MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

Free Crack Pipes? Time to Pardon Tommy Chong

Posted by M. C. on February 14, 2022

It would be far better for Biden to call an end to the disastrous federal drug war. But we are unlikely to see such courage or wisdom from a man who, during his decades in the Senate, was renowned for championing punitive crime bills to impose his favorite cure: “Lock the S.O.B.s up!”

by Jim Bovard

Conservative publications have accused the Biden administration of planning to distribute $30 million worth of free crack pipes and other paraphernalia as part of its effort to achieve “racial equity” among “underserved communities.” The original notice for federal grants included provisions to pay for “safe smoking kits/supplies” but the Biden administration insists that no federal funds will be specifically used to purchase crack pipes. But taxpayers will get screwed anyway thanks to federal distribution of free condoms under the same program.

While “harm reduction” is the stated goal of  that federal program, the Biden administration continues to ignore the vast harms caused by federal drug prohibitions, despite record numbers of deaths from drug overdoses last year.

The latest federal drug war farce should be a reminder of one of the biggest drug war publicity stunts of this century. On the eve of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the most decisive federal attack ever made on pipes and bowls often used for smoking marijuana, tobacco, and other substances. Ashcroft bewailed, “The illegal drug paraphernalia industry has invaded the homes of families across the country without their knowledge.” Ashcroft did not offer any evidence that pipe sellers, unlike government agents, were planting evidence in people’s homes.

Operation Pipe Dreams involved more than 1,200 federal agents conducting raids in Pennsylvania, Texas, Oregon, Iowa, California, and Idaho. Fifty-five people and 10 companies were indicted in the biggest attack on glass bowls in American history. The feds confiscated 124 tons of what was alleged to be drug paraphernalia, including plastic baggies that could potentially be used to package illicit drugs.

Ashcroft’s prosecutors used a rarely enforced 1980s laws that criminalized the sale of drug paraphernalia. Seizure fever permeated the bong attack. U.S. Deputy Marshal Dale Ortmann commented, “This was the biggest push in asset seizures that I’ve seen in eight years.” U.S. Deputy Marshal Gary Richards noted that, thanks to cash grabbed from businesses that were raided, “We have access to money that will pay for inventory and storage fees” for the 124 tons of goodies. Apparently, this was the only “boondoggle test” that Justice Department masterminds applied to this case.

The biggest catch of Operation Pipe Dreams was 64-year-old Tommy Chong, the older half of the legendary, Grammy Award-winning comic duo Cheech and Chong, who lampooned drug warriors from the 1960s to the 1980s. Their movie “Up in Smoke” was some of the best political-cultural humor of the 1970s. Chong’s company, Chong Glass, sold ornate bongs that cost hundreds of dollars over the Internet; a Los Angeles art gallery had an exhibit of Chong’s top-of-the-line products. The Drug Enforcement Administration set up a phony shop in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, and ordered bongs and other material from Chong Glass and then nailed Chong for shipping paraphernalia across state lines.

The DEA hit Chong’s Pacific Palisades, California, house at 5:30 a.m., while Chong and his wife were asleep. Chong later commented, “It was a full-on raid. Helicopters, them bangin’ on the door. They come in with loaded automatic weapons, flak jackets, helmets, visors, about 20 agents. They bust in the house. They took all my cash, took out my computers, and they took all the glass bongs they could find.”

Chong’s arrest sparked ridicule far and wide, including barbs from both David Letterman and Jay Leno. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette snipped, “With the nation on Orange Alert at the time, the only bearded men most Americans wanted to see in custody were members of al-Qaida.” Though Chong controlled much less than 1 percent of the national bong market, busting him guaranteed the feds massive publicity.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

A New Way to Fight the Drug War?

Posted by M. C. on February 14, 2022

Settling for reform can, at best, only result in an improvement of our condition as serfs. To achieve the free society, we have to dismantle and repeal, not reform, all infringements on liberty. That necessarily means making the consistent, principled case for the free society, including ending, not reforming, the drug war.

by Jacob G. Hornberger

A letter to the editor of the Las Vegas Sun yesterday shows how important it is to raise people’s vision to higher level — one that goes beyond reform and instead goes to the principles of a free society.

The letter was written by a man named Michael Westerhaus. His letter brings up some of the important points about the government’s decades-long war on drugs:

1. “Our failed war on drugs” has brought on deaths of people from corrupted black-market drugs.

2. Charging the sellers of drugs with murder is just political posturing.

3. No-knock raids have killed innocent people. 

4. Drug laws bring into existence drug cartels and gang wars “with more murders.”

5. Drug laws are not going to prevent addicts from doing whatever is necessary to get drugs. 

To those points I would add the following one: People have the fundamental, God-given right to ingest whatever they want to ingest, no matter how harmful it might be. That’s an essential aspect of a free society.

