edited by Quincy Institute co-founder Andrew Bacevich and U.S. Army veteran Daniel Sjursen. A description of a 2023 webinar marking the release of the book caught its main theme perfectly:

“[T]hese soldiers vividly describe both their motivations for serving and the disillusionment that made them speak out against the system. Their testimony is crucial for understanding just how the world’s self-proclaimed greatest military power went so badly astray.”

There are also entire organizations, including Veterans for Peace (VFP), Common Defense, and About Face: Veterans Against the War, devoted to ensuring that such endless wars remain over and crafting an American foreign policy grounded in diplomacy and defense rather than in a quest for global military dominance. (And, of course, they are distinctly not dedicated, like President Donald J. Trump, to ever more regularly blowing boats out of the water in the Caribbean.)

Common Defense, in fact, goes beyond an antiwar stance to address the underlying ills that make such wars so much more likely. Its members describe themselves this way:

“We are the largest grassroots membership organization of progressive veterans standing up for our communities against the rising tide of racism, hate and violence.  We vow to organize together against those who seek to divide us so they cannot rig our systems and economy for their own gain.”

As for VFP, one of its members, Chris Overfelt, offered a succinct summary of the group’s stance in a 2019 House Budget Committee hearing organized by the Poor People’s Campaign: A Call for Moral Revival. He noted that he had “indirectly participated in the destruction of… Iraq and Afghanistan.” He then reflected on the consequences of those all-American wars, adding, “Neither of these countries will likely recover from that devastation in my lifetime. Nothing I can do… will make up for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan men, women, and children killed in these useless wars.”

About Face’s current campaign, “Keep the Military Off Our Streets,” reaches out to the 35,000 or more National Guard and military personnel that President Trump has already deployed to U.S. cities and the Mexican border area, offering assistance in “exploring your options.” As that outfit puts it, “If you are a National Guardsperson or active-duty member and you’re concerned about the moral, ethical, or legal implications of your situation, you’re not alone.”

Nor is opposition to such fruitless, devastating conflicts limited to progressives. Trump himself used his 2016 election campaign to hammer Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton for supporting the disastrous 2003 U.S. intervention in Iraq. And then there were statements like the one that he made at a September 2024 campaign stop in Mosinee, Wisconsin, in which he said, “I will expel the warmonger from our national security state and carry out a much needed clean-up of the military-industrial complex to stop the war profiteering and to put always America First.”

The president has, of course, not faintly fulfilled that pledge, but he said it for a reason — to appeal to those in his base who are sick of war and no longer trust corporations or traditional politicians to rein in the war machine.

One of the most interesting political collaborations of the past few years was when the conservative group Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) teamed up with VoteVets, which describes itself as “a home for progressive veterans and their supporters.” The two groups worked together to repeal the authorization of military force, or AUMF, passed by Congress after the 9/11 attacks, a document that has been used ever since as a public rationale for numerous wars all over the globe. Dan Caldwell, the head of CVA at the time, explained how the two groups had come to work together in an interview on C-SPAN that included Will Fischer, then the director of government relations for VoteVets:

“I honestly did go into the interview expecting a combative conversation… but when we started talking about foreign policy, it was clear there were some areas of alignment especially on war powers. The wheels started turning in my head, and we came together and decided to pursue some of these shared goals.”

Perhaps most important right now, Major General Paul Eaton, who (among his many other assignments) served as commanding general in charge of reestablishing the Iraqi Security Forces in 2003-2004, has joined with other veterans to roundly criticize Trump’s deployment of troops to U.S. cities. As he put it, “This [deployment of troops to U.S. cities] is the politicization of the armed forces. It casts the military in a terrible light.”

Of course, there are also what might be thought of as warriors for war in this country, veterans who believe the U.S. isn’t spending enough on its military or relying on force (or the threat of force) often enough. For example, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Alabama), a prominent voice on national security in the Republican Party, is all in on pushing for yet more Pentagon spending, the development of ever more and different kinds of nuclear weapons, and a quicker trigger for using force (including a possible war with Iran). Then there’s General Mike Minihan who, in January 2023, wrote a memo predicting that the U.S. would be at war with China within two years. That was hardly an official U.S. position. He was, in fact, publicly contradicting the stance of his commander-in-chief and yet he was never held accountable for that rogue statement of his.

