Blog 36 | The Libertarian Institute

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Why We Need to End the Federal Reserve System

by Jeremy R. Hammond | Nov 11, 2024 | Blog

When I first started learning about how the Federal Reserve system works, I watched an excellent short documentary from the Mises Institute titled Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve, which was released in 1996 (a transcript of the video is available here, or as a PDF file here). That video was also one of my early introductions to the great Ron Paul, whom I also later came to admire for his sensible views on foreign policy. If you have never seen it, I highly encourage you to watch it.

Last month, the Mises Institute released a new 40-minute documentary titled Playing with Fire: Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve, which reiterates the need to end this government-legislated private monopoly over the currency supply, including by taking a look at how the Fed has expanded its own power since the 2008 financial crisis, which was precipitated by the collapse of the housing bubble that the Fed blew up with its inflationary monetary policy.

The new documentary explains the importance of sound money as a medium of exchange and a unit of account and how the central banking system engages in legalized counterfeiting to manipulate people’s borrowing and spending behaviors for the benefit of the few at the expense of everyone else in society.

This system arose from banks issuing paper certificates redeemable for gold deposited in their vaults, where in time the bankers, realizing that only a certain proportion of depositors ever came in to withdraw their money in any given period of time, began lending out paper certificates backed by nothing.

Under the “fractional reserve” monetary system, the Federal Reserve expands the base money supply by monetizing government debt, purchasing Treasury securities with dollars created out of thin air. In other words, the Fed exists to engage in legalized counterfeiting, which of course the government loves because it enables politicians to engage in insane amounts of spending without having to directly tax the public. Instead, the spending is paid for through the “hidden tax” of inflation.

From that monetary base, other banks then further expand the money supply by issuing loans. One misconception is that banks lend depositors’ money, so that if a $1,000 deposit is made, the bank can loan out $900 of it and keep $100 in reserve. Instead, what happens is from that $1,000 deposit, the bank can lend $9,000 created out of thin air while maintaining the legal reserve requirement.

Under this system of legalized counterfeiting, the banks are inherently insolvent, which is why there exists the risk of a “bank run” in which a mass panic causes everyone at once to go try to withdraw their money, but since only a certain proportion of that money actually exists in tangible form, the inherent insolvency is exposed, and bank failure occurs.

The Fed was created in 1913 by an act of government legislature with the stated aim of stabilizing the banking system, but instead it has given us permanent inflation as a feature of the economy and the cycle of booms and busts characterized by illusory economic growth that is really an unsustainable misallocation of resources that is inevitably followed by a market correction known as a recession.

We’re supposed to view the recession as the problem that the Fed will cure by doing what it always does, which is to print more money, creating artificial demand for Treasury securities that pushes interest rates down below where they would otherwise be if determined by the market. Actually, the recession is the cure for the unsustainable boom caused by the Fed’s monetary inflation and manipulation of interest rates, which are a critical price in the economy signaling to investors and entrepreneurs how scarce resources ought to be allocated.

The documentary explains the Austrian theory of the business cycle using the appropriate analogy of the Fed acting as both the fireman arriving on the scene to put the fire out and as the arsonist who started the fire in the first place.

Through its monetary manipulation, the Fed creates winners and losers in the economy. Those who get the new money first at low rates are able to use it to buy up assets before the resulting price increases, while everyone else in society is robbed of their purchasing power, thus effecting an upward transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the politically connected financial elites.

Then, of course, when the banks do get into trouble during times of economic crisis, they get bailed out at the public’s expense. As explained in the video, the profits are privatized while the losses are socialized. The biggest losers are the average American workers and families.

Since the COVID‑19 pandemic, we continue to see the economic devastation and soaring price inflation described by the mainstream media as a consequence of “the pandemic” or “the virus” when in fact it was caused by the government deliberately shutting down the economy and spending trillions of dollars created out of thin air to try to keep things going.

It was the lockdown insanity and the Fed’s monetary inflation that caused the housing affordability crisis that clueless politicians try to blame on the free market, including the claim that it is a failure of the market to produce enough supply of houses, which isn’t true, as I discussed in my October 19 article “Kamala Harris’s Economic Ignorance and the Housing Affordability Crisis”, and as economist Thomas Eddlem demonstrates graphically at The Libertarian Institute in his November 5 article “The Myth of an American Housing Shortage”.