But then here’s the kicker. Westerhaus cannot bring himself to see the solution to all this drug-war mayhem. He writes, “We need to find a better way to solve the medical problem of addiction.” The title of his letter to the editor is, “Find a new way to fight drug war.”

Oh so close, but yet still so far. Westerhaus is clearly on the verge of recognizing the only solution to America’s drug-war woes, but obviously still can’t bring himself to see it. The solution is not to find a new way to fight the drug war. The solution is to end the drug war. That necessarily means repealing all laws that criminalize the possession and distribution of drugs. 

Prohibition of alcohol produced the same consequences as the prohibition of drugs. While there were those who called for new ways to enforce Prohibition, Americans finally came to the realization that the only solution was to end Prohibition. That’s what we need with the drug war. 

Thus, the importance of raising people’s vision to a higher level — not on reforming the drug war but instead to the principles of a free society. Settling for reform can, at best, only result in an improvement of our condition as serfs. To achieve the free society, we have to dismantle and repeal, not reform, all infringements on liberty. That necessarily means making the consistent, principled case for the free society, including ending, not reforming, the drug war.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Why We Need Secession – LewRockwell LewRockwell.com

Posted by M. C. on February 14, 2022

The Federalists thought they knew better, and they gave us such nonsense as Madison’s claim that an extended government was a “cure” for faction, not one of its main causes. The tragic result of their efforts was the terrible War Between the States. Let’s not make that mistake again. Let’s try peaceful secession while there is still time.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/02/lew-rockwell/why-we-need-secession/

By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

The leftists who control Washington, D.C., with brain-dead Biden as their figurehead, want to impose a totalitarian dictatorship on America. The tyranny of Covid vaccines, mask mandates, and lockdowns, and preparations for war in the Ukraine are the latest signs of this, but the leftist plans have long been in the making.

Ordinary Americans don’t want this, and their resistance has generated to so-called split between Red and Blue States. Actually, the leftists control a few big cities through corrupt machine politics and pandering to minority and immigrants mobs, and the rest of the country resists them. The leftists are determined to crush this resistance. As Bill Sardi explains: “Democrats ‘own’ the cities (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Philadelphia, Boston, etc.); Republicans ‘own’ the space (rural land).  That is maybe why fires razed through rural areas in California as the Red zones were burnt to the ground.  This may have been a covert attempt to force Republicans to move into cities.”

The federal government’s agenda to impose its draconian measures on the Red States goes far beyond this. Mike Adams supplies the details: “With illegitimate occupier-in-chief Joe Biden waging outright war and economic terrorism against red states (see examples below), the leaders of those red states must now nullify federal government overreach in order to prevent their own citizens from being mass murdered by D.C. swamp policies that are intentionally designed to achieve depopulation.

Some of the ways the Biden regime is waging war on red states include:

  • Economic terrorism: Unleashing OSHA to destroy all businesses that won’t enforce vaccine mandates by levying fines of $70,000 per day or even higher.
  • Engineered medicine shortages: Biden recently announced restrictions on shipping monoclonal antibodies to red states in order to maximize covid fatalities in those states.
  • Vaccine mandates: Through vaccine mandates, Biden is committing medical genocide against every American, working to achieve a mass die-off that will leave states in a worsening economic crisis (and humanitarian crisis) as the deaths unfold.
  • Border invasion: The Biden regime and its corrupt DOJ are actively fighting against sensible border security, openly allowing a land invasion of states like Texas and Arizona in order to flood the nation with replacement Democrat voters.
  • Money printing madness: Every dollar printed by the Fed and distributed by the Treasury is actually an instrument of debt that steals purchasing power from the hard-working Americans who produce things. Those producers tend to live in red states, while blue states are the welfare states where more people get handouts that were essentially stolen from the producers in the red states.
  • Election rigging: Biden and other Democrats like Newsom are now institutionalizing never-ending election rigging in order to make sure the will of the people is never honored in any election. Although their own disastrous policies are wildly unpopular they can continue to maintain power by cheating in elections, just like they cheated in 2020.
  • Outlawing of medicine that works: Notice how the D.C. swamp has attacked ivermectin and made sure no hospital prescribes it to patients? This is also part of the medical genocide agenda, and it’s a war on humanity.
  • Punitive taxation: Under the Biden regime (which is actually run by Obama), the IRS will be handed a mandate to raise taxes on productive American workers, punishing them for having jobs, all while handing out more welfare and entitlements to the illegals who are allowed to invade America by the hundreds of thousands each month.”