Military Invalidators

Many liberals and progressives feel that the only way to generate sustained public pressure against overspending on the Pentagon budget (now heading for the trillion-dollar mark) is to get military validators, ideally high-ranking officers, to weigh in. This was possible in the past, as in the Vietnam War years, when Admirals Gene Larocque and Eugene Carroll founded the Center for Defense Information, an indispensable resource for opponents of massive Pentagon budgets and misguided wars.

It’s important to remember, however, that the use of military validators can go terribly wrong. This was certainly the case in 1983 when President George W. Bush sent General Colin Powell, whose approval rating was then 20 points higher than his, to the United Nations in February 2003 to make a case for Iraq’s alleged (but, in fact, nonexistent) arsenal of nuclear weapons, a month before the U.S. invaded that country. It was certainly good theater, but many of his points would prove to be sheer fantasy.

There were also prominent retired generals like Lee Butler and James Cartwright who called for sharp reductions in, or the total elimination of, all nuclear weapons globally, including the American arsenal. Butler, a former head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, signed a 1998 statement, organized by the group Global Zero, that called for the elimination of nuclear weapons globally. And Cartwright, a retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former commander of United States nuclear forces, endorsed a 2012 report by Global Zero arguing that nuclear deterrence could be maintained with a far smaller U.S. nuclear arsenal of 900 total warheads, versus the current stockpile of thousands of them, either deployed or in reserve.

But high-level military officers able and willing to criticize Donald Trump’s current global strategy and this country’s still rising military spending levels are an ever-shrinking cohort. Little wonder, given that, as a Quincy Institute report found, 80% of all three- and four- star generals who retired in a recent five-year period went to work for — yes, of course! — the arms industry in one capacity or another.

And although mid-level officers and those below them in the ranks are the likely backbone of a growing movement for peace and racial, gender, and economic justice, they simply can’t do it alone, even if their voices are crucial for reaching certain key audiences.

And here’s a reality of this moment: Given the torrent of threats to basic rights now emanating from Washington, movements of resistance need all the help they can get. In that grim context, antiwar veterans will certainly be crucial allies in the struggle for peace and justice, but there will also have to be a cultural and psychological shift, weaning many Americans from their attraction to war as a way to solve problems and their sense of themselves as citizens of “the most powerful country in the world.”

America’s “increasingly dysfunctional relationship to war” is analyzed in detail in 26-year Army veteran Gregory Daddis’s new book, Fear and Faith: America’s Relationship with War Since 1945. He believes that this country’s “martial bonds… have been informed by deep-seated frictions between faith in and fear of war and its consequences.” In his concluding chapter, “War for War’s Sake,” Daddis underscores the stubborn commitment to war that prevails among many Americans, despite the costly and disastrous wars of this century. “War,” he writes, “remains with us because we have inherited Cold War tendencies toward viewing the world in black-and-white terms, where every threat seems existential to the global American project… America’s faith never truly wavered, even after the debacle in Vietnam. Calls for military crusades against evil still resonate.”

Daddis believes that “a twisted relation with faith and fear, if left unbroken, can only preordain the nation to a militarized way of life bounded by the grimness of war.”

In light of the devastating impact of America’s post-9/11 wars, as documented by the Costs of War Project at Brown University — the loss of $8 trillion, hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, millions of people driven from their homes, and hundreds of thousands of U.S. veterans suffering physical wounds or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) — calls for “peace through strength” and ever higher Pentagon budgets should ring increasingly hollow.

Isn’t it finally time for a respectful national dialogue about what constitutes an adequate defense and how to balance military preparations with other urgent national needs? Of course, having any such conversation, given the present deep divisions in American society, will be a challenge in its own right. But the alternative is a continuation of some variation of the devastating wars of the post-9/11 period, and such new and perilous conflicts will involve boots on the ground, air strikes, or the endless arming of repressive regimes.

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.

The post Can Warriors Stop Endless Wars? appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Frank’s death was a real personal blow to me,” Murray Rothbard confessed in 1973. Frank Meyer and Rothbard debated at the Harvard University Institute of Politics in 1971. Less than a year later, Meyer was dead at 62.

