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Face Masks and Freedom: Beware of Skepticism as a Tool of Inaction. – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on January 16, 2021

Being different is not enough. Seeking truth is the goal, and marshalling your resources accordingly is the necessity. Far from that goal, the contrarian may even be left with a spirit opposed to cooperation with others: one of our greatest resources are the people we are able to surround ourselves with.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/01/allan-stevo/face-masks-and-freedom-beware-of-skepticism-as-a-tool-of-inaction/

By Allan Stevo

We are taught a healthy and critical mind is skeptical. That is not true. A healthy and critical mind is skeptical when appropriate. Skeptical must never be a default, for then skepticism can be as self-sabotaging as apathy.

To be convinced to not care about the outcome of your own actions, or to not believe that your actions bring meaningful consequences, is one of the greatest harms that can be done to you in the modern era. An additional harm is done to an individual in modernity by injection of undue skepticism in his world view.

Libertarians, conservatives, and other heterodox thinkers of our contemporary and overly trendy era are especially at risk of this.

It can be easy to come to heterodox thinking because one is, by default, contrarian rather than insightful. Contrarian is not a synonym for insightful, though it is often mistaken as such.

This desire to be different from others sheds little more light than a default desire to be the same as others. Rather than being the obedient sheep of the herd, you are then the black sheep who dyed his own wool black.

The contrarian behavior lends itself to individualism, but not necessarily to a pursuit of greater truth.

Being different is not enough to be right. In fact, there are many things that the herd does right. Like anyone else living an unexamined life: the contrarian is left with a distorted view of the world and a life full of kneejerk reactions if he can’t recognize and control this tendency.

Being different is not enough. Seeking truth is the goal, and marshalling your resources accordingly is the necessity. Far from that goal, the contrarian may even be left with a spirit opposed to cooperation with others: one of our greatest resources are the people we are able to surround ourselves with.

To innately be hard to cooperate with and to leave yourself in that raw state is self-debilitating.

Unchecked skepticism places itself in a similar position of self-debilitation.

An unfamiliar idea is not then evaluated on its merits. It is evaluated on its novelty.

Skepticism can be the other side of the coin of trend following. It can be mere trend opposing.

Skepticism can be the enemy of faith. It is with great truth that people say faith can move mountains. It need not be a religious conviction. To tell yourself something is possible and to commit yourself to doing that thing makes that thing possible and far more likely to occur than before the person of faith conceived it. The person of faith is required to act in order for creation to occur. If you don’t act, creation cannot occur. If you don’t fight, you can’t win.

He with no faith, moves no mountains.

It is the leap of faith that brings creation, that brings victory, that brings the moving of mountains. No matter how outlandish the aim, the leap of faith is required to reach the goal. Those able to make the greatest leaps of faith, and who find themselves able to commit to the execution, achieve the greatest feats. In contrast, it is the overly skeptical voices around us or within us that prevent creation, that prevent victory, that prevent the moving of mountains.

In whose interest could it possibly be to prevent greatness in our midst? Probably not yours, dear warrior. And certainly not mine.

The skeptical can be easily convinced to focus on that which does not matter. Politics sucks. Fights are brutal. Government is rotten. Life is a drag. I get it: there are lots of bad things in the world. That’s no permission for anyone to be such a wuss. For anyone to be so mentally weak. It’s no permission at all.

Skepticism is a grand tool. Used improperly, like any tool, it can be leverage for such great evil. It is not the tool that is evil or good, it is the behavior of the one holding the tool. To allow unchecked skepticism is a great evil to yourself and all around you. And do you know whose fault it is when you use a tool for evil?

Yours.

You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You’ll never take back your freedom with weakness. You’ll never take back our freedom with weakness.

Lots of things suck.

That’s no reason to leave the fight.

Skepticism is not a tool of action.

That is evil enough, but it is not sufficiently derided in our era. It is worse than a mere tool of inaction. It is a tool of weakness. Skepticism is a tool of weakness.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates.

One of your greatest tools is your ability to do exactly that — to turn a mirror on yourself, to find truth in your search, to exactingly look at the world, and to act in the world, but most importantly to act within yourself and in your own life around you.

Examined skepticism can be such a useful tool, while some of the greatest potential in our present era is lost upon those with unchecked skepticism.

How useful they are to the enemy.

How effectively they have debilitated themselves.

How little faith it takes, how wonderfully powerful you become, if you can take a tiny leap of faith.

A tiny leap of faith.

The unchecked skepticism you proudly welcome into your own life, and nurture, chokes faith out of your life in a way your greatest enemy would never be able to do.

Push away unexamined skepticism and act, for you actions matter. “Face Masks in One Lesson” is a tool you can use for exactly that.

The Best of Allan Stevo Allan Stevo [send him mail] writes about international politics and culture from a free market perspective at 52 Weeks in Slovakia (www.52inSk.com). He is the author of How to Win America, The Bitcoin Manifesto, and numerous other books.

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How Government Policy Reduces Fertility | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on January 16, 2021

First, working adults have a cut of their incomes taxed away to fund these programs which benefit only people beyond the years during which they are likely to be raising a family. Those who are net taxpayers during childbearing years are thus less capable of affording children.

Minimum wage laws disproportionately affect the least skilled workers(like teenagers), whose productivity is not high enough for them to be worth hiring under a high minimum wage. These young workers are then denied entry-level jobs which rob the young workers of both income and work experience.

https://mises.org/wire/how-government-policy-reduces-fertility

Gor Mkrtchian

The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, and every country in Europe have fertility rates below replacement level (2.1 births per woman). And where there is smoke, the state has lit a fire.

This is not an accident, and much of what’s behind these demographic trends can be found in economic policy.

Below I’ll sprint through some of the many avenues through which the state encourages low fertility rates. One of the clearest channels is forcing the productive to pay for others’ abortions and contraception.

Beyond subsidizing the physical elimination and prevention of pregnancy, the two main ways the state reduces birthrates are by (1) reducing the potential benefits of having children and (2) by increasing the costs imposed on current and potential parents.

Social Insurance

For example, Social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare make it harder for adults to afford children while reducing the net benefits of having them.

First, working adults have a cut of their incomes taxed away to fund these programs which benefit only people beyond the years during which they are likely to be raising a family. Those who are net taxpayers during childbearing years are thus less capable of affording children. When these adults are retired and are unlikely to produce children, then the state transfers money to them. This also outsources the job of eldercare to the state, thus reducing one of the main perceived benefits of having children. 

Moreover, as. Jörg Guido Hülsmann explains, social insurance programs reduce the incentive to have children by taxing away their incomes as well. If one of the reasons parents have children is that they expect their children to take care of them in their old age, the fact that the state will tax children makes them less financially capable of caring for their parents:

The state pension system turns this relationship upside down in economic terms. Families must continue to bear the costs of bringing up children but must share their children’s future tax payments with all other citizens, including the childless. The benefits of children are socialized, while the cost of raising children remains private. If you wanted to reduce families, you couldn’t think of anything better.

Child Labor Laws and the Minimum Wage

The regulatory state intervenes in family finances as well.  Minimum wage laws restrict employment even for a family’s older children who might otherwise have been able to contribute more fully to college costs, transportation costs, and more.  Minimum wage laws disproportionately affect the least skilled workers(like teenagers), whose productivity is not high enough for them to be worth hiring under a high minimum wage. These young workers are then denied entry-level jobs which rob the young workers of both income and work experience. 

