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Republicans Miss the Real Issue Regarding TSA Scanners

Posted by M. C. on April 18, 2022

The real issue here is the existence of the TSA in the first place. The nation’s airports are either owned by local government entities or are privately owned. They are not owned by the federal government. Therefore, the federal government has no more authority to provide airport security than it has to provide security at hotels and convenience stores. 

Republicans Miss the Real Issue Regarding TSA Scanners

by Laurence M. Vance

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is back in the news again, and, as usual, it is not because the agency did something noteworthy.The TSA shouldn’t have more inclusive scanners; it shouldn’t have any scanners at all. The agency should not exist in the first place.
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The TSA was established by the Aviation and Transportation Security Act (S.1447) that was passed by the 107th Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush on November 19, 2001. No Republicans in the Senate voted against the bill, and only nine Republicans in the House (including the heroic Ron Paul) voted no. Originally part of the Department of Transportation (DOT), the TSA was moved to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) when that department was created in 2003. The TSA is headquartered in Springfield, Virginia.

The official mission of the TSA is to “protect the nation’s transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce.” Although this mainly concerns security in airports, the TSA, with industry partners, also “safeguards all four general modes of land-based transportation: mass transit, freight rail, highway motor carrier and pipeline.” The TSA has about 65,000 employees, most of whom are transportation security officers, inspectors, specialists, administrators, or other security professionals. Its approximately $8 billion budget is partially funded by a $5.60 per-passenger fee for each one-way airplane flight originating in the United States. Although airports are allowed to opt-out of TSA screening and hire private companies, those companies must be approved by the TSA and follow TSA procedures.

For years, the TSA has been known for its ineptitude, baggage theft and other criminal activity, inefficiency, waste, sexual harassments and assaults, and abuses of airline passengers. At various times, the TSA has failed to detect explosives, knives, and guns, all the while treating Americans like—in the words of James Bovard—“cattle being chuted to a civil liberties slaughterhouse.”

The latest outrage perpetrated by the TSA is the spending of more than $18.6 million of taxpayer money “to update airport screening protocols and technology to be more inclusive of transgender, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming passengers.” The TSA “hopes the new technology will help reduce the pat-downs and other invasive screen procedures that are required when transgender individuals trigger body scanners ‘in a sensitive area.’”

The TSA issued a press release timed to coincide with the so-called Transgender Day of Visibility (March 31):

On this internationally recognized day for the transgender community, TSA is proud to announce significant initiatives as a direct result of close partnership with community stakeholders,” said TSA Administrator David Pekoske. “Over the coming months, TSA will move swiftly to implement more secure and efficient screening processes that are gender neutral, as well as technological updates that will enhance security and make TSA PreCheck® enrollment more inclusive. These combined efforts will greatly enhance airport security and screening procedures for all.”

“To transgender Americans of all ages, I want you to know that you are so brave,” President Biden said. “You belong. I have your back.”

Republicans charged the president with politicizing the TSA to appease the Democratic Party’s base. This is “outrageous” and “wokeness over national security,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Montana).

Why is it that Republicans only seem to criticize the TSA when the agency or one of its security screeners does something outrageous?

Probably for the same reason that Republicans criticize NPR, but only because it has a liberal bias. Probably for the same reason that Republicans criticize the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), but only when it funds pornographic art. Probably for the same reason that Republicans criticize Medicare, but only for waste, fraud, and abuse. Probably for the same reason that Republicans criticize federal funding of Planned Parenthood, but only because the organization performs abortions. Probably for the same reason that Republicans criticize federal regulations for being excessive, burdensome, or costly, but not because they should not be issued in the first place. And probably for the same reason that Republicans criticize the National Institutes of Health (NIH), but only when it awards grants for ridiculous things like the $33,037 grant to the University of South Florida “to study factors that can increase vaccination among gay men for the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) to prevent them from developing anal cancer.”

The real issue here is the existence of the TSA in the first place. The nation’s airports are either owned by local government entities or are privately owned. They are not owned by the federal government. Therefore, the federal government has no more authority to provide airport security than it has to provide security at hotels and convenience stores. The only security business the federal government should be in is national security. There is no reason why airports and airlines cannot use private screening services, just like many other countries do.

