Blog 38 | The Libertarian Institute

Free Trade Facts Don’t Matter to Democrats or Republicans

by Jeremy R. Hammond | Nov 19, 2024 | Blog

Elon Musk must think it is hilarious that he has been tasked by Donald Trump to head up a new “Department of Government Efficiency”, which bears the acronym of “DOGE”.

Musk, who bought Twitter and changed its name to “X”, once temporarily replaced the familiar Twitter icon of a blue bird with the dog logo of Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that started as a joke and seems to greatly amuse Musk.

The Dogecoin logo is based on a dog meme based on a photo of a Shina Inus (or Shibes), a dog breed from Japan. The cryptocurrency’s name is based on an episode of a puppet show video on YouTube from “Homestar Runner” in which one of the characters misspells dog “d-o-g-e”.

In an article about the DOGE, which Trump tasked Musk to run along with Vivek Ramaswamy, the New York Times criticizes the latter’s suggestion that one easy way to achieve a major cut in government spending would be to fire 75 percent of federal employees. Showing a chart of the data, the Times shoots back that the proportion of the US population working for the federal government is “lower now than when President Reagan was in office.”

Therefore, the Times argues, “overstaffing should not be the first thing on the agenda” of the DOGE.

“If anything,” the Times continues, “the problem may more often be understaffing in key positions: The federal government doesn’t have the people it needs to adequately monitor and vet its enormous streams of payments to defense contractors, hospitals and individuals.”

The Government Had to Bankrupt Spirit Airlines to Save It

by Jeremy R. Hammond | Nov 19, 2024 | Blog

The US government is very good at destroying things on the pretense that its actions are required to save the things destroyed.

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” an unnamed major was famously quoted as saying in 1968 in reference to the indiscriminate bombing of the provincial capital of Bến Tre in southern Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

The government destroys the economy in the name of saving it and harms consumers in the name of protecting them, too.

The New York Times, which is ever in favor of massive government interventionism into the economy, provides an example of the government harming consumers with ostensibly benevolent intent by reporting that Spirit Airlines has filed for bankruptcy.

Paul Krugman: The Dollar Can’t Collapse! Unless…

by Jeremy R. Hammond | Nov 19, 2024 | Blog

In the New York Times, columnist and Nobel-Prize-Winning Keynesian economist Paul Krugman pooh-poohs the idea that the US dollar system could collapse. His reasoning for the strength of the dollar is that it continues to serve as the world’s reserve currency. He writes,

I’ve spent more or less my entire professional career being bombarded with dire warnings that the dollar’s global status was at imminent risk of collapse, and with it American power. Even if such a collapse were likely, it would matter much less than people think; America certainly derives some advantages from what was once called the “exorbitant privilege” of issuing the world’s dominant currency, but they’re not that big.

In any case, predictions of the dollar’s demise generally fail to appreciate the extent to which the dollar’s role is a result of network externalities that no potential rival offers. International banks make payments in dollars because dollar markets are huge, largely because the dollar is used so widely. Importers and exporters write contracts in dollars because everyone else does and hold dollar balances to make those payments. And so on.

In typical Krugman fashion, though, there’s an important caveat. The US dollar certainly could collapse, under certain conditions:

Taking It for Granted

by Sheldon Richman | Nov 19, 2024 | Blog, Economics

“Capitalism, says Marx, unthinkingly repeating the fables of the eulogists of the Middle Ages, has an inevitable tendency to impoverish the workers more and more. The truth is that capitalism has poured a horn of plenty upon the masses of wage earners who frequently did all they could to sabotage the adoption of those innovations which render their life more agreeable. How uneasy an American worker would be if he were forced to live in the style of a medieval lord and to miss the plumbing facilities and the other gadgets he simply takes for granted!” —Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Taliban is Still on the Western Dole

by Bill Buppert | Nov 19, 2024 | Blog

taliban2024

However, the Taliban is the group handing out NGO licenses in Afghanistan. If a Taliban sympathizer asks for an NGO license, they get it. So, many of these groups send money directly to the Taliban or to support the families of suicide bombers.

