Baltimore has just exceeded 300 murders for the year so far (An underestimate, since many dead bodies found in the streets riddled with knife  or gunshot wounds are “officially” labeled as “unknown cause of death” by the police).  This is a higher number than New York City, which has fourteen times the population.  The good news, however, is that the city council has just banned plastic bags.  Hopefully, they will follow up with a ban on plastic straws as well.  The citizens are feeling safer already.

I am on RT America with Rick Sanchez:

I am participating on the “Debate” program on Iran’s PressTV about US and UK war crimes. I am happy to have had the chance to toss out one of Tom Woods’ bons mots in the process…

. . . by obeying their demands to discontinue charitable donations to Christian schools and charities that help homeless people, provide Christmas gifts for children in poverty, and summer sports programs for low-income kids held at historically black colleges and universities.

What an odd set of priorities for a corporation that touts itself as a Christian, family-based organization.  Was the whole Chick-fil-A “Christian-not-open-on-Sundays” thing always just a marketing scam that was abandoned as soon as the atheistic Left gave it a little pushback?  It would seem so.

VD says he “used to like” Max Boot, but doesn’t explain why: the reason? They were both among the star neocon supporters of  Bush 43’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While Boot has since atrophied, VD has quietly morphed into a lifelong (!) America Firster. He’s a history buff, even a classical historian, but in this case he’s a walking, talking product of the Ministry of Truth.

Government carries out theft through taxes. It carries out bribery through spending (or wealth redistribution). The bribe recipient is expected to support the government, government taxation and government spending. The spending is expected to influence votes of bribees, garner favorable publicity from recipients and others, and increase campaign contributions of recipients.

To bribe is to “persuade (someone) to act in one’s favor, typically illegally or dishonestly, by a gift of money or other inducement.” This persuasion is precisely what government spending does, among other things. The aimed-at-action in government’s favor includes legitimizing the government, supporting it, voting for particular candidates, and all other ways of otherwise acting on behalf of the government or particular persons in it.

Bribes are offered openly by legislators in office and candidates for office, but their true purposes, their quid pro quos, are concealed beneath the rhetoric of noble causes. Every spending proposal is a bribe, but bribers claim that their spending is urgent, necessary, a gain to society and above all doing good in multiple ways. Government bribery is always sold by the bribers as beneficent, problem-solving and bringing us one step closer to any number of ideals deemed to be all but holy.

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez provide a timely example of bribery. They propose that the government steal and spend $180 billion over the next 10 years: “The Green New Deal for Public Housing Act would commit up to $180 billion over 10 years to upgrading 1.2 million federally owned homes.” It is not difficult to track down who the main recipients of this huge bribe will be.

Similarly, one can find out who is being bribed with funds earmarked for nuclear weapons. According to the Congressional Budget Office, “The U.S. will need to spend $1.2 trillion over the next 30 years to modernize and maintain its nuclear weapons, according to a new government estimate.” That’s $400 billion per 10-year period, which is more than double the Sanders-AOC plan, but of course they and other legislators have many other plans for the funds they plan to steal.

Government spending is driven, not by noble or even worthy causes, but simply by symbiotic relations between the bribers and taxers in Congress and the recipients, the bribees. The U.S. government theft estimated via tax revenues is estimated at $3.3 trillion in fiscal year 2018. The bribery through spending is estimated at $4.11 trillion. The latter, which is spending, is a better estimate of the total theft because it includes debt that can only be repaid by taxes or repudiated.

The government determines the composition of its theft (taxes) and bribes (spending). That is a complex political process to which the bribers and bribees pay great attention, not least because the outcomes have huge money implications. In the libertarian analysis, these outcomes of the political process have no known favorable impact on such constitutionally-stated goals as “a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…” Indeed, the opposite is the case. In other words, these goals would be better achieved without the Constitution than with it. The Constitution is a blueprint for the twin evils of government theft and government bribery: taxation and spending.

Government should be condemned, not celebrated; shrunk and not expanded, destroyed and not spread.