Even if we succeed in rolling back the current totalitarians, this won’t be enough. There is a structural problem in the American government that won’t go away, even if the current mob in Washington is replaced with “good guys.” The government is too big. The American population is around 330,000,000. States like California and Texas are bigger than many countries. How can a nation that vast be governed by a few people? The situation is even worse if we think about the division between the Reds and the Blues that I mentioned before. As Stephen Marche puts it, “Each side accuses the other of hating America, which is only another way of saying both hate what the other means by America…. On both sides, the sense of being under occupation dominates…. Every political faction operates under a siege mentality…. Everyone wants to build a wall of one kind or another. The geographical divide between the competing American Utopias means that, in every election, whoever loses comes to feel like they’ve been dominated by a foreign power.”

Clearly, we have a disunion, not a union, today, and we would do better to recognize this and act accordingly. The problem is nothing new. When the Constitution was up for ratification, the Anti-Federalists pointed to the danger. In the fifth volume of Conceived in Liberty, Murray Rothbard quotes one of the most eloquent of them, Patrick Henry: “Shall we imitate the example of those nations who have gone from a simple to a splendid government? Are those nations more worthy of our imitation? What can make an adequate satisfaction to them for the loss they have suffered in attaining such a government—for the loss of their liberty? If we admit this consolidated government, it will be because we like a great, splendid one. Some way or other we must be a great and mighty empire; we must have an army, and a navy … When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: liberty, sir, was then the primary object. … But now, sir, the American spirit, assisted by the ropes and chains of consolidation, is about to convert this country into a powerful and mighty empire. … Such a government is incompatible with the genius of republicanism. There will be no checks, no real balances, in this government. What can avail your specious, imaginary balances, your rope-dancing, chain-rattling, ridiculous ideal checks and contrivances? But, sir, we are not feared by foreigners; we do not make nations tremble. Would this constitute happiness or secure liberty.”

The Federalists thought they knew better, and they gave us such nonsense as Madison’s claim that an extended government was a “cure” for faction, not one of its main causes. The tragic result of their efforts was the terrible War Between the States. Let’s not make that mistake again. Let’s try peaceful secession while there is still time.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Fear Not to Be – Edward Curtin

Posted by M. C. on February 14, 2022

The courage to be was Tillich’s way of saying that we are upheld by far more than we know. Call it Being, Tao, the Great Spirit, or God. Courage is contagious and will carry us on. It is what we need to resist the fear-mongers who are at our throats.

http://edwardcurtin.com/the-fear-not-to-be/

Edward Curtin

This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the theologian Paul Tillich’s famous book, The Courage to Be.  Widely read in the days when an educated public read books, it is long forgotten.  In it, Tillich surveys the history of anxiety and fear and their relation to courage, religious faith, and the meaning of life.  His closing sentence – “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt” – became acclaimed as an astute description of the existential need to find a foundation for faith and courage when their foundations were shaking.

His writing profoundly influenced many, even when they didn’t wholly agree with him.  This included Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who, commenting on Tillich’s death in 1965, said, “His Christian existentialism gave us a system of meaning and purpose for our lives in an age when war and doubt seriously threatened all that we had come to hold dear.”

I mention The Courage to Be not to engage in a recondite theological and philosophical analysis, which is the last thing we now need, but to contrast his call for spiritual courage with what we have been experiencing pouring forth from the mass corporate media for years  There is a drumbeat of fear-mongering so intense and constant that it is almost comical if it weren’t so effective in reducing people to quaking, frightened children.

Primarily about Covid and the need to obey the authorities and submit to being jabbed with mRNA Covid “Vaccines” – the idolatrous religion of bio-security – this  religion of fear goes much further and much deeper.  Scenarios of fear have been rehearsed and produced for decades by the intelligence/IT/media giants on a multitude of issues, large and small.  They are rooted in a spiritually nihilistic political propaganda campaign that is exponentially increasing fear, anxiety, and despondency on a vast scale, which is its intent.  Fearful people are easily cowered and controlled.  The elites know that regular people throughout the world are fed up with being subjected to violence and abuse in multiple forms, and if courage triumphs over their fears, they might join in worldwide solidarity and revolt, as they have been doing in various places recently. To prevent this, the authorities must use terror tactics to divide and conquer them. If people dare to rise up and even question the propaganda, they have been and will be called terrorists for doing so.  Dissent is now equated with terrorism and thus it must be censored.