This could have reduced overall costs for parents in terms of future tuition, thus reducing student loan bills, and more. But by reducing unemployment for unskilled your workers, the state passes on to the parents higher costs for child-rearing. 

The Wrong and the Right Way to Increase Birthrates

As with any activity, product, or service, when the state imposes higher costs, we can expect to see less of it. Thus, all else being equal, fertility rates would increase were fewer regulatory burdens placed on children and families.

On the other hand, some governments have moved to the opposite extreme in promoting pronatalist policies. These usually appear either as either cash transfers or tax exemptions for those who have children.

For example, in Poland parents received/receive about $125 a month for each child. Meanwhile, “Hungary’s populist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has promised that women who have four or more children will never pay income tax again.”

Tax exemptions are arguably preferable to cash transfers, because they involve less bureaucratic waste. This is because it’s presumably easier to not take money from a portion of the populace than to take money from one group, identify the correct recipients, and transfer the money to them.

Indeed, in some cases, when the government transfers money from Peter to Paul, Paul actually only ends up with 30 cents on the dollar. The other seventy cents go to Bob the Bureaucrat:

on average, 70 cents of each dollar budgeted for government assistance goes not to the poor, but to the members of the welfare bureaucracy and others serving the poor….In contrast, administrative and other operating costs in private charities absorb, on average, only one-third or less of each dollar donated, leaving the other two-thirds (or more) to be delivered to recipients.

Of course, why stop at tax exemptions for just one group of people (i.e., potential parents)? Rather than put the state in the position of being “profertility” or “antifertility”—and picking winners and losers in terms of family planning—it would be best to lessen the overall government burden on all households. This must be done through reductions in the regulatory burden. Similarly, social security taxes, which necessarily transfer income and wealth from families with children (or potential children) to pensioners, should be reduced.

Seemingly unrelated and benign policies influence society’s most intimate relationships and consequential decisions. Jettisoning the antinatalist programs reviewed above would reduce Leviathan and also potentially strengthen the family.

Gor Mkrtchian

Gor Mkrtchian is a research assistant at the Free Market Institute and a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Texas Tech University. He received a BA in political science and theater studies from Yale University.

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What Is Fascism? It’s the System We’ve Been Living under for Decades. | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on January 16, 2021

Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the police state as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive state the unlimited master of society.

This describes mainstream politics in America today. And not just in America. It’s true in Europe, too. It is so much part of the mainstream that it is hardly noticed anymore.

It is ever more widely known that statism does not and cannot work. Statism is the great lie. Statism gives us the exact opposite of its promise. It promised security, prosperity, and peace; it has given us fear, poverty, war, and death. If we want a future, it is one that we have to build ourselves. The fascist state will not give it to us. On the contrary, it stands in the way.

https://mises.org/wire/what-fascism-its-system-weve-been-living-under-decades

Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

[Editor’s Note: In 2011, Lew Rockwell penned this thorough explanation of what fascism really is and what must be done to combat it. Fascism, unlike what the dominant media narrative asserts, has virtually nothing to do with people expressing politically incorrect opinions, or people refusing to wear masks, or a group of disorganized rioters smashing windows in the US Capitol. Fascism, rather, is an ideology of state control, and one that has been immensely successful over the past seventy years in the United States. As Rockwell explains below, the “eight marks of fascism” are all clear and powerful trends within the United States regime today.]

Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the police state as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive state the unlimited master of society.

This describes mainstream politics in America today. And not just in America. It’s true in Europe, too. It is so much part of the mainstream that it is hardly noticed anymore.

If fascism is invisible to us, it is truly the silent killer. It fastens a huge, violent, lumbering state on the free market that drains its capital and productivity like a deadly parasite on a host. This is why the fascist state has been called the vampire economy. It sucks the economic life out of a nation and brings about a slow death of a once thriving economy.

…

The talk in Washington about reform, whether from Democrats or Republicans, is like a bad joke. They talk of small changes, small cuts, commissions they will establish, curbs they will make in ten years. It is all white noise. None of this will fix the problem. Not even close.

The problem is more fundamental. It is the quality of the money. It is the very existence of 10,000 regulatory agencies. It is the whole assumption that you have to pay the state for the privilege to work. It is the presumption that the government must manage every aspect of the capitalist economic order. In short, it is the total state that is the problem, and the suffering and decline will continue so long as the total state exists.

The Origins of Fascism

To be sure, the last time people worried about fascism was during the Second World War. There can be no question of its origins. It is tied up with the history of post–World War I Italian politics. In 1922, Benito Mussolini won a democratic election and established fascism as his philosophy. Mussolini had been a member of the Italian Socialist Party.

All the biggest and most important players within the fascist movement came from the socialists. It was a threat to the socialists because it was the most appealing political vehicle for the real-world application of the socialist impulse. Socialists crossed over to join the fascists en masse.

This is also why Mussolini himself enjoyed such good press for more than ten years after his rule began. He was celebrated by the New York Times in article after article. He was heralded in scholarly collections as an exemplar of the type of leader we needed in the age of the planned society. Puff pieces on this blowhard were very common in US journalism all through the late 1920s and the mid-1930s.

In Italy, the Left realized that their anticapitalistic agenda could best be achieved within the framework of the authoritarian, planning state. Of course our friend John Maynard Keynes played a critical role in providing a pseudoscientific rationale for joining opposition to old-world laissez-faire to a new appreciation of the planned society. Recall that Keynes was not a socialist of the old school. As he himself said in his introduction to the Nazi edition of his General Theory, National Socialism was far more hospitable to his ideas than a market economy.

Flynn Tells the Truth

The most definitive study on fascism written in these years was As We Go Marching by John T. Flynn. Flynn was a journalist and scholar of a liberal spirit who had written a number of best-selling books in the 1920s. It was the New Deal that changed him. His colleagues all followed FDR into fascism, while Flynn himself kept the old faith. That meant that he fought FDR every step of the way, and not only his domestic plans. Flynn was a leader of the America First movement that saw FDR’s drive to war as nothing but an extension of the New Deal, which it certainly was.

As We Go Marching came out in 1944, just at the tail end of the war, and right in the midst of wartime economic controls the world over. It is a wonder that it ever got past the censors. It is a full-scale study of fascist theory and practice, and Flynn saw precisely where fascism ends: in militarism and war as the fulfillment of the stimulus spending agenda. When you run out of everything else to spend money on, you can always depend on nationalist fervor to back more military spending.

The Eight Marks of Fascist Policy

Flynn, like other members of the Old Right, was disgusted by the irony that what he saw, almost everyone else chose to ignore. After reviewing this long history, Flynn proceeds to sum up with a list of eight points he considers to be the main marks of the fascist state.

As I present them, I will also offer comments on the modern American central state.

Point 1. The government is totalitarian because it acknowledges no restraint on its powers.

If you become directly ensnared in the state’s web, you will quickly discover that there are indeed no limits to what the state can do. This can happen boarding a flight, driving around in your hometown, or having your business run afoul of some government agency. In the end, you must obey or be caged like an animal or killed. In this way, no matter how much you may believe that you are free, all of us today are but one step away from Guantanamo.

No aspect of life is untouched by government intervention, and often it takes forms we do not readily see. All of healthcare is regulated, but so is every bit of our food, transportation, clothing, household products, and even private relationships. Mussolini himself put his principle this way: “All within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” I submit to you that this is the prevailing ideology in the United States today. This nation, conceived in liberty, has been kidnapped by the fascist state.