In his powerful semi-autobiographical work, The Betrayal of the Right, Murray N. Rothbard, revealed in chapter 10, “The Postwar Renaissance IV: Swansong of the Old Right,” that:

One of the most sophisticated pieces of right-wing muckraking in this era was undertaken by the Reece Committee of the House to investigate tax-exempt foundations during 1953–54. Staffed by such leading conservatives as attorney René Wormser (brother of Felix E. Wormser, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Interior) and Norman Dodd, the Reece Committee zeroed in on alleged Communist and also liberal and socialist tie-ins with the large foundations: Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, etc. But, furthermore, the Committee attacked the large foundations for invariably sponsoring empirical and quantitatively oriented studies in the social sciences and thus leading these disciplines into a “scientistic” promotion of technocratic and spurious “value-freedom” to the neglect of the qualitative and the ethical. Here, the Reece Committee, following upon the searching critiques of liberal empiricism and scientism leveled by F.A. Hayek, and by the conservative University of Pennsylvania sociologist Albert H. Hobbs, hit an extremely important flaw in the new, postwar social science, but the committee’s insights were buried in an avalanche of vituperation in the Establishment press. The foundations’ man on the committee, obstructing its purposes and in quiet league with the Eisenhower White House, was Rep. Wayne Hays (D., Ohio), a Truman and later a Lyndon Johnson Democrat.

Discover for yourself the continuing importance of the Congressional Investigations of Tax Exempt Foundations, particularly in regards to the capturing of the teaching of American history at the university level as a strategy of the elite foundations in fostering collectivism in the public schools: Tax Exempt Foundations: Hearings – Reece Committee – 1953; Who was Norman Dodd and why what he had to say is still vitally important?

The Eugenics movement drew their greatest enthusiastic support and funding — extensive funding from America’s upper-most philanthropic sources such as from the Carnegie Institute and the Harriman railroad fortune. The Rockefeller Foundation helped develop and fund various German eugenics programs, including the one that Dr. Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz. Cereal magnate J.H. Kellogg provided funding to help found the Race Betterment Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan. They were all in league with some of America’s most respected scientists from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton.

Top tier social scientists, especially economists, gave their full sanction to the Eugenics project. Several feminist reformers advocated an agenda of eugenic legal reform. The National Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the National League of Women Voters were among the variety of state and local feminist organizations that at some point lobbied for eugenic reforms. One of the most prominent feminists to champion the eugenics agenda was Margaret Sanger, the leader of the American birth control movement. Margaret Sanger saw birth control as a means to prevent unwanted children from being born into a disadvantaged life, and incorporated the language of eugenics to advance the movement. Sanger also sought to discourage the reproduction of persons who, it was believed, would pass on mental disease or serious physical defects. The resemblance to the genocidal eugenics programs of the murderous Third Reich is abundantly and clearly evident as documented below.

Michael Burleigh’s books include the best-selling The Third Reich: A New History (Pan Macmillan) which won the 2001 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction; Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide (Cambridge University Press 1997); Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia in Germany 1900-1945 (originally 1994 Pan Macmillan 2002); The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge University Press 1991-); Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (originally 1988 Pan Macmillan 2002); Confronting the Nazi Past (St Martin’s Press 1995) Prussian Society and the German Order (Cambridge University Press 1984). He has also been active in bringing history to television audiences. In 1991 he won the British Film Institute Award for Archival Achievement for the Channel 4/Domino Films documentary above, Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third Reich.

One of Tucker’s best interviews of the year. One thing you have to hand to progressives is that they take the long view. “Free” lunches for poor children are now universal breakfast and lunch. Next is “free” dinner and health care after the school day is extended to 6 PM, then 24/7.

On the desperate Dem tactic to spin rudeness as “sexism” and a high crime and misdemeanor.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe identified correctly the key fault of the classical liberals, which was their acceptance of government as a territorial monopolist of legal force. It was impossible to reconcile liberty and property and their protection with a territorial monopolist of legal force that established the extent of protective services, the kinds of such services, and the taxation to pay for these services. Such a government could not be restrained from exercising its powers against the people it was supposed to protect. Nothing has changed in the incentive structure brought about when a government takes over defense. What was true in 1789 is true today. It is still impossible to expect such a government to deliver the protection of property that the classical liberal imagines its role to be.
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People look around at the civil society surrounding them.

They go online or watch or listen to the daily news.

They are bewildered.

They wonder how things got to be as they are, what’s behind it all?

The documented and authoritative answers have always been there.