It wasn’t the free market that caused the median sale price for an existing home to soar from $273,342 in 2019 to $414,701 in 2023!

The Mises film also discusses the threat of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), which always brings to my mind the passage from the book of Revelation about how Satan would deceive the world and cause all to “to receive a mark” so that “no one might buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”

As noted in the video, “An increase in the money supply does not benefit society. It benefits some at the expense of others.” And as the great Ron Paul says, if you want to have sound money and a healthy economy, just get rid of the Fed.

To learn more about how the Federal Reserve’s monetary inflation caused the housing bubble that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis, read my short book Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics in the Financial Crisis, which was described by the financial weekly Barron’s as both funny and informative, conveying “more insight into the causes and cures of business cycles than most textbooks”.

Cross-posted from JeremyRHammond.com.

The Shame of Veterans Day

by Bill Buppert | Nov 11, 2024 | Blog

A photograph taken on the morning of March 8, 1906, on the eastern crest of Bud Dajo. (John R. White Papers, Knight Library, University of Oregon)

“Happy Veterans Day and thank you for your service” or “thanks for protecting our freedom.”

The events at Bud Dajo in the Philippines will cure you of that happy salutation.

What! I hear this familiar refrain again and again every November. I am appalled whenever this unthinking salutation is proffered.

I am a retired career Army officer and like USMC General Smedley Butler before me, I find these sentiments to be hogwash.

The only service rendered was to the American political power structure in the dishonorable hands of the Democrats or Republicans; the former, despite their protestations to peace, have gotten America involved in WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam, Haiti [again], Serbia, Syria, Yemen and on and on. Starting with the shameful expropriation of the Mexican territory from 1846-48 to the War of Northern Aggression from 1860-65; the United States went into hyper-colonial overdrive in 1893 in the Hawaiian Islands and has not stopped since. The entire history of American arms on Earth has been a shameful and expansionist enterprise culminating in the first ever post-WWII (the Japanese attack on American territories in the Aleutians during the War to Save Josef Stalin and the minor coastal skirmishes in Oregon by IJN submarine I-25) attack on American state soil in 2001 (9/11 attack). I am frankly astonished at the length of time it took for a substantive attack of any kind to be initiated on American soil with the breadth, ferocity and long sordid history of American mischief and mayhem abroad.

The sheer number of military expeditions the US has embarked on over time is breathtaking. One worthy notes there have been 234 military expeditions from 1798-1993 [and that study dates from 1993]. My readers and listeners may be able to point me to an updated list.

Good Gods, if I were a Martian who landed on Earth ten years ago and found myself attending government schools, to include college, and watching television for any additional cultural education, I would not be aware of any of this. The constant drumbeat emanating from the State is the Orwellian chorus about America making the world safe for freedom and liberty and never using force abroad except in self-defense. The history proves otherwise.

America, next to Rome in the Western world, ranks as one of the world’s most aggressive nation states when one examines the evidence. A country sheltered from the tempestuous and constant warring on the European continent by one ocean and the turbulence in Asia by another ocean yet the US simply cannot mind its own business nor resist the temptation to maim and murder abroad for expansion of political power and control whether for mercantilist or colonial aspirations.

One can even see that the brutality practiced by American soldiers abroad is not recent but a long-standing tradition.

Afghanistan, recently:

“All told, five soldiers were charged with killing civilians in three separate episodes early last year. Soldiers repeatedly described Sergeant Gibbs as devising “scenarios” in which the unit would fake combat situations by detonating grenades or planting weapons near their victims. They said he even supplied “drop weapons” and grenades to make the victims appear armed. Some soldiers took pictures posing with the dead and took body parts as trophies. Sergeant Gibbs is accused of snipping fingers from victims and later using them to intimidate another soldier.

He also pulled a tooth from one man, saying in court that he had “disassociated” the bodies from being human, that taking the fingers and tooth was like removing antlers from a deer.

Sergeant Gibbs said he that was ashamed of taking the body parts, that he was “trying to be hard, a hard individual.” But he insisted that the people he took them from had posed genuine threats to him and his unit.”

