After I finished that book, I reflected on the lessons taught to me in school, such as history and economics. I realized I wasn’t told the entire truth and started on a wider literary journey. Throughout my literary voyage, I aimed to discover why schools distort and hide the facts. My trip included authors such as Walter E. Williams, Milton Freedman, Ludwig von Mises, and many others.
Thomas Sowell is an American political commentator and economist who’s authored books such as Discrimination and Disparities, Basic Economics, Economic Facts and Fallacies, and my personal favorite, Black Rednecks and White Liberals. His books span a range of topics, such as race in America, history, politics, education, and much more.
However, two contrary realities exist concerning how people feel about Thomas Sowell. Conservatives revere his work and are amazed by his intellect. On the other hand, people on the left despise his work and speak ill about him. They revoke his “black card” because he doesn’t fit the mold they’ve shaped for a black man.
Thomas Sowell is a man who is a courageous advocate for the truth and doesn’t care to appease any political party. In this article, I will explain how his work affected my point of view and why his work is essential to my literary journey.
Thomas Sowell awakened me to the truth that I’m not a victim.
For it is not the function of any state, including the United States, to right the sins of the Decalogue, to spread fire and devastation in order to bring freedom around the globe—as we murdered countless Vietnamese in the name of their “freedom.” And, above all, we must realize that nuclear war is a far bigger threat to liberty than Communism. How’s that for libertarian “realism”?
In short, libertarians must realize that just as, for them, liberty must be the highest political end, in the same way, peace and the avoidance of mass murder must be the highest end of foreign policy.
[Philosopher] Eric Mack [in his article “Permissible Defense”] uses a device employed by all too many libertarians—of holding the ideal free-market anarchist system or a limited government as virtually equivalent to the current State-ridden system. Thus, he points out quite correctly that isolationism makes no sense as a principle for a free-market protective agency; he leaps from there to the conclusion that, at least for an anarchist, it cannot be a binding principle for the State either. But for an anarchist, the existing State is not a benign if a bit overly cumbersome surrogate for a free-market protection agency. The State is organized crime, murder, theft, and enslavement incarnate. And even for laissez-faire liberals the existing State should be tarred with the same dire labels.
Isolationism is not a principle for free-market defense agencies because there would be no nation-state and therefore no foreign policy for anyone to worry about. But we live, unfortunately, in a world of nation-states, in which each State has arrogated to itself a monopoly of the use of violence over its assumed territorial area. Therefore, to limit the aggressive use of the State, to limit State violence over innocent people as much as possible, the libertarian, be he an anarchist or a laissez-faire liberal, necessarily arrives at the view that at least each State should confine its operations to that area where it has a monopoly of violence, so that no interstate clashes, or, more importantly, injuries wreaked by State A on the population of State B, will be able to occur. The latter point is particularly important in the days of modern technology when it is virtually impossible for State A to fight State B without gravely injuring or murdering large numbers of civilian innocents on both sides.
Therefore, “isolationism”—the confinement of State violence to its own territory—is an important libertarian precept, whether for an anarchist or not. Limiting government to its own territory is the foreign-policy analogue of the domestic injunction of the laissez-faire liberal that the State not interfere with the lives of its own subjects. And isolationism becomes all the more important in our modern age of advanced technological weaponry.
There is an important philosophical error that Mack makes about free-market defense agencies that is quite relevant to our concerns. He maintains that if A uses B as an innocent shield to aggress against C, it is perfectly legitimate for C to shoot B. The problem here is that Mack forgets about the rights of B. Suppose, after all, that B has hired his own defense agency sworn to defend his life and property, and that, for some empirical reason, the agency can’t get to A; would it not then be perfectly legitimate for B or his agent to shoot C in self-defense? The answer, of course, is yes. The error committed by Mack is to concentrate on one person, C, and to worry about what C’s moral course of action may be, while forgetting about B. On a deeper level, Mack’s error—also engaged in by many others, of course—is to confuse morality and rights, that is, to be concerned about what actions of C may or may not be moral while ignoring what the rights are of the various parties in the given situation. To put it succinctly, it may well be that in the shield situation, it is moral for C to shoot B in order to save his own life; but even though moral, it is also murder, and a violation of B’s rights. This error stems from Mack’s unfortunate view that rights as such all disappear in emergency, “lifeboat” situations.
Thus, the political philosopher should not be concerned with morality per se; he should be concerned with that subset of morality dealing with rights.