Starting in the 1950s, both men worked as the two paid reviewers of scholarship for the Volker Fund. Ex-Communist Meyer ran Rothbard’s book reviews as literary editor of National Review during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1972, the year of Meyer’s death, Rothbard modeled much of his “Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult” on Meyer’s Moulding of Communists. They occasionally met, periodically spoke on the phone, and corresponded dozens of times from 1954 to 1972.

This correspondence, discovered in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, warehouse in 2022 as part of research for The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, amounts to about three dozen letters and numerous other items. Meyer, a telephonic creature to such a degree that he began spending about a quarter of his income on long-distance bills, often responded to letters with calls. The quotations and paraphrased material in this article—and four succeeding ones that explore their discussions of American history, populism, conservative politics, and the counterculture—appear in print for the first time here. A lengthier scholarly article on Rothbard and Meyer’s correspondence about Ayn Rand and the Objectivists appears in The Journal of Libertarian Studies.

The Meyer-Rothbard relationship started in November 1954. “I had such an enjoyable time meeting and talking to you,” Rothbard wrote, “that I thought I’d continue the conversation by typewriter.”

During the first weekend of May 1955, Frank Meyer and his wife, Elsie, ventured from Woodstock downstate to Manhattan for camaraderie with the Circle Bastiat. Rothbard’s libertarian friends, to include Leonard Liggio, Ralph Raico, and Bruce Goldberg, gathered in these years for late-night bull sessions. They allowed the outsiders to join them. Meyer told his fellow partisans of liberty that the common denominator for so many of the great political upheavals in American history remained Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” These remarks, according to Rothbard, inspired Ralph Raico to stay up Saturday night rewriting that song into the “Battle Hymn of Freedom.” The reworked lyrics, boasting a refrain of “the Circle marches on,” included:

All of Freedom’s blessed martyrs are here marching by our side

Ours the spirit and the cause for which they smiling bled and died

With us now they cut those fetters which men’s mind and body tied

Man will at last be free.

Meyer seemed amused.

“We thoroughly enjoyed our evening with the Cercle Bastiat,” he wrote Murray and Jo Rothbard the way the Frenchman Bastiat would spell the modifier to his name. “I would love to have the entire Cercle spend a rousing weekend up here some time this summer—who knows how many songs might be composed?”

Rothbard’s travel phobias prevented that upstate summer meeting.

The correspondence includes a letter of recommendation from William F. Buckley, Jr., for the “brilliant,” “congenial,” and “imaginative” Rothbard for the aim of securing him employment with the Econometric Institute’s Manhattan office after he lost a position with the Princeton Panel. This followed, and perhaps sprang from, Rothbard’s confessions to Meyer about his precarious economic situation. The National Review chieftain’s 1957 laudatory sentiment yielded to a very different one by 1959, when Rothbard suggested to Buckley that his magazine’s objections to Nikita Khruschev’s visit to the United States must be some sort of parody given its embrace of Winston Churchill, Francisco Franco, and other state leaders also responsible for death and destruction and such. Rothbard found the magazine’s complaint especially “humorous” that Khrushchev “might be sleeping in the sainted Lincoln’s bed; but this surely would be more apt, considering that Mr. K’s deeds in Hungary were precisely equivalent to Mr. Lincoln’s Butchery of the South.”

Buckley responded, “National Review may be ambitious, but it is not so ambitious as to take on the job of educating you on how to make elementary moral distinctions.”

This exchange strikes as one that reoriented the relationship between the two men. Meyer, who launched one of the anti-Khrushchev groups that Rothbard lambasted, did not let the disagreement destroy the friendship.

Other differences existed between Meyer and Rothbard. The letters show the men at loggerheads, for instance, over semantics in a manner similar to Meyer’s ongoing epistolary debates with Rose Wilder Lane. Rothbard wondered whether conservatives wished to conserve the status quo, adhere to the outlook of European rightists of the previous century, or perhaps merely favor gradual to sudden change.

“Perhaps you are a ‘conservative’ because you wish to conserve the ‘western heritage,’” he wrote. “But the Western heritage contains quantitatively more bad than good from our point of view—more murder than laissez-faire. So what you really want to promote is not the heritage en bloc but parts of it—which parts to be picked out by reason. So where can conservatism come in?”