As law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds has well said: “When, as was the case before 9/11, security screeners were contractors employed by airlines, they had every incentive to do a good job: Airlines don’t want their planes hijacked or blown up. And they also had every incentive to be speedy and pleasant: Airlines don’t want to irritate their customers, or to make flying an unpleasant experience in general.”

The TSA shouldn’t have more inclusive scanners; it shouldn’t have any scanners at all. The agency should not exist in the first place.

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Political Upheaval Is Not Threatening “Our Democracy.” Our Democracy Is.

Posted by M. C. on April 17, 2022

what incentive is there to compromise in order to govern more effectively?

Answer, unless you believe politicians are solely guided by pursuit of the public good, rather than with an eye toward their own chances at reelection, none.

https://mises.org/wire/political-upheaval-not-threatening-our-democracy-our-democracy

Joseph Solis-Mullen

Attempting to understand the political polarization and dysfunction that has increasingly come to define American politics in the twenty-first century requires grappling with a host of interconnected phenomena. The gradual transformations undergone by the Republican and Democratic parties, which saw the steady elimination of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, have deep historical roots. For all its apparent complexity, however, our political dysfunction largely stems from a small set of easy-to-understand problems. We must, therefore, resist the popular urge to attribute polarization to specific figures, such as Trump or Obama, and instead look at the structural reasons these figures emerged when they did and into what environment.

History, as Scott Horton says, didn’t start this morning. 

Single-Winner, First-Past-the-Post Districts

The problem is, in part, an inherited one. For all their ingenuity and creativity in crafting an experimental new kind of government, the Founders directly adopted the British system of elections at the district level. This was understandable, there being few if any applicable historical or contemporary examples they could look to for guidance, and this feature of the British electoral model apparently worked fine. And in a parliamentary system, where the effective head of government is the de facto leader of a majority coalition in parliament, the model can and does work fine.

In presidential systems not so much.

This has always been a bug more than a feature. And as the American political scientist Lee Drutman has documented, it is telling that while many governments around the world have amended their electoral rules, switching from single-winner, first-past-the-post districts to split-member proportional districts, none have made the switch from the latter to the former.

Uncompetitive Districts

Due to a combination of geographical sorting and gerrymandering, 94 percent of Congressional districts in the United States are now what political scientists designate as uncompetitive. This means one party enjoys so much local popular support it de facto controls that congressional seat. In these districts, the greatest threat therefore comes from a candidate’s own party—typically from farther right or left depending on whether the district is Republican or Democrat controlled. This effectively means the winner of that party’s primary becomes the de facto congressional representative for the district.

As political participation fell across the board from the 1970s through the 2000s, primary voter turnout fell with it. Today, just 28 percent of registered voters nationwide turn out on primary day—up from 14 percent a decade ago. Those who turn up are generally the most ideologically committed partisans of their parties and they effectively choose upwards of 90 percent of Congress’s members.

Unsurprisingly, under these conditions it was increasingly the most partisan of their parties each sent to Congress.

The Nationalization of Elections

This was essentially the ideological purification of brands. As the geographical sorting and ideological party realignments of the 1960s–90s documented by Alan Abramowitz unfolded, party leaders increasingly sought to distinguish their party by emphasizing its ideological commitments. The strategy, pioneered by Newt Gingrich, sought to replace discussions of local issues with the major issues separating the two national parties as the dividing lines in local races.

Because the two parties were increasingly distinct both ideologically and demographically, along urban/rural, college educated / blue collar, secular/Christian, nonwhite/white, political fights at the national level came increasingly to be about the character of the country itself. Under such circumstances, the stakes involved are perceived to dramatically increase. For, unlike distributional questions, questions of national identity cut to who we are and what are values are. Combined with a uniquely competitive electoral environment, politics has increasingly come to resemble warfare rather than reasoned debate.

Insecure Majorities

About that newly competitive electoral environment, as Frances Lee outlined in her important book insecure majorities were a relatively rare occurrence in American politics in the twentieth century. From the Civil War onward Republicans essentially dominated the White House and Congress until FDR’s landslide, which ushered in a period of Democratic dominance. From the end of the Second World War until 1994, Democrats controlled the House for forty-five of forty-nine years—with the Senate much of the time as well.

