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The Pause That Refreshes

by | Dec 24, 2024 |

jwxmas

I will be spending the holidays with my children and grandchildren at an undisclosed bunker location in the inland Rocky Mountain west and off the ‘net until the new year when I will resume blogging at the Institute…

Since I paused Chasing Ghosts and started WarNotes, I have been firing episodes on a weekly cadence debuting every Monday to complete the Fixing Fight Club series assessing how the US and the West can take a knee and change its martial course from the present azimuth to oblivion.

You will not see an episode debut on MON 30 December 2024 but the next WarNotes (Episode 007) will be published MON 6 January 2025.

Chasing Ghosts: An Irregular Warfare Podcast will resume operations in February 2025.

Make sure you get to the range because you will never exceed your highest level of training.

Merry Christmas and Happy Winter Solstice.

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Good Plan Means My Plan

by | Dec 23, 2024 | ,

“All this passionate praise of the supereminence of government action is but a poor disguise for the individual interventionist’s self-deification. The great god State is a great god only because it is expected to do exclusively what the individual advocate of interventionism wants to see achieved. Only that plan is genuine which the individual planner fully approves. All other plans are simply counterfeit. In saying ‘plan’ what the author of a book on the benefits of planning has in mind is, of course, his own plan alone. He does not take into account the possibility that the plan which the government puts into practice may differ from his own plan. The various planners agree only with regard to their rejection of laissez faire, i.e., the individuals’ discretion to choose and to act. They entirely disagree with regard to the choice of the unique plan to be adopted. To every exposure of the manifest and incontestable defects of interventionist policies the champions of interventionism react in the same way. These faults, they say, were the results of spurious interventionism; what we are advocating is good interventionism, not bad interventionism. And, of course, good interventionism is the professor’s own brand.

“Laissez faire means: Let the common man choose and act; do not force him to yield to a dictator.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Who Needs What?

by | Dec 22, 2024 | ,

“[I]t is evident … that the man, who first made himself clothes and built himself a cabin, supplied himself with things which he did not much want, since he had lived without them till then; and why should he not have been able to support in his riper years, the same kind of life, which he had supported from his infancy?”

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Equality

“Under laissez faire, says the planner, it is not those goods which people ‘really’ need that are produced, but those goods from the sale of which the highest returns are expected. It is the objective of planning to direct production toward the satisfaction of the ‘true’ needs. But who is to decide what the ‘true’ needs are?”

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Whose Plan?

by | Dec 21, 2024 | ,

“The alternative is not plan or no plan. The question is whose planning? Should each member of society plan for himself, or should a benevolent government alone plan for them all? The issue is not automatism versus conscious action; it is autonomous action of each individual versus the exclusive action of the government. It is freedom versus government omnipotence.

“Laissez faire does not mean: Let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: Let each individual choose how he wants to cooperate in the social division of labor; let the consumers determine what the entrepreneurs should produce. Planning means: Let the government alone choose and enforce its rulings by the apparatus of coercion and compulsion.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

What Full Liberalism Is Not About

by | Dec 20, 2024 | ,

“Liberalism is a doctrine directed entirely towards the conduct of men in this world. In the last analysis, it has nothing else in view than the advancement of their outward, material welfare and does not concern itself directly with their inner, spiritual and metaphysical needs. It does not promise men happiness and contentment, but only the most abundant possible satisfaction of all those desires that can be satisfied by the things of the outer world.

“Liberalism has often been reproached for this purely external and materialistic attitude toward what is earthly and transitory. The life of man, it is said, does not consist in eating and drinking. There are higher and more important needs than food and drink, shelter and clothing. Even the greatest earthly riches cannot give man happiness; they leave
his inner self, his soul, unsatisfied and empty. The most serious error of liberalism has been that it has had nothing to offer man’s deeper and nobler aspirations.

“But the critics who speak in this vein show only that they have a very imperfect and materialistic conception of these higher and nobler needs. Social policy, with the means that are at its disposal, can make men rich or poor, but it can never succeed in making them happy or in satisfying their inmost yearnings. Here all external expedients fail. All
that social policy can do is to remove the outer causes of pain and suffering; it can further a system that feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, and houses the homeless. Happiness and contentment do not depend on food, clothing, and shelter, but, above all, on what a man cherishes within himself. It is not from a disdain of spiritual goods that liberalism
concerns itself exclusively with man’s material well-being, but from a conviction that what is highest and deepest in man cannot be touched by any outward regulation. It seeks to produce only outer well-being because it knows that inner, spiritual riches cannot come to man from without, but only from within his own heart.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: The Classical Tradition, 1927

 

Greeks Refuse to Purchase Fifty Million Dollar Floating Dumpsters From the US Navy

by | Dec 20, 2024 |

LCS corrosion no serious problem, U.S. Navy and analysts say - al.com

These floating dumpsters cost the American taxpayer 500-600 million per ship.

The US Navy is trying to garage sell these malfunctioning ships to Greece and they are onto the scam. The Greek Defense Minister is smarter than the average bear.

Glad to see that even foreign navies with very tight budgets have the discipline not to take on ineffective and ultimately, fatally flawed surface ships.

“As far as the agreement with the United States is concerned, I am proud of the two military agreements with the United States that bear my signature, as well as the agreements with France and the UAE. The agreements with the United States, ladies and gentlemen, put Alexandroupolis on the map. And this is absolutely essential for national reasons, as you all know, and there is no disputing that.

The United States has honored what was outlined in these agreements, colleagues. Do you know what they did not honor? What is outlined in the Blinken letter. What Secretary of State Blinken wrote to the Prime Minister was not honored by the United States, and I said so plainly. And for this, neither the Greek Government, nor the Greek Prime Minister, nor our country bears any responsibility.

They mentioned LCS and proposed LCS vessels to us without fixing the propulsion system. It would have been absurd to accept them! And, on top of that, with a requirement to pay 50 million for each of them? No. A thousand times no. And you would have made the same decision I did.”

– Nikos Dendias, Defense Minister of Greece during his speech at the Parliament on December 14, 2024

https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2024/12/no-a-thousand-times-no-greek-defense-minister-on-lcs-deal/

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The Welfare-State Paradox

by | Dec 19, 2024 | , ,

“Whether … a system of social security is a good or a bad policy is essentially a political problem. One may try to justify it by declaring that the wage earners lack the insight and the moral strength to provide spontaneously for their own future. But then it is not easy to silence the voices of those who ask whether it is not paradoxical to entrust the nation’s welfare to the decisions of voters whom the law itself considers incapable of managing their own affairs; whether it is not absurd to make those people supreme in the conduct of government who are manifestly in need of a guardian to prevent them from spending their own income foolishly. Is it reasonable to assign to wards the right to elect their guardians? It is no accident that Germany, the country that inaugurated the social security system, was the cradle of both varieties of modern disparagement of democracy, the Marxian as well as the non-Marxian.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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