But these answers were elusive.

They were often found in obscure hard to locate volumes or publications.

The elite media rarely, if ever, discussed these factual issues.

Many of those media elites were party to what was being perpetrated

(as with the contemporary Russiagate attempted coup against Trump or

the present kangaroo court impeachment process).

But with the birth of the Internet that is no longer the case.

Here are several books, films, and documentaries that lay it all out.

They are audacious, forthright, and shocking in their boldness.

Each one holds nothing back in telling their particular story.

This isn’t “ancient history” but documentation of the roots of the problems

which beset us.

The truth is out there.      (more…)

Physicians starting to move in the opposite direction of the mainstream media in their views of Jeffrey Epstein’s death. This is of course upsetting the media.

A mixed bag but definitely right on the U.S. playing with fire by continually poking Russia via Ukraine.

Who Rules America: Power Elite Analysis, the Deep State, and American History

The American Deep State

Along with the multinational petroleum and weapons/intelligence industries of the military-industrial complex, the global narcotics trade is one the biggest businesses in the world. It is fueled and enabled by the intersection of drug money, intelligence and money laundering on a vast scale by banks and financial institutions. Researchers have connected the dots linking the “underworld” of organized crime (narcotics) to the “upperworld” of the Establishment (Wall Street banks and CFR-connected corporations/foundations/media). Interwoven within the nexus are the covert intelligence agencies.

Coup d’etat and Assassination: Business as Usual in America

A coup d’tat is the sudden, illegal, extra-constitutional overthrow of a government, usually by a small elite group of the existing state establishment, to replace the deposed government with another body; either civil or military. On November 22, 1963, a coup d’etat and brutal assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was initiated by Vice President Lyndon Johnson and the top tier of the National Security State.

The Deep State and the Anti-Trump Coup: The Evolving Four Year Retrospective

“The Elite Is Neat – The Masses Are . . . Asses”

See Dr. David M. Hart’s Schematic on the Pyramid of Political Power: Institutions and Class Structure of the State.

Elitism and the Myth of Pluralism 

We are inundated with fake muckraking. That’s what Russiagate was. That’s what Ukrainegate is. That’s what the impeachment of Trump is.

You wouldn’t know it from CNN, MSNBC and all the rest that Trump is against corruption, not with their constant muckraking.
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“World War II was a transformational event. It offered the United States general government the opportunity to codify the aggressive Lincolnian nationalism prevalent but not triumphant since 1865. The entire United States was affected politically, militarily, diplomatically, and socially.”

I think that historian Brion McClanahan has offered some extremely valuable and prescient commentary on World War II. You may think what he has to say is heresy but that essentially proves his point. Now is this the only historical prism of analysis in evaluating WWII? Of course not. But this is a serious viewpoint that promotes disinterested reflection and critical thinking regarding that virus of nationalism which has infected our body politic since 1945.

And here are two related articles also for your consideration —

Who Really Won World War II?, by Michael E. Kreca

Not Just Japanese Americans: The Untold Story of U.S. Repression During ‘The Good War’, by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel

(Hummel is best known for his outstanding Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War, 2nd Edition, the definitive one volume history of the War Against Southern Independence.

. . . in disguise?  I do see a resemblance.

Dear M:

Re this.

I’m a Trump supporter, vis a vis any of the likely democratic nominees (maybe with the exception of Tulsi? Probably not, although that’s close, for me; she’s the best of a poor lot. Great on foreign policy, horrid on econ).

So, I do disagree with my friend Andrew on this one issue.

But, I don’t apply your very stringent criterion: if you think a libertarian is wrong on one issue, you damn him to hell; you say he’s not a libertarian at all.

I revere Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul. Yet, I disagree with both on abortion. I’m an evictionist, the former is a pro choicer, the latter a pro lifer. If I adopted your policy, I’d damn both to hell, remove them from my list of libertarians.

I continue to think that Napolitano, along with Rothbard and Paul, are all magnificent libertarians, despite that fact that I don’t agree with them 100% on all important issues.

Best regards,

Walter

PS. I’m a big fan of Laurence Vance’s

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Dear R:

If the Martians threaten to blow up our entire planet unless someone kills innocent person Joe, it is murder to do so, but it would not be wrong to murder him, paradoxically, saving all others except for him.