Philippines, then:

“Like many of their officers, American troops also showed incredible callousness toward the Philippine civilian population. A man named Clarence Clowe described the situation as follows in a letter he wrote to Senator Hoar. The methods employed by American troops against civilians in an effort to find insurgent “arms and ammunition” include torture, beating, and outright killing.

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At any time I am liable to be called upon to go out and bind and gag helpless prisoners, to strike them in the face, to knock them down when so bound, to bear them away from wife and children, at their very door, who are shrieking pitifully the while, or kneeling and kissing the hands of our officers, imploring mercy from those who seem not to know what it is, and then, with a crowd of soldiers, hold our helpless victim head downward in a tub of water in his own yard, or bind him hand and foot, attaching ropes to head and feet, and then lowering him into the depths of a well of water till life is well-nigh choked out, and the bitterness of a death is tasted, and our poor, gasping victims ask us for the poor boon of being finished off, in mercy to themselves.

All these things have been done at one time or another by US forces, generally in cases of trying to obtain information as to the location of arms and ammunition.

Nor can it be said that there is any general repulsion on the part of the enlisted men to taking part in these doings. I regret to have to say that, on the contrary, the majority of soldiers take a keen delight in them, and rush with joy to the making of this latest development of a Roman holiday.[16]

Another soldier, L. F. Adams, with the Washington regiment, described what he saw after the Battle of Manila on February 4-5, 1899:

In the path of the Washington Regiment and Battery D of the Sixth Artillery there were 1,008 dead niggers, and a great many wounded. We burned all their houses. I don’t know how many men, women, and children the Tennessee boys did kill. They would not take any prisoners.[17]

Similarly, Sergeant Howard McFarland of the 43rd Infantry, wrote to the Fairfield Journal of Maine:

I am now stationed in a small town in charge of twenty-five men, and have a territory of twenty miles to patrol…. At the best, this is a very rich country; and we want it. My way of getting it would be to put a regiment into a skirmish line, and blow every nigger into a nigger heaven. On Thursday, March 29, eighteen of my company killed seventy-five nigger bolo men and ten of the nigger gunners. When we find one that is not dead, we have bayonets.[18]

These methods were condoned by some back at home in the U.S., as exemplified by the statement of a Republican Congressman in 1909:

You never hear of any disturbances in Northern Luzon; and the secret of its pacification is, in my opinion, the secret of pacification of the archipelago. They never rebel in northern Luzon because there isn’t anybody there to rebel. The country was marched over and cleaned in a most resolute manner. The good Lord in heaven only knows the number of Filipinos that were put under ground. Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records; they simply swept the country, and wherever or whenever they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him. The women and children were spared, and may now be noticed in disproportionate numbers in that part of the island.[19]”

And countless incidents small and large in between from the only nation state in the Western world that not only endorses the use of torture but makes it an official means of projecting power abroad.

I have often remarked that cops are the only reason freedom and liberty is and has been in the hazard in America, and unfortunately, the same standard applies for military power abroad.

The only just war is one fought to defend one’s own soil from invasion. There is no other. Every other conflict reeks of statist opportunism and a yen to expand tax jurisdictions and the power to rob others of their wealth and resources. Some may mistake this for a pretense of the Left, this is the government supremacist mindset, right and left. Not only do the progressives and the collectivists in America have a rich history of cheer-leading wars such as WWI and WWII but they also wish to employ military-style violence domestically to achieve their government supremacist dreams.

The notion that foreign wars and entanglements are wrong still emanates from a sparsely populated philosophical quarter that has no majority presence in the academy or the government–media complex. It is a true voice in the wilderness. That voice has one signature message: you cannot thank a veteran for your freedom because they have actively done nothing more than endanger its very existence. In fact, American military power abroad (and increasingly, at home) has made civilians more unsafe than they have ever been. The threat not only emerges from aggrieved victims of American brutality abroad but a government desperate in bad times to ensure that not one dollar of military expenditures is reduced. America is now a national security garrison state. Think about that the next time you take a flight.

Veterans don’t need gratitude but a self-realization on their part that the machine they worked for was never an engine for liberty but a device whose single purpose was aggrandizement of American political power at home and abroad. And that political hammer always extinguishes liberty and never expands it.

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”

– Gandhi

Some Things Never Change

by Sheldon Richman | Nov 11, 2024 | Blog, Justice

“The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.”