On October 26, 1956, Rothbard’s letter exudes an ebullience regarding the as-yet uncrushed Hungarian Revolution. “The Circle Bastiat,” he noted, “is thrilled to the core.” He enclosed a “monstrous” article by Walter Lippmann on the uprising that prompted a vow to forgo reading him. As Meyer had inspired Raico to rewrite the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” the previous year, events in Hungary catalyzed Rothbard to rewrite The Communist Manifesto in abridged form. He included within a letter to Meyer his “Individualist Manifesto”:

A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Individualism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise the spectre: ……… The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of caste struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a world, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another…a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending castes….The modern Statist society that has sprouted from the ruins of laissez-faire capitalism, has established new castes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle… Our epoch, the epoch of the bureaucrat, possesses, however, this distinctive feature; it has simplified the caste antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting into two great hostile camps, into great castes directly facing each other: State and People …… Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one caste for oppressing another….In place of the old Statist society, with its castes and caste antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of all ……. Let the ruling castes tremble at an Individualistic revolution. The people have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. People of all countries, unite!!

The ruling castes, alas, did not tremble. Meyer, an actual revolutionary, understood why.

Prince Mirsky, who accompanied him into the Communist Party headquarters in London where he joined the party in 1932, had died a few years later in a Soviet gulag; Walter Ulbricht, whom he worked directly for on peace activism in 1934, had already ordered murders and would later erect the Berlin Wall as the longest serving dictator of East Germany; and John Cornford, Charles Darwin’s great-grandson and Meyer’s protégé in England, died fighting for the Communists in the Spanish Civil War the day after he turned 21 in 1936.

In other words, Meyer knew that Communists not just died but killed for the ideas in The Communist Manifesto.

The reasons why the ruling castes did not tremble ultimately became obvious to Rothbard as well. Although he continued to romanticize and fetishize the rebellions against authority that the more conservative Meyer forcefully rejected, Rothbard, in the year after Meyer’s death, articulated the nonaggression principle that “no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else.”

Murray’s revolution, then, necessarily differed from Marx’s revolution not merely in ends but means.

[Daniel J. Flynn, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and American Spectator senior editor, wrote The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer (Encounter/ISI Books, 2025).]

The post Newly Discovered Letters Reveal More on Rothbard’s Friendship With Frank Meyer appeared first on LewRockwell.

The extraction of resources from the domestic population has always been a crucial and central function of every state, whether it’s the United States, Russia, or Argentina. In the modern world all states at least attempt to impose a mixture of excise taxes, income taxes, import taxes, or a variety of similar taxes. Most states with a reasonable level of state capacity are able to successfully impose and enforce these taxes.

States that are able to impose taxes in this manner are what Joseph Schumpeter called “tax states.” These are states in which the power of the central government to impose direct taxation at will is fully developed. Tax states are generally characterized by the following:

1. Centralization: taxes are directly imposed by the central government. The central government does not rely on regional or local governments to collect taxes or enforce tax laws. (This does not preclude regional or local governments from imposing their own taxes.)
2. Unilateral power: The central government can raise taxes unilaterally. The central government’s legislature or executive has the prerogative to raise taxes on its own authority without the permission of any other sovereign within the state’s territory. Put another way, no regional or local government has the ability to veto a tax increase or legally prevent its implementation.
3. The central government freely decides how revenues are spent. Once tax revenues are collected, the central government spends the revenues in whatever manner is preferred by the central state’s legislative power.
4. Taxes are not fees or a payment for a service. Strictly speaking, a fee is a payment that is designed to fund a specific service, and only those who “benefit” from the service pay the fee. Tax “benefits” are not tied to any particular “service” and states are not legally held to any sort of reciprocal duty to spend tax revenues in a manner that benefits those who pay the tax.

Nearly all residents of the “developed” and middle-income worlds today are very familiar with this sort of taxation. This has been the modern reality for tax states for more than a century.

It was not always so, however. In the West, tax states are relatively modern institutions, and they developed from earlier non-state civil governments that were often not primarily funded by taxes.