When one party enjoys such broad support, the dynamics of negotiations between parties are fundamentally different than when either party could find itself in power come next November. Where much of the twentieth century saw minority parties positively collaborating in the legislative process, using what power they had to pragmatically shape legislation more to their liking, American politics in the twenty-first century has been defined by strategic opposition—betting, in effect, that fiercely opposing your opponent’s legislative initiatives will prove more popular with your own voters than will making compromises to govern more effectively.

The Growth of Government

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Happy Easter

Posted by M. C. on April 17, 2022

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Talking About Stoicism 170 We Are What They Grow Beyond

Posted by M. C. on April 16, 2022

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Has Elon Musk stumbled into some scandalous truths about Twitter?

Posted by M. C. on April 16, 2022

Twitter shut down the president of the United States, which, if it’s controlled by the government, while the elites take the profits, it means the government itself shut Trump down.  What would be the implications of that, and how the heck could this scandal be corrected?  It would show the extent of the rot of the Deep State that an entity so closely connected to the federal government could carry out that kind of coup.  And that presents a constitutional crisis.  This kind of third-world behavior would have to be exposed by Musk — and Congress would need to stop it.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/has_elon_musk_stumbled_into_a_scandalous_truth_about_twitter_with_the_strange_reaction_to_his_twitter_buyout_offer.html

By Monica Showalter

Sure enough, Elon Musk pulled the trigger, handed Twitter a fat offer of a buyout, and it’s been nothing but bonkersville ever since.

According to CBS News:

Elon Musk is offering to buy Twitter for $43 billion, saying the social media company “needs to be transformed as a private company.”

The billionaire and founder of electric car maker Tesla, who earlier this month disclosed he owns a 9.2% stake in Twitter, proposed in a regulatory filing on Thursday to buy all of the company’s outstanding common stock for $54.20 per share. 

“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” he said in the filing. “However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form.”

The market acted as one might expect of a company that has seen stagnant growth over recent months:

Twitter shares rose 3.6% to $47.49 in early trading. Shares in the social media platform, which was valued at $37 billion prior to Musk’s offer, had declined by roughly a third over the prior year.

It prompted huffing and puffing from the likes of the Washington Post, owned by mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos, about Musk being a threat to democracy or something.

The blue checks, meanwhile, completely beclowned themselves:

David Leavitt, the third blue check on that list, recall, is the one who tried to shake down a Target employee for an $89.99 toothbrush for a penny, called the police, and then used Twitter to doxx her when he didn’t get what he wanted.

Here’s the obvious problem on the surface:

Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald

Yesterday was a flagship day in corporate media. It was the day they were forced to explicitly state what has long been clear: they not only favor censorship but desperately crave and depend on it. Even if Musk doesn’t buy Twitter, never forget what yesterday revealed.

Here’s the weird stuff:

Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who owns roughly 5% of Twitter, tweeted that the bid significantly undervalues the company and that he will reject it.

Musk shot back in a tweet: “How much of Twitter does the Kingdom own, directly & indirectly? What are the Kingdom’s views on journalistic freedom of speech?”

Saudi Arabia’s richest man has a stake in Twitter? 

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Exclusive: Russia’s Sergey Glazyev introduces the new global financial system

Posted by M. C. on April 16, 2022

However, sovereign interests of Russia and China logically led to their growing strategic partnership and cooperation, in order to address common threats emanating from Washington. The US tariff war with China and financial sanctions war with Russia validated these concerns and demonstrated the clear and present danger our two countries are facing. 

https://thecradle.co/Article/interviews/9135

By Pepe Escobar

Sergey Glazyev is a man living right in the eye of our current geopolitical and geo-economic hurricane. One of the most influential economists in the world, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and a former adviser to the Kremlin from 2012 to 2019, for the past three years he has helmed Moscow’s uber strategic portfolio as Minister in Charge of Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).

Glazyev’s recent intellectual production has been nothing short of transformative, epitomized by his essay Sanctions and Sovereignty and an extensive discussion of the new, emerging geo-economic paradigm in an interview to a Russian business magazine.

