Voluntary Association and Non-Aggression
Thomas Knapp on doing justice to Donald Trump’s “invasion” claim.
Chris Calton writes about Let There Be Light: The documentary the Army suppressed.
Jacob Hornberger uncovers yet another unconstitutional U.S. government propaganda scheme.
Rod Dreher discusses the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Ryan McMaken on immigration: give the private sector a bigger role in deciding who comes here.
And Robert Wenzel analyzes Day 9 of Paul Krugman’s Masterclass: How to justify hating the rich.
John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute discusses our rights to freedom of speech and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, and the right to talk back to the government, the right to “speak truth to power.”
In a tweet linking to Ben Shapiro, Justin Raimondo says that the reasons why the Libertarian Party isn’t more successful have more to do with Gary Johnson and Bill Weld than John McAfee. Shapiro asked why the LP isn’t more successful, after he linked to a vulgar tweet by former LP Presidential candidate John McAfee.
The truth is that the Libertarian Party just has not been successful (except for little pockets here and there with some LP elected state officials) since it began as an official political party in 1971, because generations of Americans have been brainwashed to believe that statism and government are supreme, freedom not so much.
According to Wikipedia, the 1972 LP Presidential nominee John Hospers received only 3,674 votes, but he did receive one Electoral vote. By 1980, Ed Clark received almost 1 million votes. But it went downhill from there, and then up again. In 1988 Ron Paul received a little more than 400,000 and it remained roughly around that number until Gary Johnson in 2012 with 1.2 million and Johnson in 2016 with 4.4 million. I’m not sure I believe that last number. Bob Barr and Gary Johnson de-libertarianized the Libertarian Party more than anyone could ever dream of doing.
So, the real reason for the LP’s lack of success since it began is the fact that, when there has been an opportunity to bring the principles of the so-called Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights into the federal government in Washington, most people among the masses reject such principles.
Accepting those principles of those founding documents requires dismantling the empire and the warfare state by closing down ALL foreign U.S. military bases overseas and bringing all the U.S. troops back to the U.S. (and ultimately putting them to honest work in the private sector), end all U.S. tax-funded foreign aid and let private Americans and groups donate to foreigners if they want to, and end all U.S. government collusions with foreign regimes (a.k.a. foreign entanglements). Most Americans are ignorant, gullible sheeple and they believe the propaganda of the Washington warmongers. In the early 1970s, despite the truth telling of the Pentagon Papers, the American people still voted for war criminal Nixon by a landslide. Most Americans would not have been able to tell you what the Pentagon Papers actually revealed. They would not have even believed that their own government officials in Washington knew during the 1960s that the Vietnam War could not be won but continued to send troops there to die for no good reason anyway. And in 1990-91 the American people again believed all the propaganda of George H.W. Bush and approved his starting a new war of aggression, now against Iraq, for no good reason.
And accepting the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights also requires dismantling the welfare state, including Social Security, Medicare, and all private property-trespassing laws and policies that the Founders would never have approved of. It would mean repealing all income tax laws, because those involve transactions that are involuntary and intrusions into the privacy and personal lives of the people. It would also means repealing the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and ending that bureaucracy, ending the federal money monopoly and declaring separation of money and State and separation of economy and State. But the sheeple would never stand for all those things, which the Libertarian Party platform has endorsed since the beginning of the Party.
The sheeple are brainwashed to believe that dependence on government and the police state is a given, a fact of life that is inherent in society. No, it is not. And I am sorry if some people are offended by my use of the words, “sheeple” and “brainwashed.” I calls it like I sees it. If the shoe fits….
So that is mostly why the Libertarian Party hasn’t been successful. One other minor reason is the elitists of the mainstream media who look upon libertarians as “tinfoil hat-wearers,” and refuse to cover them as they cover the total clowns of the two major parties, Republicrat and Demopublican. Clowns, corrupt criminals, morons and misfits. THOSE are the ones who get free coverage by the mainstream media elitists. And look who they helped get elected President with such free coverage.
A decorated Navy Seal has been accused of war crimes. You can read the details here. I don’t know whether he is guilty of what the government says he did, but if he is, he was trained mentally and physically by the government to do it. Something more important that is never discussed is the nature of the Iraq War itself. The Iraq War itself was a crime of epic proportions, as I maintained for years. All Navy Seals who went to Iraq are war criminals.