Point 2. Government is a de facto dictatorship based on the leadership principle.

I wouldn’t say that we truly have a dictatorship of one man in this country, but we do have a form of dictatorship of one sector of government over the entire country. The executive branch has spread so dramatically over the last century that it has become a joke to speak of checks and balances.

The executive state is the state as we know it, all flowing from the White House down. The role of the courts is to enforce the will of the executive. The role of the legislature is to ratify the policy of the executive. This executive is not really about the person who seems to be in charge. The president is only the veneer, and the elections are only the tribal rituals we undergo to confer some legitimacy on the institution. In reality, the nation-state lives and thrives outside any “democratic mandate.” Here we find the power to regulate all aspects of life and the wicked power to create the money necessary to fund this executive rule.

Point 3. Government administers a capitalist system with an immense bureaucracy.

The reality of bureaucratic administration has been with us at least since the New Deal, which was modeled on the planning bureaucracy that lived in World War I. The planned economy—whether in Mussolini’s time or ours—requires bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is the heart, lungs, and veins of the planning state. And yet to regulate an economy as thoroughly as this one is today is to kill prosperity with a billion tiny cuts.

So where is our growth? Where is the peace dividend that was supposed to come after the end of the Cold War? Where are the fruits of the amazing gains in efficiency that technology has afforded? It has been eaten by the bureaucracy that manages our every move on this earth. The voracious and insatiable monster here is called the Federal Code that calls on thousands of agencies to exercise the police power to prevent us from living free lives.

It is as Bastiat said: the real cost of the state is the prosperity we do not see, the jobs that don’t exist, the technologies to which we do not have access, the businesses that do not come into existence, and the bright future that is stolen from us. The state has looted us just as surely as a robber who enters our home at night and steals all that we love.

Point 4. Producers are organized into cartels in the way of syndicalism.

Syndicalist is not usually how we think of our current economic structure. But remember that syndicalism means economic control by the producers. Capitalism is different. It places by virtue of market structures all control in the hands of the consumers. The only question for syndicalists, then, is which producers are going to enjoy political privilege. It might be the workers, but it can also be the largest corporations.

In the case of the United States, in the last three years, we’ve seen giant banks, pharmaceutical firms, insurers, car companies, Wall Street banks and brokerage houses, and quasi-private mortgage companies enjoying vast privileges at our expense. They have all joined with the state in living a parasitical existence at our expense.

Point 5. Economic planning is based on the principle of autarky.

Autarky is the name given to the idea of economic self-sufficiency. Mostly this refers to the economic self-determination of the nation-state. The nation-state must be geographically huge in order to support rapid economic growth for a large and growing population.

Look at the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. We would be supremely naive to believe that these wars were not motivated in part by the producer interests of the oil industry. It is true of the American empire generally, which supports dollar hegemony. It is the reason for the North American Union.

Point 6. Government sustains economic life through spending and borrowing.

This point requires no elaboration because it is no longer hidden. In the latest round, and with a prime-time speech, Obama mused about how is it that people are unemployed at a time when schools, bridges, and infrastructure need repairing. He ordered that supply and demand come together to match up needed work with jobs.

Hello? The schools, bridges, and infrastructure that Obama refers to are all built and maintained by the state. That’s why they are falling apart. And the reason that people don’t have jobs is because the state has made it too expensive to hire them. It’s not complicated. To sit around and dream of other scenarios is no different from wishing that water flowed uphill or that rocks would float in the air. It amounts to a denial of reality.

As for the rest of this speech, Obama promised yet another long list of spending projects. But no government in the history of the world has spent as much, borrowed as much, and created as much fake money as the United States, all thanks to the power of the Fed to create money at will. If the United States doesn’t qualify as a fascist state in this sense, no government ever has.

Point 7. Militarism is a mainstay of government spending.

Have you ever noticed that the military budget is never seriously discussed in policy debates? The United States spends more than most of the rest of the world combined. And yet to hear our leaders talk, the United States is just a tiny commercial republic that wants peace but is constantly under threat from the world. Where is the debate about this policy? Where is the discussion? It is not going on. It is just assumed by both parties that it is essential for the US way of life that the United States be the most deadly country on the planet, threatening everyone with nuclear extinction unless they obey.

Point 8. Military spending has imperialist aims.

We’ve had one war after another, wars waged by the United States against noncompliant countries, and the creation of even more client states and colonies. US military strength has led not to peace but the opposite. It has caused most people in the world to regard the United States as a threat, and it has led to unconscionable wars on many countries. Wars of aggression were defined at Nuremberg as crimes against humanity.

Obama was supposed to end this. He never promised to do so, but his supporters all believed that he would. Instead, he has done the opposite. He has increased troop levels, entrenched wars, and started new ones. In reality, he has presided over a warfare state just as vicious as any in history. The difference this time is that the Left is no longer criticizing the US role in the world. In that sense, Obama is the best thing ever to happen to the warmongers and the military-industrial complex.

The Future

I can think of no greater priority today than a serious and effective antifascist alliance. In many ways, one is already forming. It is not a formal alliance. It is made up of those who protest the Fed, those who refuse to go along with mainstream fascist politics, those who seek decentralization, those who demand lower taxes and free trade, those who seek the right to associate with anyone they want and buy and sell on terms of their own choosing, those who insist they can educate their children on their own, the investors and savers who make economic growth possible, those who do not want to be felt up at airports, and those who have become expatriates.

It is also made of the millions of independent entrepreneurs who are discovering that the number one threat to their ability to serve others through the commercial marketplace is the institution that claims to be our biggest benefactor: the government.

How many people fall into this category? It is more than we know. The movement is intellectual. It is political. It is cultural. It is technological. They come from all classes, races, countries, and professions. This is no longer a national movement. It is truly global.

And what does this movement want? Nothing more or less than sweet liberty. It does not ask that the liberty be granted or given. It only asks for the liberty that is promised by life itself and would otherwise exist were it not for the Leviathan state that robs us, badgers us, jails us, kills us.

This movement is not departing. We are daily surrounded by evidence that it is right and true. Every day, it is more and more obvious that the state contributes absolutely nothing to our well-being; it massively subtracts from it.

Back in the 1930s, and even up through the 1980s, the partisans of the state were overflowing with ideas. This is no longer true. Fascism has no new ideas, no big projects—and not even its partisans really believe it can accomplish what it sets out to do. The world created by the private sector is so much more useful and beautiful than anything the state has done that the fascists have themselves become demoralized and aware that their agenda has no real intellectual foundation.

It is ever more widely known that statism does not and cannot work. Statism is the great lie. Statism gives us the exact opposite of its promise. It promised security, prosperity, and peace; it has given us fear, poverty, war, and death. If we want a future, it is one that we have to build ourselves. The fascist state will not give it to us. On the contrary, it stands in the way.

In the end, this is the choice we face: the total state or total freedom. Which will we choose? If we choose the state, we will continue to sink further and further and eventually lose all that we treasure as a civilization. If we choose freedom, we can harness that remarkable power of human cooperation that will enable us to continue to make a better world.

In the fight against fascism, there is no reason to be despairing. We must continue to fight with every bit of confidence that the future belongs to us and not them.

