6/22/21 William Hartung on the Pork Barrel Politics Behind America’s H-Bomb Policy

Scott talks to William Hartung about America's nuclear policy and the shocking profit motives that end up determining it. Hartung draws particular attention to land-based ICBMs, which, he explains, aren't nearly as effective, since they're fixed in one place, and for that same reason are especially vulnerable to the possibility of an accidental launch. When a country's government thinks their missile silos are being attacked, they have very little time to decide whether to launch those missiles in a counter-strike before losing the opportunity forever. This is why cutting back on ICBMs is...

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6/22/21 Kalmen Barkin on Israel’s New Coalition Government

Kalmen Barkin is back for an update on Israeli politics. Naftali Bennett has just taken over as Israel's prime minister, following Benjamin Netanyahu's failure to successfully form a coalition government. Bennett, explains Barkin, is quite far on the right, yet he and Netanyahu are bitter rivals—indeed, Barkin says, this whole election was less about specific policy issues than it was about mutual desire to oust Netanyahu. And so the new ruling coalition has elements from both the left and the right, and, for the first time, Arabs. Mainstream Israeli political parties have traditionally...

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Biden’s Buffoonish War on Extremism

Jim Bovard in TAC: 'Extremism' is a meaningless word weaponized by politicians against their enemies. The Biden administration revealed on Tuesday that guys who can’t get laid may be terrorist threats due to “involuntary celibate–violent extremism.” That revelation is part of a new crackdown that identifies legions of potential “domestic terrorists” that the feds can castigate and investigate. But there is no reason to expect Biden administration anti-terrorism and anti-extremism efforts to be less of a farce and menace than similar post-9/11 campaigns. Since the French Revolution,...

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Intro to Rothbard

I don't know. Maybe you're new at this libertarianism stuff and need to read Anatomy of the State; War, Peace and the State; Our Anti-Imperialist Heritage; Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty; and The Case Against the Fed by Murray N. Rothbard

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6/17/21 Ray McGovern: Baby Steps at the Biden-Putin Summit

Scott interviews Ray McGovern about the Biden-Putin summit. It was not exactly a groundbreaking meeting, says McGovern, though Biden and Putin did agree on at least one crucial point: America and Russia must never fight a nuclear war, since the results would be beyond catastrophic. It used to be the case, McGovern explains, that nuclear-armed powers recognized the concept of mutually assured destruction, and for that reason would never have countenanced a nuclear first strike. But the Reagan administration seemed to think that anti-ballistic missile systems could keep the U.S. safe from...

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6/10/21 Ray McGovern on the Biden-Putin Summit

Ray McGovern is back to talk about America's relationship with Russia. President Biden met with Putin recently, McGovern explains, which is good for Biden's stance toward Russia, and, of course, for world peace. War with Russia is sometimes held out as an actual possibility, especially over supposed acts of provocation like Russia's annexation of Crimea or the various cyberattacks of recent months. But since Russia has nuclear weapons, there's simply no world in which we could fight a full scale war—the consequences could be the destruction of the entire human race. Whatever Biden's foreign...

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How America Destroyed the Middle East

How America Destroyed the Middle East

The following is the Introduction to the Libertarian Institute's Executive Director Scott Horton’s new book, Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism. The Middle East, North Africa and South-Central Asia are in chaos. Populations have been riven by sectarian civil war in what remains of the former states of Iraq, Syria, Libya and Mali, across to Afghanistan and down into the Arabian Peninsula. More than a million people have been killed. Tens of millions more have been displaced, resulting in the massive refugee crisis that afflicted Europe in the last decade. This is because the...

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