In France, a Muslim refugee was acquitted of rape of a girl based on a difference in “cultural norms,” according to WND. Now, I don’t like linking to an article involving the anti-Islam wacko Robert Spencer (not to be confused with the racist neo-Nazi wacko Richard Spencer, it’s a different “Spencer”). But no one should be acquitted of rape or any other crime of violence, when there is evidence of proof against the accused. No excuses. If you are someone who doesn’t understand that people have a right to not be raped and that it is immoral and criminal to do that, then tough noogies, in my view. Perhaps a good way for girls and women to protect themselves from rape or any violent assault is to exercise their right to keep and bear arms. This is exactly why women are the ones who should be encouraged to be armed, as they are more vulnerable than males.
Dave Lindorff has this exclusive at The Nation of the Pentacon’s massive accounting fraud.
George Neumayr with this article from the American Spectator on why British spooks don’t want Donald Trump to declassify documents pertaining to illicit FBI FISA Spying on Carter Page, et al.
Zero Hedge with an article on Jerome Corsi rejecting Mueller plea deal and planning to sue. (Not sure what to believe anymore regarding Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi, because now there’s conflicting information on this angle.)
And Gareth Porter says that the U.K. and Ecuador conspire to deliver Julian Assange to U.S. authorities. (Talk radio ditto-head conservatives side with Assange now because of DNC-gate, but when they see that Washington fascists want Assange because of the 2010 Bradley Manning Iraq War revelations, the ignorant talk radio ditto-heads will then go back to hating Assange.)
Laurence Vance has this excellent piece on the way the market ought to work.
It looks like WND is now allowing lefty columnists on, either out of fear that a “Fairness Doctrine” for political websites might be implemented, or perhaps just out of kindness. They have a column by Ellen Ratner who comments on the most recent climate change alarmism, and from the Trump administration, of all places.
Like her hysterical fellows in the climate change crowd, Ratner says that the fires in California are the result of climate change, and that global temperatures are rising and that “we are heating up the oceans and the snow on the mountains to a place from which we can’t turn back. We need action now.”
And by that she probably means we need more government interventionism (i.e. more police state), more bureaucracies and new carbon taxes and raising other taxes. Because really the main intention of the climate activists in their propaganda and making the masses hysterical is to further empower the government to suppress progress and innovation and to steal more from the people so that bureaucrats and those tied to government powers can enrich themselves, and that’s basically it.
But a lot of people are brainwashed to believe the “global warming” and climate change hysteria and that it’s “settled science,” and the “97% of climate scientists believe…” and so on.
Many among the masses believe the hysterical propaganda for government expansion in climate change in the same way that many people believed the post-9/11 propaganda.
After 9/11, the vision of planes crashing into buildings and the buildings collapsing was repeated over and over and over and the people believe the mantra that “We were here minding our own business and then Muslim extremists have committed an act of war against us, they hate us for our freedom and they want to kill us all,” etc., etc., etc. Whereas prior to 9/11 there were those who pointed out that in the preceding decades the U.S. government was sending its military over to the Middle East and invading, bombing, occupying foreign lands and murdering hundreds of thousands of innocents especially Muslims and provoking foreigners to retaliate, and so on. Prior to 9/11 those truth tellers were ignored, and after 9/11 they were called “traitors” and “unpatriotic.”
And now when the non-brainwashed climate skeptics bring up actual scientific facts, empirical evidence and common sense, they are called “deniers,” which is an intentional reference to Holocaust denial. But the True Believers — and there are many of them — don’t want to hear facts and truth. And we know that it becomes a fanaticism when the alarmists call for jailing “deniers.”
The hysterical climate change True Believers will probably not want to hear that if the sea levels really are rising and that might cause disasters down the road, there is nothing we humans can do about it. Well, you can build barriers along the coasts, I suppose. But even if we completely stop all industry, close down all manufacturing plants and have no more cars and planes, it still won’t stop the climate from changing or the sea levels from rising, because the main cause of climate change is nature. Climate change has been occurring since the Earth began. There have been ice ages, and times of warming. After an ice age and things warmed up, it was not because humans were affecting things with their industrial smokestacks, SUVs and fossil fuels, because obviously those didn’t exist during those times.
And as I mentioned previously, the “settled science” that the climate change True Believers refer to has mainly been computer models which make very bad predictions for future events or conditions. And if they do use actual scientific data, they have to resort to fraudulent and skewed testing.
But True Believers will believe what they want to believe, based on their blind faith in the powers of governments to fix things, based on emotionalizing issues by seeing poor little polar bears stranded on melting icebergs, really based on years of indoctrination and hysteria now. Actually, these people are the “deniers” of our time. When people say that the “science is settled,” they mean that it is settled by consensus. But there is never a legitimate consensus when scientific inquiry and testing and retesting of data are resisted. Actual science is important.
There probably will be global warming in the long term mainly because the sun is getting hotter and by about 1 billion years from now everything on Earth will be dried up and no life will exist. But for now we should look at global warming as a good thing. There are colder areas of the Earth in which agriculture and vegetation would benefit from more warming. That means an increase in food production. And isn’t that a good thing?
