Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I feel you MUST be a doctor or a scientist to understand what’s going on with COVID-19, it’s just that, he is on the world stage like no one else, while legitimate doctors are being censored for their views on COVID-19 which happen to bring people relief and calm.
The Facts:James Corbett has released a full documentary looking at who Bill Gates really is and why he is front and center during COVID-19.
Reflect On:Who elected Bill Gates to have such impact over people? Are his actions being done in the best interest of humanity? You decide.
His name has been at the top of headlines for months since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Why? Why is a person who is not a doctor or scientist getting so much attention around this time? Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I feel you MUST be a doctor or a scientist to understand what’s going on with COVID-19, it’s just that, he is on the world stage like no one else, while legitimate doctors are being censored for their views on COVID-19 which happen to bring people relief and calm.
Well, just in time for #ExposeBillGates Global Day of Action, The Corbett Report has released the full Who Is Bill Gates? documentary in a single upload for your viewing pleasure. This documentary is truly an incredible deep dive into Bill Gates and what he is up to.
We are in a time where, as a collective we are Breaking The Illusion. This is the first step of the CE Protocol and it outlines the idea that in order for us to create change we must first see past the smokescreen or wake up from the spell we have bee under that stops us from seeing what’s really going on in our world. It’s crucial step in conscious awakening.
So as people sift through documentaries, read articles and have conversations about new ideas during this COVID-19 pandemic, it has initiated a mass awakening to information they may never have spent the time to uncover if there was no lockdown. The information learned informs completely new actions as to how we will engage with and create our world.
The main effect of COVID isn’t medical; it’s the hysteria that’s destroyed the economy. And political actions are even more insane than those after 9/11.
Politics thrives on hysteria. The politicization of everything is the real problem.
International Man: The Lancet recently retracted an anti-hydroxychloroquine study, which the media had used to attack Trump.
Trump had admitted to taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventative measure against the coronavirus. The media then went into a frenzy. The talking heads often cited The Lancet study as proof hydroxychloroquine was dangerous.
The bottom line is that bogus research made its way—likely deliberately—into one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. People then used this “science” as a political weapon.
What is your take on this?
Doug Casey: I’d say the whole charade is tragic, except that “tragic” has become the most overused word in the language today. It bears a short discussion.
Look at the recent death of a small-time career criminal, George Floyd. It’s as if “tragic” were part of his name. It’s as if people no longer understand the meaning of the word. A tragedy used to mean that a heroic protagonist succumbed to a cosmic force. There are no heroes in the degraded melodrama, just villains, where a costumed thug murdered a street thug under the color of law.
Sorry to go off on a tangent. But it’s a timely instance of another word whose meaning has been twisted. It’s Orwellian, like so many other things in our devolving society.
Let’s talk about something that’s actually tragic: the corruption of science over the last couple of generations.
I’ve subscribed to Scientific American, Discover, and New Scientist for many years. During this time, I’ve noticed a distinct change in their respective editorial policies. They’ve all been politicized, captured by the PC left. These popular magazines are nowhere near the quality they once were. But this is just symptomatic of a bigger problem.
You might recall the 2018 hoax where three academics, disgusted with widespread incompetence and dishonesty in research, submitted absurd “spoof” papers to twenty leading journals. They were written in gobbledygook, full of made-up facts and flawed reasoning. But most, as I recall, were peer-reviewed and published.
If you research the subject a bit, you come to the conclusion half the peer-reviewed papers—absolutely in “soft” fields like psychology, sociology, political science, race and gender studies, etc.—are unreadable, dishonest, useless, and pointless.
Why might this be? If an academic wants to advance in today’s university system, he has to publish research. It’s Pareto’s Law in action, the 80–20 rule. It’s pretty reliable, 80% of this sort of thing is crap because it’s written mainly to fabricate credentials, not advance knowledge.
This is a bad thing.
It’s causing the average guy, who may not know anything about science but still has some respect for it, to lose that respect. That’s because science has become politicized.
You can see it with the conflicting information about COVID-19. Is it deadly or just another seasonal flu? Does it affect everyone, like the black death, or mainly the old and sick? Does almost everyone who contracts the virus get very sick or die or only a tiny percentage? Should you quarantine or live normally?
So far, as near as I can tell, the great virus hysteria has gone from being the next black plague to basically a big nothing. It’s not nearly as bad as the Asian Flu from the 50s or the Hong Kong Flu from the 60s. Forget about the Spanish Flu—there’s no comparison whatsoever. The main effect of COVID isn’t medical; it’s the hysteria that’s destroyed the economy. And political actions are even more insane than those after 9/11.
Politics thrives on hysteria. The politicization of everything is the real problem. And it’s not just about the total disruption of society and multitrillion-dollar deficits. For instance, I’ve played poker with a bunch of guys in Aspen every Monday night for years. Now, even though the lockdown in town is easing, the group is breaking up because most of them insist that everyone wear a mask. I won’t, nor will a couple of other guys. So, between that and a few guys who are now scared to socialize no matter what … game over. It may also mean the end of a larger Friday business lunch group I belong to that’s been around for decades.
There are millions of similar small rips in the social fabric taking place everywhere now. And they’re largely justified by “the science.”
The real problem is that the knock-on effects of the virus will last much, much longer than the trivial virus itself—which will soon burn out and be forgotten. The political, economic, and social changes, however, will linger for years, as will attitudes toward “science.”
International Man: What are the implications of people corrupting the scientific process to launder their political propaganda to shape mainstream opinions?
Doug Casey: You might think this is a new thing, but the left, in particular—who have always been advocates of social engineering— love using “science” to further their political agenda.
The first important instance of this was Karl Marx and his notion of “scientific socialism”—a totally bogus idea.
Since he first promoted it over 150 years ago, the concept has become ingrained in the culture, especially academia. People have been taught to believe there’s such a thing as “scientific socialism,” and that it’s not just inevitable, but desirable. In fact, it’s pseudoscience. But that’s just the first example of corruption of science in modern times.