Unfortunately, as Douglas Murray wrote, “the growing divide…between what the people want and what a small elite at the top of politics, finance and the media want” are two different things. And yet remodeling society to a tiny minority’s image should be science fiction, not a syndrome of our weakness.
Mozart family on tour: Leopold, Wolfgang, Nannerl; watercolour by Carmontelle, c. 1763
GSTAAD—This is the best news since the Bush-Blair duo saved us from the nuclear holocaust Saddam was about to unleash upon us. Half a million—perhaps even one million—dead Iraqis later, we were, nevertheless, saved with minutes to spare, so we should always believe official sources. Especially when Uncle Sam is involved.
This time the good news is not nuclear but musical. The Mostly Mozart Festival has been canceled by New York’s Lincoln Center after fifty-odd years because of rising disdain for “elitism and exclusivity.” Instead, “the Criminal Queerness Festival,” as it’s called, is geared toward “neurodiverse audiences and the world’s first LGBTQIA mariachi group,” Welcome, Cardi B, Pusha T, and Snoop Dog; so long and goodbye, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
I read that the final two Mostly Mozart concerts were packed, but in today’s low-life, celebrity-driven woke culture, disdain for great music and the miracle that is Mozart needs no excuses. Lincoln Center will probably soon be renamed George Floyd Memorial, or better yet, Black Lives Matter Hall. Art had, once upon a time, a responsibility to make the planet more beautiful. Mozart and thousands of others did just that. Now Damien Hirst and fellow “artists” like Snoop Dog make the planet as ugly as those who own their art or listen to their rap music. Wolfie, as I like to call the greatest of musical miracles, wrote six immortal operas including the Requiem, 41 symphonies, almost fifty concertos, 24 chamber works, and eighteen miscellaneous pieces, but is now replaced by “artists” who include the F-word, the N-word, and the S-word in every single woman-hating, violence-praising sentence of their singularly untalented noise. Bravo, and long live the decision-makers at Lincoln Center, who, incidentally, I have heard from an impeachable source, were all conceived by a chimp with a dose of the clap.
Never mind, as an eternal optimist said in Hiroshima after the blast, “It could get worse.” I know it could, but canceling Mozart for the cesspool that is rap and hip-hop is equivalent to choosing Lizzo over Lily James, or one with moles, boils, and warts over the divine Keira Knightley. And the irony is that no one from the packed house of the last concert dared say a word. That’s because the woke left defines what Americans can think and say nowadays, and no Christians, whites, or conservatives need apply, let alone Mozart fans.
What rankles is that aggressive minorities are imposing their ideology on the rest of us, and no one is doing anything about it. Rule Britannia and flag-waving at the proms should be ruled sacrosanct, as Mozart should have been at Lincoln Center. Unfortunately, as Douglas Murray wrote, “the growing divide…between what the people want and what a small elite at the top of politics, finance and the media want” are two different things. And yet remodeling society to a tiny minority’s image should be science fiction, not a syndrome of our weakness.
Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin describes the F-35 series on its website as the “most advanced fighter jet in the world,” as well as the “most lethal, stealthy and survivable aircraft.”
In other words it is the most expensive piece of junk on the planet…except for the Ford Class aircraft carrier that can’t launch or land planes half the time.
The claim that the CIA used bribes to bury findings supporting a COVID lab leak brings scrutiny of an influential D.C. consulting firm filled with former intelligence officials.
Last week, lawmakers in Congress probing the origins of the coronavirus pandemic revealed that they had heard testimony from a new whistleblower, reportedly “presents as a highly credible senior-level CIA officer,” who claimed that CIA leadership had suppressed an assessment that COVID-19 came from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
According to the whistleblower, six of seven CIA officers researching the outbreak of COVID-19 found evidence to make a “low confidence assessment” of origin from the Wuhan lab. But a senior official allegedly helped muddy the waters and used financial incentives to persuade the officers against the lab assessment, ensuring that the CIA did not blame China.
The lawmakers requested that CIA chief operating officer Andrew Makridis, who coordinated the agency’s response to the pandemic until retiring last year, participate in a voluntary interview with congressional investigators. Makridis, the whistleblower claimed, “played a central role in its formation and eventual conclusion that the CIA was unable to determine” the origins of COVID-19. The congressional letter makes clear that Makridis could soon face a subpoena.