Legend also said if the United States suspended these weekly payments, we would see signs of the Taliban and other Afghanistan-based terror groups crumbling within a year. The $40 million weekly cash shipments have stabilized the Afghani, making the Taliban’s newly printed currency the world’s best performer, beating the U.S. dollar in September 2023.

It is not like this administration doesn’t know who they’re dealing with. President Joe Biden was a senator and Vice President Kamala Harris was an attorney in the 1990s when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan with an iron fist. During that time, women were stripped of their rights and treated as prisoners, and the Taliban provided safe haven to al-Qaeda in the years leading up to the 9/11 attacks.

https://burchett.house.gov/media/burchett-opinions/rep-tim-burchett-your-tax-dollars-are-going-taliban

The multidimensional crises facing Afghanistan present a dilemma for the international community. An underlying assumption is that the Taliban will remain in power for at least the immediate future, which will require workarounds and tough compromises if the plight of Afghanistan’s people is to be alleviated to any degree. The large-scale influx of humanitarian aid since the end of 2021 has come largely in the form of physical shipments of U.S. dollars, delivered under the coordination of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) to various UN agencies and UN-partnered international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating on the ground. The funds are used to pay staff salaries and procure food and supplies, including covering the costs of imports. As of this year, UN cash shipments remain a critical lifeline for an estimated 23.7 million people at risk in a nation of 41 million. The country’s modest degree of economic stabilization since 2021 is in large part owed to the weekly inflow of these donor funds, which have totaled more than $2.9 billion since the Taliban takeover.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/future-assistance-afghanistan-dilemma#:~:text=With%20respect%20to%20the%20use,of%20the%20financial%20system’s%20revival.

My Substack

Email at cgpodcast@pm.me

The Miracle of Mass Production

by Sheldon Richman | Nov 18, 2024 | Blog, Economics

“The fact that my fellow man wants to acquire shoes as I do, does not make it harder for me to get shoes, but easier.” —Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Against Rubio

by Connor Freeman | Nov 17, 2024 | Blog

Marco Rubio’s foreign policy vision is the antithesis of America First as he advocates for wars and increased military spending in Ukraine, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific. During the 2015/2016 GOP presidential primaries, Rubio was a fervent supporter along with Hillary Clinton, of a no-fly-zone in Syria which could have sparked World War III. “The United States should work with our allies, both Arab and European, to impose a no-fly zone over parts of Syria,” Rubio said.

Rubio has been on the America Last side of every foreign policy issue since he took office, he was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton’s disastrous regime change war in Libya and he opposed Barack Obama’s modest troop withdrawal in Afghanistan after his surge accomplished nothing besides making the Taliban stronger and getting more American soldiers killed.

More recently, Rubio has insisted that Israel should attack Iran “disproportionately” which is a direct call for an all out war with Iran and risks the safety of US troops in the region.

Rubio co-authored an amendment to the 2024 NDAA with Senator Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s former running mate, that would prevent Donald Trump or any future president from exiting the free-riding, war-seeking NATO alliance without Senate approval or an Act of Congress.

Regarding Beijing, he has boasted, “We need a military focused on blowing up Chinese aircraft carriers.”

Moreover, Rubio supports keeping American troops in harm’s way in Iraq indefinitely and even opposed repealing the outdated 2002 AUMF which unconstitutionally authorized the catastrophic Iraq War. Likewise, he backs the open-ended illegal US occupation of roughly a third of Syria, launched by Obama, which Trump attempted to end and finally bring our troops home.

Shame on You, Socialists!

by Sheldon Richman | Nov 17, 2024 | Blog, Economics

American socialists not only pit workers against entrepreneurs; they also pit rich American workers against the poor workers of the rest of the world. Shame on you, socialists!