All this fear-mongering draws on people’s normal fears of “not to be,” meaning dead. It is of course understandable not wanting to be dead, but living in constant fear is a living death.  Tillich, who suffered deep trauma as a chaplain in the trenches of WW I and was later dismissed from his teaching position in Germany when Hitler came to power, wrote that courage is rooted in the spiritual acceptance that underlying our individual lives is the power of Being, by which he meant God, and that fear and anxiety about our fates can be confronted only through the courage to accept in faith this foundational reality.

I think it is self-evident to anyone who glances at the mainstream media that fear is their staple.  In just the last week or so, I have seen The New York Times, an official organ of propaganda if there ever were one but known historically as the Grey Lady for understatement, tell its readers in a hyperventilating style that anxiety about climate change has spawned a growing field of therapeutic treatment for sufferers, how deer in your back yard are infected with Omicron, how the Russians are coming, etc.  This is the typical fear promoting propaganda that headlines all the media sites every day and has been doing so for years.  Any casual observer can list them on a daily basis, from major to minor matters to fear.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Crisis in Ukraine is not about Ukraine. It’s about Germany, by Mike Whitney – The Unz Review

Posted by M. C. on February 14, 2022

Sanctions are not going to work, so Uncle Sam has flipped to Plan B: Create a big enough external threat that Germany will be forced to block the opening of the pipeline. Frankly, the strategy smacks of desperation, but you have to be impressed by Washington’s perseverance.

https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/the-crisis-in-ukraine-is-not-about-ukraine-its-about-germany/

Mike Whitney

“The primordial interest of the United States, over which for centuries we have fought wars– the First, the Second and Cold Wars– has been the relationship between Germany and Russia, because united there, they’re the only force that could threaten us. And to make sure that that doesn’t happen.” George Friedman, STRATFOR CEO at The Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs

The Ukrainian crisis has nothing to do with Ukraine. It’s about Germany and, in particular, a pipeline that connects Germany to Russia called Nord Stream 2. Washington sees the pipeline as a threat to its primacy in Europe and has tried to sabotage the project at every turn. Even so, Nord Stream has pushed ahead and is now fully-operational and ready-to-go. Once German regulators provide the final certification, the gas deliveries will begin. German homeowners and businesses will have a reliable source of clean and inexpensive energy while Russia will see a significant boost to their gas revenues. It’s a win-win situation for both parties.

The US Foreign Policy establishment is not happy about these developments. They don’t want Germany to become more dependent on Russian gas because commerce builds trust and trust leads to the expansion of trade. As relations grow warmer, more trade barriers are lifted, regulations are eased, travel and tourism increase, and a new security architecture evolves. In a world where Germany and Russia are friends and trading partners, there is no need for US military bases, no need for expensive US-made weapons and missile systems, and no need for NATO. There’s also no need to transact energy deals in US Dollars or to stockpile US Treasuries to balance accounts. Transactions between business partners can be conducted in their own currencies which is bound to precipitate a sharp decline in the value of the dollar and a dramatic shift in economic power. This is why the Biden administration opposes Nord Stream. It’s not just a pipeline, it’s a window into the future; a future in which Europe and Asia are drawn closer together into a massive free trade zone that increases their mutual power and prosperity while leaving the US on the outside looking in. Warmer relations between Germany and Russia signal an end to the “unipolar” world order the US has overseen for the last 75 years. A German-Russo alliance threatens to hasten the decline of the Superpower that is presently inching closer to the abyss. This is why Washington is determined to do everything it can to sabotage Nord Stream and keep Germany within its orbit. It’s a matter of survival.

That’s where Ukraine comes into the picture. Ukraine is Washington’s ‘weapon of choice’ for torpedoing Nord Stream and putting a wedge between Germany and Russia. The strategy is taken from page one of the US Foreign Policy Handbook under the rubric: Divide and Rule. Washington needs to create the perception that Russia poses a security threat to Europe. That’s the goal. They need to show that Putin is a bloodthirsty aggressor with a hair-trigger temper who cannot be trusted. To that end, the media has been given the assignment of reiterating over and over again, “Russia is planning to invade Ukraine.” What’s left unsaid is that Russia has not invaded any country since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and that the US has invaded or toppled regimes in more than 50 countries in the same period of time, and that the US maintains over 800 military bases in countries around the world. None of this is reported by the media, instead the focus is on “evil Putin” who has amassed an estimated 100,000 troops along the Ukrainian border threatening to plunge all of Europe into another bloody war.