While the source of the virus is still unclear, growing evidence suggests that COVID-19 first emerged at the Wuhan lab and escaped under subpar biosafety standards. Many fear that such a conclusion will further harm U.S. ties to China, and potentially disrupt the $800 billion in trade relations between the two countries.
Makridis, notably, left the CIA to pass through the revolving door into a Washington, D.C. business that monetizes the nexus of U.S.-China relations. He now serves as a senior advisor to Beacon Global Strategies, a firm that helps corporate clients navigate delicate national security concerns, particularly surrounding China.
Beacon Global Strategies, founded by a bipartisan group of officials from the CIA, Defense Department, and House Intelligence Committee, maintains high-level contacts throughout the U.S. government and regularly speaks with national security agencies, information that it uses to help clients understand the geopolitical and regulatory landscape.
Nullification: As explained on page 47 of the TTAC’s 2022 State of the Nullification Movement Report, TTAC’s nullification strategy follows James Madison’s blueprint of non-cooperation to nullify federal acts in practice and effect. For example, on pages 47 through 50, the report discusses the historical success of using a nullification strategy to thwart the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it a federal crime to help an escaped slave. Below are some additional TTAC materials discussing the non-cooperation strategy of nullification.
The current twist in the plan to put globalists in charge of America, under the pretext of saving society from infectious disease, has two tracks—a treaty track and a track to modify international health regulations. Boiled down to their essence, both tracks aim to hand the WHO control over most aspects of Americans’ lives, to be triggered by the WHO allegedly determining that a new pandemic is underway.
Dr. Meryl Nass has taken the lead in warning about the current iteration of the plan, and, on September 1, 2023, she was interviewed by Del Bigtree about it. Nass is the founder of Door to Freedom, and its website has information about the looming threat of WHO control. James Roguski is another voice repeatedly warning about this threat. Both Nass and Roguski post articles about this topic on Substack.
Nass and Roguski have worked heroically, trying to educate Americans about the scheme, and trying to propel Americans to insist that their elected leaders stop it. They’re correct, of course, that it’s much easier to squelch tyranny before it’s put into place under purported “legal” proceedings than to try to roll it back or peel it off afterward. However, modern day Americans aren’t inclined to get ahead of bad things to prevent them. So, this issue likely won’t get Americans’ attention until they’re once again locked in their homes and masked up, this time with mandatory injection squads knocking on their doors, donning uniforms in a lovely shade of WHO light blue. Interestingly, this is nearly the same shade of blue as the masks forced upon the population, to muzzle and dehumanize it.
If the warnings of Nass and Roguski go largely unheeded, as this author expects, and smoke and mirror “legal” proceedings purportedly give the WHO control over Americans, are we all just simply screwed at that point?
No.
I believe the work of another set of heroes—Mike and Michael, or “the Mikes” as they’re sometimes called—will play a pivotal role in what then unfolds.
Mike Maharrey is the National Communications Director of the Tenth Amendment Center (TTAC).
Michael Boldin is the founder and Executive Director of TTAC.
TTAC recently had its 17-year anniversary. Since its inception, it’s been educating the public about the use of strategies, rooted in American history and law, to protect our rights from federal overreach. Those strategies within TTAC’s bailiwick will be what’s needed when we’re informed that we henceforth live in WHO-istan.
Once again boiling things down to their essence, the scheme to give the WHO control over Americans is based upon federal overreach because it will involve the feds attempting to hand such control to the globalists. It will be the feds telling Americans that the WHO is their new master.
Strategies that will keep America red, white and blue—and repel the powder blue.
TTAC’s website discusses measures that will be essential for peacefully resisting the impending attempt to hoist a light blue flag over America. Below is a sampling of some of the information discussed there.
An important factor to keep in mind is that, whilst collectivism is ever-popular with globalists, it kills the free market and man’s sense of enterprise. Therefore, it eventually diminishes the creation of real wealth and prosperity, upon which collectivism feeds. As Maggie Thatcher said, “The problem with socialism is that, eventually, you run out of other people’s money.” For this reason, collectivists eventually (and invariably) kill off the milk cow that feeds them.
In advising those who are considering international diversification, the most common misconception I hear is that, “There’s not really anything you can do. The globalists are taking over the world and that means that there’s nowhere to go to escape them.”
Not so.
Clearly, much of what was at one time known as the “free world” is in a dramatic decline and this is most certainly due, in large part, to globalists. Consequently, those who live in one of the declining countries assume that the world mirrors what exists in the country in which they live.