The Domain State versus the Tax State 

The political economist Joseph Schumpeter developed and popularized the idea of the “tax state” with his influential 1918 lecture “The Crisis of the Tax State.” In the lecture, Schumpeter provides, among many other things, a brief explanation of what preceded the tax state. This was the “domain state”—although Schumpeter does not appear to have used the phrase. In a domain state, the prince was expected to use his own funds—collected through rents and fees on the prince’s personal property—to fund the prince’s acts of governance. Although taxes did exist, taxation was regarded as an extraordinary and temporary measure to be reserved for infrequent emergencies. Or, as economic historian Jacob Viner put it, taxation in this period was not assumed to be a “routine, normal, [or] respectable method of providing for the financial needs of government.” Consequently, princes who sought to raise revenue via taxes or tax increases faced major institutional, ideological, and political impediments to a degree unknown in most modern states.

However, with the rise of the state in the early modern period, taxation became a commonplace practice and both the state and taxation grew concomitantly from earlier non-state origins. “[I]t is well known that the modern tax state is not rooted in the tax state of antiquity,” Schumpeter writes, and he attributes the tax state’s origins to the consolidation of power under “the princes of the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.”

So, what came before this period? How did political rulers fund themselves before the tax state? This can be extraordinarily difficult for modern readers to imagine since we have been so completely inculcated with the idea of the state as a sovereign, unified corporate entity that has a monopoly on legitimate coercion within a territory. Schumpeter nonetheless attempts to explain this and notes that prior to the state and the power to tax at will, ”The prince did not look upon his territory then as a modern estate owner looks upon his cattle. All this came later.”

Schumpeter explains that in the medieval period prior to the tax state, there was no concept of the “common good” as we now think of it, and the prince did not exercise “social power” in a way that allowed him to claim to be the provider or arbiter of any sort of “public” benefit. There were simply the prince’s domains, over which he exercised property rights. But this “sovereignty” was merely that of a private property owner. The prince might claim to be a ruler over a certain population, but he met strident opposition from the nobility, the towns, and even the peasantry, all of whom exercised their own forms of sovereignty and property rights. A prince’s “powers” were only “the sum of diverse rights” stemming from the prince’s possessions spread across many properties. There was no “public” that could be taxed for the benefit of an imagined common good since there was nothing we would call a “commonwealth” or state. There certainly was no “nation-state” as we now conceive of it.

Consequently, Schumpeter notes that a prince had to look to his own properties for resources:

So far as the economy of the prince was concerned, it followed that he had to meet all the expenses of any policy which was his private affair and was not the policy of the state. For instance, he himself had to meet the cost of a war against “his” enemies, at least unless he had a right to the necessary contributions by virtue of particular titles, such as the vassals’ obligation to render military service. ….Neither the means at the prince’s disposal for this purpose nor his sovereignty derived from any centralized state power.

Whatever claims the prince enjoyed over a right to call for military service or a share of agricultural production, this was due to specific legal contracts and oaths. So, what were these revenue sources that a prince could cultivate? Schumpeter lists them:

Most important were the revenues from his own lands, that is, the dues of his subjects, the peasant-serfs, whose landlord he was. Since the thirteenth century these dues were paid mostly in money. Until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these revenues were considered the foundation of the princely economy …. In addition there were diverse feudal rights, such as the mint, market, customs, mining, or protection-of-jewry regalia and all the rest of them, and finally the revenues from those powers which he had as a dispenser of justice or as lord over towns and bailiwicks. Apart from that there were traditional gifts of vassals, the highly controversial contributions of the church, but no general right to “taxes.”

In some cases, towns were subject to taxes, but, as Schumpeter notes, “Aside from this neither the freeman nor even the dependent nobleman paid taxes as a rule.”

Moreover, if a prince did attempt to raise taxes, he often met fierce resistance because the very idea of a general legal right to taxation was largely rejected by those princes sought to tax—i.e., the “estates” of the nobility, Church, and town councils. Thus, cut off from raising taxes to fund new projects, the princes were forced to borrow. But, once debt became crippling, taxation was again the assumed recourse. Schumpeter continues:

The prince did what he could: he got into debt. When he could borrow no more, he turned begging to the estates. He acknowledged that he had no right to demand, declared that accession to his plea was not to prejudice the rights of the estates, promised never again to beg…

The princes also benefited from the presence of military threats—both real and imagined—in neighboring lands. This was the ultimate shortcut to the creation of new centralized states. Taxation gradually became permanent and insidious in pursuit of what we now call “national security”:

The prince pointed to his insolvency and suggested that matters such as the Turkish wars were not merely his personal affair but a “common exigency.” The estates admitted this. The moment they did so a state of affairs was acknowledged which was bound to wipe out all paper guarantees against tax demands.