Their world is falling apart. Ours is just being built. Their world is based on bankrupt ideologies. Ours is rooted in the truth about freedom and reality. Their world can only look back to the glory days. Ours looks forward to the future we are building for ourselves. 

Their world is rooted in the corpse of the nation-state. Our world draws on the energies and creativity of all peoples in the world, united in the great and noble project of creating a prospering civilization through peaceful human cooperation. We possess the only weapon that is truly immortal: the right idea. It is this that will lead to victory.

This article is adapted from a longer version published in 2011. Author:

Contact Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and editor of LewRockwell.com.

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Crazy People

Posted by M. C. on January 15, 2021

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Hard talk with Václav Klaus: “The people should say NO to all of it.”

Posted by M. C. on January 15, 2021

VK: The restrictions on basic civil rights that were introduced so swiftly and so easily demonstrate the power of the modern state, with all its new, “smart“ technologies and drastically expanded enforcement capabilities. Economists often talk about the so-called “ratchet effect”, or the limited ability of existing processes and dynamics to be reversed and to return to normal once a specific event has radically altered them. It is true of prices, of productivity and it is also true of social and political systems. Therefore, I am afraid it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to return to the pre-corona days.

https://claudiograss.ch/2020/05/hard-talk-with-vaclav-klaus-the-people-should-say-no-to-all-of-it/

As we get deeper into this crisis and we get used to our “new normal”, it’s easy to focus on the daily corona-horror stories in the media or the latest shocking unemployment numbers, and lose track of the bigger picture and of what is really, fundamentally important. Even as the lockdown measures begin to get phased out, the scale of the economic damage is unimaginable and the idea of returning to “business as usual” is no longer tenable. The last couple of months have had a severe impact not just on the economy, but on our societies and geopolitical reality too. These changes are most likely irreversible and we as citizens and as investors will have to be prepared to deal with this massive shift and all that it entails for a long time.

Amid the panic, the distractions and the hyperbole that are prevalent these days, my own daily task has been an effort to separate the signals from the noise. In order to do so, I’ve also reached out to the few people whose views and insights I have long found invaluable and who have prioritized critical thought and kept their principles intact throughout this crisis. Straight talk and direct answers are very hard to come by these days from most Western leaders and institutional figures, this is why I turned to Former President of the Czech Republic, Prof. Ing. Václav Klaus, who has long been a voice of reason and whose unique perspective is even more important now. In the interview that follows, he shares his views on the current crisis and on what’s to come, in a succinct and resolute way and with a directness that is as rare and as it is essential in times like these.

Claudio Grass (CG): The magnitude and the global scale of the lockdown and shutdown measures we’ve seen during this corona-crisis are unprecedented. How do you evaluate the response compared to the threat itself? Do you believe it is justified? 

Václav Klaus (VK): I don‘t pretend to be an expert in epidemiology, but my background in economics and statistics tells me that the threat is smaller than the consequences „organized“ by governments all over the world as a reaction to this pandemic. I would add unnecessary consequences. The authorities reacted in an exorbitant way, in a moment of fear. This is partly the result of the current „online democracy“.

CG: The “emergency measures” and the restrictions that have been imposed on civilians’ basic rights have served as a reminder of the true extent of the state’s powers. Do you find this worrying and do you see a risk that these new, extraordinary powers might not be as easy to roll back once the crisis is over? 

VK: The restrictions on basic civil rights that were introduced so swiftly and so easily demonstrate the power of the modern state, with all its new, “smart“ technologies and drastically expanded enforcement capabilities. Economists often talk about the so-called “ratchet effect”, or the limited ability of existing processes and dynamics to be reversed and to return to normal once a specific event has radically altered them. It is true of prices, of productivity and it is also true of social and political systems. Therefore, I am afraid it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to return to the pre-corona days. 

CG: On an economic level, what is your assessment of the impact of the shutdown measures? 

VK: Most, if not all, of the circulating quantitative estimates and forecasts, are wrong. The “experts” should first say how long the quarantine restrictions will last and when the economic shutdown will be fully lifted. Their economic forecasts depend on the length of the quarantine period. They should announce explicitly when they plan to end it. Until this is established and known, the current forecasts are economically meaningless. 

CG: The monetary and fiscal interventions that we’ve seen so far are as extreme and as shocking as the shutdown policies themselves. Do you think they’ll be enough to keep the economy afloat though, or is a deep and long recession simply inevitable? 

VK: The monetary and fiscal measures – unacceptable for the true democrats – may have positive short-term effects, but they will destabilize the economy and public finances for a very long period of time. They could lead to very high inflation. 

CG:  Trillions upon trillions are being injected into the system, while wild ideas like the Universal Basic Income have become mainstream. Apart from the obvious monetary and economic risks of these policies, do you also foresee political and social implications? 

VK: Those of us in the ex-communist countries were used to living in a world of something like “Universal Basic Income”. We wanted to get rid of communism because of principles like this. These principles destroyed the motivation to work, which proved to be ruinous.  

CG: Within just a few weeks we have witnessed an abrupt and absolute turn towards centralization. The free market has been brought to its knees, individual voluntary exchanges, productivity and the very right to work and to create were all suspended and replaced with central planning. Do you think this approach has any chance of being sustainable? 

VK: I would not call it “central planning” yet. I prefer Walter Eucken’s term (used for the description of the German economy in Hitler’s time), “centrally administrated economy”. It is not planning in its original meaning. It is the very heavy and visible hand of the government at work, instead of the “invisible hand” of the market. 

CG: The corona-crisis has also had some very serious geopolitical ramifications, especially vis-à-vis China. What are the main changes that you expect to see going forward in this arena? 

VK: We shouldn’t use this situation for the introduction of new dangerous foreign relations policies and to strengthen the demonization of countries such as China and Russia. To my great regret, however, we see this is already happening.

CG: What about the future of the EU? Do you think this crisis has further weakened it and what is your outlook for the bloc? 

VK: The EU will – unfortunately, in my view – survive the corona-crisis. Its exponents will use it to further weaken nation-states. They are on the defensivenow, but they will reemerge again in full strength very soon. I wish I’ll be proven wrong, but I do believe they’ll use this crisis to their advantage and I fear they’ll do so successfully.

CG: Citizens, investors and savers everywhere are justifiably scared, if not of the virus itself then certainly of financial ruin. In your view, what can we do to take back at least some control of our own future? 

VK: It’s quite simple. The people should say “NO” to all of it. Otherwise, what lies ahead is a real-life approximation of the dystopian “Brave New World” of Aldous Huxley. 

Claudio Grass, Hünenberg See, Schweiz

This article has been published in the Newsroom of pro aurum, the leading precious metals company in Europe with an independent subsidiary in Switzerland.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Is The USPS Creating A National Biometric Criminal Background Check Program? – Activist Post

Posted by M. C. on January 15, 2021

Remember the whining from snowflake voters about not getting their ballots counted because they waited until a week before election day to send FOR their ballot? Trump privatization is the problem!

The USPS is anything but non-governmental. In fact it is becoming a giant FIB field office.

We know the USPS photographs our mail and shares the bounty.

https://www.newsweek.com/postal-service-photographs-every-piece-mail-us-shares-agencies-request-it-280614

The gorilla in the room is does the USPS scan and data bank fingerprints on mail. How long before it scans contents?

https://www.activistpost.com/2021/01/is-the-usps-creating-a-national-biometric-criminal-background-check-program.html

By MassPrivateI

Are Americans ready for a national United States Postal Service (USPS) biometric criminal background check program?