All of the hysterical war propaganda is created with the intention of manufacturing a crisis that can be used to isolate, demonize and, ultimately, splinter Russia into smaller units. The real target, however, is not Russia, but Germany. Check out this excerpt from an article by Michael Hudson at The Unz Review:

“The only way left for U.S. diplomats to block European purchases is to goad Russia into a military response and then claim that avenging this response outweighs any purely national economic interest. As hawkish Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, explained in a State Department press briefing on January 27: “If Russia invades Ukraine one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” (“America’s Real Adversaries Are Its European and Other Allies”, The Unz Review)

There it is in black and white. The Biden team wants to “goad Russia into a military response” in order to sabotage NordStream. That implies there will be some kind of provocation designed to induce Putin to send his troops across the border to defend the ethnic Russians in the eastern part of the country. If Putin takes the bait, the response would be swift and harsh. The media will excoriate the action as a threat to all of Europe while leaders around the world will denounce Putin as the “new Hitler”. This is Washington’s strategy in a nutshell, and the whole production is being orchestrated with one goal in mind; to make it politically impossible for the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to wave NordStream through the final approval process.

Given what we know about Washington’s opposition to Nord Stream, readers may wonder why earlier in the year the Biden administration lobbied Congress NOT to impose more sanctions on the project. The answer to that question is simple: Domestic politics. Germany is currently decommissioning its nuclear power plants and needs natural gas to make up for the energy shortfall. Also, the threat of economic sanctions is a “turn-off” for Germans who see them as a sign of foreign meddling. “Why is the United States interfering in our energy decisions,” asks the average German. “Washington should mind its own business and stay out of ours.” This is precisely the response one would expect from any reasonable person.

Then, there’s this from Al Jazeera:

“Germans in the majority support the project, it is only parts of the elite and media who are against the pipeline…

“The more the US talks about sanctioning or criticizes the project, the more it becomes popular in German society,” said Stefan Meister, a Russia and eastern Europe expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations.” (“Nord Stream 2: Why Russia’s pipeline to Europe divides the West”, AlJazeera)

So, public opinion is solidly behind Nord Stream which helps to explain why Washington settled on a new approach. Sanctions are not going to work, so Uncle Sam has flipped to Plan B: Create a big enough external threat that Germany will be forced to block the opening of the pipeline. Frankly, the strategy smacks of desperation, but you have to be impressed by Washington’s perseverance. They might be down by 5 runs in the bottom of the 9th, but they haven’t thrown in the towel just yet. They’re going to give it one last shot and see if they can make some headway.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The War Party Wants a New Cold War, and the Money that Comes with It | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on February 14, 2022

Note also that Mead uses the “spending as a percentage of GDP” metric which is a favorite metric of military hawks. They use this metric because as the US economy has become more productive, wealthy, and generally larger, the US has been able to maintain sky-high military spending levels without growing the amount of spending in relation to GDP.

https://mises.org/wire/war-party-wants-new-cold-war-and-money-comes-it

Ryan McMaken

In perhaps the most predictable column of the year, the Wall Street Journal this week featured a column by Walter Russell Mead declaring it’s “Time to Increase Defense Spending.”

Using the Beijing Olympics and the potential Ukraine War to push for funneling ever more taxpayer dollars into military spending, Mead outlines how military spending ought to be raised to match the sort of spending not seen since the hot days of the Cold War. 

Mead claims that “The world has changed, and American policy must change with it.” The presumption here is that the status quo is one of declining military spending in which Americans have embraced some sort of isolationist foreign policy. But the reality doesn’t reflect that claim at all. The status quo is really one of very high levels of military spending, and even outright growth in most years. This sort of gaslighting my military hawks is right up there with leftwing attempts to portray the modern economy as one of unregulated laissez-faire.  

mil

Rather, according to estimates from the White House’s office of management and budget, military spending is set to reach a post-World War II high in 2022, rising to more than $1.1 trillion. That includes $770 billion spent on the Pentagon plus nuclear arms and related spending. Also included is current spending on veterans. Keeping veteran spending apart from defense spending is a convenient and sneaky political fiction, but veterans spending is just deferred spending for past active duty members—necessary to attract and retain personnel. And finally, we have the “defense” portion of the interest of the debt, estimated to be about 20 percent of total interest spending. Taking all this together, we find military spending has increased 13 years out of the last twenty, and is now at or near the highest levels of spending seen since the Second World War. 

This, not surprisingly, is not enough for Mead who would like to see military spending much closer to the Cold War average of 7 percent of GDP, up from today’s spending of a little less than 4 percent. To get this average back up would require at least an extra $300 billion in spending, possibly even requiring spending levels not seen since the bad old days of the Vietnam War. In those days, of course, the US was busy spending enormous amounts of taxpayer wealth on a losing war that cost tens of thousands of American lives. The spending was so enormous that the US regime was driven to breaking the dollar’s last link to gold and subjecting ordinary Americans to years of price controls, inflation, and other forms of economic crisis. 