Yet, even at this point, princes still were forced in most circumstances to look to their own properties to fund the prince’s plans. Over time, however, this changed. ”At first the concession of taxes by no means implied a general tax duty,” Schumpeter notes. Rather, the tax concession was valid “only for the estates which granted it and perhaps for their own vassals…[A]t first, only those who had themselves voted for the tax concession were committed, while he who had mounted his horse before the concession and had ridden off did not have to pay.”

Nor did the taxpayers simply allow the prince to spend these revenues as he saw fit, and Schumpeter adds that

The estates did not trust their prince. Frequently the funds that had been raised were channeled to their intended purpose through the estates’ own agents, and always, except in disagreeable cases of difficult collection, the estates opposed the intervention of the prince as to the way in which the voted sums were to be raised.

Needless to say, this contrasts greatly with our own modern idea of taxation in which a simple vote among members of a national legislative assembly somehow grants “consent” among all potential taxpayers within a state, with the ruling party then free to spend these funds however it wishes.

Modern Taxation vs. Medieval Fees and Dues

Nonetheless, as the “medieval political community” gave way to the modern state, the tax state was formed, and as Schumpeter concludes, “Tax liability on the basis of a majority decision, even more so general tax liability and a legally controlled distribution of the tax burden among lords and vassals—all this came about but very slowly.”

The extensive time necessary to establish a “right” of taxation illustrates how taxes were not simply a new name for the dues, rents, fees and tolls under the medieval arrangements. There was a recognized qualitative difference between taxes and the revenues collected under feudal oaths. After all, the dues and rents paid by the peasantry and vassals were often based on centuries-old contract—albeit usually unwritten—in which the lord was obligated to provide specific services in exchange for revenues paid. Services included primarily military defense from invaders and criminals, but also legal arbitration and defense, and keeping roads and waterways clear. That is, revenues were tied to specific services, and revenues were expected to be spent on those services considered to be beneficial to those who paid. More importantly, these agreements were reciprocal in nature and did not grant the lord the power to unilaterally increase the size of fees, dues, or rents. Even in cases where payments of rents and fees were de facto mandatory, the oaths, rights, agreements, and conditions varied from place to place within a prince’s own domains. This amounted to an enormous and complex patchwork. Unlike a tax state, within which uniform taxes may be imposed upon a population of “equal” citizens, the utter lack of uniformity among pre-state domains imposed sizable transaction costs on princes which led to innumerable difficulties in imposing increased demands for revenue en masse. 

There was a quantitative difference between taxes and the old fees-and-dues system as well. Schumpeter emphasizes that non-tax revenues were remarkably small in Western Europe, and he illustrates this by comparing the revenues of Western princes—who mostly relied on non-tax revenues—with the tax-bloated revenues of the Turkish regime. While the Turkish regime could send tax-funded armies into the field with relative fiscal ease, the princes of the West could raise only small fractions of the Turkish sums being spent. Thus, Western princes hoping to go on campaign in the east relied on one-time tax payments from resistant nobles and bourgeois townsfolk who regarded taxation as an absolute last resort—and a shameful one at that.

Ultimately, however, the forces in favor of a general “right” to taxation on the parts of princes—later transferred to democratic regimes—won the day. Most modern states now are fully developed in the sense that they meet all the requirements of the tax state as listed above: states raise funds on their own accord, unilaterally applied, universally, without fear of veto, and with an assumed right to spend freely as the central government sees fit.

The rising tax state enabled the newly empowered princes to wipe away the old medieval estates, the decentralized sovereign nobility, and the countless impediments to taxation that had grown up from the rubble of the Roman Empire in the west. Naturally, this windfall to the states’ ruling classes has remained at the very center of state-building ever since, and thus Schumpeter concludes:

Taxes not only helped to create the state. They helped to form it. … Tax bill in hand, the state penetrated the private economies and won increasing dominion over them. The tax brings money and calculating spirit into corners in which they do not dwell as yet, and thus becomes a formative factor in the very organism which has developed it.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

The post Schumpeter Explains the Origins of the Modern Tax State appeared first on LewRockwell.