–John Philpot Curran, Irish statesman, 1790

Anti-War Blog – Remember

by Kym Robinson | Nov 11, 2024 | Blog

The 11^th of November, specifically at 11AM is a sacred time that has taken on a religious observance among the victorious of World War One. A time to officially remember those who died in that war and the many others since, often with the observation of silence for a minute of more. It is when a nation is supposed to fall silent, stand still and dip it’s head for those who died in the service of King, President, Empire Or Government. It is to remember the millions who died in war that ended ancient dynasties and gave rise to new ones, a war that was supposed to be so terrible that it should have ended all wars. Instead in it’s aftermath we have seen a century plus of conflicts and carnage emerge because of it.

By November 1918, the Russian empire was no more, allowing for the German and Austro-Hungarian attention to switch West and Southwards. Both empires themselves starved and suffering beneath the weight of attrition. By then the United States was now fighting in the war, it was a desperate situation for the Central Powers. Peace was negotiated, and an armistice was reached. After four horrible years, there would be peace.

With days of preliminary negotiations, the Kaiser vacating his throne on 9^th November, the new German Republic signed the Armistice with the Allied representatives in a railway carriage at 5am on the 11^th November.

War makes communication unreliable at the best of times and in an age where new technology was used alongside ancient methods, the word spread both fast and slow.

British Prime Minister released his official communique at 10:20am that day to the people of Great Britain, ““The armistice was signed at five o’clock this morning, and hostilities are to cease on all fronts at 11 a.m. to-day.”

The news reached the front line with a mixed reaction, joy, relief, exhaustion, wariness, disbelief and in some cases anger. Those who had sacrificed and lost close ones felt a need to justify such hardship with total victory, while others were happy that it was all over. Some had matured into adulthood while serving in war, it was all they had known. Others had been mutilated in mind and body that such news could never reach them.

Despite being informed of the Armistice and when hostilities were to end, fighting raged up until that hour. An urgency to claim more ground before the war officially ended led to the needless death of more soldiers. Canadian force at Mons were ordered to fight hard by their General Sir Arthur Currie, who had received the news about the Armistice at 6am that morning. Instead of giving his men a safer uneasy peace for five hours, he sent them into the Hell of war.

Canadian Private George Lawrence Price was the last known Allied casualty of the war, when a German sniper took his life just two minutes before the end of hostilities was to be observed. What was to be gained from his death is only known in the minds of warmongers.

Many others died after the Armistice from the injuries they had been inflicted in the hours, days and weeks prior. The war slowly consuming thousands despite the signatures of ‘great men’ on a piece of paper,

The war was not limited to just Europe, those in Africa and the Middle East slowly ceased hostilities, and navigated the complex nature of colonial rule alongside the emergence of new Nation States, where old enemies suddenly became uneasy comrades against locals and bandits. A tradition that would happen on a greater scale at the end of World War Two, when thousands of Japanese soldiers remained on active duty serving the Allies to preserve colonial possessions at the expense of independent movements and the promises they had received. Such is imperialism.

The lesson the Great War is that it never should have happened, the death of an imperial regent led to the mass murder of millions. An event of hubris and arrogant ignorance which led to vile men pushing their hands across the map, ignoring terrain, modern warfare or the well-being of those involved. It was a war that began with Statesmen and Regents signatures and just as magically it ended with inked names on paper.

It is a war that in its final moments of death led to the birth of the deadly infections of Bolshevism, Fascism, Hitlerism, variations of national Communism and the ‘Spanish Flu’. It would be the cause of World War Two, the realities of the ongoing wars in the Middle East, much of Africa and Asia since. Genocides occurred during, and many others would happen afterwards. It was a war that did not end on 11-11-11-18. With names like Sykes-Picout, Balfour and so on tainting the future of the world, to the point that we would see the fingerprints of such signatures in murder armies such as ISIS.

Inside the nations that identify as “free” the end of the war reigned in greater surveillance powers, more taxation, a debt economy to be paid for by each generation thereafter, collectivised prohibitions, censorship, aerial policing that culminated into dropping bombs from aircraft onto civilians and an exceptionalism based on the notion that variations of democracy as the victor in the Great War thus should be worshipped as the most moral ideology.