Keynesianism is another example. Keynesians believe that they can manipulate the economy as if it were a machine.
A machine is a horrible analogy for the economy, however. It’s not a machine or a factory where you can pull levers to make magic happen—which is precisely what the Keynesians (who run the economic world today) think they can do.
The economy is more like a rainforest, which is very complex. It can’t be manipulated from outside by apparatchiks enforcing rules. And if you do try to manipulate a rainforest from outside, you’re likely to destroy it.
The BLMF identified itself as being created by top foundations including in addition to the Ford Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundations. They described their role: “The BLMF provides grants, movement building resources, and technical assistance to organizations working advance the leadership and vision of young, Black, queer, feminists and immigrant leaders who are shaping and leading a national conversation about criminalization, policing and race in America.”
The Movement for Black Lives Coalition (M4BL) which includes Black Lives Matter, already in 2016 called for “defunding police departments, race-based reparations, voting rights for illegal immigrants, fossil-fuel divestment, an end to private education and charter schools, a universal basic income, and free college for blacks.”
Notably, when we click on the website of M4BL, under their donate button we learn that the donations will go to something called ActBlue Charities. ActBlue facilitates donations to “democrats and progressives.” As of May 21, ActBlue had given $119 million to the campaign of Joe Biden.
Color Revolution is the term used to describe a series of remarkably effective CIA-led regime change operations using techniques developed by the RAND Corporation, “democracy” NGOs and other groups since the 1980’s. They were used in crude form to bring down the Polish communist regime in the late 1980s. From there the techniques were refined and used, along with heavy bribes, to topple the Gorbachev regime in the Soviet Union. For anyone who has studied those models closely, it is clear that the protests against police violence led by amorphous organizations with names like Black Lives Matter or Antifa are more than purely spontaneous moral outrage. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans are being used as a battering ram to not only topple a US President, but in the process, the very structures of the US Constitutional order.
If we step back from the immediate issue of videos showing a white Minneapolis policeman pressing his knee on the neck of a black man, George Floyd, and look at what has taken place across the nation since then, it is clear that certain organizations or groups were well-prepared to instrumentalize the horrific event for their own agenda.
The protests since May 25 have often begun peacefully only to be taken over by well-trained violent actors. Two organizations have appeared regularly in connection with the violent protests—Black Lives Matter and Antifa (USA). Videos show well-equipped protesters dressed uniformly in black and masked (not for coronavirus to be sure), vandalizing police cars, burning police stations, smashing store windows with pipes or baseball bats. Use of Twitter and other social media to coordinate “hit-and-run” swarming strikes of protest mobs is evident.
What has unfolded since the Minneapolis trigger event has been compared to the wave of primarily black ghetto protest riots in 1968. I lived through those events in 1968 and what is unfolding today is far different. It is better likened to the Yugoslav color revolution that toppled Milosevic in 2000.
Gene Sharp: Template for Regime Overthrow
In the year 2000 the US State Department, aided by its National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and select CIA operatives, began secretly training a group of Belgrade university students led by a student group that was called Otpor! (Resistance!). The NED and its various offshoots was created in the 1980’s by CIA head Bill Casey as a covert CIA tool to overthrow specific regimes around the world under the cover of a human rights NGO. In fact, they get their money from Congress and from USAID.
In the Serb Otpor! destabilization of 2000, the NED and US Ambassador Richard Miles in Belgrade selected and trained a group of several dozen students, led by Srđa Popović, using the handbook, From Dictatorship to Democracy, translated to Serbian, of the late Gene Sharp and his Albert Einstein Institution. In a post mortem on the Serb events, the Washington Post wrote, “US-funded consultants played a crucial role behind the scenes in virtually every facet of the anti-drive, running tracking polls, training thousands of opposition activists and helping to organize a vitally important parallel vote count. US taxpayers paid for 5,000 cans of spray paint used by student activists to scrawl anti-Milošević graffiti on walls across Serbia.”
Trained squads of activists were deployed in protests to take over city blocks with the aid of ‘intelligence helmet’ video screens that give them an instantaneous overview of their environment. Bands of youth converging on targeted intersections in constant dialogue on cell phones, would then overwhelm police. The US government spent some $41 million on the operation. Student groups were secretly trained in the Sharp handbook techniques of staging protests that mocked the authority of the ruling police, showing them to be clumsy and impotent against the youthful protesters. Professionals from the CIA and US State Department guided them behind the scenes.
The Color Revolution Otpor! model was refined and deployed in 2004 as the Ukraine Orange Revolution with logo and color theme scarves, and in 2003 in Georgia as the Rose Revolution. Later Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used the template to launch the Arab Spring. In all cases the NED was involved with other NGOs including the Soros Foundations.
After defeating Milosevic, Popovic went on to establish a global color revolution training center, CANVAS, a kind of for-profit business consultancy for revolution, and was personally present in New York working reportedly with Antifa during the Occupy Wall Street where also Soros money was reported.
Antifa and BLM
The protests, riots, violent and non-violent actions sweeping across the United States since May 25, including an assault on the gates of the White House, begin to make sense when we understand the CIA’s Color Revolution playbook.
The impact of the protests would not be possible were it not for a network of local and state political officials inside the Democratic Party lending support to the protesters, even to the point the Democrat Mayor of Seattle ordered police to abandon several blocks in the heart of downtown to occupation by protesters.Read the rest of this entry »
“Our troubled world continues along its current revolutionary path with no clear idea as of yet just how far the diabolical disorientation that has been unleashed may go. One thing and one thing alone seems definite to me in the midst of the general uncertainty. With a few very notable exceptions, the leadership of our beloved Church, legitimate though that leadership is, has proven itself to be utterly subservient” to the state.
It was not the governors who shut the churches; it was — with some courageous exceptions — the gutless American Catholic bishops who did so.
Here is a pop quiz on the Constitution. What is the first freedom protected by the Bill of Rights? If you guessed speech or press, then you are close. The first protected freedom is religion. The two religion clauses in the First Amendment keep the government out of our pockets for religious purposes and out of our churches for all purposes. That was, at least, the intent of the framers.
