Jeff Deist | The Libertarian Institute

War Abroad, War at Home

by Jeff Deist | Aug 21, 2018 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, speaking at a Ron Paul Institute conference this past weekend, predicted US troops would remain in Afghanistan another 50 years — just as they have in Germany and Korea. He also termed the ongoing US-backed campaign in Yemen the "most brutal war on earth," a war western media overwhelming ignore. Colonel Douglas Macgregor at the same conference called Washington DC "the place where good ideas go to die." His years at the Pentagon, coupled with his experience leading US forces into Iraq during the first Gulf War, caused him to question the DC War Party in the most...

Against War in Syria

by Jeff Deist | Apr 13, 2018 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

By the Editors of the Ludwig von Mises Institute: President Donald Trump has announced that he plans new missile strikes against the Syrian regime in response to an alleged chemical attack on Syrian civilians in a rebel-held suburb of Damascus. The US has offered no evidence of the attack, since, as the Financial Times has admitted, confirmation of any such attack could take weeks. Moreover, confirming the attack took place at all is not the same thing as confirming that the Syrian regime was responsible for it. The Trump administration, apparently, has little interest in such...

Peace Is Popular

by Jeff Deist | Jun 30, 2017 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Capitalism is essentially a scheme for peaceful nations. What the incompatibility of war and capitalism really means is that war and high civilization are incompatible. — Ludwig von Mises Peace is popular. That was Ron Paul’s message to our audience in Texas earlier this spring, and it has been his consistent message since first running for Congress in the 1970s. So why do seemingly endless wars remain such a stubborn feature of the American presidency, with the shameful complicity of Congress? Americans who supported Trump did so overwhelmingly because he promised a populist “America First”...

What Nassim Taleb Can Teach Us

by Jeff Deist | May 3, 2017 | Featured Articles, Politics

Nassim Nicholas Taleb does not suffer fools gladly. Author of several books including The Black Swan and Antifragile, Taleb is known for his incendiary personality almost as much as his brilliant work in probability theory. Readers of his very active Medium page will experience a formidable mind with no patience for trendy groupthink, a mind that takes special pleasure in lambasting elites with no “skin in the game.” “Skin in the game” is a central (and welcome) tenet of Taleb’s worldview: we increasingly are ruled by an intellectual, political, economic, and cultural elite that does not...

How Taxes Distort Business

by Jeff Deist | Apr 19, 2017 | Economics, Featured Articles

Today is Tax Day in America. When April 15th happens to fall on a weekend, the IRS generously permits us to extend the filing ritual until the following Monday. But since Monday was a holiday in the District of Columbia known (without irony) as Emancipation Day, we all enjoyed an extra bonus day to comply. And for the most part, comply we do: the voluntary compliance rate, defined by the IRS as taxes timely paid as a percentage of taxes owed in aggregate, is nearly 82%. Compare this with Italy, for example, where tax evasion is a national pastime. For a nation born out of tax resistance, we...

RIP Will Grigg

by Jeff Deist | Apr 12, 2017 | Blog

Will Grigg, full name William Norman Grigg, passed away today after a series of hospitalizations. He was much too young to leave us. Will was a dedicated voice for liberty, and a prolific writer and blogger on the subjects of police misconduct and police militarization. An archive of the many articles he wrote for LewRockwell.com is here. He also appeared on our Mises Weekends show discussing the growing police state. Will was a gentle soul but an indomitable spirit. He will be missed. Republished from the Mises Institute.

Steve Bannon Dismisses Austrian Economics

by Jeff Deist | Mar 27, 2017 | Economics, Featured Articles, Libertarianism

Writing in The New York Times Magazine about last week’s stillborn RyanCare bill, Robert Draper recalls a conversation he had with White House strategist Stephen Bannon earlier this year. Bannon, lamenting the ability of both congressional Democrats and Republicans to get things done, contrasts the identity-obsessed progressives with the one-trick pony conservatives: What’s that Dostoyevsky line: Happy families are all the same, but unhappy families are unhappy in their own unique ways?” (He meant Tolstoy.) “I think the Democrats are fundamentally afflicted with the inability to discuss and...

Truman Was Right About the CIA

by Jeff Deist | Mar 8, 2017 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Say what you will about President Harry Truman, but at least he didn't leave the White House a suspiciously rich man. He also actually went home, to Independence Missouri, and moved into a modest house he didn't own. It was the same house belonging to his wife's family where he had lived with Bess (and his mother-in-law!) decades earlier. Flat broke, and unwilling to accept corporate board positions or commercial endorsements, Truman sought a much-needed loan from a local Missouri bank. For several years his sole income was a $113 monthly Army pension, and only the sale of a parcel of land...