Many died, suffered and experienced tremendous loss due to the Great War. A miserable mark in human history that has gone on to leave other moments and periods of horror. Lest we not forget those who died. But also the legacy of the war itself and each war after. Young men volunteered or were press ganged to serve, enslaved and eager to go fight across the world. Millions died, not all of them soldiers or men. It was a war that claimed many civilians as well. Lest we not forget them. In that moment of symbolic remembrance, don’t forget the history that spiralled from the assassins bullet when it took the Archduke’s life in 1914, by 1918 several millions more had fallen and humanity was worse for it. Lest we Forget.

Rust-Bucket Life Extension for the Win

by Bill Buppert | Nov 8, 2024 | Blog

Ticonderoga Class

Arleigh Burke Class

It seems counterintuitive but keeping old ships commissioned is expensive. Expertise on the hulls ages out and retires, technology moves on and maintenance demands increase and don’t decrease. These life extensions are random and sometimes informed by rational calculations but these are large and cumbersome bureaucracies for which pencil whipping is key. The B52 fleet, the last one rolled off the factory floor in 1962 is destined to be in service until 2060 due to its potential replacements in the B1B, F117 and the B2 bombers are being (or have been) retired well before that time.

Shipbuilding capacity in America and the west has been in the hazard for half a century and nothing will make it better without a herculean effect. Nuclear shipbuilding is in even worse shape.

The US Navy surface fleet is certainly at the bottom tier of first world navies now.

Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro announced on October 31 that the Department of the Navy plans to operate 12 Arleigh Burke class (DDG 51) Flight I Destroyers beyond their 35-year expected service life.

The decision, based upon a hull-by-hull evaluation of ship material condition, combat capability, technical feasibility and lifecycle maintenance requirements, will result in an additional 48 ship-years of cumulative ship service life in the 2028 to 2035 time-frame. The Navy has proposed DDG service life extension funding in the FY26 budget request, and will update the shipbuilding plan accordingly.

…

The Department of the Navy plans to operate three Ticonderoga-class (CG 47) cruisers beyond their expected service life: USS Gettysburg (CG 64), USS Chosin (CG 65), and USS Cape St. George (CG 71). This decision adds 10 years of cumulative ship service life from fiscal year 2026 to 2029

https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/Press-Releases/display-pressreleases/Article/3952231/secnav-announces-service-life-extensions-for-12-destroyers-to-keep-more-ready-p/

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My esteemed colleague Kim sent me a great video on how poor discipline and training can lead to multi-million dollar accidents and injury:

My Substack

Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me

Censorship Down Under

by Kym Robinson | Nov 7, 2024 | Blog

The Australian parliament pushes through a bill that will now control access to social media. Like most censorship and prohibition acts it is done under the guise of child protection, the fear mongering used has been constant. Children can be groomed, manipulated and infected with information and contacted by predators if only not for these measures. We are told, again.

What does it likely mean?

Given that social media will now be banned by anyone under the age of sixteen, it will require a proof of ID to access. The digital ID that has been avoided and rejected by most people is now a closer reality. Soon digital ID will be needed not just to access and use social media and online platforms and services but could be made a requirement across for banking, entitlement services, medical treatment, registration, licensing and employment. The State has control with its regulation and monopoly powers to lean into the service providers with its power to ensure that they comply.

It means that people will be unable to use anon accounts, and have to be themselves which has repercussions for employment. Those working government or corporate jobs can’t say or share things online for fear of punishment. This is why a lot of people divorce their online avatar from their real self. Not all are trolls hiding behind a digital mask to shitpost. This can include non-traditional social media platforms such as fetish, gaming and political outlets where anonymity is preferred. Digital ID also makes finding personal information such as place of employment and address easier to access for stalkers, given the States track record with the retention of such information in the past.

What is Social Media?

We think of Facebook, X(Twitter) and Snapchat along with the much hated by governments TikTok as social media platforms but this can include online forums, YouTube or any platform where there is a comment section, that has an interaction interface. Not to mention messaging apps that allows for the creation of groups such as encrypted ones like Signal, Telegram and Whatsapp.

TikTok has constantly come under attack because of it’s association with Andrew Tates rise to fame among young males, to the allegations that it is controlled by the Chinese government but the reality is that it’s used to get information out from conflict zones like Palestine without fear censorship. It also does not allow for the US government or its allies to access user data. While other social media platforms have to comply with the US and other governments to give up their information and privacy, TikTok is not controlled by such, just yet.