The tyrannical behavior of many state governors, who have issued executive orders purporting to regulate private behavior on private property — even religious behavior in houses of worship — and in the process have enforced these orders as if they were laws, has ignored this. In America, governors do not write laws; only legislatures do. There are no pandemic or public health or emergency exceptions in the Constitution.
Here in New Jersey, Catholics were permitted — permitted — to attend public Masses last Sunday for the first time in 88 days.
This has deeply troubled many of the faithful, and many non-adherents, who understand the concepts that only legislatures write laws and that no legislature can write a law telling a religious institution when and how to permit worship.
So, who closed all the houses of worship? Why did Catholic bishops dispense with a nearly 1,600-year-old rule — which survived all sorts of wars and pestilence — requiring attendance at Sunday Mass? What became of the wall of separation?
Here is the backstory.
When first-year law students are asked the meaning of the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause in the First Amendment, they often argue that these clauses mandate a wall of separation between church and state. Some students even offer to find the “wall of separation” language in the Constitution. They are still looking for it.
While it is accurate to use the wall of separation phrase, it is nowhere in the Constitution or in any federal statute. It was first publicly used in an 1802 letter from President Thomas Jefferson to a congregation of Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut. The congregation had written to Jefferson complaining that Connecticut was taxing all landowners to pay for the state-supported Congregationalist Church.
They told him that the state regarded their religious freedom as a privilege to be doled out, rather than as an inalienable right as the congregation believed it to be and as he had characterized it and other rights in the Declaration of Independence.
Jefferson understood the values underlying the religion clauses of the First Amendment to mean that while only Congress was prohibited from establishing a church or interfering with worship, the states should not do so either. In his famous letter, he opined that the First Amendment erected “a wall of separation between church and state.” To Jefferson, the word “state” in that context meant all governments.
Though the imposition of state taxes to support churches ended during the 19th century, it wasn’t until 1947 that the Supreme Court ruled with clarity that the First Amendment — the language in which only restrains Congress — applies to the states as well.
We know that it does because the 14th Amendment prohibits all states from abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States. The phrase “privileges or immunities” connotes attributes of national citizenship — first among which are a prohibition on government establishing a religion or interfering with its free exercise.
Stated differently, the right to worship or not, and the right not to be charged for someone else’s worship, are personal human rights — as Jefferson called them, inalienable rights.
Now, back to the governors and the bishops.
The governors permitted crowds at Walmart and arrested folks for attending funerals. They permitted thousands of demonstrators in public streets and arrested not one of them for marching without masks or not socially distancing.
My friend Professor John Rao of St. John’s University wrote: “Our troubled world continues along its current revolutionary path with no clear idea as of yet just how far the diabolical disorientation that has been unleashed may go. One thing and one thing alone seems definite to me in the midst of the general uncertainty. With a few very notable exceptions, the leadership of our beloved Church, legitimate though that leadership is, has proven itself to be utterly subservient” to the state.
It was not the governors who shut the churches; it was — with some courageous exceptions — the gutless American Catholic bishops who did so. Never before in the history of America has the Church become an arm of the state. The governors told the bishops to close their churches, and they complied. Their predecessors were martyrs. They are cowards.
That is not rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s. That is rendering to Caesar what is God’s.
Faithful Catholics believe that we consume the Bread of Life at Mass. The bishops have no more moral right to deny us that salvific sacrament than do the governors. Faithful Catholics also believe that Holy Mother Church is the route to eternal salvation and the Bread of Life is the food for that route. What mother would deny her children food? One in the hands of state-subservient bishops.
When the Supreme Court explained the two religion clauses, it ruled that they prohibit both conspicuous governmental aid to religion and all government interference with it, and all excessive entanglement between church and state.
In another time and place, how different this might have been. One hundred years ago, the Church was outlawed in Mexico and militias hunted down priests. Saying a public Mass then was the functional equivalent of a capital offense. Yet, there were more Masses celebrated for the faithful per day in Mexico in those years than in America in the last 88 days.
The wall of separation insulates our religious beliefs and practices from governmental tyranny. But without episcopal fidelity and courage, the wall crumbles.
The results of the Progressive Era were not pretty, and this leads to ominous predictions for the 2020s. Corrupt politicians will always use recessions, crises, and changing political landscapes as justifications for special interest policies that provide benefits to their benefactors and constituents at the expense of society overall.
The 2020s started off horrendously. Thanks to an exaggerated coronavirus pandemic, government lockdowns sunk the economy into the most serious recession since the Great Depression. From February to April 2020, industrial production collapsed by 15.2 percent and official unemployment figures skyrocketed from 3.5 percent to 14.7 percent. To put these numbers in perspective, during the Great Recession industrial production fell by a similar amount (17.3 percent) from December 2007 to June 2009 and unemployment “only” peaked at 10 percent in October 2009. In other words, the current recession is breaking all of the wrong records.1
In order to prevent the economy from completely imploding, the US government engaged in massive expansionary monetary and fiscal policy. From February to April the Federal Reserve exploded its assets by $2.5 trillion and pumped up the money supply (M2) by 14.6 percent.2 On the fiscal side, in late March Congress passed a belt-busting $2 trillion stimulus bill,3 and in mid-May the House passed another stimulus bill of $3 trillion. Then in early June Fed chairman Jerome Powell declared that low interest rates were here to stay indefinitely.4
If current political and economic trends continue, the 2020s will usher in a new period of drastically increased government activity and regulation of the economy. Despite justification on the grounds of public interest and cutting-edge modern “science,” these interventions promise to be thoroughly crony: they will enrich favored businesses, politicians, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and labor groups at the expense of the overall public. In short, the 2020 recession will usher in a new “Progressive Era” of the early 1900s, or, more accurately, another “Regressive Era.”