But none of that will dissuade hawks like Mead who pound the drum incessantly for more military spending. Note also that Mead uses the “spending as a percentage of GDP” metric which is a favorite metric of military hawks. They use this metric because as the US economy has become more productive, wealthy, and generally larger, the US has been able to maintain sky-high military spending levels without growing the amount of spending in relation to GDP. The use of this metric allows hawks to create the false impression that military spending is somehow going down, and that the US is being taken over by peaceniks. In reality, spending levels remain very high—it’s just that the larger economy has been robust. 

Yet, even if we use this metric—and then compare it to other states with large militaries—we find that Mead’s narrative doesn’t quite add up. These numbers in no way suggest that the US regime is being eclipsed by rivals in terms of military spending. 

mil

For example, according to the World Bank, China—with a GDP comparable to that of the US—has military spending amounting to about 1.7 percent of GDP (as of 2020). Meanwhile, the total was at 3.7 percent of GDP in the United States. Russian military spending rose to 4.2 percent of GDP in 2020, but that’s based on a GDP total that’s a small fraction of the US’s GDP. Specifically, the Russian economy is less than one-tenth the size of the US economy. 

Thus, when we look at actual military spending, we find the disconnect to be quite clear. 

According to the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, in 2020 total Chinese military spending totaled approximately $245 billion in 2019 dollars. In Russia, the total was $66 billion. In the US, the total—which in the SIPRI database excludes veterans spending and interest—amounted to $766 billion in 2020. 

mil

In other words, total military spending by these presumed rivals amounts to mere fractions of total spending in the US. Moreover, as China scholar Michael Beckley has noted, the US benefits from pre-existing military capital—think military know-how and productive capability—built up over decades. Even if the US and China (or Russia) were spending comparable amounts on military capability right now, this would demonstrate any sort of actual military superiority in real terms. 

But, as usual, Mead’s strategy is to claim that financial prudence is in fact imprudence with the usual refrain of “you can’t afford to not spend boatloads of extra money!” This claim is premised on the new domino theory being offered by anti-Russia hawks today. This theory posits that if the US does not start wars with every country that pushed back against US hegemony—i.e., Iran or Russia—then China will see this “weakness” and start conquering countless nations within its own periphery. 

The old cold warriors were telling us this back in 1965 also, insisting that a loss in Vietnam would place all the world under the Communist boot. Needless to say, that didn’t happen, and it turned out Vietnam had nothing to do with American national security. 

But none of this will convince the usual hawks—for example the Heritage Foundation—that there’s ever enough military spending. 

Prudence, however, suggests the US should be going in the opposite direction. At its most belligerent, the US regime should be adopting a doctrine of restraint—focusing on naval defense and cutting back troop deployments—while changing its nuclear posture to one that is less costly and more defensive. 

The ideal solution is far more radically anti-interventionist than that, but a good start would be eliminating hundreds of nuclear warheads and freezing military spending indefinitely. After all, the US’s deterrent second-strike capability does not at all depend on keeping an arsenal of thousands of warheads, as many hawks insist. And geography today continues to favor US conventional defense, just as it always has. 

Unfortunately, we’re a long way from a change toward much more sane policy, but at the very least we must reject the latest opportunistic calls for a new cold war and trillions more taxpayer dollars burned in the name of “defense.” 

Author:

Contact Ryan McMaken

Ryan McMaken is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power and Market, but read article guidelines first.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

David Stockman on Scientism and the New Road to Serfdom

Posted by M. C. on February 13, 2022

These claims amount to invented science based on large theories of how the world works, which are essentially goal-seeked. That is, they first posit the climate, public health and economic models that inherently require heavy-handed state intervention to prevent catastrophic outcomes, and then they array the evidence and projections to validate the predicate.

David Stockman on Scientism and the New Road to Serfdom

By David Stockman

It’s long past time for conservative folks to wake up. Today’s great threat to capitalist prosperity, personal liberty and constitutional government as we have known it is not Marxism, socialism or any other variant of traditional left-wing ideology.

The real threat to liberty is more generic. Rather than a specific history-rooted ideology, such as the working class socialism of the early industrial era, the foundational threat has always been the aggrandizement of the state, and the empowerment of the political classes and nomenklatura that thrive upon it, whatever the ideology upon which they justified their will-to-power.

And today the vehicle for that impulse of statist expansion is Scientism — the false claims that economic science, public health science and climate change science, among others, require sweeping increases in state intervention and control.

This proposition is not merely a grand abstraction. The recently passed $7 trillion in stimmies, bailouts and infrastructure boondoggles, the Biden Administration’s claims that we have just nine years until irreversible climate disaster, and the ongoing depredations of the COVID Virus Patrols are real time instances of Scientism at work — unnecessarily and destructively extending the long arm of the state deep into daily economic and social life.