In another of his recent essays, Glazyev comments on how “I grew up in Zaporozhye, near which heavy fighting is now taking place in order to destroy the Ukrainian Nazis, who never existed in my small Motherland. I studied at a Ukrainian school and I know Ukrainian literature and language well, which from a scientific point of view is a dialect of Russian. I did not notice anything Russophobic in Ukrainian culture. In the 17 years of my life in Zaporozhye, I have never met a single Banderist.”

Glazyev was gracious to take some time from his packed schedule to provide detailed answers to a first series of questions in what we expect to become a running conversation, especially focused to the Global South. This is his first interview with a foreign publication since the start of Operation Z. Many thanks to Alexey Subottin for the Russian-English translation.

The Cradle: You are at the forefront of a game-changing geo-economic development: the design of a new monetary/financial system via an association between the EAEU and China, bypassing the US dollar, with a draft soon to be concluded. Could you possibly advance some of the features of this system – which is certainly not a Bretton Woods III – but seems to be a clear alternative to the Washington consensus and very close to the necessities of the Global South?

Glazyev: In a bout of Russophobic hysteria, the ruling elite of the United States played its last “trump ace” in the hybrid war against Russia. Having “frozen” Russian foreign exchange reserves in custody accounts of western central banks, financial regulators of the US, EU, and the UK undermined the status of the dollar, euro, and pound as global reserve currencies. This step sharply accelerated the ongoing dismantling of the dollar-based economic world order.

Over a decade ago, my colleagues at the Astana Economic Forum and I proposed to transition to a new global economic system based on a new synthetic trading currency based on an index of currencies of participating countries. Later, we proposed to expand the underlying currency basket by adding around twenty exchange-traded commodities. A monetary unit based on such an expanded basket was mathematically modeled and demonstrated a high degree of resilience and stability.

At around the same time, we proposed to create a wide international coalition of resistance in the hybrid war for global dominance that the financial and power elite of the US unleashed on the countries that remained outside of its control. My book The Last World War: the USA to Move and Lose, published in 2016, scientifically explained the nature of this coming war and argued for its inevitability – a conclusion based on objective laws of long-term economic development. Based on the same objective laws, the book argued the inevitability of the defeat of the old dominant power.

Currently, the US is fighting to maintain its dominance, but just as Britain previously, which provoked two world wars but was unable to keep its empire and its central position in the world due to the obsolescence of its colonial economic system, it is destined to fail.

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You’ve Been Misinformed

Posted by M. C. on April 16, 2022

Let the sunshine in to disinfect the arena. Cast the Demons back into darkness. You go, Elon!

You’ve Been Misinformed

James Howard Kunstler

Isn’t it obvious by now that pervasive dishonesty is the foremost crisis of many crises in Western Civ generally and American life in particular? All our authorities have made themselves false, lying their way into the broad collapse of confidence that drives the nation toward some culminating horror show of strife and loss.

The go-to lever of concerted mind-fuckery has been the term-of-art misinformation, applied especially to things and propositions that are truthful — thereby confounding the public’s ability to discern truth in anything, or to discover how they are being misled in matters of life and death. We’ve allowed the worst in human nature to disgrace ourselves. Satan, Father of Lies, is Western Civ’s paragon of disgrace, and so American life appears more and more Satanic and disgraceful.

All this was epitomized in the operation of Twitter, the cheerful little bluebird of social messaging which evolved in a very few years into an instrument of coercion, punishment, deception, and lying, until it became clear that Twitter’s misinformation was misinformation itself. Half the nation doesn’t believe anything it is told by those in authority and the other half revels in its reckless abuse of authority.

And so, it’s refreshing to see one Elon Musk act to seize control of this Satanic vector of disgrace. Mr. Musk appears motivated to defeat the culture of lying by restoring open debate in the ubiquitous online public arena. It’s a heroic deed. But, you see, it’s not merely Twitter’s management or its biggest shareholders that Mr. Musk is messing with, but malign forces in the US government, which have surreptitiously taken control of Twitter and other social media to work its will on events. If you don’t know that Twitter, Facebook, and Google are proxies serving the US Intel Community, then you have not been paying attention.