Once again, it feels as if we’re tiptoeing toward an official war between the United States and Russia — as opposed to the proxy war that has endured for three and half years between Russia and NATO-backed Ukraine.

Although President Trump has downplayed the “rare and urgent” meeting of top military commanders from around the world at Quantico, Virginia, on Tuesday, the event has generated intense speculation.  The Pentagon says that secretary of War Hegseth merely wants to deliver a speech on the “warrior ethos” and make sure that military leaders are all walking in the same direction.  The president describes the focus of the gathering in general terms: “We’re talking about what we’re doing, what they’re doing, and how we’re doing.”  Still, to gather the highest-ranking members of the U.S. military in one location for a chat with the president and secretary of War leaves the impression that something of significant importance will be discussed.

On Monday morning, ZeroHedge gathered data from several sites that analyze open-source intelligence to predict military engagements.  Those sites were all tracking a large deployment of U.S. aerial refueling tankers crossing the Atlantic on their way to Europe.  A social media account that tracks pizzerias near the Pentagon showed a spike in orders late Sunday night.  The last time these sources noted a wave of air tankers leaving the United States and increased carryout orders from restaurants near the Pentagon, the U.S. military was preparing to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.  When these open-source data points are viewed alongside the unusual meeting of top military commanders in northern Virginia, it is difficult not to conclude that a potentially significant military operation is imminent.

Notably, there has been a shift in public messaging from high-ranking government officials.  U.S. special envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg told Fox News on Sunday that President Trump has authorized NATO to use U.S. missiles in direct strikes against Moscow.  In a post on Truth Social one week ago, the president stated, “I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.”  Trump’s rhetorical departure from months of effort directed toward peace came right after a meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky at the United Nations in New York City.  While answering reporters’ questions at the U.N., Trump said that allies should shoot down Russian aircraft that enter into the airspace of NATO nations.  Marveling at the president, Zelensky called Trump a “game changer.”

In a separate interview on Fox News, Vice President Vance said that the administration might provide Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk missiles.  Noting that President Trump would make the “final determination” on whether to equip Ukraine with weapons that can strike Moscow, Vance’s assessment of the situation nonetheless suggested that U.S.-NATO is about to take a more aggressive posture in the region.

While signs indicate greater U.S. involvement in the Ukraine-Russia conflict in the near future, the Russian foreign ministry has been highlighting uncorroborated online chatter claiming that the Ukrainian military intends to use captured Russian drones in staged “false flag” attacks on logistics hubs in Poland and Romania.  There are no hard facts to back this assertion, but numerous media reports coming from Hungarian sources have repeated the claim in recent days.  Should Poland or Romania be attacked, President Trump’s recent comments suggest that there would be a swift U.S.-NATO response.  As is always the case in war, propaganda and misdirection make it almost impossible to analyze this information.

Ukraine has an obvious motive to undertake an operation against its allies in an effort to drag U.S.-led NATO into a larger war.  Over the last three years, the Ukrainian military appears to have been involved in several attacks on NATO interests — including the sabotage of Nord Stream pipelines supplying Russian energy to Germany and the more recent attack on pipeline networks supplying oil from Russia to Hungary and Slovakia — as part of an overall strategy to separate Russia from European Union economic partners.

At the same time, it is entirely logical for Russia to flood the information space with allegations of a looming “false flag” attack while carrying out an actual attack of its own.  If something were to occur in Poland, Romania, or Moldova in the next few days, both Russia and NATO will accuse the other of spreading disinformation.  These competing “narratives” ensure that confusion will reign — ratcheting up the prospect of retaliatory attacks and perilous escalation.

I do not like where this is heading.  The issue of U.S.-NATO support for the Kyiv government in its fight against the Russian Federation has divided American conservatives.  Some Americans view Russia with such hostility that they almost appear eager for a direct U.S.-Russia confrontation.  I believe that such a conflict has the potential to kill millions of people and put us on the path toward long-term global instability.