Many of these people tend to be fatalists and assume that they have no options. However, throughout history, there have always been countries (and empires) that were in the declining stages of their “shelf-life.” But, likewise, there have also always been those countries that were on the rise at the same time.
It’s as perennial as the ebb and flow of the tides. As the tide of prosperity and freedom flows away from one nation’s shore, it flows toward another’s. The objective is to pick those countries that are on the rise, to increase the likelihood of a good future.
An important factor to keep in mind is that, whilst collectivism is ever-popular with globalists, it kills the free market and man’s sense of enterprise. Therefore, it eventually diminishes the creation of real wealth and prosperity, upon which collectivism feeds. As Maggie Thatcher said, “The problem with socialism is that, eventually, you run out of other people’s money.” For this reason, collectivists eventually (and invariably) kill off the milk cow that feeds them. When this happens, they can no longer fund their programmes and the system collapses. This means that they cannot continue to provide entitlements, nor can they afford to enforce their draconian laws. (Think about that.)
It’s also important to keep in mind that wealth is not destroyed; it just changes hands. If it flows out of one country, that means it’s flowing to another. There’s always a balance.
And that would of course be a fine and normal thing for America’s 44th president to do — had America’s 44th president not personally played a massive role in paving the way to the devastation we’re seeing in Libya today.
And that’s exactly what the Obama administration set out to do: pouring weapons into Syria with the goal of effecting regime change, once again on the side of Al Qaeda-linked fighters. Had Russia not intervened in 2015 to prevent Damascus from being toppled, Syria would likely have suffered the same fate as Libya.
The Twitter account of America’s 44th president just casually shared some links to organizations providing relief to the victims of the terrible flooding in Libya, which as of this writing has already killed thousands of people.
And that would of course be a fine and normal thing for America’s 44th president to do — had America’s 44th president not personally played a massive role in paving the way to the devastation we’re seeing in Libya today.
“If you’re looking to help people impacted by the floods in Libya, check out these organizations providing relief,” Obama tweeted.
In 2010 the oil-rich Libya ranked higher on the UN Human Development Index than any other nation in Africa, with much better national infrastructure to protect itself from floods and other natural disasters. Today Libya is a chaotic humanitarian disaster where UN-backed investigators now say literal crimes against humanity have been taking place, including women being forced into sexual slavery.
What changed? If you’re reading this, you probably already know what changed.
In 2011, US, French and British forces helped rebels with extensive links to Al Qaeda kill Libya’s longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi, which immediately plunged the nation into violence, chaos, extremism and instability which persists to this day. It was later revealed that NATO powers knew they were backing murderous Al Qaeda-linked jihadists at the time.
Falsely branded a “humanitarian intervention” designed to prevent alleged plans for genocide and Viagra-fueled mass rapes against peaceful protesters by Gaddafi’s troops, the NATO attack on Libya quickly morphed into a regime change operation which saw Gaddafi brutally lynched in the streets and dying after being stabbed in the anus with a bayonet. Years later in 2016 a UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee found that the narratives used to justify the intervention in Libya were “not supported by the available evidence.”
Daily Bell: Are you denying, then, that we need the state to defend us?
Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Indeed. The state does not defend us; rather, the state aggresses against us and it uses our confiscated property to defend itself. The standard definition of the state is this: the state is an agency characterized by two unique, logically connected features. First, the state is an agency that exercises a territorial monopoly of ultimate decision-making. That is, the state is the ultimate arbiter and judge in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving itself and its agents. There is no appeal above and beyond the state. Second, the state is an agency that exercises a territorial monopoly of taxation. That is, it is an agency that can unilaterally fix the price that its subjects must pay for the state’s service as ultimate judge. Based on this institutional set-up you can safely predict the consequences. First, instead of preventing and resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision-making will cause and provoke conflict in order to settle it to its own advantage. That is, the state does not recognize and protect existing law, but it perverts law through legislation. Contradiction number one: the state is a law-breaking law protector. Second, instead of defending and protecting anyone or anything, a monopolist of taxation will invariably strive to maximize his expenditures on protection and at the same time minimize the actual production of protection. The more money the state can spend and the less it must work for this money, the better off it is. Contradiction number two: the state is an expropriating property protector.