The same goes for encrypted messaging services. Which is why the owner and founder of Telegram has been a man of interest, foreign governments have threatened and imprisoned him in an attempt to force him to give them access to the platform. Why would they want to do that?

Naturally the naive think of criminal networks or even terrorists would be the main focus of such government surveillance but consistently the focus is on journalists, whistle blowers and human rights activists. And foreign users. Telegram for example has been used by those reporting on the Russia-Ukraine war giving raw and uncensored access in dedicated channels, both combatant nations want to stop this. Telegram has also been used by dissident groups inside of repressive regimes to keep information and news flowing in and out. While also used by journalists for information dumps.

The same goes for the other encrypted chats. Not to mention the fact that individuals may like to have intimate and private conversations between themselves without pervert spying. Spying which has been used to blackmail and abuse those messaging in the past for no other reason other than they were having a conversation with a lover or lovers that did not need to be public knowledge.

What is misinformation?

There is a lot of bunk online, always has been and always will be. Heck there is a lot of junk in magazines, books, on television and coming from peoples mouths. That’s something we have learned to navigate. The concern is that any information that is not APPROVED or controlled can no longer be shared or expressed. This information may be very factual and come from credible sources but it it is contrary to the State or a regimes ambitions then it is to be banned. Anything that challenges the control and influence of legacy mainstream media or the government has and is to be labelled as mis-dis information or harmful speech.

Both traditional forms of media are waning and have been avoided for some time. People have lost trust in them and look to alternatives whether they happen to be long form podcasts, journalists directly expressing information via social media or the many other independent news groups online. Many times those sources can be wrong and found to spread disinformation, they lose their reputation and need to work hard to regain trust. That is how a free market on information works. BUT legacy media outlets and the State have also been found to lie and spread nonfactual information that has been proven to be false. When they have the monopoly on authority there is no need for them to concern themselves with reputation or the notion of credible ethics because alternatives are banned.

The new Australian law makes it possible to go back and look at a person or organisations previous posts to punish them. This may include anything that challenges foreign policy, prosecutions against whistle blowers, handling of the COVID pandemic, or any conversations that may challenge the approved narrative in that time. This would include the sharing of Wikileaks and the many cables that exposes government and corporate evils which harm millions the world over.

Ultimately public servants in a government department will determine what a fact is. They will determine for you what information you are allowed to know and what you should be allowed to know. These public servants will also determine what opinion you are allowed to express and hear. The public servants will determine what information suits any given reigning political regime, meaning it has the potential to change at the whim of each and every election. It can also influence the public outcries of corruption that leads to Royal Commissions, or potentially what the findings are of such a Commission itself is.

It can punish academics, intellectuals, medical practitioners and scientists from having public debates and discussions which are crucial for the progress of each field. Limiting the conversation to echo chambers of elitism and removing the inclusion of such conversations from online platforms. Not to mention it will go after political and philosophical dissent, any one who does not have a homogenised world view. The believers of democracy boast that government is supposed to represent the people and be an extension of the mobs will, rather than determining what the public can think. This includes religion itself as that will suffer under such measures.

Many public servants especially those who aspire to such positions have a tendency of not understanding nuance, humour or the ability to see outside of their own self interested perspective. These are the experts who will be reviewing and disseminating what is allowed. The legacy and State media are exempt from punishment along with approved officials. This creates an information hierarchy determined by the State. The irony is that this Bill was pushed because legacy media outlets themselves spread misinformation themselves without fact checking.

Whose kids?

Even if this all remains specifically isolated to prohibiting anyone under the age of sixteen from using online services and platforms, why is it that the State can assume it has these parental powers? How is it that the State constantly can determine the rights of parents and what their kids can and can’t do. It is another example of the human ownership that government assumes over those who are born and live inside the borders of its taxation zone. There will be many who welcome this step with the belief that children are already drowning in screens and this will be a means of getting them outside and away from the digital predators or distracting influences of non-approved media.

Is that not for the parents and family to have this influence and to set those parameters?