Related: See Murray Rothbard’s Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution.
Jacob Hornberger writes about the Washington Post‘s hypocrisy on Khashoggi and John F. Kennedy.
Walter Block clarifies the non-aggression principle (NAP) regarding “disparaging somebody” based on skin color, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc.
Robert Wenzel asks, Can ideas be blocked? regarding the Google/thought police crowd.
Jeff Deist interviews Lew Rockwell (both of the Mises Institute) on Rockwell’s life’s work. A transcript. If a video is made available, I would like to post it. (Good discussion, although Lew Rockwell stated that he is glad that Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Bureaucrats. Hmm. Who can figure that one out? Oh, well.)
Laurence Vance on what the Republicans could have done while they still had both houses of Congress.
And Shlomo Sand discusses the twisted logic of the Jewish “historic right” to Israel.
George Reisman has 13 illustrations of the benevolence of capitalism. It is a must read, in my view.
It is quite lengthy, but here are some excerpts that caught my eye:
(6) … in a market economy … private ownership of the means of production operates to the benefit of everyone, the nonowners, as well as owners. The nonowners obtain the benefit of the means of production owned by other people. They obtain this benefit as and when they buy the products of those means of production. To get the benefit of General Motors’ factories and their equipment, or the benefit of Exxon’s oil fields, pipelines, and refineries, I do not have to be a stockholder or a bondholder in those firms. I merely have to be in a position to buy an automobile, or gasoline, or whatever, that they produce.
Moreover, thanks to the dynamic, progressive aspect of the uniformity-of-rate-of-profit or rate-of-return principle that I explained a moment ago, the general benefit from privately owned means of production to the nonowners continually increases, as they are enabled to buy ever more and better products at progressively falling real prices. It cannot be stressed too strongly that these progressive gains, and the generally rising living standards that they translate into, vitally depend on the capitalist institutions of private ownership of the means of production, the profit motive, and economic competition, and would not be possible without them. It is these that underlie motivated, effective individual initiative in raising the standard of living.
…
(10 ) … capitalism is in actuality as thoroughly and rationally planned an economic system as it is possible to have. The planning that goes on under capitalism, without hardly ever being recognized as such, is the planning of each individual participant in the economic system. Every individual who thinks about a course of economic activity that would be of benefit to him and how to carry it out is engaged in economic planning. Individuals plan to buy homes, automobiles, appliances, and, indeed, even groceries. They plan what jobs to train for and where to offer and apply the abilities they possess. Business firms plan to introduce new products or discontinue existing products; they plan to change their methods of production or continue to use the methods they presently use; they plan to open branches or close branches; they plan to hire new workers or layoff workers they presently employ; they plan to add to their inventories or reduce their inventories.
…
Ironically … socialism, as Mises has shown, is incapable of rational economic planning. In destroying the price system and its foundations, namely, private ownership of the means of production, the profit motive, and competition, socialism destroys the intellectual division of labor that is essential to rational economic planning. It makes the impossible demand that the planning of the economic system be carried out as an indivisible whole in a single mind that only an omniscient deity could possess.
What socialism represents is so far from rational economic planning that it is actually the prohibition of rational economic planning. In the first instance, by its very nature, it is a prohibition of economic planning by everyone except the dictator and the other members of the central planning board. They are to enjoy a monopoly privilege on planning, in the absurd, virtually insane belief that their brains can achieve the all-seeing, all-knowing capabilities of  omniscient deities. They cannot. Thus, what socialism actually represents is the attempt to substitute the thinking and planning of one man, or at most of a mere handful of men, for the thinking and planning of tens and hundreds of millions, indeed, of billions of men. By its nature, this attempt to make the brains of so few meet the needs of so many has no more prospect of success than would an attempt to make the legs of so few the vehicle for carrying the weight of so many.
But as Dr. Reisman notes at the beginning of the essay, freedom is the essential element in free-market capitalism. So, I will add that besides economic freedom which is necessary to raise the standard of living for all, there also needs to be personal and political freedom as well. The freedom of speech and the Press, freedom of religion, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to due process, and the right to be secure in one’s person, papers, houses and effects are important freedoms for a prosperous as well as free and civilized society.
In the U.S. we seem to be losing more and more of those personal and political freedoms, as well as the economic freedom that existed here prior to World War I and the imposition of the income tax-theft.
In Orwellian China, what they have now is some sort of “Social Credit Score,” in which almost everything the people do is monitored by the government. Their traveling behaviors, the trains they take or their behavior as a pedestrian following or not following the street lights, their social media expressions, and so on.