What initially started out as an employee criminal background screener program has morphed into a biometric criminal background check program for the public.

In 2019, the USPS innocuously began installing fingerprint scanners in post offices so they could scan potential employees. The USPS used fingerprint scanners and the National Agency Check with Inquiries (NACI) to conduct in-depth background checks.

NACI investigations are conducted for all newly hired employees as part of the post-hiring process. Based on the NACI results, the Postal Service makes a final suitability determination and the employee is either retained or separated. During the hiring process, controls are implemented to help ensure that appropriate due diligence (reviews, approval certifications, justifications, etc.) is applied.

But an article from the Federal News Network dated October, 2020 revealed all that was about to change.

The Postal Service is working with the FBI to provide fingerprinting services at more than 100 post offices across the country. Before this partnership, the FBI had up to a 14-week turnaround time to process fingerprints for its Identity History Summary Check. But local post offices have processed these fingerprints in less than a day. People go through the fingerprinting program if they apply for a visa, adopt a child, or apply for jobs working with children. USPS officials said the agency is also looking to expand its fingerprint services to other federal agencies.

According to the feds, the USPS has been providing “Identity History Summary Checks” for the public using their fingerprints in 100 post offices.

A hundred post offices offering biometric background checks to the public is nothing to be concerned about, right?

Fast-forward four months, and the 100 post offices conducting biometric background checks on Americans has changed dramatically.

According to a January, 2021 Federal News Network article the USPS biometric criminal background checks of the public has expanded 3900 percent or 4,000 post offices!

The Postal Service is planning to expand its fingerprinting services to 4,000 facilities before the end of 2021 — a 40-fold increase from current levels – in an effort to make the most of its vast network of post offices across the country.

A PR Newswire news release revealed that the USPS and facial recognition company IDEMIA are working together to conduct biometric criminal background checks on people nationwide.

“This award will enable the Postal Service to further leverage its nationwide retail network and information infrastructure to better serve federal agencies and the American public through broader access to biometric capture and in-person proofing services.”

It appears that the Feds and IDEMIA have finally found a way to turn the USPS into a profitable business. Albeit by profiting off of background checks on the public; but it’s something.

IDEMIA’s CEO Andrew Boyd could not be any happier,

We are delighted to partner with USPS to help bring their vision forward, and to leverage USPS’s broad infrastructure to offer the American people greater access to identity verification and assurance solutions.

The feds could use post offices to conduct criminal background checks on 99% of the population.

The January 2021 Federal News Network article hints that all 31,000 post offices will soon be conducting biometric criminal background checks.

Shane Powers, the vice president of operations at NSS, said the success of the program, and its potential for growth, stem from the agency’s vast delivery network. USPS operates 31,000 post offices, and 99% of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of their nearest post office.

The feds could use America’s trust of the USPS to create a national biometric criminal background check program.

“They’re very proud that they’re one of the most trusted government agencies time and time again, and a lot of it comes back down to their employees. This partnership will ensure that USPS employees are properly vetted through the FBI channels to make sure that they don’t have that rap sheet that has negative stuff in it,” Powers said.

Still don’t think that the Feds could use the USPS to create a national biometric criminal background check program?

“IDEMIA will also support USPS in offering digital fingerprint services, enabling faster turnaround from the FBI in providing members of the public with their criminal history record,” Powers said.

And there is more,

“They want to innovate faster, and with that comes this value that they’ll deliver. Our platform will be able to scale, it has the flexibility to deploy nationwide and very quickly, so we can move at the speed that USPS wants to innovate,” he said.

In the not too-distant future our government could require citizens to visit their nearest FBI-run post office and submit to biometric criminal background checks complete with facial recognition.

Turning the USPS into police department sub-stations appears to be on the fast track and is something we should all be concerned about.

Source: MassPrivateI Blog

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Big Tech’s Purge is Only Beginning… For Them – Gold Goats ‘n Guns

Posted by M. C. on January 15, 2021

Discord and Telegram are exploding as we go back to the days of Usenet and Yahoo Groups dedicated to specific topics of like-minded people. Gab has had private groups for years now.

Now more than at any other point in history is there the opportunity for a real, properly-built and decentralized social media platform owned by those that hold the governance tokens and not a corporation or organization which is corruptible.

https://tomluongo.me/2021/01/13/big-tech-purge-beginning-for-them/

Author: Tom Luongo

There’s nothing easy about living through a political coup. The Big Tech firms long in cahoots with our government have been pushing a false narrative of evil MAGA-Nazis trying to undermine polite society for more than four years now.

Suppression started with Milo Yiannopoulos, accelerated to include Alex Jones and InfoWars and reach a temporary peak in 2018 with the persecution of alternative social media platform Gab in the wake of the Pittsburgh shooting.

I said this then in a piece entitled: Attack on Gab Proves Speech Was Never Free:

Friday’s attack by an unhinged, vile piece of human excrement on a Synagogue in Pittsburgh wasn’t hours old before real world agendas pushed to the top of the news.

Twitter alternative Gab was immediately dropped by PayPal without specific reasons.

Then immediately, Gab’s latest hosting service unilaterally gave the company a 48-hour termination notice of its contract.

Gab was hounded to the point of extermination and only a herculean effort by CEO and total warrior Andrew Torba and his staff kept the company afloat. Today Gab can only take Bitcoin and checks for payment. Torba himself has no banking privileges or access to credit, payment processors etc.

All for what? Running a social network where someone posted something terrible hours before doing something terrible?

Or was this a political hit job? The coordination of the event with the response is a little too convenient for any person of room temperature or higher intelligence to stomach.

The Rhyme Without Reason

Sound familiar to what happened to Parler? The attack then on Gab was a dry run for this weekend. If no one would stand up for Gab who didn’t have the resources to fight this in court, then when it came time to do it for real to a more high profile firm they knew it would stand up.

This growing duopoly in internet on-ramp gatekeeping by Apple and Google has been something I’ve warned about for years (go look through the archives searching out terms like Gab and Facebook).

No one listened. We all kept retweeting Trump and I even finally broke down and bought an iPhone. Parler just got the Gab treatment literally over nothing.

I’m not going to say both events were scripted false flags (though there’s certainly enough evidence that there was something really hinckey going on at the Capitol) but they certainly had their action plans ready for when the right trigger occured.

In fact, I’d argue that it’s more likely the people posting vile garbage on these networks is a plant than a real violent dissident. We know that the FBI, for example, infiltrates militia groups all the time and in some cases there are more agents working undercover than there are actual militia guys.

When you’re in the narrative creation business and we know that a minimum of 30% of users on Twitter aren’t real but bots, is it really a stretch to think a Deep State actor isn’t posting inflammatory shit on Parler to give the tech giants the excuse they need to do the thing they desperately want to do anyway, namely destroy their up and coming competition?

These companies have normalized suppression of speech in the public commons that their networks operate on top of. I remind people all the time that they are bandwidth pigs, feeding at the subsidized trough of publicly-built and maintained infrastructure.

Net Non-Neutrality

Trump’s biggest sin in his time as president wasn’t, to these people, saying inflammatory things, it was getting rid of their cashcow, Net Neutrality.

Net Neutrality took pricing of bandwidth out of the hands of consumers. It handed the profits from it to Google, Facebook and all the crappy advertisers spamming video ads, malware, scams, and the like everywhere.