Murray Rothbard brilliantly showed that during the Progressive Era, which mainstream academics and other proponents of intervention laud as the nation’s first step into modernity, big business, big government, big intellectuals, and big labor succeeded in securing cronyism that made it easier for corporations and trade associations to cartelize, for politicians to increase their power, for technocrats to exert influence over planning the economy, and for unions to exclude cheaper immigrant workers. These groups had failed to achieve their goals until the Panic of 1893 allowed William Jennings Bryan’s Populist Democrats to supplant Grover Cleveland’s laissez-faire Democrats, which ushered in political dominance by the moderate corporatist Republican Party. It unfortunately seems far too likely that the federal government will now pass similar legislation in the 2020s, such as corporate and safety regulation, environmental laws, welfare and other entitlements, and more taxation.5
In the name of weakening the trusts, eliminating “unsafe” products, and cleaning up “subpar” working conditions, the Progressives passed a flurry of business regulations that restricted entry, reduced production, and raised prices. Notable examples include the rejuvenation of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, the creation of the Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903 (split into two departments in 1913), the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug Acts of 1906, and establishment of the Federal Trade Commission in 1914. These new crony laws and agencies blocked hostile socialist legislation and also stymied free market pressures by raising compliance costs on newer, usually smaller, businesses and crippling price and product competition.6
The 2020s will most likely see similar business regulations. Even before the crisis, big tech welcomed new federal red tape over the internet in order to consolidate their market positions and stave off hostile antitrust suits from radical socialists and competing businesses. The current recession has already ushered in calls for formal coronavirus safety regulations in the workplace—a new “modern” age of federal, state, and local intrusiveness in the employer-employee relationship and how businesses cater to consumer desires. All of these laws, far from encouraging competition or protecting consumers, will just cartelize industries and raise relative compliance costs on smaller businesses that cannot afford to retool their facilities to meet new technology and safety restrictions.7
The Progressive Era also witnessed the enactment of conservationist laws and agencies. These interventions, such as the Reclamation Act of 1902 and the Public Lands and Inland Waterways Commissions (established in 1903 and 1907, respectively), funneled taxpayer funds into the research and development of certain methods of resource production, particularly irrigation, while restricting the use of various raw materials, such as timber. Although environmentalists advocated for these laws in order to preserve nature and encourage “ecofriendly” production processes, the legislation raised the prices of restricted lumber (benefitting the land speculators and railroads that owned competing reserves) and encouraged the uneconomic development of irrigation in the West.8
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has led the modern environmentalist movement for a Green New Deal that would totally overhaul American society and enormously reduce well-being. This economic program—estimated by some to potentially cost a truly earth-shattering $93 trillion over the next decade—would “save the planet” by drastically restricting the usage of fossil fuels (which most of the world relies upon to maintain modern living standards) and encourage the production of ecofriendly energy sources that will supposedly make up the shortfall. After the recent crisis, supporters have argued that the population is already numb to drastic changes in living standards and will correspondingly be more receptive to the Green New Deal. If such a program is enacted, the government will pick winners and losers in the energy market like never before and open up a Pandora’s box of widespread cronyism and special interest subsidies.9
In the early 1900s, the wise stewards of the government did not stop at corporate and conservationist cronyism—they also looked out for the labor interests. In the 1910s the Progressives enacted compulsory workmen’s compensation laws on the state level that forced businesses and taxpayers to cough up funds for worker welfare. The federal government followed this up with the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act of 1916 (also known as the Kern-McGillicuddy Act), which provided workmen’s compensation to federal employees. Taxpayer funds socialized the costs of disability insurance, and the regulations raised compliance costs on businesses. The enactment of workmen’s compensation laws served as the opening wedge to the infamous Social Security Act of 1935.10
Andrew Yang gained notoriety during the presidential Democratic primary by advocating a “universal basic income” (UBI) of $1000 each month. Fortunately for Yang, the crisis has already led to a UBI of sorts through stimulus checks and generous unemployment benefits given to displaced workers. Now advocates are arguing for $2000 a month until the government decides that the coronavirus crisis is over. The results of these policies are already disastrous for the labor market’s recovery: a significant portion of the workforce is dependent on the US government (i.e., the taxpayer) and many smaller businesses cannot rehire workers, because they would actually take a pay cut. A new age of welfare and artificially high labor costs has dawned upon the nation.11
To pay for the cronyism of the Progressive Era—legislation diligently administered by job-seeking bureaucrats, scientists, and technocrats—the Progressives “reformed” government revenue with the Sixteenth Amendment of 1913, which legalized the income tax. The federal government could now extract from taxpayers funds far greater than what was possible with tariffs and excise taxes. Initially, the income tax applied only to the contemporary “1 percent,” but World War I extended the government’s depredations to the rest of the public. This ensured that the cost of government was shifted to up-and-coming entrepreneurs and the middle class.12
A similar situation could appear during the present recession or later in the decade. The cost of the current stimulus programs and projected future legislation simply cannot be financed under the current revenue system. One “solution” is to monetize the deficits, a disastrous option that would lead to runaway inflation. Another option is to embark upon wealth taxes—the siren song for advocates of redistribution—on the wealthiest members of society. Although advocates argue that they will only apply to the most “privileged” strata, the government net will inevitably extend to the rest of the population. This is because big businesses will use their political influence to spread the burden upon the less wealthy (Social Security, after all, is still a regressive tax) and governments will use the newfound source of revenue to spend beyond their initial estimates and will subsequently clamor for more money. The result of widespread wealth taxes will be a harsh disincentive to work, save, and innovate, all to the detriment of society.13
The results of the Progressive Era were not pretty, and this leads to ominous predictions for the 2020s. Corrupt politicians will always use recessions, crises, and changing political landscapes as justifications for special interest policies that provide benefits to their benefactors and constituents at the expense of society overall. The year 2020 has already provided all three excuses, which means we may be headed for another Regressive Era—a disaster for the economic recovery and Americans’ freedoms.
1. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Industrial Production Index, retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, June 14, 2020, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INDPRO.
2. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US), Assets: Total Assets: Total Assets (Less Eliminations From Consolidation): Wednesday Level, retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, June 14, 2020, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL; Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US), M2 Money Stock [M2], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, June 14, 2020, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2.