If they get a score of “untrustworthy,” those people are barred from trains and planes, and are “unable to move even a single step,” as the bureaucrats have stated. So I assume that the people of China are not or will not be able to “vote with their feet,” if they are not physically able to travel out of the country. How will they be able to travel out of such a tyrannical dictatorship hellhole? The former East Germany would shoot people trying to escape. Those trying to leave the former Soviet Union were considered deserters and traitors, according to Wikipedia.
Hmm, not being able to “vote with their feet” to leave tyranny reminds me of the uncapitalistic national socialist Donald Trump, except his restrictions and the government Wall he wants to surround his utopian closed society are presumably to keep people out and prevent foreigners from going to a better place as they attempt to flee tyranny. (But what will future Washington administrations use the Wall for, Donald? Hmmm?)
So, despite whatever capitalistic reforms China has attempted to make in recent years, it seems to want to become more like North Korea, rather than more like the U.S. (I want to say, “the former U.S.,” given how down the totalitarian drain Amerika has gone. Oh, well. We have the college campus craziness with the suppression of dissent from PC idiocy, and the Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes of the world who want to turn America into a socialist utopia, which, if you read the above Reisman article you will understand how such a utopia is literally impossible and historically always failed.)
If Donald Trump really wants to have the U.S. compete with China, he should dismantle all impediments to Americans’ freedom, especially economic freedom, not increase such impediments as he keeps threatening to do. Dump the tariff-taxes, get rid of the unconstitutional bureaucracies whose purpose is mainly to live high off the hog on the wealth those bureaucrats suck away from the workers and producers of society. Just as the area around Washington, D.C. is the wealthiest part of the country (because of all the parasites associated with U.S. government and all the wealth they siphon off the actual producers of America), the bureaucrats in China are also of great wealth.
As far as the increasing Orwellian government surveillance and molestation of the people and their private lives and movements in the U.S., what we need to do is have some sort of private agency, or agencies, to make government bureaucrats, including all lawmakers, law enforcers, judges, and executives like governors and Presidents, report all their activities and submit to 24-7 monitoring by the people, rather than the other way around. We really need to make it very uncomfortable and unprofitable for anyone to be a government official of any kind, which should help to ensure a freer and healthier society.
Antony Mueller has these ten reasons why governments fail.
Thomas Knapp has an article on why Donald Trump won’t sanction Saudi Arabia. Knapp comments on the alleged Saudi assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and refers to 9/11, the mainly Saudi hijackers and the redacted 28 pages from “Congress’s official 9/11 report were finally released to the public – and still ‘friendly’ relations between Washington and Riyadh continued without interruption.” It’s all about oil, weapons sales for the greedy merchants of death, and that all-important U.S. foreign policy.
My view is that, like all Presidents since the JFK assassination, Trump is totally a puppet of the military and CIA who are in complete control of the government (as Jacob Hornberger wrote in this recent post — and note Hornberger’s article on the national security state’s assassination of JFK, today being the 55th year of that terrible time).
Wendy McElroy writes about the modern “victimhood” culture. The #MeToo movement now says Believe All Women — who accuse men of sexual harassment or assault.
But what about those who are falsely accusing a male of something? For example, the Duke lacrosse case. For example, the university of Virginia case, involving the Rolling Stone reporter. Another example, Tawana Brawley. And those are very high profile cases that we know about. There are many others that have occurred that were not as highly publicized.
And was there the possibility that some of Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers were just making it all up? Should we believe Dr. Ford, even though she seemed quite unbelievable?
Is there ever any justice for those who have been the victims of false accusation? What about the McMartins from the McMartin preschool case? That was quite a fiasco. And what about the Fells Acres Day Care case? It was the prosecutors who were guilty of child abuse, in my view, not the accused teachers.
What about “presumption of innocence”? What if some of the loud women activists are themselves one day falsely accused?
People who are proven to be false accusers, including prosecutors who knowingly withhold evidence that would exonerate the accused, should be convicted of such false accusation, and be given even stricter sentences than what the falsely accused victim would have been sentenced to if convicted.
Another aspect of the victimhood culture that Wendy McElroy writes about is that of group identity, in which if someone is a member of a particular racial group then one is already guilty of … something … and if one is a member of another designated racial group then one is a presumed victim. It doesn’t seem to matter what anyone actually does or says, but what someone’s skin color is, or what someone’s sex or ethnic background is, is what matters. So, in my view, the people advocating for this kind of group identity victimhood are the real racists and sexists.
Veronique de Rugy believes in a woman’s right to a free market. End restrictive immigration policies, tariffs, the drug war, and paid leave mandates. And also a lot of deregulation is needed to restore women’s rights and their prosperity.
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