By mandating ‘equal access’ and equal fee structures the advertisers behind Google and Facebook would spend their budgets without much thought or care. Google and Facebook ad revenue soared under Net Neutrality because advertisers’ needs are not aligned with Google’s bottom line, but with consumers’.

And, because of that, the price paid to deliver the ad, i.e. Google’s cost of goods sold (COGS), thanks to Net Neutrality, was held artificially low. And Google, Facebook and the Porn Industry pocketed the difference.

They grew uncontrollably. In the case of Google and Facebook, uncontrollably powerful.

Look, I’m more than okay with saying that Apple, Google or Facebook have the right to restrict content on their services, but only if they are also doing that over their own privately-built public networks, their own private wires.

But, we all know that isn’t the case. They utilize the public airwaves, fiber trunks, satellites etc. that we paid to build. As libertarians we’ve always argued that freedom of association also meant freedom from association.

That freedom, through the application of private property, also comes with responsibility to the counter-party in any and all interactions. No one would have allowed these companies to build these networks in a true private property regime.

No way would they have become this big, this powerful or this cowardly if they had had to bear the true costs of their business roll out. These aren’t the bastions of the free market conservatives (and even classical liberals to an extent) think they are.

They are, ultimately, as we’ve seen from their actions this week, the biggest welfare queens in the world simply stepping on the competition to ensure conformity of information flow.

Continued Section 230 immunity has elevated their ever-changing Terms of Service above the proscriptions against limiting speech in the Bill of Rights.

Moreover, these firms use these Terms of Service to provide no guarantee of service. These ToS’s are contracts of adhesion, entered into where one party has unequal standing versus the counter-party.

But, since the whole idea of living under a coercive government is one big contract of adhesion, since you really aren’t an equal partner to the government in the social contract nor did you have any choice but to sign on the moment you were born, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when that reality is shoved into our faces when their power is threatened.

This is the fundamental problem with accepting any of these ideas as valid. The whole society is structured around these enshrined power imbalances and we think we’re going to upend them by voting for Orange Man Bad?

Globo-Stasi’s

The way they operate is far beyond the strictures placed on governments themselves, who have to at least create Byzantine rules to obfuscate the tyranny and force us into a corrupt and expensive court system stacked against us to get the barest minimum of injunctive relief, assuming the judge isn’t a partisan hack or a congenital moron.

I think it’s rich that a person like Angela Merkel, the first political leader to send police into a person’s home for posting hate speech on Facebook, is now clutching her pearls over the censorship by Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Google.

Spare me the crocodile tears Frau Stasi.

Because now, anyone to the right of your rank and file BLM member is looking over their shoulder waiting for the hammer to fall on them. It has become commonplace on Twitter for the star-bellied bluechecks to call out for blood against any and all Trump supporters or worse, *shudder* Republicans.

They should be driven to the brink of extinction. Denied jobs or a living for using the wrong pronoun because they are simply, too stupid to matter. We’ve got people honestly thinking it’s okay to take children out of your home for voting for the wrong party.

What comes next is even worse, vaguely-worded legislation from D.C. supporting these companies’ hyper-aggressive market defense, we’re already being treated to it by none other than AOC.

This is all the bad news I can come up with (today). What I do know, however, is that what comes next is that Facebook, Twitter and Google have whistled far beyond their graveyards here.

The backlash will against them will be epic. Shareholder lawsuits as stock prices plummet will gut them leaving them in the position to be bailed out or nationalized by the government.

Because, at the very least, there is still some semblance of sanity in that corner of the legal system. These companies have attacked and alienated their customers. In the process they have tainted their brand and if their stock prices do not recover will have real problems in the future.

They may look invincible now, but wait until the government under control of totalitarians like Pelosi, AOC, Schumer and the rest, turn on them and gobble them up to regain their credibility with a rightfully outraged and horrified public.

The best thing all of us can do is complete that transition to other services, deploy our time, expertise and investible capital into building censorship-proof communications platforms without an owner to lean on.

All things built on a nodal structure have critical points of failure. Amazon nuked Parler, not Apple or Google. Gab is proof that a social network doesn’t need an app to survive or even thrive.

Finding Our Way Home

Dave Rubin, major partner in Locals, is convinced the days of monolithic, massive social networks are numbered and we’ll all be congregating into smaller, more intimate communities. And I don’t disagree with him.

In fact, I hope he’s right.

Date: January 13, 2021Author: Tom Luongo20 CommentsTweet

There’s nothing easy about living through a political coup. The Big Tech firms long in cahoots with our government have been pushing a false narrative of evil MAGA-Nazis trying to undermine polite society for more than four years now.

Suppression started with Milo Yiannopoulos, accelerated to include Alex Jones and InfoWars and reach a temporary peak in 2018 with the persecution of alternative social media platform Gab in the wake of the Pittsburgh shooting.

I said this then in a piece entitled: Attack on Gab Proves Speech Was Never Free:

Friday’s attack by an unhinged, vile piece of human excrement on a Synagogue in Pittsburgh wasn’t hours old before real world agendas pushed to the top of the news.

Twitter alternative Gab was immediately dropped by PayPal without specific reasons.

Then immediately, Gab’s latest hosting service unilaterally gave the company a 48-hour termination notice of its contract.

Gab was hounded to the point of extermination and only a herculean effort by CEO and total warrior Andrew Torba and his staff kept the company afloat. Today Gab can only take Bitcoin and checks for payment. Torba himself has no banking privileges or access to credit, payment processors etc.

All for what? Running a social network where someone posted something terrible hours before doing something terrible?

Or was this a political hit job? The coordination of the event with the response is a little too convenient for any person of room temperature or higher intelligence to stomach.

The Rhyme Without Reason

Sound familiar to what happened to Parler? The attack then on Gab was a dry run for this weekend. If no one would stand up for Gab who didn’t have the resources to fight this in court, then when it came time to do it for real to a more high profile firm they knew it would stand up.

This growing duopoly in internet on-ramp gatekeeping by Apple and Google has been something I’ve warned about for years (go look through the archives searching out terms like Gab and Facebook).

No one listened. We all kept retweeting Trump and I even finally broke down and bought an iPhone. Parler just got the Gab treatment literally over nothing.

I’m not going to say both events were scripted false flags (though there’s certainly enough evidence that there was something really hinckey going on at the Capitol) but they certainly had their action plans ready for when the right trigger occured.

In fact, I’d argue that it’s more likely the people posting vile garbage on these networks is a plant than a real violent dissident. We know that the FBI, for example, infiltrates militia groups all the time and in some cases there are more agents working undercover than there are actual militia guys.

When you’re in the narrative creation business and we know that a minimum of 30% of users on Twitter aren’t real but bots, is it really a stretch to think a Deep State actor isn’t posting inflammatory shit on Parler to give the tech giants the excuse they need to do the thing they desperately want to do anyway, namely destroy their up and coming competition?

These companies have normalized suppression of speech in the public commons that their networks operate on top of. I remind people all the time that they are bandwidth pigs, feeding at the subsidized trough of publicly-built and maintained infrastructure.

Net Non-Neutrality

Trump’s biggest sin in his time as president wasn’t, to these people, saying inflammatory things, it was getting rid of their cashcow, Net Neutrality.

Net Neutrality took pricing of bandwidth out of the hands of consumers. It handed the profits from it to Google, Facebook and all the crappy advertisers spamming video ads, malware, scams, and the like everywhere.

By mandating ‘equal access’ and equal fee structures the advertisers behind Google and Facebook would spend their budgets without much thought or care. Google and Facebook ad revenue soared under Net Neutrality because advertisers’ needs are not aligned with Google’s bottom line, but with consumers’.

And, because of that, the price paid to deliver the ad, i.e. Google’s cost of goods sold (COGS), thanks to Net Neutrality, was held artificially low. And Google, Facebook and the Porn Industry pocketed the difference.

They grew uncontrollably. In the case of Google and Facebook, uncontrollably powerful.

Look, I’m more than okay with saying that Apple, Google or Facebook have the right to restrict content on their services, but only if they are also doing that over their own privately-built public networks, their own private wires.

But, we all know that isn’t the case. They utilize the public airwaves, fiber trunks, satellites etc. that we paid to build. As libertarians we’ve always argued that freedom of association also meant freedom from association.

That freedom, through the application of private property, also comes with responsibility to the counter-party in any and all interactions. No one would have allowed these companies to build these networks in a true private property regime.

No way would they have become this big, this powerful or this cowardly if they had had to bear the true costs of their business roll out. These aren’t the bastions of the free market conservatives (and even classical liberals to an extent) think they are.

They are, ultimately, as we’ve seen from their actions this week, the biggest welfare queens in the world simply stepping on the competition to ensure conformity of information flow.

Continued Section 230 immunity has elevated their ever-changing Terms of Service above the proscriptions against limiting speech in the Bill of Rights.

Moreover, these firms use these Terms of Service to provide no guarantee of service. These ToS’s are contracts of adhesion, entered into where one party has unequal standing versus the counter-party.

But, since the whole idea of living under a coercive government is one big contract of adhesion, since you really aren’t an equal partner to the government in the social contract nor did you have any choice but to sign on the moment you were born, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when that reality is shoved into our faces when their power is threatened.

This is the fundamental problem with accepting any of these ideas as valid. The whole society is structured around these enshrined power imbalances and we think we’re going to upend them by voting for Orange Man Bad?

Globo-Stasi’s

The way they operate is far beyond the strictures placed on governments themselves, who have to at least create Byzantine rules to obfuscate the tyranny and force us into a corrupt and expensive court system stacked against us to get the barest minimum of injunctive relief, assuming the judge isn’t a partisan hack or a congenital moron.

I think it’s rich that a person like Angela Merkel, the first political leader to send police into a person’s home for posting hate speech on Facebook, is now clutching her pearls over the censorship by Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Google.

Spare me the crocodile tears Frau Stasi.

Because now, anyone to the right of your rank and file BLM member is looking over their shoulder waiting for the hammer to fall on them. It has become commonplace on Twitter for the star-bellied bluechecks to call out for blood against any and all Trump supporters or worse, *shudder* Republicans.

They should be driven to the brink of extinction. Denied jobs or a living for using the wrong pronoun because they are simply, too stupid to matter. We’ve got people honestly thinking it’s okay to take children out of your home for voting for the wrong party.

What comes next is even worse, vaguely-worded legislation from D.C. supporting these companies’ hyper-aggressive market defense, we’re already being treated to it by none other than AOC.

This is all the bad news I can come up with (today). What I do know, however, is that what comes next is that Facebook, Twitter and Google have whistled far beyond their graveyards here.

The backlash will against them will be epic. Shareholder lawsuits as stock prices plummet will gut them leaving them in the position to be bailed out or nationalized by the government.

Because, at the very least, there is still some semblance of sanity in that corner of the legal system. These companies have attacked and alienated their customers. In the process they have tainted their brand and if their stock prices do not recover will have real problems in the future.

They may look invincible now, but wait until the government under control of totalitarians like Pelosi, AOC, Schumer and the rest, turn on them and gobble them up to regain their credibility with a rightfully outraged and horrified public.

The best thing all of us can do is complete that transition to other services, deploy our time, expertise and investible capital into building censorship-proof communications platforms without an owner to lean on.

All things built on a nodal structure have critical points of failure. Amazon nuked Parler, not Apple or Google. Gab is proof that a social network doesn’t need an app to survive or even thrive.

Finding Our Way Home

Dave Rubin, major partner in Locals, is convinced the days of monolithic, massive social networks are numbered and we’ll all be congregating into smaller, more intimate communities. And I don’t disagree with him.

In fact, I hope he’s right. https://www.youtube.com/embed/VCGp-zYjUKA?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent

I’ve tried to use Patreon this way to bring people together. It’s why I started a private server on Slack for people to congregate away from the insanity of Twitter. It thrives today as a place where only the most interested and committed people hang out, share ideas and help each other.

It’s a community. The very thing lefties think libertarians are no good at building. Don’t let the wrapper fool you, though. Community is all we ever have on our minds.

Discord and Telegram are exploding as we go back to the days of Usenet and Yahoo Groups dedicated to specific topics of like-minded people. Gab has had private groups for years now.

The cries about echo chambers being a bad thing are falling on deaf ears all across the spectrum. People complain at me all the time that there are no use-cases for cryptocurrency and blockchains and I just look at them like they are children.

Now more than at any other point in history is there the opportunity for a real, properly-built and decentralized social media platform owned by those that hold the governance tokens and not a corporation or organization which is corruptible.

Because we’ve seen how that story ends.

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A Flawed Impeachment for ‘Incitement’ | Chronicles

Posted by M. C. on January 15, 2021

Mr. Lee gave the crowd Zimmerman’s address—it was erroneous, but that is beside the point—and tweeted several times urging people to “Kill that *,” and similar statements.

But let us set that aside for a moment and use this episode to engage in a philosophical analysis of the law regarding incitement. “Incitement” is pretty much on everyone’s lips, Democrat as well as Republican, friend or enemy of Mr. Trump’s, so this gives a golden opportunity to reflect upon the libertarian analysis of incitement, and why it should not be considered a crime. 

The difficulty with incitement comes over the issue of free will. Murray N. Rothbard said it best when he wrote:

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blog/a-flawed-impeachment-for–incitement-/

By Walter Block

President Donald Trump was hastily impeached by the House for a second time on Wednesday for “inciting insurrection.” 

Legislators accused Trump of egging on, instigating, and inciting his supporters to engage in insurrection and overthrow the U.S. government, starting with a violent attack on Congress. Uttering phrases such as, “You will never take back our country with weakness,” during his speech on Jan 6, 2021, Trump encouraged his supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” at the Capitol building. 

There are major factual errors in the House’s decision. We know now that the riots started well before Trump’s speech ended, so it’s wrong to strongly or even weakly imply that the subsequent events were a reaction to his speech. Furthermore, after the impeachment Wednesday, CNN reported that the FBI is examining evidence that the attack on the U.S. Capitol was planned, with the rioters stashing equipment in advance. 

Thus, it is not at all clear that Trump anticipated the actions of the rioters, let alone supported them. Rather, the goal of his speech was to attain an electoral college victory. How so? By demanding that electors from enough Biden states be rejected by Mike Pence in particular, in his role as Vice President, and by Congress in general. It was his last-ditch effort to make the case that Congress should overturn an election that he, along with many others, thought improper. If read carefully, Trump’s Jan. 6 speech will not offer a scintilla of evidence that he incited anyone. 

In retrospect, however, the speech and rally appear unwise, for several reasons. First, he lost the support of such virtue-signaling members of his Administration as Betsy DeVos, William Barr, Mick Mulvaney, Matt Pottinger, Ryan Tully, Stephanie Grisham, and Sarah Matthews. It also gave the likes of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi an opening to attack him. 

As a supporter of President Trump, do I regret that he gave that speech? Yes. Not because of the discourse—which was excellent—but because of the “hay” his enemies were able to make of it. Schumer and Pelosi are deliriously happy that Trump spoke out as he did on this occasion; therefore, I am not.

But let us set that aside for a moment and use this episode to engage in a philosophical analysis of the law regarding incitement. “Incitement” is pretty much on everyone’s lips, Democrat as well as Republican, friend or enemy of Mr. Trump’s, so this gives a golden opportunity to reflect upon the libertarian analysis of incitement, and why it should not be considered a crime. 

The difficulty with incitement comes over the issue of free will. Murray N. Rothbard said it best when he wrote:

Should it be illegal …. to ‘incite to riot’? Suppose that Green exhorts a crowd: ‘Go! Burn! Loot! Kill!’ and the mob proceeds to do just that, with Green having nothing further to do with these criminal activities. Since every man is free to adopt or not adopt any course of action he wishes, we cannot say that in some way Green determined the members of the mob to their criminal activities; we cannot make him, because of his exhortation, at all responsible for their crimes. ‘Inciting to riot,’ therefore, is a pure exercise of a man’s right to speak without being thereby implicated in crime. On the other hand, it is obvious that if Green happened to be involved in a plan or conspiracy with others to commit various crimes, and that then Green told them to proceed, he would then be just as implicated in the crimes as are the others—more so, if he were the mastermind who headed the criminal gang. This is a seemingly subtle distinction which in practice is clearcut—there is a world of difference between the head of a criminal gang and a soap-box orator during a riot; the former is not, properly to be charged simply with ‘incitement.’

In sharp contrast, when filmmaker Spike Lee was incensed at George Zimmerman for his killing of Trayvon Martin, he was not guilty of mere incitement. Mr. Lee was, instead, guilty of actively aiding and abetting the crowd to go and attack Zimmerman, who was later exonerated for his act of self-defense. Mr. Lee gave the crowd Zimmerman’s address—it was erroneous, but that is beside the point—and tweeted several times urging people to “Kill that *****,” and similar statements.

We have a continuum issue here. Lee, who went out of his way to help bring about mob violence, behaved culpably under libertarian law. The person who simply advocates violence does not. The key distinction is that Mr. Lee aided the mob by providing (though erroneous) an address for Mr. Zimmerman. Mr. Trump did no such thing. Lee did not merely incite. He aided and abetted the mob. 

All of this is philosophical, of course: by any standard, President Trump did not incite the mob on Jan. 6, let alone aid and abet them.

P.S. Does anyone notice the wildly different treatment of this right-wing riot compared to the much more devastating ones put on by left-wing “peaceful” marches and mayhems organized by BLM and Antifa? I don’t think it is politically correct to even mention this disparity. So, fughedaboudit, as we say in Brooklyn. 

P.P.S. Is it possible that there was a false flag operation in effect here? That BLM and Antifa snuck into the confused melee, with the goal of undermining President Trump’s authority? Enquiring minds want to know.

(Correction: The 10th paragraph of an earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled Trayvon Martin’s first name without a “y.”)

Walter Block

Walter Block is an economics professor at Loyola University and a Mises Institute senior fellow. He is author or several books, including Defending the Undefendable (1976). 

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Transferism

Posted by M. C. on January 14, 2021

Image may contain: 4 people, text that says 'The animating principle of American politics is neither socialism nor capitalism, but transferism. Politicians gather votes by promising to take from one group of voters to give to another. WORDS NUMBERS wordsandnumbers.org'

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EU Leaders Demand “Standardised” Vaccine Passport For Travel | ZeroHedge

Posted by M. C. on January 14, 2021

However, the EU’s data protection chief Wojciech Wiewiórowski recently labeled the idea of an immunity passport “extreme” and has repeatedly said it is alarming, and ‘disgusting’.

Recently, the government in Ontario, Canada admitted that it is exploring ‘immunity passports’ in conjunction with restrictions on travel and access to social venues for the unvaccinated.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/eu-leaders-demand-standardised-vaccine-passport-travel

Tyler Durden's Photoby Tyler DurdenThursday, Jan 14, 2021 – 3:30

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

EU leaders are demanding that the Commission should ‘standardise’ a vaccine passport across all member countries, and that it should be required for people to travel throughout the area.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has penned a letter to EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, outlining that “Persons who have been vaccinated should be free to travel.”

The letter calls for a “standardised certificate, which will prove that a person has been successfully vaccinated.”

While it stops short at advocating mandatory vaccination, the letter further urges that “It is urgent to adopt a common understanding on how a vaccination certificate should be structured so as to be accepted in all member states.”

Mitsotakis has pledged to raise the issue during an upcoming EU summit on January 21, declaring that “there is an urgent need for a high-level EU-wide mobilization to move things forward.” 

Vaccine passports have previously been touted by the EU, with officials suggesting back in April that visa applicants would also be required to be vaccinated.

EU countries including Spain, Estonia, Iceland, and Belgium have all indicated that they are open to some form of vaccine passports, as well as sharing the data across borders.

This week, it was also revealed that Denmark is the latest country to announce that it is rolling out a ‘Covid passport’, to allow those who have taken the vaccine to engage in society without any restrictions.

However, the EU’s data protection chief Wojciech Wiewiórowski recently labeled the idea of an immunity passport “extreme” and has repeatedly said it is alarming, and ‘disgusting’.

The spectre of so called ‘immunity passports’ is looming globally.

Having left the EU, Britain would not be part of any standardised European scheme, however it has now confirmed that it is rolling out vaccine passports, despite previous denials that it would do so.

Recently, the government in Ontario, Canada admitted that it is exploring ‘immunity passports’ in conjunction with restrictions on travel and access to social venues for the unvaccinated.

Last month, Israel announced that citizens who get the COVID-19 vaccine will be given ‘green passports’ that will enable them to attend venues and eat at restaurants.

A litany of other government and travel industry figures in both the US, Britain and beyond have suggested that ‘COVID passports’ are coming in order for ‘life to get back to normal’.

Anna Beduschi, an academic from Exeter University, commented on the potential move toward vaccine passports by EU, noting that it “poses essential questions for the protection of data privacy and human rights.”

Beduschi added that the vaccine passports may “create a new distinction between individuals based on their health status, which can then be used to determine the degree of freedoms and rights they may enjoy.”

A report compiled last year by AI research body the Ada Lovelace Institute said so called ‘immunity’ passports “pose extremely high risks in terms of social cohesion, discrimination, exclusion and vulnerability.”

Sam Grant, campaign manager at the civili liberties advocacy group Liberty has warned that “any form of immunity passport risks creating a two-tier system in which some of us have access to freedoms and support while others are shut out.”

“These systems could result in people who don’t have immunity potentially being blocked from essential public services, work or housing – with the most marginalised among us hardest hit,” Grant further warned.

“This has wider implications too because any form of immunity passport could pave the way for a full ID system – an idea which has repeatedly been rejected as incompatible with building a rights-respecting society,” Grant further urged.

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