5. Murray Rothbard, The Progressive Era, ed. Patrick Newman (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2017).
6. Rothbard, Progressive, 213–30, 235–52, 288–91. See also Patrick Newman, “Personnel is Policy: Regulatory Capture at the Federal Trade Commission, 1914–1929,” Journal of Institutional Economics (2019) 15, no. 6: 1037–53; Patrick Newman “Public Interest or Public Choice? The Beef Trust and the 1906 Meat Inspection Act” (Jan. 22, 2019), SSRN, https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3363155.
My motto in matters of this sort is the following: “If it moves, privatize it; if it does not move, privatize it. Since everything either moves or does not move, privatize everything. A CHAZ undertaken by Rothbardians is a move in the right direction.
The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) is an area of several city blocks in Seattle that has been taken over by a group of people unconnected with the government. They have established a police-free zone and are now busily administering this territory.
Is this a voluntary socialist commune? A free enterprise zone? Are the new inhabitants who have seized control of the area legitimate homesteaders or illegal squatters, that is, trespassers? Who are now the proper owners of this acreage, of the buildings, roads, parks, and houses therein?
From a libertarian perspective, we must first distinguish between (previously) city government–owned property and that of the private storekeepers, homeowners, and other private citizens. As to the latter, the analysis is easy: they should remain in control of their property, and if the CHAZ folk interfere with their continued use of these possessions of theirs, they are in the wrong. But what about public property? CHAZ now possesses the streets, police stations, libraries, museums, post offices, parks, opera houses, and other assets previously in government hands. Who, now, has a right to take charge of all of these goods?
Suppose we were privatizing this area under Rothbardian rules. Who would obtain which government assets? “Homesteading” and “Rothbard” are not synonyms in the English language, but in the present context they might as well be. All of these resources would belong to the owners of private property in the area. However, there is one difficulty in concluding that control of this material properly belongs to them and not to the CHAZites: these locals did nothing to claim ownership. They did not lift a finger in objection to governmental property in their area. One part of homesteading, to be sure, is to “mix one’s labor” with virgin territory. But, another is to declare ownership. Rather, the CHAZers did precisely that. They actually seized control of illicit statist property. At the very least then, even if the previous owners were to be given a portion of these statist goods, the CHAZ people would certainly be owed what might be considered a “finder’s fee.”
Of course, implicit in the Rothbardian notion of homesteading is that it is open to just about anyone, except for criminals. The actual possessors of CHAZ, as of this writing, are members of Antifa, a criminal organization, guilty of vast mayhem, looting of private property, assault, threats, etc. So they cannot be the proper owners of the goods in question. But suppose that instead of Antifa a group of Rothbardians took on this role (we pass quickly over the point that the powers that be in Seattle and Washington State, although looking on somewhat askance but also benignly at CHAZ, would crush without mercy any free enterprisers who acted as they have, in a similar manner to what happened to David Koresh in Waco).
Would the ownership of the libertarian CHAZers be legitimate, not of the private hotels, restaurants, shops, houses, and condos in this six-block area, but, rather, of the public facilities? It is difficult to see why not. After all, according to strict
Rothbardianism, these amenities are not—cannot be—legitimately owned by a coercive government. If this is so, then they are unowned and therefore available for the taking by the next homesteader to come down the pike. And that would be this passel of hypothetical Rothbardians, not the owners of the private facilities who long acquiesced in paying compulsory taxes to support them.
Another theory, prevalent in libertarian circles on this matter, has been put forth by Hans-Hermann Hoppe and by Jeff Deist in this recent article. In this Hoppean view, the proper owners of the government roads, streets, parks, libraries, museums, etc., are not the libertarian homesteaders. They are but trespassers. No, the appropriate titleholders are the long-suffering taxpayers. And which organization is their agent? Why, the very government that has long been abusing them in this manner.
The Hoppean solution to the problem is open to several objections. First, Hoppe is a world-class anarcho-capitalist. There is at least a certain tension, not to say a blatant self-contradiction, in such a scholar holding out the state apparatus as the agent of the tax victims. No, the government is not their agent; it is their abuser. Hoppe here is in the unenviable position of taking on the role of a progovernment anarchist. So much for deontology.
Second, this thesis also faces a pragmatic difficulty. Remember, the would-be homesteaders here are all Rothbardians. They will attempt to engage contractually with the home and business owners along the hypothetical lines of what would have occurred had free enterprise been the order of the day right before the time of settlement. For example, the road owners will not charge the locals gigantic fees for usage of their holdings to the locals. Rather, they will require an amount that would have arisen had they attracted businesses to locate along their thoroughfares before anyone had located there. This hypothetical fee level would have been voluntarily agreed upon. And, ditto for use of the parks and other features of the urban landscape.
But Hoppe’s theory would say nay to these arrangements. This author would place in charge, as their “agent,” the very institution responsible for the deviation from pure Rothbardianism in the first place. Thus, the implication of Hoppe’s theory would be a very conservative one, conservative in the worst sense. What would be conserved, in this view? It would be the reinstitution of government control over these premises. The anarcho-libertarian homesteaders would be considered illegal squatters and arrested for their supposed violation of private property rights—the roads, parks, etc., presumably owned by the taxpayers. To see the falsity of this, let one of these citizens try to sleep in a government park or library overnight; he will soon become acquainted with their real owner. It is not him. Not even close. Under Hoppeanism, there would be no way for the ancap libertarians to “seize the streets.” The roadways would be forever in the hands of the evil state.
That is not the libertarianism of the Rothbard variety. (I full well acknowledge that Rothbard himself would not allow the “bum” in the public library. He would side with Hoppe in this matter. I speak here, then, of the platonic version of Rothbardianism that would exult in such a ruination of public property.) Either we take the libertarian rejection of public property seriously, or we do not. If the latter, we reduce the power and accuracy of this philosophy. My motto in matters of this sort is the following: “If it moves, privatize it; if it does not move, privatize it. Since everything either moves or does not move, privatize everything. A CHAZ undertaken by Rothbardians is a move in the right direction.