Here are some readings on that:

Block, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2010, 2011

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Dear Ed:

Here are some good intros to Austrian econ:

Callahan, 2004; Gordon, 2000; Hazlitt, 1946; Murphy, 2007, 2010; Rothbard, 1962, 1963, 1969, 1985, 1990; Taylor, 2011

Good luck in your new teaching career.

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To discuss “millennial socialism.”

(Confession: Going through some old family photographs after my mother passed away I ran across one of my maternal grandmother’s brother (my great uncle) who, unlike her, never immigrated to America in the early 20th century.  He remained back on the old country, and in the photo was wearing the uniform of the Red Army, complete with the red star on the cap).

Iconic Canadian hockey commentator eighty-four-year-old Don Cherry, a former Boston Bruins NHL coach, was immediately fired from his lucrative commentating job of 38 years for daring to criticize the behavior of immigrants to Canada.  His criticism on his show, “Hockey Night in Canada,” in hockey-crazy Canada, was based on his assertion that most immigrants seem to have no interest in supporting or participating in Canadian culture, specifically, in spending “a couple of bucks” on a poppy pin on Veterans Day (Canadians pin poppy flowers to their lapels to show their appreciation to veterans on that day).

While I am sympathetic to anyone who resists pressure to worship all things military, at the same time it is a sure bet that if Don Cherry had criticized native-born Canadians for being too poppy pinless, his employer would not have said a word about it, probably even agreeing with him and broadcasting his  opinion as an exemplar of Canadian patriotism.  (It probably didn’t help his cause either that he called global warming hysterics “cuckaloos”).

Writing about the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Conceived in Liberty: The New Republic: 1784-1791, just published by the Mises Institute thanks to Patrick Newman’s  translation of an entire hand-written manuscript, Murray Rothbard wrote (p. 146):

“Particularly important was the decision, now and afterward, to hold the entire convention in strictest secrecy in order to make sure that the public would not know what was going on until the convention presented its conclusions as a fait accompli . . . .  This secrecy rule, proposed by Pierce Butler of South Carolina [no relation to Rhett Butler], was to be demonized by Thomas Jefferson as ‘abominable.'”

There are good young people (young adults), many, many; but there are also too many who are spoiled brats, so to speak. These are the ones whose behavior manifests in demands for safe spaces, no freedom of speech for people they disagree with, antifa brutes, demands for language peculiarities, catering to self-declared gender oddities, anti-white male notions, hiring preferences, payments for being “oppressed”, etc. etc.

These people are spoiled brats. Human beings before them and around them have struggled and are struggling against numerous problems without coming to such unreasonable demands and burdens placed upon others around them. The spoiled brat contingent wants to be babied and coddled. They want to get their way.

Naming the group for what they are, spoiled brats, does not explain the growth of such a class of people. There are such deep reasons as the growth of the government welfare state that has made a shambles of the traditional family in which the father was the boss and survival demanded a degree of coherence and proper behavior of all types that is today a quaint remembrance, if that, in too many families.

Who is responsible for spoiled brats? The adults who raise them, and that includes at today’s schools and universities all the paid help that supposedly teaches them. It includes the weak administrators who find it easier to give in. These people may believe in spoiling kids, who knows? But the fact is that by giving in to insensible demands and caving in they are weak, wavering cowards, lacking in convictions about proper and improper behavior among their charges. The parents are where we look first to see improper child-rearing, but the schools are a huge influence too.

What we see is a form of appeasing ill-behaved and unreasonably-acting young adults and children. They need to have a healthy fear of authority of adults, but they do not. The result can only be to reinforce lack of respect and to produce more and more violent self-centered behavior. Undisciplined young people are the seedbed for monsters, people whose predatory behavior simply grows when they encounter weak people in authority.

There are several ways to discipline these brats, but we actually have politicians who stand for spoiling them and everyone else even more. That’s what massive giveaways concerning health care, college tuition and college debt come down to. Instead of making life easier for brats by government theft, the very opposite is needed. Kick the bums out. Make the courses demanding. Stop watering down admission standards. Take no-nonsense stands in favor of speakers invited to campus and professors who are raising issues the brats do not want to hear. As for antifa, a few of their heads need to be bashed in.