On August 21, 1992, Federal agents came to arrest Randy Weaver for his failure to appear on firearms charges after he was given the wrong court date. The charges stemmed from Weaver’s alleged sale of a sawed-off shotgun to an undercover federal informant, who convinced him to modify the firearm below the legal barrel length. Federal agents shot Vicki Weaver, killing her while holding her child. They also shot and killed 14-year-old Sammy Weaver and his dog Striker. Abolish the FBI. Abolish the ATF.
Central banks have become the dominating force in financial markets.
Modern central banking has shown that no single authority should set interest rates and liquidity.
As such, central banks are not a limit to risk-taking, rising government spending and budget irresponsibility, but rather a tool that enables market and government excess.
Easing and tightening decisions move all assets from bonds to private equity. Their role is supposed to be to control inflation, provide price stability, and ensure normal market functions. However, there is little evidence of any success in achieving their goals. The era of central bank dominance has been characterised by boom-and-bust cycles, financial crises, policy incentives to increase government spending and debt, and persistent inflation. Recently developed economies’ central banks have taken an increasingly interventionist role.
The creation and proliferation of central banks over the past century promised greater financial stability. Nevertheless, as history and current events continually show, central banks have not prevented financial crises. The frequency and severity of these crises have fluctuated but have not declined since central banks became the leading figure in financial market regulation and monetary interventions. Instead, central banking has introduced new fragilities and changed the nature, but not the recurrence, of financial turmoil.
Empirical evidence dispels the myth that central banks ended the era of frequent financial crises. Regardless of central bank oversight, a credit boom preceded one in three banking crises. Who created those credit booms? Central banks, through the manipulation of interest rates. According to Laeven and Valencia’s comprehensive database, there were 147 banking crises between 1970 and 2011 alone, in an era of near-universal central bank dominance. Financial crises remain a persistent global phenomenon, occurring in cycles that coincide with episodes of credit expansion. Central banks have often prolonged boom periods with low rates and elevated asset purchases and created abrupt bust moments after making mistakes about inflation and credit risks.
According to Reinhart and Rogoff’s work, the rate of crises has not dramatically changed with central banking. Instead, the forms of crises evolved. Twin crises (banking and currency) remain common, and the severity, measured in output loss or fiscal costs, has often increased, especially as financial institutions and governments grew intertwined with monetary authorities.
The Great Financial Crisis of 2008, the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, and the 2021–2022 inflationary burst rank among the events with the highest costs in history, contradicting the view that central banks have neutralised the risk or costliness of crises.
Those darned Iranians with their long memories don’t appreciate our benevolence in installing a malevolent dictator for the sake of oil com….errr…..common Iranian folk.
On this day, August 19th, 1953, the CIA and MI6 orchestrated a coup to overthrow Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh, reinstating the Shah and sparking decades of resentment. This intervention, driven by oil interests, violated Iranian sovereignty and fueled anti-U.S. sentiment. It exemplifies the blowback of meddling in foreign affairs. This affair is unknown to most Americans today, and its obfuscation continues the false narratives that drive public opinion to support bellicose policies towards Iran while ignoring legitmate grivences spawned by the policies and actions of our own government against our will.
The Libertarian Party of Pennsylvania critiques this U.S. meddling, advocating for non-intervention to avoid such long-term harm. We believe respecting sovereignty prevents conflicts like the Iran hostage crisis. Let’s end imperial overreach and prioritize peace.
CJ is back with a beast of a DHP episode that he’s been brewing laboriously for over a month, if not two.
On June 8th, 1967, during the Six Day War, the USS Liberty, a virtually unarmed signals intelligence ship operating off the coast of Egypt, was attacked by Israeli planes & torpedo boats. 34 men were killed, 171 were wounded, & the ship was nearly sunk before the attack was finally called off. The Israelis claimed it was a tragic case of mistaken identity, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and LBJ, America’s first “Israel-First” President, let them get away with it, & even helped cover it all up.
Tune in for the whole Dose of Historical MALinformation! This one’s a big red pill!
The reduction of individuals to impotent, isolated units—who interact primarily with state agents—is the ultimate outcome of the Left’s efforts, regardless of what its stated goals may be. Instead of independent family groups, bonded by biology and ancient, natural modes of human affection and loyalty, we are instead to have, as the “norm,” state-regulated sex workers and state-apportioned children, conceived by IVF and grown in surrogate wombs. This, the left tells us, will free us from the “slavery” of marriage and family,…
“The only real difference between marriage and prostitution is the price and the duration of the contract.”
Early last month, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)sponsored a panel on the family at the organization’s Socialism Conference 2025. The organization described the topic this way: “How should the left relate to the family? Socialist analysis makes clear that the nuclear family form is an inherently repressive, racist, and hetero-sexist institution that functionally reinforces and reproduces capitalism.”
The roundtable featured Olivia Katbi, the co chair of Portland DSA; Eman Abdelhadi, an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago; and Katie Gibson, a Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago.
Key observations from the panelists included:
“When we talk about family abolition, we’re talking about the abolition of the economic unit… all of our material needs taken care of by the collective.”
“We argue for abolition of the family in general… the institution of the family acts as part of the carceral system.”
Naturally, these leftists partly want to abolish the family because they agree with Marx that the family is a “bourgeois” institution that must be destroyed in order to clear the way for the socialist utopia. Another element of opposition to the family comes from the Left’s bizarre preoccupation with commodifying sex. It is ironic that these “anti-capitalists” seek so vehemently to turn sex into an economic commodity, but this appears to be a key tenet of leftist thinking in recent decades. Thus, they seek to normalize sex work. This is partly because the Left views marriage as a type of sex work itself. After all, the family is “inherently repressive,” and all sex within marriage is essentially rape. It is therefore “progress” to abolish marital sex and replace it with “sex work.”
A couple of quotations from the roundtable that capture this attitude include:
“Sex work and marriage can’t exist without each other—they’re two sides of the same coin.”
“The only real difference between marriage and prostitution is the price and the duration of the contract.”
These leftists also believe that the rearing of children ought to be managed and controlled by the state. That is, the raising of children should be collectivized and the parent-child bond replaced with the child-collective relationship.
(Lewis is partly correct. Surrogacy does indeed undermine the family as an institution and widespread surrogacy will prove to be a key building block for the post-humanist dystopian nightmare that people like Elon Musk are trying to build.)
At the core of all of this is opposition to the family as an independent institution, and the leftist contention that the family must be placed totally under the control of the state.
Whatever the Left might have to say about the economic mechanisms supposedly underlying the family, the fact is the Left’s hatred for the family mostly stems from the fact that the family is an obstacle to state power.
As I noted in this lecture last year, the family is an institution that predates all states and which is natural to the human condition and to all human societies.
Leftists such as those at the DSA conference seek to abolish any remaining vestiges of non-state independent governance. Although they deny it, “democratic socialists” are at the forefront of pushing for untrammeled state power, to be administered by an “enlightened” ruling oligarchy. The democratic socialists, therefore, seek to refocus all human loyalties toward the state, creating a direct state-citizen relationship for all, and setting up the state as the institution that meets all human needs. Unlike every particular family, which is relatively weak in its exercise of power, and is always temporary, the state’s power, in the Left’s vision, is to be overwhelming and permanent.
This idea of the family as an obstacle was central to advocates of state-building throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Marxists, being extreme advocates for state power, also saw the “problem” of the family.
Dozens of Members of the US House are on their way to Israel on an AIPAC-paid trip after Speaker Johnson – also in Israel – called August recess early to avoid a vote on Rep. Thomas Massie’s resolution to release the Epstein files. Priorities?
MCViewPoint 