Using Twitter to impose that culture of pervasive dishonesty in public chatter is what gave permission for all others to follow the script. Medicine has succeeded completely in disgracing and destroying itself by lying about everything connected to Covid-19, from its origins, to the insanely outlawed treatments for it, to the harmful actions of the vaccines, to the hidden data that might tell us the results of all that lying. Twitter set the tone for that with its censorship policies. Anyone who suggested that lockdowns, masking, remdesivir protocols, and vaccine mandates violated common decency was tossed out of the arena, often with added punishment of losing a career, a professional license, a livelihood, and having to endure the betrayal of colleagues cowed into silence.

Twitter also enabled the suicide of higher education, which has succumbed to a plague of Jacobin craziness that would embarrass the inmates of an old-time locked ward. The failure of authority on campus is cosmic. Can you name a single college president who has raised a voice against such manifest idiocy as men competing in women’s sports, the invention of ersatz fields of study, the re-segregation of dormitories and graduation ceremonies, the shouting down of invited lecturers, the persecution of free-thinking faculty, the kangaroo courts for sex disputes, and a hundred other violations of intellect and decency?

All this coerced insanity has been nurtured by social media’s sly mechanisms for bending narrative into propaganda: their beloved algorithms, all fine-tuned to destroy anything that touches on truth. The result is a country so marinated in falsehood that it can’t construct a coherent consensus of reality, and can’t take coherent actions to avert its own collapse.

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The Problem With Public (Government) School Superintendents Is the Same Problem With Jon Stewart, But With the Additional, Lethal Yoke of Bureaucracy

Posted by M. C. on April 16, 2022

It’s become abundantly clear that the people most loudly accusing America of being a bastion of “systemic racism” are either economic ignoramuses, or self-serving cowards. In the case of Jon Stewart, it’s a bit of both.

To whit, the superintendent asked me what I would do to address the disparities. I first replied what I would not do, which is scapegoat “systemic racism.” I then informed him that there is no perfect “solution,” but only trade-offs, and that beyond disparities, the best way to foster and facilitate better opportunities for all individuals of all colors, is to at least start addressing the anti-liberty public policies destroying culture and economy. Ending these policies will at least help to restore liberty-based culture which will necessarily foster and facilitate better opportunities for all individuals, to pursue meaningful, productive lives.

By Jason Peirce

It’s become abundantly clear that the people most loudly accusing America of being a bastion of “systemic racism” are either economic ignoramuses, or self-serving cowards. In the case of Jon Stewart, it’s a bit of both.

Case-in-point is a recent episode of Stewart’s show “The Problem with Jon Stewart.” In the episode, entitled “The Problem with White People,” Stewart joined two of his guests in eagerly condemning a third, Andrew Sullivan, as a racist. Sullivan’s transgression was his mere willingness to question Stewart and the other guests’ assertions that America today is a hotbed of “systemic racism.” Stewart displayed ignorance regarding America’s complicated history with race, as well as the role current economic policies play in destroying the lives of individual Americans of all races. He displayed cowardice by defaulting to the virtue-signaling, mob-appeasing accusation of “racist.” I don’t want to spend too much more time discussing Stewart. That said, there is much to learn from Sullivan’s must-read summary of the episode.

The fact is that the obsession with “systemic racism,” driven by Critical Race Theory (CRT), is pervasive throughout all American institutions, from “woke” corporate America, to the federal government’s alphabet bureaucracies, to academia and public education. Everything driven by CRT only serves to agitate more social conflict, while distracting from the anti-liberty economic policies which demonstrably harm individuals of all races. This problem is arguably most evident at the intersection of CRT and America’s public (government) education system.

This brings us to a meeting I had last summer with the superintendent of my local school district on the Space Coast of Florida, Brevard Public Schools, (BPS). Like many districts across the country, BPS is skirting responsibility for racial disparities in educational outcomes, by blaming “systemic racism.” In BPS’ case, blacks and Hispanics lag behind whites (though it’s interesting to point out BPS’ apparent lack of concern that all races, including whites, lag behind Asians.)