Is it not enough that main stream television, print media and the radio are all heavily regulated by what can and can’t be expressed. Is it that those realms will now need to be more child friendly and inoffensive in their challenge of approved narratives or with the concern of triggering the most sensitive? Just as concerning is that the internet allows us to directly read Bills, studies, findings and reports without it being digested and ‘broken down’. Rather observe debates and challenges to dogma and doctrines that assume to influence and control us all?

Let’s not forget that the justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was based on lies, all since admitted. This has been the cast with other past wars such as the US-Vietnam war. The legacy media and State outlets went along with the narrative and snuffed alternatives out through the control of the informationspace. Now we have the opposite where the common person can witness through their screens an ongoing genocide in visceral clarity and can challenge the narratives, to the point that legacy and State media react by switching on how they report as a response to the widespread disdain for what is occurring. The awareness of what was occurring coming about because of access to many forms of media which granted an accurate depiction of events. Rather than a one sided version.

Censorship has been an obsession to curtail free expression using all forms of slurs ranging from hate speech, to dis-misinformation. We all should have the right to chose what we wish to hear or see and not hear and see. Even if the most obscene extent of potential for these laws are attained, government mercenaries will enforce them regardless, the market and those with a dissident spirit will find a way to defy. But for the mob who don’t challenge or seek alternatives they will be drunk in the miasma of lies that the government feeds them. The sad truth is in the many who wish to trample the flower of speech that pushes through the pavement of the dreary, rather than to appreciate it for what it is. But the spirit of truth will push through, shame on those who continue to poison it with the pesticide of lies and oppression.

Right Diagnosis, Wrong Prescription

by Sheldon Richman | Nov 7, 2024 | Blog, Economics

The populist Sanders-left (which is actually broader because it includes Tucker Carlson and others called rightists) is partly correct and partly incorrect about what happened to the Democrats last Tuesday.

They say correctly that the Democrats failed because they have taken non-elites for granted, patronizing and subsidizing some (minorities, for example) and disparaging and penalizing others (regular bourgeois working Americans of both sexes and all skin tones and ethnicities). This is usually stated as “The Democrats have betrayed the working class.”

This is good as far as it goes, but it goes not far enough. The elites have taken some Americans for granted. Meanwhile, a large swath of Americans, especially those between the coasts, have been treated like outhouse-using country bumpkins if not outright racists and patriarchists. Remember Obama’s sneering reference to people who in troubled times seek refuge in their guns and bibles?

It was only a matter of time before an officer-seeker would voice the concerns of the disparaged. It happened in 2016 and again this week. Enough of those people struck back on Tuesday, benefitting Trump and humiliating Harris. People will take only so much abuse or condescension before shouting, “Cut it out!”

Where the Sandersnistas go wrong is in prescribing a warmed-up Marxism. Not full-out nationalization of the means of production, mind you, but heavy government interference with everyone’s market relations: a minimum wage, rent control, price ceilings, usury laws, tariffs, product regulation, immigration barriers, etc. They think this is what the “working class” needs. (Ironically, government control of nominally private enterprise is an essential feature of fascism.)

But no, intervention is not the answer, though class bigotry blinds the Sandersnistas to that fact. The same could be said for the MAGA architects. These measures have long harmed people, especially the intended beneficiaries, and they will do so in the future. But you have to know something about economics to understand that. They don’t.

The first thing the “working class” needs to do is reject the Marxian notion of an inherent class conflict between business and employees. The market economy—the profit-and-loss system void of government regulation and subsidy—is good for all because, as Ludwig Mises spent his life teaching, we all have a deep harmony of interest in freedom, social cooperation, and rising living standards. Surface disputes are insignificant compared to that deeper compatibility.

The industrious “class”—all contributors to the creation of wealth (which excludes politicians and bureaucrats)—should reject the “left” and the “right.”

Bang for your Buck: Fraud, Waste and Abuse as a Lifestyle Choice

by Bill Buppert | Nov 7, 2024 | Blog

I don’t agree with everything he says and he gets technical details wrong like “…these destroyer class ships, probably doing the same thing the submarine does.” No, but that’s OK.

One thing that is always missed here is the tax cascade of these purchases where the developers and buyers are paying taxes at every level making this a self-licking ice cream cone.

It’s much worse than you think.

Is national bankruptcy the sole solution to stop the malpractice and fiscal bleeding.

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