Quaker Foods, the company behind the “Aunt Jemima” brand of syrup and other breakfast foods, says it will rename this line of products and discontinue its label’s image of a black woman “to make progress toward racial equality.”
Aunt Jemima has been featured on these products for 130 years.
The picture has changed over time, and in recent years Quaker removed the “mammy” kerchief from the character to blunt growing criticism that the brand perpetuated a racist stereotype that dated to the days of slavery. But Quaker, a subsidiary of PepsiCo, said removing the image and name is part of an effort by the company “to make progress toward racial equality.”
“We recognize Aunt Jemima’s origins are based on a racial stereotype,” Kristin Kroepfl, vice president and chief marketing officer of Quaker Foods North America, said in a press release. “As we work to make progress toward racial equality through several initiatives, we also must take a hard look at our portfolio of brands and ensure they reflect our values and meet our consumers’ expectations.”
Kroepfl said the company has worked to “update” the brand to be “appropriate and respectful” but it realized the changes were insufficient.
As an example of “consumers’ expectations,” NBC quoted Riché Richardson, an associate professor at Cornell University, who said Aunt Jemima is “a retrograde image of black womanhood on store shelves.”
“It’s an image that harkens back to the antebellum plantation … Aunt Jemima is that kind of stereotype is premised on this idea of Black inferiority and otherness,” Richardson said.
“It is urgent to expunge our public spaces of a lot of these symbols that for some people are triggering and represent terror and abuse,” he declared.
“Quaker said the new packaging will begin to appear in the fall of 2020, and a new name for the foods will be announced at a later date,” NBC reported. “The company also announced it will donate at least $5 million over the next five years ‘to create meaningful, ongoing support and engagement in the Black community.’”
The purge of Aunt Jemima comes as a wave of municipalities across the United States are removing historical monuments for similar complaints of racial insensitivity. Crowds of protesters have defaced or even destroyed statues of notable figures from the Civil War-era ConfederateStates of America,FoundingFathers, veterans, and even abolitionists. The current unrest was sparked by a string of racially-charged killings: Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, and George Floyd in Minnesota. As the Black Lives Matter movement organized protests across the nation, some of which descended into violent riots and looting, tensions flared again after Atlanta police shot and killed another unarmed man, Rayshard Brooks.
Mere weeks before this unrest, another food brand removed a longstanding label icon over perceived racial insensitivity. Land O’Lakes announced in April it would remove the likeness of a Native American woman from its butter products after 92 years.
When it comes to criminal law, things get a bit more complicated. But none of those complications are avoided in the current legal system. They are actually exacerbated by having the same group make the laws, enforce the laws, prosecute the cases, and judge the cases. These are no longer disinterested third parties. They have many interests wrapped up in performing their jobs to satisfy bosses and colleagues rather than victims and people in dispute.
How can something be considered a crime if there is no victim?
This is a problem. You can go through life making sure you don’t hurt anyone, and still break the law. Wouldn’t that be great if you could simply base your actions on common sense and respect for the standards of a community?
Instead, people must also make sure they don’t do anything labeled wrong by the government. Of course, it is impossible to know all the multitude of laws which the government has created. And what they call wrong is not always intuitive, nor offensive.
The whole point of common law was to settle disputes in non-violent ways.
The problem with government statute law is it goes beyond resolving disputes. It includes enforcers trolling around looking for a statute that has been broken. There doesn’t have to be a victim. No one has to have been wronged by the legal breach.
These enforcers actually create conflict instead of resolving it. Their actions often lead to violent altercations, rather than deescalating disputes.
In an essay called “The Obviousness of Anarchy,” John Hasnas discusses the origins of common law, and how it was born out of anarchy. He says that clearly, no organized society can exist without governance.
But that does not necessarily mean it has to be organized by government.
In arguing for anarchy, I am arguing that a society without a central political authority is not only possible but desirable. That is all I am doing, however. I am not arguing for a society without coercion. I am not arguing for a society that abides by the libertarian non-aggression principle or any other principle of justice. I am not arguing for the morally ideal organisation of society. I am not arguing for utopia. What constitutes ideal justice and the perfectly just society is a fascinating philosophical question, but it is one that is irrelevant to the current pursuit. I am arguing only that human beings can live together successfully and prosper in the absence of a centralised coercive authority. To make the case for anarchy, that is all that is required.
Inevitably, there will be disputes between humans living in the same area. Hasnas argues that the best society possible is one where the entire governing structure exists exclusively to settle disputes.
Rule of law was born out of trying to peacefully solve disputes that might have otherwise erupted into violence. Common law is a collection of these outcomes. Others in similar predicaments can look to precedent to see what worked to avoid violent outcomes in similar past circumstances.
…common law provides us with rules that facilitate peace and cooperative activities. Government legislation provides us with rules that facilitate the exploitation of the politically powerless by the politically dominant. The former bring order to society; the latter tend to produce strife. Hence, not only is government not necessary to create the basic rules of social order, it is precisely the rules that the government does create that tend to undermine that order.
No Victim? No crime.
Courts consisted of respected members of a community who had been involved in previous conflict resolutions. They were therefore well equipped to suggest outcomes that had in the past avoided violence. Their job was to find an arrangement that satisfied both parties involved in the dispute.
English common law is, in fact, case-generated law; that is, law that spontaneously evolves from the settlement of actual disputes. Almost all of the law that provides the infrastructure of our contemporary society was created in this way. Tort law, which provides protection against personal injury; property law, which demarcates property rights; contract law, which provides the grounding for exchange; commercial law, which facilitates complex business transactions; and even criminal law, which punishes harmful behavior, all arose through this evolutionary process.
When it comes to criminal law, things get a bit more complicated. But none of those complications are avoided in the current legal system. They are actually exacerbated by having the same group make the laws, enforce the laws, prosecute the cases, and judge the cases. These are no longer disinterested third parties. They have many interests wrapped up in performing their jobs to satisfy bosses and colleagues rather than victims and people in dispute.