The leadership of BPS suffers the same shortcomings as Jon Stewart. But BPS is a public bureaucracy. All public bureaucracies extend a unilateral power relationship to the people they ostensibly exist to serve, at the people’s expense. Bureaucracies are inherently geared toward self-preservation. Criticize or seek to change the bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy will defend itself by any means it can.

By blaming “systemic racism,” BPS is sacrificing the well-being of students of all colors. For example, the message to white students is, that they’re guilty of “white privilege” and beneficiaries of “systemic racism.” The message to black students is, that they’re helpless victims of oppression, with the chances for a successful life stacked against them, and therefore they must be held to different educational and disciplinary standards (a form of soft bigotry). The effect on society is  destruction of goodwill and greater conflict in communities.

“Systemic racism” is also being used to expand the BPS bureaucracy. For example, the disparities, along with George Floyd’s death, and BLM’s subsequent daily lootings, beatings and burnings of people and cities across the US over the summer and fall of 2020, were used to Trojan Horse-in BPS’ CRT-informed Diversity and Equity (DE) Program. [Sadly, the BPS school board’s conservative members, including the co-founder of the national, conservative, parental rights organization Moms For Liberty, supported “overcoming racism” trainings (school board agenda minutes, page 4) and the creation of the DE program. Yes, there’s many lessons to be learned here, beyond the scope of this article.]

BPS’ new DE director wasted no time in identifying “systemic racism” as the program’s cause du jour:

“(BPS) Leadership is also doing a great job of understanding how systemic racism, biases, how mindsight really helps in driving all of these necessary changes (sic).”

She continued, to refer to Floyd’s death as a catalyst for similar DE programs across the country, even though there was zero evidence Floyd’s death was due to “racism.”

The DE director then declared her dedication to “Antiracism,” which is anything but “anti-racist” (and more just another way to attack capitalism), before expressing her grand-plan to root-out  “unconscious bias” in teachers and administrators:

“One of the things we will be doing within the district is really being more conscious and committed to unconscious bias training. Also, trying to not only create this shared awareness, of not only what biases are, this systemic racism, things of that nature…(sic)”

Beyond the tossed word-salad, the director offered zero evidence to back her claim that disparities are due to “systemic racism.” Nor did she attempt to prove the existence of “unconscious bias” in teachers and administrators.

As to the latter, outside of explicit word or deed, how can anyone truly divine if racism is in another’s heart and head? They can’t, unless they’re a mind-reader.

As to the former, “systemic racism,” those obsessed with it never do provide current evidence of its existence. The simple truth, is disparities do not necessarily prove “systemic racism.” Furthermore, “systemic racism,” requires two things to exist. One, is codified law. The other is mass social acceptance of racism. Neither can be found in America today. (Of course, this is hardly to say that “systemic racism” never existed in the US, or that America’s unfortunate and complicated history regarding race, should not be discussed and analyzed.)

As for how my meeting with BPS’ superintendent came about, over the previous school year, I had reached out via email on numerous occasions, regarding my family’s objections to the racist, CRT-informed material my 6th-grade daughter was bringing home from her elementary school. The superintendent offered an in-person meeting to discuss the matter. I accepted.

For the record, I advocate for freeing the children, and ending compulsory, government education altogether. At the least, full school choice would be a great step in the right direction. So, even though my perspective on education amounts to an existential threat to BPS and the superintendent’s livelihood, I looked forward to the opportunity to meet him on his home field, so to speak, firsthand, to try and wrap my head around his logic (or lack thereof) regarding why he’s comfortable with racist, CRT-based material in BPS.

The meeting unfolded as I thought it would. I provided evidence CRT was in the district. I informed the superintendent that he was presiding over the destruction of children in BPS, and the district itself. Parents of students in BPS were already at war over CRT, the DE program, LGBTQ+ issues, and the effects of covid lockdowns, and mask mandates, for example. Sides were forming. I told the superintendent he had chosen a side against many children and families he’s supposed to work and advocate for. I added that CRT was doing exactly what its proponents designed it do: create conflict to divide, destroy, and ultimately conquer.

The superintendent played both ignorant and cowardly, alternately deflecting, denying, and defending CRT’s existence in the district. He failed to commit to do anything about it. Rather, he circled-the-wagons, attacking all criticism of BPS and of himself. This confirmed firsthand, my concerns that CRT and bureaucracies like BPS pose an existential threat to America.