Introduction: Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, born in 1949 in Peine, West Germany, studied philosophy, sociology, economics, history and statistics at the University of the Saarland, in Saarbruecken, the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, in Frankfurt am Main, and at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. He received his doctorate (Philosophy, 1974, under Juergen Habermas) and his “Habilitation” degree (Foundations of Sociology and Economics, 1981) both from the Goethe University in Frankfurt. Dr. Hoppe is the author of eight books – the best known of which is Democracy: The God That Failed – and more than 150 articles in books, scholarly journals and magazines of opinion. As an internationally prominent Austrian School economist and libertarian philosopher, he has lectured all over the world and his writings have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Daily Bell: Please answer these questions as if our readers were not already aware of your fine work and considered opinions. Let’s jump right in. Why is democracy “the God that failed?”
Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: The traditional, pre-modern state-form is that of a (absolute) monarchy. The democratic movement was directed against kings and the classes of hereditary nobles. Monarchy was criticized as being incompatible with the basic principle of the “equality before the law.” It rested on privilege and was unfair and exploitative. Democracy was supposed to be the way out. In opening participation and entry into state-government to everyone on equal terms, so the advocates of democracy claimed, equality before the law would become reality and true freedom would reign. But this is all a big error.
True, under democracy everyone can become king, so to speak, not only a privileged circle of people. Thus, in a democracy no personal privileges exist. However, functional privileges and privileged functions exist. Public officials, if they act in an official capacity, are governed and protected by “public law” and thereby occupy a privileged position vis-à-vis persons acting under the mere authority of “private law.” In particular, public officials are permitted to finance or subsidize their own activities through taxes. That is, they are permitted to engage in, and live off, what in private dealings between private law subjects is prohibited and considered “theft” and “stolen loot.” Thus, privilege and legal discrimination – and the distinction between rulers and subjects – will not disappear under democracy.
Even worse: Under monarchy, the distinction between rulers and ruled is clear. I know, for instance, that I will never become king, and because of that I will tend to resist the king’s attempts to raise taxes. Under democracy, the distinction between rulers and ruled becomes blurred. The illusion can arise “that we all rule ourselves,” and the resistance against increased taxation is accordingly diminished. I might end up on the receiving end: as a tax-recipient rather than a tax-payer, and thus view taxation more favorably.
And moreover: As a hereditary monopolist, a king regards the territory and the people under his rule as his personal property and engages in the monopolistic exploitation of this “property.” Under democracy, monopoly and monopolistic exploitation do not disappear. Rather, what happens is this: instead of a king and a nobility who regard the country as their private property, a temporary and interchangeable caretaker is put in monopolistic charge of the country. The caretaker does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his and his protégés’ advantage. He owns its current use – usufruct – but not its capital stock. This does not eliminate exploitation. To the contrary, it makes exploitation less calculating and carried out with little or no regard to the capital stock. Exploitation becomes shortsighted and capital consumption will be systematically promoted.
Daily Bell: If democracy has failed what would you put in its place? What is the ideal society? Anarcho-capitalism?
Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: I prefer the term “private law society.” In a private law society every individual and institution is subject to one and the same set of laws. No public law granting privileges to specific persons or functions exists in this society. There is only private law (and private property), equally applicable to each and everyone. No one is permitted to acquire property by means other than through original appropriation of previously un-owned things, through production, or through voluntary exchange, and no one possesses a privilege to tax and expropriate. Moreover, no one is permitted to prohibit anyone else from using his property in order to enter any line of production he wishes and compete against whomever he pleases.
Daily Bell: How would law and order be provided in this society? How would your ideal justice system work?
Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: In a private law society the production of law and order – of security – would be undertaken by freely financed individuals and agencies competing for a voluntarily paying (or not-paying) clientele – just as the production of all other goods and services. How this system would work can be best understood in contrast to the workings of the present, all-too-familiar statist system. If one wanted to summarize in one word the decisive difference – and advantage – of a competitive security industry as compared to the current statist practice, it would be: contract.
The state operates in a legal vacuum. There exists no contract between the state and its citizens. It is not contractually fixed, what is actually owned by whom, and what, accordingly, is to be protected. It is not fixed, what service the state is to provide, what is to happen if the state fails in its duty, nor what the price is that the “customer” of such “service” must pay. Rather, the state unilaterally fixes the rules of the game and can change them, per legislation, during the game. Obviously, such behavior is inconceivable for freely financed security providers.
MCViewPoint 