There is no valid science that calls for either the extinction of fossil fuels, or lockdowns to stop the spread of a virus like those that have afflicted mankind since time immemorial, or massive monetary and fiscal stimulus to keep capitalism from plunging into the drink.

These claims amount to invented science based on large theories of how the world works, which are essentially goal-seeked. That is, they first posit the climate, public health and economic models that inherently require heavy-handed state intervention to prevent catastrophic outcomes, and then they array the evidence and projections to validate the predicate.

For example, the natural climate change now underway — as it has been for 4.5 billion years — is essentially benign, not catastrophic. Current warming is nothing new — it’s happened repeatedly from the Medieval Warm Period (900–1300 AD) to the Roman Warming (200 BC to 300 AD) to the Holocene Climate Optimum (7,000–3,000 BC) and on back in countless unnamed cycles reaching deep into the history of the planet.

Contrary to the false claims of the climate howlers —

  • current mildly rising temperatures are in keeping with the historical truth that warmer is better for humanity and most other species, too; and
  • climate cycles are a function of powerful planetary forces, such as the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, which causes ice ages in 100,000 year intervals, and solar irradiation oscillations, which modulate cosmic rays and cloud formation. These forces have shaped the earth’s climate for eons and long preceded and massively exceed the impact of industrial era CO2 emissions;

Continued planetary equipoise requires no interventions whatsoever by the state to retard the use of prosperity-fostering fossil fuels or to subsidize and accelerate the adoption of high cost renewable energy.

Editor’s Note: We’ve seen governments institute the strictest controls on people and businesses in history. It’s been a swift elimination of individual freedoms.

But this is just the beginning…

Most people don’t realize the terrible things that could come next, including negative interest rates, the abolition of cash, and much more.

If you want to know how to survive what the central bankers and the Deep State have planned, then you need to see this newly released report from legendary investor Doug Casey and his team.

Click here to download it now.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Talking About Stoicism 161 Find A Good Role Model

Posted by M. C. on February 12, 2022

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

This Is How the Progressives Will Write the History of Covid

Posted by M. C. on February 12, 2022

How many people today are aware that America’s past experiments in Prohibition, ethnic discrimination, and eugenics were all once fervent policies of progressivism? And in many ways it already seems to have begun: only days after a Johns Hopkins University study found that lockdowns caused far more harm than good, the Biden administration claimed it has “not been pro-lockdown; that has not been his agenda—most of the lockdowns actually happened under the previous President.”

https://mises.org/wire/how-progressives-will-write-history-covid

Robert Zumwalt

It seems obvious that wherever vaccine mandates, mask mandates, and lockdowns have been imposed in response to covid-19, progressive political and media elites have been the driving forces behind them. This is clear to those of us alive today, but it is worth considering whether future history books will attempt to erase progressives’ culpability for the disasters their covid policies have caused. The argument that follows is speculative, but bad ideologies should be held to the fires of their own making, and it seems to be in the nature of progressivism to attempt to escape the historical reckoning it is due.

Not long ago, it seemed more likely that the progressive elites would eventually just declare covid-19 to be over and herald themselves as humanity’s saviors. But as the pandemic has worn on, the cracks in the covid disinformation regime have widened for all to see. The failures and destructiveness of their policies are now beyond deniability to reasonable people, and so long as it is well known that progressivism was the driving force behind those policies, this episode will tarnish its reputation and its core dogma that technocratic social planners holding “correct” moral beliefs will save mankind from itself.

Therefore, it now seems likely the progressive elites who engineered and proselytized these disastrous public health policies will begin to distance themselves from those actions and eventually attempt to paint a new history absolving their ideology from today’s failures. Philosophy professor Alex Rosenberg argues in How History Gets Things Wrong that narrative histories almost always get the “why” of history wrong because the narratives we spin about history, especially popular histories, are usually motivated by our own moral causes. If true, perhaps even the “what” of history can be distorted for the same reasons.

As Murray Rothbard demonstrated in The Progressive Era, American progressivism was born of just this type of motivated moral cause:

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

White House Incompetents Plotting Russia War!

Posted by M. C. on February 12, 2022

Surely at 3AM Zelensky is visited by the ghosts of Gaddafi, Saddam, Noriega, and endless former US clients who “went rogue” and found themselves on the wrong end of US “democracy promotion.” The price of crossing your US overlords is anal rape and death.