And it is further complicated by the fact that government has mixed arbitrary statute law with laws protecting actual victims.
But do we really need the government to know that murder is wrong, theft is wrong, and rape is wrong?
It is true that most of our current law exists in the form of statutes. This is because much of the common law has been codified through legislation. But the fact that politicians recognised the wisdom of the common law by enacting it into statutes, hardly proves that government is necessary to create rules of law. Indeed, it proves precisely the opposite.
Rape, murder, and theft were being punished before the government said they were illegal. Victims and their families naturally have an incentive to bring suit against people who have wronged them. And they have an incentive to do so through a neutral third-party, lest it devolve into a “Hatfields and McCoys” type family feud.
In common law, the entire point is to solve a problem. So the best solutions are more widely adopted.
But that doesn’t mean those solutions are universal best practices.
Cultures and communities have different values and standards. One culture may see picking an apple off a neighbor’s tree as trivial, while another may take the crime quite seriously. And it likely depends on whether it is a region where food is abundant or a society on the brink of starvation.
But even with different legal standards by region, obeying common law does not require years of legal study.
Understanding the traditional rules of common law requires only that one be a member of the relevant community to which the rules apply, not that one be an attorney.
Government legislation, in contrast, need have no relationship to either the understanding or the moral sensibility of the ordinary person.
It is still your responsibility to understand how rules differ from place to place.
Under common law, if you aren’t hurting anyone, you are probably fine. But you have to be more careful if you don’t know the cultural acceptance of, for example, picking apples that don’t belong to you.
By contrast, governments have arbitrary statutes that are not intuitive.
For instance, walking around town with an alcoholic beverage isn’t hurting anyone, but could be illegal depending on what town or state you’re in.
The same applies to carrying a concealed weapon, possessing marijuana, and taking your shirt off. None of these actions by themselves hurt anyone, but could very well be illegal.
Throughout his piece, Hasnas repeatedly tells readers to look around when it comes to evidence that things can, will, and do function just fine without government law in certain areas.
Business is contracted around the world among parties from virtually all countries. Although there is neither a world government nor world court, businesses do not go to war with each other over contract disputes.
…[I]nternational commercial disputes are effectively resolved without the government provision of courts. How can this be?
The answer is simplicity itself. The parties to international transactions select, usually in advance, the dispute settlement mechanism they prefer from among the many options available to them. Few choose trial by combat.
This is the main argument for why there would still be effective governance without government. Disputes, violence, and unpredictability threaten profits and wealth.
We don’t need legislatures: all law can be created through dispute resolution.
We don’t need government courts: neutral, preselected, third-parties have more incentive to deliver justice.
And we don’t need government enforcers. They create conflict by initiating violence when a statute has been violated, even when no victim exists.
In fact, government sponsored law enforcement is relatively recent. Society as we know it predates public police.
The proper response to the claim that government must provide police services is: look around.
I work at a University that supplies its own campus police force. On my drive in, I pass a privately operated armored car that transports currency and other valuable items for banks and businesses. When I go downtown, I enter buildings that are serviced by private security companies that require me to sign in before entering. I shop at malls and department stores patrolled by their own private guards. While in the mall, I occasionally browse in the Security Zone store that sells personal and home protection equipment.
I converse with attorneys and, once in a while with a disgruntled spouse or worried parent, who employ private detective agencies to perform investigations for them. I write books about how the United States Federal government coerces private corporations into performing criminal investigations for it. When I was younger, I frequented nightclubs and bars that employed “bouncers.”
Although it has never happened to me personally, I know people who have been contacted by private debt collection agencies or have been visited by repo men. Once in a while, I meet people who are almost as important as rock stars and travel with their own bodyguards. At the end of the day, I return home to my community that has its own neighborhood watch.
Look around.
The most important laws, the ones that actually protect people from harm, were not created by government.
The most effective courts which settle disputes without violence were not created by government.
And most current security which keeps us safe, investigates crime, and brings people to justice are not government forces.
It’s not about creating utopia. But we could have a society where aggression is extremely dangerous and unprofitable, whether the attacker is an individual, a corporation, or the police.
Elected officials reacted to Google’s threat of demonetization of the Federalist, which would restrict ad revenues to the news media outlet. Sean Davis, co-founder of the Federalist, spoke with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson on Tuesday’s edition of the latter’s eponymous TV program, describing coordination between NBC, Google, and a foreign left-wing organization in Europe.
NBC worked with the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an organization that smears conservative websites — including Breitbart News — while advocating digital boycotts and blacklists against them.
Rep. Josh Hawley (R-MO) noted Google’s application of a standard to the Federalist that it does not apply to itself.
Wait, wait – you want to treat the @FDRLST comment section, which they don’t curate, as THEIR speech but simultaneously say the content you directly host and modify IS NOT your speech under Section 230? Wow, this is getting really interesting https://t.co/QEtpCtssco
Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) noted Google’s opposition to the Federalist’s characterization of protests, riots, and unrest following the death of George Floyd.
.@Google bans @FDRLST from its ad platform for writing the media had lied about violence & rioting at “largely peaceful” protests.
— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) June 16, 2020
Donald Trump Jr., President Donald Trump’s eldest son, called for Republicans to investigate Google as an “out of control monopoly” using its monopoly of the flow of information to advance left-wing politics.
The GOP Senate needs to wake up & IMMEDIATELY subpoena & haul in the CEO of @Google for questioning.
Google is an out of control monopoly, with a leftwing political agenda, engaging in a clear campaign to silence dissent. It’s election interference, full stop.
A leftwing activist masquerading as a NBC journalist helped bully @Google into pulling ad revenue from The Federalist because they criticized a political movement they disagree with.
Breitbart News reported that NBC’s Adele-Momoko Fraser thanked two foreign non-profit organizations for their “collaboration” in urging Google to demonetize the Federalist.
As of this article’s publication, Alphabet Inc., which owns Google, is valued at $985 billion. Its market capitalization is the third-highest of all companies in the world.