This is not hyperbole. CRT is a radical, Marxist ideology. Its own proponents liked it to a virus, designed to destroy Western Civilization, starting with the nuclear family. Bureaucracies are inherently inefficient and ultimately unsustainable. Bureaucracies radicalized by CRT, the growing trend across America, are at war with all-things liberty. Simply, liberty, and racist, CRT-driven bureaucracies cannot co-exist. Suffice to say, if liberty doesn’t win – liberty, the rising tide which lifts all boats – every American loses, sooner than later.

To whit, the superintendent asked me what I would do to address the disparities. I first replied what I would not do, which is scapegoat “systemic racism.” I then informed him that there is no perfect “solution,” but only trade-offs, and that beyond disparities, the best way to foster and facilitate better opportunities for all individuals of all colors, is to at least start addressing the anti-liberty public policies destroying culture and economy. Ending these policies will at least help to restore liberty-based culture which will necessarily foster and facilitate better opportunities for all individuals, to pursue meaningful, productive lives.

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America’s Exceptional Amnesia (About Those War Criminals…)

Posted by M. C. on April 16, 2022

The question now for U.S. government officials such as Secretary of State Blinken, who has shunned negotiation for months, is this: Why allow the destruction of any more human lives and property in Ukraine before agreeing to sit down and talk? Blinken may believe that dead Ukrainians are a small price to pay for U.S. foreign policy objectives, but the victims would surely disagree, 

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/americas-exceptional-amnesia-about-those-war-criminals/

by Laurie Calhoun

The top-ranking U.S. diplomat, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, recently denounced Russian president Vladimir Putin as a war criminal, which has resulted in a marked uptick in the usage of that term throughout the media. Putin decided to invade Ukraine in February 2022 and has killed people in the process. That’s what happens when leaders decide to address conflict through the application of military force: people die. The U.S. government has needless to say killed many people in its military interventions abroad, most recently in the Middle East and Africa. Yet Americans are often hesitant to apply the label war criminal even to figures such as George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, whose Global War on Terror has sowed massive destruction, death, and misery, adversely affecting millions of persons for more than twenty years.

Nor do people generally regard affable Barack Obama as a war criminal, despite the considerable harm to civilians unleashed by his ill-advised war on Libya. “Drone warrior” Obama also undertook a concerted campaign to kill rather than capture terrorist suspects in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen, with which the United States was not at war, and he armed radical Islamist rebel forces in Syria, which exacerbated the conflict already underway, resulting in the deaths of even more civilians. Obama’s material and logistical support for the Saudi war against the Houthis in Yemen gave rise to a full-fledged humanitarian crisis, with disease and starvation ravaging the population.

Moving a bit farther back in time, U.S. citizens and their sympathizers abroad typically do not affix the label war criminal to Bill Clinton either, despite the fact that his 1999 bombing of Kosovo appears to have been motivated in part to distract attention from his domestic scandal at the time. The moment Clinton began dropping bombs on Kosovo, the press, in a show of patriotic solidarity, abruptly switched its attention from the notorious “blue dress” to the war in progress. Throughout his presidency, Clinton not only bombed but also imposed severe sanctions on Iraq, as a result of which hundreds of thousands of civilians died of preventable diseases.

Despite knowing about at least some of the atrocities committed in their name by the U.S. government (torture, summary execution, maiming, the provision of weapons to murderers, sanctions preventing access to medication and food, etc.), many Americans have no difficulty identifying Vladimir Putin as a war criminal while simultaneously withholding that label from their own leaders. Viewed from a broader historical perspective, none of this may seem new. During wartime, much of the populace dutifully parrots pundits and politicians in denouncing the foreign leaders with whom they disagree as criminals, while supporting the military initiatives of their own leaders, no matter what they do. Is the use of the term of derogation war criminal, then, no more than a reflection of the tribe to which one subscribes?