Those who rush to defend Ukraine’s territorial borders routinely ignore that the eastern territories in dispute belong mainly to Russian-speaking peoples who have repeatedly allied with the Russian Federation.  When NATO and Kyiv deny people the natural right to determine their own future in the name of Ukraine’s national “self-determination,” I find the argument for war ludicrous.

This has always been a civil war involving historically Russian areas, and bloodshed began only after Obama’s State Department and European Union emissaries decided to expand NATO’s territorial grip right up to Russia’s doorstep by sacrificing Ukraine in a proxy war.  Of all the reasons that U.S. and European politicians provide for the necessity of defending Ukraine, the idea that Russia’s invasion was entirely “unprovoked” is most laughable.

Ukraine is not a member of NATO.  Ukraine has directly attacked property belonging to NATO nations.  Nonetheless, NATO appears ready to protect a country that has attacked its members and to attack a country that has not.

This has always felt like another expedient “bankers’ war,” meant to put money into the hands of the world’s wealthiest financial institutions while stealing the lives and tax dollars of Western citizens.  Over at The Conservative Treehouse, Sundance framed the issue aptly:

The reason why the EU member states of NATO want escalated war with Russia is financial and economic.  Through policy and ideology, the EU/NATO members have walked themselves into an economic dead end.  They are out of assets to leverage.  The only way out for the EU/NATO leadership is to create a war to erase debt, expand assets and reset the economics.

While BlackRock, J.P. Morgan, and other World Economic Forum heavyweights divide up Ukraine’s assets and manage control over the Ukraine Recovery and Reinvestment Bank, international financial interests will turn wartime spending into a money machine.  At the same time, all the self-inflicted economic damage caused by “green” energy regulations and central bank money-printing propping up the expansive European welfare state can be blamed on “Russian aggression.”  Should the whole financial system near collapse, the perfect rationale will exist to implement central bank digital currencies and mandatory digital identities for Western citizens.  Once again, governments will manufacture potentially catastrophic problems in order to justify “solutions” that nobody wanted in the first place.

In this case, however, the problem that NATO governments are creating comes with the certain loss of numerous lives and the inherent risk of cataclysm.  I don’t like this game, and I wish that wiser heads would succeed in preventing this violent calculus from reaching its ever deadlier conclusion.

Right now, however, all signs point to madness.  It looks as if a wider war with Russia will coincide with Antifa’s war against Americans at home.  Prepare accordingly.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

The post Guns of October appeared first on LewRockwell.

If you missed the Secretary of War’s speech, here it is:

Long overdue.

The Democrats’ DEI policy was designed to destroy the military.  Had Hegseth waited any longer, there would have been no institutional base left for a real military.

My concern is whether the assumption or pretense that we have enemies, such as China and Russia, that need “containing” is cover for the neoconservative policy of American Hegemony in the service of Israel. Are we building a capable war-fighting military for our defense or for our hegemony?

In other words, what Secretary of War Hegseth says is true, but is it being done for the right reason?

Neither Russia nor China expresses hostility toward us.  Russia has asked to join NATO.  Russia has been ignoring our provocations and seeking a mutual security agreement, not war.  China just wants to do business. Neither “adversary” is preaching or planning war against us.

Nuclear weapons are an extreme danger to all life, no matter how prepared the military is. A war ready military needs to be accompanied with a war averse foreign policy. 

Neither is Iran an adversary.  Iran is concerned with being painted as an adversary and in that way being set up for an American attack in the service of Greater Israel.  I would have found it reassuring if Hegseth had said something about the US reasserting control over its foreign and war policies.

Too much military strength and too much confidence in it can result in an aggressive foreign policy that leads to war, not to peace.  

Hegseth quoted the Romans, a formidable military power.  It would have been appropriate for him also to quote President Theodore Roosevelt:  “speak softly and carry a big stick.”  We need the soft speech as much as we need the big stick.

Western governments are full of insane people. Former British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace is one of them. Yesterday he said that we have “to make Crimea unviable. We need to choke the life out of Crimea. If it is not habitable or not possible for it to function… I think, if we do that, Putin will suddenly realize he’s got something to lose.”  Does Wallace think that Putin’s response will be to surrender?

Wallace is a good example that a competent military in the hands of fools can be a death warrant.

The post Ending the War on Warriors appeared first on LewRockwell.