The creeping suppression of press freedom in Hungary and India is frequently criticised by the Western commentariat. But, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out in the Intercept, Western media have ‘largely ignored what is, by far, the single greatest attack on press freedoms by the US government in the last decade at least: the prosecution and attempted extradition of Julian Assange for alleged crimes arising out of WikiLeaks’s... publication – in conjunction with the world’s largest newspapers – of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and US diplomatic cables’. They couldn’t jail the editor of the New York Times so they pursued Assange instead.
Julian Assange was running WikiLeaks in 2010 when it released a vast hoard of US government documents revealing details of American political, military and diplomatic operations. With extracts published by the New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El País, the archive provided deeper insight into the international workings of the US state than anything seen since Daniel Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the media in 1971. But today Ellsberg is celebrated as the patron saint of whistleblowers while Assange is locked in a cell in London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison for 23 and a half hours a day. In this latest phase of the American authorities’ ten-year pursuit of Assange, he is fighting extradition to the US. Court hearings to determine whether the extradition request will be granted have been delayed until September by the Covid-19 pandemic. In the US he faces one charge of computer hacking and 17 counts under the Espionage Act of 1917. If he is convicted, the result could be a prison sentence of 175 years.
I was in Kabul when I first heard about the WikiLeaks revelations, which confirmed much of what I and other reporters suspected, or knew but could not prove, about US activities in Afghanistan and Iraq. The trove was immense: some 251,287 diplomatic cables, more than 400,000 classified army reports from the Iraq War and 90,000 from the war in Afghanistan. Rereading these documents now I’m struck again by the constipated military-bureaucratic prose, with its sinister, dehumanising acronyms. Killing people is referred to as an EOF (‘Escalation of Force’), something that happened frequently at US military checkpoints when nervous US soldiers directed Iraqi drivers to stop or go with complex hand signals that nobody understood. What this could mean for Iraqis is illustrated by brief military reports such as the one headed ‘Escalation of Force by 3/8 NE Fallujah: I CIVKIA, 4 CIVWIA’. Decoded, it describes the moment when a woman in a car was killed and her husband and three daughters wounded at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Fallujah, forty miles west of Baghdad. The US marine on duty opened fire because he was ‘unable to determine the occupants of the vehicle due to the reflection of the sun coming off the windshield’. Another report marks the moment when US soldiers shot dead a man who was ‘creeping up behind their sniper position’, only to learn later that he was their own unit’s interpreter.
These reports are the small change of war. But collectively they convey its reality far better than even the most well-informed journalistic accounts. Those two shootings were a thousand times repeated, though the reports were rare in admitting that the victims were civilians. More usually, the dead were automatically identified as ‘terrorists’ caught in the act, regardless of evidence to the contrary. The most famous of the WikiLeaks discoveries concerned an event in Baghdad on 12 July 2007 during which the US military claimed to have killed a dozen terrorists. But the incident had been filmed by the gun camera of the US Apache helicopter that had carried out the shootings, and the people it targeted were all civilians. Much was known about the killings because among the dead were two local journalists working for Reuters. It was known, too, that such a video existed, but the Pentagon refused to release it despite a Freedom of Information Act request. Appalled by what the video revealed about the way the US was conducting its war on terror, and appalled by the contents of the thousands of reports and cables it was stored alongside, a junior US intelligence analyst called Bradley Manning, who later changed her legal gender and became Chelsea Manning, released the entire archive to WikiLeaks.
The video still has the power to shock. The two helicopter pilots exchange banter about the slaughter in the street below: ‘Ha, ha, I hit them,’ one says. ‘Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,’ the other says. They have mistaken the camera held by one of the journalists for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, unlikely though it was that armed insurgents would stand in the open in Baghdad with a US helicopter hovering overhead. They shoot again at the wounded as one of them, probably the Reuters assistant Saeed Chmagh, crawls towards a van that has stopped to rescue them. When the pilots are told over the radio that they have killed a number of Iraqi civilians and wounded two children, one of them says: ‘Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into the battle.’
The WikiLeaks documents exposed the way the US, as the world’s sole superpower, really conducted its wars – something that the military and political establishments saw as a blow to their credibility and legitimacy. There were some devastating revelations, the helicopter video among them, but many of the secrets uncovered weren’t particularly significant or indeed very secret. In themselves they don’t explain the degree of rage WikiLeaks provoked in the US government and its allies. This was a response to Assange’s assault on their monopoly control of sensitive state information, which they saw as an essential prop to their authority. Making such information public, as Assange and WikiLeaks had done, weaponised freedom of expression: if disclosures of this kind went unpunished and became the norm, it would radically shift the balance of power between government and society – and especially the media – in favour of the latter. It is the US government’s determination to defend its ongoing monopoly, rather than the supposed damage done by the release of the secrets themselves, that has motivated it to pursue Assange and to seek to discredit both him and WikiLeaks.
This campaign has been unrelenting and has had a fair measure of success, despite the fact that most of the charges made against Assange are demonstrably untrue. Regarding the release of documents, there were two lines of attack. First, Assange and WikiLeaks were accused of revealing information that endangered or led to the deaths of Americans or their allies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Second, they were accused of having injured the US state in general through activities amounting to espionage, which should be punished as such. Much more damaging to Assange, however, and to the whole WikiLeaks project, were the allegations of rape made against him in Sweden, also in 2010. This led to a prosecutorial investigation lasting nearly ten years, which was dropped three times and three times restarted before finally being abandoned last November as the statute of limitations approached, beyond which no charges could be brought.
The result is that Assange has become a pariah. Lost is the fact that he and WikiLeaks did what all journalists should do, which is to make important information available to the public, enabling people to make evidence-based judgments about the world around them and, in particular, about the actions of their governments. Given the constant drum beat of attacks on Assange from so many directions it can be hard to remember that in 2010 WikiLeaks won a great victory for freedom of expression and against state secrecy, and that the US government and its allies have made every effort to reverse it. Read the rest of this entry »