Dear Friends:

The Biden Administration geniuses who botched the US departure from Afghanistan, who assured us there was no way the Taliban would take over, and that no American would be left behind, are the very same people assuring us that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is “imminent.” Then it’s not. Now it is again! As soon as Tuesday!

It’s clear that we are not dealing with competent people. No wonder Biden’s approval ratings are at historic lows – below 40 percent! Ironically – and dangerously – that gives a great deal of leverage to the incompetent Obama-holdover hawks like Blinken, Nuland, and Sullivan, who are no doubt whispering in the president’s ear what wonders a delightful little war might bring.

According to some reports, the White House has shared “secret” intelligence with previously hesitant allies, and today Japan, Netherlands, and South Korea have joined the US in frantically demanding their citizens leave Ukraine immediately because, as Biden himself said – along with his incompetent National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan –  the invasion is imminent (again) and, “things could go crazy quickly.”

The leaking of “secret intelligence” is the best way to get the lapdog mainstream media to stand up and beg for more. It is also reminiscent of all the bogus “intelligence” that lied us into the catastrophic Iraq war, where we flushed trillions down the toilet in the pursuit of killing a million innocent people. All lies. God have mercy.

It was only a week or so ago that the State Department spokesman was ruthlessly hammered by AP’s Matt Lee over the fact-free claims that Putin was about to make a film faking a Ukrainian attack on Donbas to justify Russia’s own invasion of Ukraine. Lee did what journalists used to do: he asked for proof. The State Department flack – surprise surprise a former CIA officer – found himself pumping mud under what should have been normal scrutiny from the so-called fourth estate.

Here’s how it’s going down, folks, if it does go down. And I mentioned this in an interview tonight:

The US has turned its propaganda amplifiers up to 11 hyping the threat that Russia would somehow want to take Kiev in the next day or two. It has been able to establish this panic with the assistance of the Pravda-esque US mainstream media, 

Next step – already happening – is that the US is pulling its OSCE monitors from Donbas in eastern Ukraine due to the MSM/Biden hyped “imminent” threat. US allies may well follow and pull their OSCE monitors from Donbas, leaving no one to actually tell us who started shelling first.

How convenient.

And this while the OSCE monitors in Donbass have recorded a 400% increase in Kiev shelling the area today over the previous seven day average. Goaded by sugar daddy US, an otherwise seemingly-reluctant Zelensky – a comedian who fell into the role of Ukraine president – is the wild card.

There is no doubt that US pressure is on him like a pack of Texas fire ants. He has been desperately walking back unhinged (and objectively false) US assertions over the past several weeks that a Russian invasion was just a day away, but how long can he continue to poke his benefactor in the eye before he recalls what happens to former US allies?

Surely at 3AM Zelensky is visited by the ghosts of Gaddafi, Saddam, Noriega, and endless former US clients who “went rogue” and found themselves on the wrong end of US “democracy promotion.” The price of crossing your US overlords is anal rape and death.

As RPI Academic Advisor John Laughland famously wrote in 2005, “it is better to be an enemy of the Americans than their friend. If you are their enemy, they might try to buy you; but if you are their friend they will definitely sell you.”

Take note, Zelensky!

I’ve been writing for the better part of two decades on the corruption of the OSCE and its infiltration by western intelligence services. So while they are not for the most part reliable in the first place, the removal of all monitors under the false assertion that an invasion is imminent will remove any honest monitor who might lurk.

With no one from “the West” to monitor who fires first, all those wonderful weapons of war provided to Ukraine by the US and UK can be unleashed against the citizens of eastern Ukraine and no one will be there (except those unreliable Russians and their allies) to report that the attack came from Kiev rather than from Moscow.

This is how World War III starts. It’s all laid out before us. An incompetent yet hubristic Biden Administration believes that it can bring Ukraine into NATO and then use Article 5 to regain Crimea from Russia.

It’s like totally insane former US Ambassador Michael McFaul is recalled into a senior policymaking position after three years of sniffing glue!

Dear friends: This is no longer DC think tank speculation. Russia has a legitimate reason to oppose NATO on its doorstep. And that is not an endorsement of the concept of “regions of influence,” which is dumb. It is simply the Russians understanding that the next regime change will be theirs. There is nothing in such a stupid policy for the rest of us Americans. Who cares who runs Russia? Who cares who runs Ukraine?

Here is the forbidden but true conclusion: it is not “pro-Russia” but in fact pro-America to oppose nuclear war over insignificant Ukraine. Let Europe deal with its own border problems and how about we deal with our own as well?

BTW: how do you like that 1970s-era stagflation? Pre-order your bell-bottoms and disco records! It’s coming. We used to rule the world…
Sincerely yours,

Daniel McAdams
Executive Director
Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »