I’m interviewed by Israeli News Live on US foreign policy in the Middle East and the perils of interventionism.

. . . to portray black athletes as dim-witted, mumbling fools?  Or to mock the brilliant comedian Chris Rock? Well yes, apparently, if you are a commie pinko Leftist like Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel.   Perhaps Megyn Kelly was thinking of Fallon and Kimmel when she said on her television show recently that it was “OK” for white people to dress up in black face on Halloween (for which she was promptly fired).  It’s OK for SOME white people, Megyn, SOME white people.

Immigration can have many, many effects, and I wish to comment on a single one of these possible effects: effect on wages. There was a large wave of immigration between 1890 and 1910 in America. In the raw data, not attempting any complex model to hold all things equal, wage rates didn’t fall. They actually rose. Of course, one can always argue that they would have risen even more had not the immigrants arrived. However, if we cannot see a negative effect in the raw data and we actually see the opposite, a rise, it’s unlikely that some omitted factor is going to reverse this.

The crude model saying that wages will fall assumes that the immigrants compete with existing workers in competing for a fixed number of jobs. However, according to the economics of Jean-Baptiste Say, admired by the Austrian school, supply creates its own demand. If there are a million new immigrants, they will expand the work force, expand the hours worked and produce more goods which gives them the buying power to buy the goods they want. The whole economy gets bigger, and there is no necessary reduction in the wages of existing workers. Think of 100,000 new immigrants who create a new city away from the existing ones. They need not drive down wages of existing workers elsewhere. If there’s plenty of land, they may not even raise land and rent prices. If these immigrants form a set of concentrated enclaves within existing communities, their new supply will create demand for what they’re producing. It’s not much different from what happens as population grows and native newcomers enter the economy.

Granted, there are many complications such as short-run vs. long-run adjustments, local instances of wages being under pressure, and pressure on public facilities, but the big picture is that in a free market economy, which I’m assuming, markets will operate to absorb new labor supply because there will be new jobs to create the new supply that they will demand. This process is facilitated if new arrivals have sponsors here who have already scouted the possibilities of jobs and can house the arrivals for awhile.

Some may argue that markets do not adjust instantaneously. New people have to be absorbed, and this takes some time. Surely, if 7 million new people arrived in Chicago from overseas, rents would rise. But this would cause new supply to be built and existing housing to accommodate more people. If new supply were not feasible or bad government regulations precluded it, the arrivals would be induced to move elsewhere. Market prices induce adjustments that mitigate short-term impacts.

The main worry about immigrants seems today to be mainly a cultural one, not an economic one, and that includes the worry that their voting patterns and preferences won’t be like the pre-existing ones. Voters in the existing population can already swing to new positions and support new kinds of politicians. Even before considering immigrants, the question is whether all people should have the power to vote, even among non-immigrants.

Another very real worry is that the government admission process is ineffective in filtering out criminals, bad apples, no-goods and terrorists.

As far as voting goes, the American system of federal government is already light-years away from being a real republic. Congress does not represent the people; a single Congressman who stands in the place of 800,000 constituents cannot possibly re-present their views, i.e., distill them and speak for them in a body that’s supposed to coordinate the views of 325 million people. Consequently, we have a government that most people distrust and rightfully so. The danger is that new immigrants concentrated in particular regions will come under the sway of politicians and philosophies that accelerate the existing destruction of the values and culture that made the country great in the first place.

These very real concerns aside, my main point is that the economic concerns about immigrants, the populist and nativist concerns, shouldn’t be exaggerated. That’s what economic theory suggests to me, at any rate. And some common sense immigration actions, such as sponsorship, can mitigate the economic impacts.

. . . when their professor, Christine Ballsy Fraud, returned from D.C. to the classroom and lectured in her normal, 53-year-old woman voice instead of that frightened five-year-old-girl’s voice that she acted out before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing a few weeks ago.  I also wonder if, when she lectures, she also feigns a tick and a head shake that makes it look like she fears someone is about to sneak up behind her and smash her head with a baseball bat.  Like she did at the hearing.

PEW polls Americans. It has a graph for 1958-2017. Trust is now just slightly above its historic low. Only 18 percent say that they trust the government in Washington to do the right thing always (3%) or most of the time (15%).

We are talking about a poll that vaguely measures millions of opinions over 60 years. There’s a huge number of reasons why people register a lack of trust in the U.S. government. I will suggest one big reason: war. Polls taken right after a president gets us into a war always show high approval; but that support evaporates as time passes. In the PEW graph, trust declines from 1964 to 1980, a period covering the unpopular Vietnam War. Trust falls during the Bush I first war in Iraq. Trust falls sharply during the wars started by Bush II. Trust rises during the relatively peaceful years of Reagan and Clinton, their military forays being relatively brief and limited.

I think that big events that indicate disorder cause Americans to lose trust, because they expect the government to provide order. Disorder indicates a government failing at its basic mission. Wars show disorder. Other major events revealing disorder are the assassination of John F. Kennedy followed by other notable assassinations, the inflation accompanying the Vietnam War, the energy crisis of the 70s associated with the inflation, and the attacks on and destruction of the Trade Towers in New York City.

All these events permeated the entire society. They were broad and far-reaching in their effects on Americans.

We are now experiencing a fairly high level of domestic disorder that’s rooted in political rivalries, specifically, opposition to Trump. Under ordinary moderate kinds of opposition to the sitting president and his policies, we might expect trust to rise if the policies renewed order and didn’t bring new disorder. This is not the case now. The opposition of Democrats is not moderate but bitter, resentful and unforgiving; and it includes many Republicans.

.  . . near a business owned by yet another unhinged, hysterically Trump-hating Democrat, this time Robert DeNiro in NYC.  I note that the LMS (Lying Media Scum) are now calling these things “suspicious packages.”  Surely the people who fabricated the lie that a Supreme Court nominee once ran a drug/gang-rape ring when he was 16 would not stoop to a stunt this low, would they?

UPDATE:  This Just In:  LMS now reporting another “suspicious package” near the residence of Joe Biden. The Trump-hating FBI is on the scene to investigate and get to the bottom of this. (Unless of course it was the same Trump-hating FBI, the people who concocted the “Russia investigation,” who planted the “suspicious packages” in the first place).  Will the FBI shoot and kill a “loner” who they claim to be the culprit with no witnesses in another alleged “confrontation”?  Will they then tell us that his computer showed that he frequented “right-wing Web sites”?  Will they immediately bury him at sea, bin Laden style?

Tim R. writes to suggest that we might think of this as a “false frag.”

From manipulating numbers to boost jackpots to bait-and-switch spending on “education.”

Jorge Ramos (net worth: approx. $12 million) loves the poor of Central America.  Just don’t ask him what he’s done to personally help them. Watch Jorge squirm and dodge.

“Liberalism . . . forces no one against his will into the structure of the state.  Whoever wants to emigrate is not held back.  When a part of the people of the state wants to drop out of the union, liberalism does not hinder it from doing so.  Colonies that want to become independent need only do so.”

–Ludwig von Mises, Nation, State, and Economy, p. 39

Forcing a people against their will into the structure of a state is therefore the opposite of liberalism:  tyranny.

I am fully in accord with Stephen Kinsella’s excellent exposition of libertarian property theory. Near the outset, he explains

“As Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues in A Realistic Libertarianism and many other pieces, property rights arise only because of the fundamental fact of scarcity: the fact that in the real world human actors can have conflict over the use of scarce, rivalrous, material goods and means. To permit the peaceful, cooperative, productive, conflict-free use of scarce resources, property rights allocate a unique owner for each and every resource. The rules are simple, common sense, and natural. They are rooted in Lockean homesteading, or original appropriation: whoever has and uses a resource first has a better claim to it than a latecomer.”

I’d like to present a brief argument as to why property rights to unique owners of each and every resource permit their productive use. This argument explains why property rights to unique owners have arisen. It was a matter of survival, I suggest.

Production is making stuff from raw materials, whereas conquest is stealing stuff that others have produced.

Imagine mankind in its early stages. Imagine two tribes. The one tribe P is productive, offering a tempting target of conquest to the other tribe C, which for whatever reasons now looks upon conquest as a better choice than its own productive efforts. C prefers taking to making, conquest to production.

C appears with all its weapons and demands that P give it tribute or join its forces to engage in plunder further afield. The result may or may not be war, but either way, P is the loser. Tribute in things or in the bodies of its men, women and children is not its idea of fun.

P does not confer with C and say “Everything I have is yours,” as the song goes. P automatically puts up some sort of defense. It automatically defends what it conceives to be its property. Why? It doesn’t have available to it the theory of original appropriation or the theory that it has a better claim, not that these would prevail against C anyway. P knows that if its goods are spread over both P and C, and not just over P, that there will be less for themselves than they had. This decrease endangers its survival.

P’s basic idea is “Produce to eat”, whereas C’s basic idea is “Steal to eat”. C’s idea cannot ensure long-run survival. It needs the Ps of this world to produce. Otherwise, it cannot steal. P’s idea is sustainable, but C’s is not.

P’s notion that they own what is in their hands and what they produced, themselves included, is virtually instinctive. Why? It’s because their standard of living, their lives and their very survival are endangered by C’s conquest. Their productivity is endangered as well if their labor is diverted into war-making, which is C’s method.

Taking is not productive, not like making. Anything made can be stolen, which is not productive. To defend against theft is a matter of survival. Sooner or later, the idea will be articulated that property belongs to people who first produce it from resources and resources are the property of those who first appropriate them for some sort of production. Property will at some point be seen as a matter of right. This idea will rest on a foundation that survival is at stake in maintaining what one has made.

Sooner or later, the idea of individual property within groups will arise, as opposed to ownership by the tribe or community or state. This institution will be seen “To permit the peaceful, cooperative, productive, conflict-free use of scarce resources…” That is, experience will accumulate that demonstrates greater production when property belongs to individuals. At some point, even more productive ways will be devised that meld individual ownership with delegated control, as in corporations.

The root of the property institution, the reason for this permitting and its allocating processes, will still be survival.

Today would have been  Ralph Raico’s eighty-second birthday. He was a foremost historian of classical liberalism and a leading libertarian theorist. He was a member of Murray Rothbard’s legendary Circle Bastiat and one of Murray’s closest friends. Ralph was also my friend for thirty-seven years, and his learning, analytical abilities, and devotion to liberty always inspired me. He was also extremely funny and a master of the sarcastic put-down. He once said, responding to a radio interviewer who challenged him “You libertarians criticize the state, but this is a democracy, and the state represents all of us” with “Is that right?” delivered in a mordant tone of voice that was all his own.

Lew references a bombshell revelation, that Carter Page was an FBI spy. I find that this source tells the story in a reasonably clear way.

It’s truly shocking and it’s news we haven’t heard before. Page worked for the FBI to trap a Russian spy. “The same John P Carlin who, together with the FBI counterintelligence unit, conscripted Carter Page as an FBI Under-Cover Employee, gains a guilty plea [against the Russian target], then turns around and six months later accuses Page of being a Russian Spy.”

The reason for this about-face was to make the case for a FISA warrant that allowed the FBI to spy on the Trump campaign. Page was a convenient link. Never expecting this major corruption ever to see the light of day, the FBI people involved simply used Page.

While the preceding is fact, I will now indulge in a theory that presents itself to me. In reading Page’s biography as presented in Wiki, I cannot help wondering if Page was a CIA asset too for a long time. More generally, a reader comments, he could have been an intelligence agent for any one of the numerous such outfits in Washington (17?). He could have been a State Department operative or an NSA operative or Navy intelligence. A lot of his life points in that direction. Look at his education and positions around the time he graduated. He worked “as a researcher for the House Armed Services Committee. He served in the U.S. Navy for five years, including a tour in western Morocco as an intelligence officer for a United Nations peacekeeping mission, and attained the rank of lieutenant. In 1994, he completed a MA degree in National Security Studies at Georgetown University.” He’s intimate with intelligence and national security issues. He goes on to the Council of Foreign Relations and gets an MBA. He gets a job at Merrill Lynch in London and then becomes a vice-president in their Moscow office. I suspect he was recruited to work for U.S. intelligence at that time (2000) because “Page’s work in Moscow was at a subordinate level, and he himself remained largely unknown to decision-makers.” He has a perfect cover. Furthermore, after forming his own investment fund after returning to New York, it engages in no projects. Page becomes known for being critical of U.S. policy toward Russia and supportive of Putin. I cannot help thinking that this is a ruse to gain the confidence of Russians so that he can spy on them. It would also not surprise me if the FBI had no idea of a connection with the CIA. The Russians might well suspect Page of being a CIA or other U.S. intelligence asset and string him along to feed him misleading information.

The above is total spinning of a theory. There has been no revelation, not even a hint of a suggestion of the above link to the CIA, that I know of. We are hearing bizarre news all the time, so why not spin a plausible possibility? I am certain that Carter Page would vigorously deny ever working for the CIA if he read this, and I could not dispute it. I present it mainly to suggest that we do not have the tools of knowledge really to gauge the realities in the world of intelligence operations that now engulfs government. We have to imagine possible scenarios.

As a true man of the Enlightenment, in his parlor at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson had portraits of the persons whom he considered the three greatest men who had ever lived: Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Issac Newton, and John Locke.

There is a vast amount of specialized interdisciplinary academic studies on the origins of modern science, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and their roots in esoteric knowledge and occult traditions with the religious, philosophical and political implications which are largely unknown to the general public. These scholarly works have revolutionized and transformed how we view the history of the past 500 years and the beginnings of the Modern Age to the present.

LRC readers should begin with the magisterial works of Dame Frances Yates, followed by this powerful volume by D.P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella.

Next I recommend these four illuminating books by Stephen McKnight: Sacralizing the Secular: The Renaissance Origins of Modernity; The Modern Age and the Recovery of Ancient Wisdom: A Reconsideration of Historical Consciousness, 1450-1650; The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon’s Thought; and Science, Pseudo-Science, and Utopianism in Early Modern Thought. 

Then consult this controversial work exposing centuries of Neoplatonic-Hermetic intrigue, The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome, by revisionist historian Michael Hoffman.

The essential, authoritative book in understanding how these ideas impacted political revolutions, from the French Revolution in 1789 to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, is Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith.  It was written by James H. Billington, the former Librarian of Congress, and is truly one of the great scholarly works of the 20th Century. Here is an introduction and overview of the book by the author, and here is the book in .pdf format.

Sir Francis Bacon

“The status and reputation of Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) is one of the great puzzles in the history of social thought. What had he actually accomplished to warrant all the accolades? Essentially, he was the metaempiricist, the head coach and cheerleader of fact grubbing, exhorting other people to gather all the facts,” writes Murray N. Rothbard. (audio version).

Bacon Masonry, by George V. Tudhope 

“Francis Bacon’s God,” by Stephen McKnight

Sir Issac Newton

Religious views of Isaac Newton (like Thomas Jefferson, Newton was not a Trinitarian, but essentially an Arian or Unitarian).

(Murray Rothbard’s father David, named him after the great scientist Sir Issac Newton)

John Locke

Liberty and Property: the Levellers and Locke, by Murray Newton Rothbard

“John Locke: Deist or Theologian?”

Finally let us turn to the United States and the ideological or intellectual background to its Founding.

One of the most important books written on the American Revolution in the last century is The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn. (.pdf format) It won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize. Through its focus on the transatlantic influence of republican ideology, Ideological Origins put ideas back at the center of the revolutionary narrative. In doing so, it helped spark an unprecedented burst of scholarship on the intellectual history of the origins of the Revolution that lasted for nearly two decades and whose influence lives on.

One cannot fully study the American Founding and the Founding Fathers without examining the arcane subject of Freemasonry and its substantial impact upon these men and events. The place to begin is CONSPIRACY IN PHILADELPHIA: Origins of the United States Constitution, by Dr. Gary North, followed by Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840, by Steven C. Bullock; Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe, and The Radical Enlightenment – Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans, by Margaret C. Jacob; and The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook, by Niall Ferguson.

Highly recommended is the outstanding volume, Gnostic America: A Reading of Contemporary American Culture & Religion according to Christianity’s Oldest Heresy, by Peter M Burfeind. The author’s acquaintance with the scholarship of Murray N. Rothbard is both very refreshing and commendable.

Election day is fast approaching. Most conservative Christians think it is their civic duty to vote. Voter guides are being distributed at churches and congregations are being urged to “vote right,” meaning, “vote correctly.” What no one says, but everyone means, is “vote Republican.” The 11th commandment, according to most conservative Christians, is “Thou shalt not vote for a Democrat.” Although I am a conservative Christian, I dissent. Why? Because I have actually examined the Republican record. My conclusion? The Republicans are just as evil as the Democrats. Actually, they are worse because they talk about the Constitution, the free market, and limited government while believing nothing of the kind.

So, Mr. Conservative Christian, before you vote Republican on Nov. 6th to keep those evil Democrats out of office or because, God forbid, you actually think the Republicans are going to do something good for a change, then at least read my many articles on the Republican Party before you waste your time.

Opening statement:
The Saudis have been murdering journalists, murdering dissents for decades. They’ve been doing it at a heightened rate for the last two years…The Obama administration was arming the Saudis in order to create the worst humanitarian crisis in Yemen by slaughtering civilians by the thousands and imposing famine conditions on millions. The Trump administration has done the same.

The reason people in Washington suddenly decided they’re angry about Saudi Arabia is because this time their victim is somebody who they ran into in Washington restaurants and who was popular in Washington social circles. That’s the reality. They didn’t care at all when the victims of Saudi Arabia by the hundreds of thousands were people that they didn’t like or care (about). This time they killed one of their friends.

Yes, it is a horrible thing that the Saudis killed that journalist. I keep hearing people talk about how his family must be grieving over his death. Yet, hardly anyone gets upset when the Saudis execute drug dealers or kill people in Yemen. And no one gets upset when the U.S. kills people all over the world via drone, bombs, or bullets. They have grieving families too you know.

Democrats are once again calling for the abolition of the Electoral College. Doing so would be to their advantage during presidential elections. Republicans are generally opposing this scheme. But knowing Republicans as we do, never forget that if abolishing the Electoral College would favor the Republicans in presidential elections, they would be the ones calling for its abolition and Democrats would be the defenders of the Constitution.

By referring to Nimrata Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, as “the next president of the United States” at the Al Smith dinner in NYC.  Because her rhetoric  is even more unhinged and bloodthirsty than even John McCain’s, she is naturally the heartthrob of neocon warmongering imperialists everywhere.

For 25 years in my high school Economics classes we have focused upon the heroic stories of dozens of American entrepreneurs and how they transformed society. Here is an amazing article from The Washington Post, “Sears’s ‘radical’ past: How mail-order catalogues subverted the racial hierarchy of Jim Crow,” which will provide LRC readers with even further historical evidence of how capitalism fosters a more harmonious, pluralistic society based upon free exchange; while statism engenders racial and ethnocultural division, hostility, animosity, and intolerance.

Each year my students view a wonderful six part series of documentary films, The Entrepreneurs: An American Adventure, hosted by Robert Mitchum, which brings a living history into the classroom and creates a visual journey to educate and inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs. (Unfortunately this series is not available online.) In addition we focus upon other innovators and entrepreneurs who dramatically impacted the information and communications industries such as Mary Pickford, Lucille Ball, David Sarnoff, Ted Turner, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

HT to my colleague Ryan C. Underwood for making me aware of this powerful article on Sears.

August 15, 1971 marked the ominous day when economic fascism formally came to the United States. It was for these draconian actions that the bastard Richard Nixon should have been impeached, not the trumped up charges relating to Watergate.

Economist Murray N. Rothbard lays out the prophetic devastating consequences of Nixon’s fascistic policies implemented on that day in breaking the last ties to the gold standard sustaining the American dollar, initiating decades of a destructive fiat paper currency without any backing except the duplicitous promises of politicians regarding the full faith and credit of the US welfare-warfare State. Wage and price controls were also implemented breaking all semblance with a free market pricing system in favor of centralized collectivist management of the economy.

But on that day there were two little known unforeseen consequences that later had significant impact.

A young Texas OB/GYN physician watched in horror Nixon’s speech on television. This prompted his entrance into politics, becoming the most outstanding congressional figure in American history in defense of individual liberty, the Constitution’s rights and safeguards of the people, a non-interventionist foreign policy of prudential diplomacy and the avoidance of divisive conflicts of unconstitutional wars of aggression. His name is Ron Paul.

In another locale in the US, a group of young Colorado citizens also viewed Nixon’s speech. Their determined reaction, spearheaded by one of them, David F. Nolan, led to the formation of the Libertarian Party, which later under the impetus of Murray Rothbard, Ron Paul, and millions of dedicated supporters and acolytes created a vast nation-wide movement for the restoration of freedom, justice, human rights and dignity for the individual, which continues to this day.

This website is also a product of the fall-out and wake of that dark day, and the reaction Nixon let loose upon the world.

Joe Martino’s article today publicizes a very important fact: The Atlantic Council is influencing Facebook’s censorship targets.

Facebook joined up with the Atlantic Council [AC] in May of this year:

“Experts from their [AC’s] Digital Forensic Research Lab will work closely with our [Facebook’s] security, policy and product teams to get Facebook real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world.”

(more…)

Remember Rachel Dolezal, the young white girl who claimed to be black because she had a bit of a suntan and curly brown hair, an African cornrow hairdo, and was employed by a local NAACP organization?  Her gig was up when both of her white parents outed her as a white girl.  She and Elizabeth Warren are ideological soul sisters in that they both repudiate Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous admonition that he hoped his children and grandchildren would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.  Not for Warren and Dolezol. No sir.  Like all other American socialists today they believe that character, behavior, and merit are nothing compared to being associated with one of the Left’s Official Victim Groups.  Warren apparently believes that this is so important that the fact that there may be a one-in-a-million chance that one of her ancesters six, seven, or ten generations ago may have copulated with and American Indian — and not anything she has done in her life — establishes her as a legitimate candidate for the job of president of the United States.