All wars result in avoidable harms to innocent, nonthreatening people: death and maiming, the destruction of property, impoverishment, psychological trauma, and diminished quality of life for those lucky enough to survive. Given these harsh realities, some critics maintain that all war is immoral. But morality and legality are not one and the same, for crimes violate written laws. In the practical world of international politics, what counts as a criminal war has been delineated since 1945 by the Charter of the United Nations, which Putin defied in undertaking military action against Ukraine.

According to the U.N. Charter, to which Russia is a party, any national leader who wishes to initiate a war against another nation must first air his concerns at the United Nations in the form of a war resolution. The only exception admitted by the U.N. Charter is when an armed attack has occurred on the leader’s territory, in which case the people may defend themselves, on analogy to an individual who may defend himself against violent attack by another individual in a legitimate act of self defense. Barring that “self-defense” exception, the instigation of a war by a nation must garner the support of the U.N. Security Council, the permanent members of which have veto power over any substantive resolution. Putin knew, of course, that the United States would veto any Russian resolution for war against Ukraine and so did not bother to go to the United Nations at all.

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Deflation: Bad for the Government, Good for Producers and Consumers. What’s Not to Like?

Posted by M. C. on April 15, 2022

Deflation is only bad for the government. In a deflationary economy, it cannot tax people indirectly via inflation and it can’t use monetary policy to artificially boost the economy and get votes before there is the inevitable recession. Consumers (mainly the poorer) and entrepreneurs are the ones who benefit from deflation (due to lower prices and larger profit margins, respectively).

https://mises.org/wire/deflation-bad-government-good-producers-and-consumers-whats-not

Andre Marques

Governments lie about the inflation rate and benefits from it, so, it is no surprise when they talk against deflation (for the purpose of this article, assume inflation as a general increase in prices and deflation as the opposite), which would be good for consumers and the economy, but bad for the government. (While Austrian Economists define inflation as an increase in the supply of money, the net effect of inflation is an increase in asset prices, as well as a distortion of the structure of production.)

Prices fall in a scenario where the currency is not inflated and, therefore, there are more sustainable investments and increased productivity. In an economy with little or no government intervention (at least few monetary interventions and few regulations, government spending and taxes), there are more long-term investments (capital investments, for example), which increase the economy’s productivity. In a deflationary economy, the purchasing power of money tends to increase, as there is no monetary inflation by central banks and prices tend to fall. Consumers can purchase more products and services and companies have higher profit margins.

But governments do not like deflation, they are the most indebted entities. Inflation is beneficial to borrowers, as they repay loans in a currency with lower purchasing power than when they took the loan. It is even more beneficial to the government since it can expand the money supply to pay the debt. Furthermore, inflation is good for the government because it creates an apparent economic boom, which will eventually be wiped out by a recession. But, as this can take a few years, the short-term incentive for the incumbents is to take advantage of this instrument.

Two typical arguments given by governments against deflation are as follows:

“Deflation Will Cost Entrepreneurs”

The reasoning behind this statement is that, if prices fall, entrepreneurs will sell products and services at lower prices than the cost to produce them. However, this statement does not hold if we consider the fact that, in a deflationary economy, the currency’s purchasing power tends to increase. So even if entrepreneurs get less money (nominally) than what their products cost, in real terms, they will still make a profit. In addition, the prices of the inputs used in production will also fall in a deflationary economy.

Therefore, with the use of productivity and management of expenses that every company must have, it is possible to sell the products at low prices, but with the same or even higher profit margin than in an inflationary environment. (Note: even if we disregard this gain in purchase power and lower production costs, it would be possible for the entrepreneur to protect himself through future contracts). And, precisely because prices get lower, consumers buy more products and services (without going into debt) and companies profit more due to the reduction in costs that occurs thanks to deflation. This is particularly the case in the technology sector. Computers today are cheaper and much better than they were 30 years ago. Because prices got lower (due to increased productivity), consumers began to buy more, which increased the industry’s profits, which brought more investments and higher productivity.

“Consumers Will Postpone Consumption under Deflation”

The reasoning behind this argument is that if prices are constantly falling, no one will buy the products and services because individuals will always expect prices to go down. This also does not make sense, as there are always products and services that people have to purchase (such as food and medicine). Nobody starves themselves to death or does not purchase medicines because a year later they will be cheaper. 

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