An important factor to keep in mind is that, whilst collectivism is ever-popular with globalists, it kills the free market and man’s sense of enterprise. Therefore, it eventually diminishes the creation of real wealth and prosperity, upon which collectivism feeds. As Maggie Thatcher said, “The problem with socialism is that, eventually, you run out of other people’s money.” For this reason, collectivists eventually (and invariably) kill off the milk cow that feeds them.
In advising those who are considering international diversification, the most common misconception I hear is that, “There’s not really anything you can do. The globalists are taking over the world and that means that there’s nowhere to go to escape them.”
Not so.
Clearly, much of what was at one time known as the “free world” is in a dramatic decline and this is most certainly due, in large part, to globalists. Consequently, those who live in one of the declining countries assume that the world mirrors what exists in the country in which they live.
Many of these people tend to be fatalists and assume that they have no options. However, throughout history, there have always been countries (and empires) that were in the declining stages of their “shelf-life.” But, likewise, there have also always been those countries that were on the rise at the same time.
It’s as perennial as the ebb and flow of the tides. As the tide of prosperity and freedom flows away from one nation’s shore, it flows toward another’s. The objective is to pick those countries that are on the rise, to increase the likelihood of a good future.
An important factor to keep in mind is that, whilst collectivism is ever-popular with globalists, it kills the free market and man’s sense of enterprise. Therefore, it eventually diminishes the creation of real wealth and prosperity, upon which collectivism feeds. As Maggie Thatcher said, “The problem with socialism is that, eventually, you run out of other people’s money.” For this reason, collectivists eventually (and invariably) kill off the milk cow that feeds them. When this happens, they can no longer fund their programmes and the system collapses. This means that they cannot continue to provide entitlements, nor can they afford to enforce their draconian laws. (Think about that.)
It’s also important to keep in mind that wealth is not destroyed; it just changes hands. If it flows out of one country, that means it’s flowing to another. There’s always a balance.
And that would of course be a fine and normal thing for America’s 44th president to do — had America’s 44th president not personally played a massive role in paving the way to the devastation we’re seeing in Libya today.
And that’s exactly what the Obama administration set out to do: pouring weapons into Syria with the goal of effecting regime change, once again on the side of Al Qaeda-linked fighters. Had Russia not intervened in 2015 to prevent Damascus from being toppled, Syria would likely have suffered the same fate as Libya.
The Twitter account of America’s 44th president just casually shared some links to organizations providing relief to the victims of the terrible flooding in Libya, which as of this writing has already killed thousands of people.
And that would of course be a fine and normal thing for America’s 44th president to do — had America’s 44th president not personally played a massive role in paving the way to the devastation we’re seeing in Libya today.
“If you’re looking to help people impacted by the floods in Libya, check out these organizations providing relief,” Obama tweeted.
In 2010 the oil-rich Libya ranked higher on the UN Human Development Index than any other nation in Africa, with much better national infrastructure to protect itself from floods and other natural disasters. Today Libya is a chaotic humanitarian disaster where UN-backed investigators now say literal crimes against humanity have been taking place, including women being forced into sexual slavery.
What changed? If you’re reading this, you probably already know what changed.
In 2011, US, French and British forces helped rebels with extensive links to Al Qaeda kill Libya’s longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi, which immediately plunged the nation into violence, chaos, extremism and instability which persists to this day. It was later revealed that NATO powers knew they were backing murderous Al Qaeda-linked jihadists at the time.
Falsely branded a “humanitarian intervention” designed to prevent alleged plans for genocide and Viagra-fueled mass rapes against peaceful protesters by Gaddafi’s troops, the NATO attack on Libya quickly morphed into a regime change operation which saw Gaddafi brutally lynched in the streets and dying after being stabbed in the anus with a bayonet. Years later in 2016 a UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee found that the narratives used to justify the intervention in Libya were “not supported by the available evidence.”
Daily Bell: Are you denying, then, that we need the state to defend us?
Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Indeed. The state does not defend us; rather, the state aggresses against us and it uses our confiscated property to defend itself. The standard definition of the state is this: the state is an agency characterized by two unique, logically connected features. First, the state is an agency that exercises a territorial monopoly of ultimate decision-making. That is, the state is the ultimate arbiter and judge in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving itself and its agents. There is no appeal above and beyond the state. Second, the state is an agency that exercises a territorial monopoly of taxation. That is, it is an agency that can unilaterally fix the price that its subjects must pay for the state’s service as ultimate judge. Based on this institutional set-up you can safely predict the consequences. First, instead of preventing and resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision-making will cause and provoke conflict in order to settle it to its own advantage. That is, the state does not recognize and protect existing law, but it perverts law through legislation. Contradiction number one: the state is a law-breaking law protector. Second, instead of defending and protecting anyone or anything, a monopolist of taxation will invariably strive to maximize his expenditures on protection and at the same time minimize the actual production of protection. The more money the state can spend and the less it must work for this money, the better off it is. Contradiction number two: the state is an expropriating property protector.
Introduction: Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, born in 1949 in Peine, West Germany, studied philosophy, sociology, economics, history and statistics at the University of the Saarland, in Saarbruecken, the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, in Frankfurt am Main, and at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. He received his doctorate (Philosophy, 1974, under Juergen Habermas) and his “Habilitation” degree (Foundations of Sociology and Economics, 1981) both from the Goethe University in Frankfurt. Dr. Hoppe is the author of eight books – the best known of which is Democracy: The God That Failed – and more than 150 articles in books, scholarly journals and magazines of opinion. As an internationally prominent Austrian School economist and libertarian philosopher, he has lectured all over the world and his writings have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Daily Bell: Please answer these questions as if our readers were not already aware of your fine work and considered opinions. Let’s jump right in. Why is democracy “the God that failed?”
Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: The traditional, pre-modern state-form is that of a (absolute) monarchy. The democratic movement was directed against kings and the classes of hereditary nobles. Monarchy was criticized as being incompatible with the basic principle of the “equality before the law.” It rested on privilege and was unfair and exploitative. Democracy was supposed to be the way out. In opening participation and entry into state-government to everyone on equal terms, so the advocates of democracy claimed, equality before the law would become reality and true freedom would reign. But this is all a big error.
True, under democracy everyone can become king, so to speak, not only a privileged circle of people. Thus, in a democracy no personal privileges exist. However, functional privileges and privileged functions exist. Public officials, if they act in an official capacity, are governed and protected by “public law” and thereby occupy a privileged position vis-à-vis persons acting under the mere authority of “private law.” In particular, public officials are permitted to finance or subsidize their own activities through taxes. That is, they are permitted to engage in, and live off, what in private dealings between private law subjects is prohibited and considered “theft” and “stolen loot.” Thus, privilege and legal discrimination – and the distinction between rulers and subjects – will not disappear under democracy.
Even worse: Under monarchy, the distinction between rulers and ruled is clear. I know, for instance, that I will never become king, and because of that I will tend to resist the king’s attempts to raise taxes. Under democracy, the distinction between rulers and ruled becomes blurred. The illusion can arise “that we all rule ourselves,” and the resistance against increased taxation is accordingly diminished. I might end up on the receiving end: as a tax-recipient rather than a tax-payer, and thus view taxation more favorably.
And moreover: As a hereditary monopolist, a king regards the territory and the people under his rule as his personal property and engages in the monopolistic exploitation of this “property.” Under democracy, monopoly and monopolistic exploitation do not disappear. Rather, what happens is this: instead of a king and a nobility who regard the country as their private property, a temporary and interchangeable caretaker is put in monopolistic charge of the country. The caretaker does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his and his protégés’ advantage. He owns its current use – usufruct – but not its capital stock. This does not eliminate exploitation. To the contrary, it makes exploitation less calculating and carried out with little or no regard to the capital stock. Exploitation becomes shortsighted and capital consumption will be systematically promoted.
Daily Bell: If democracy has failed what would you put in its place? What is the ideal society? Anarcho-capitalism?
Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: I prefer the term “private law society.” In a private law society every individual and institution is subject to one and the same set of laws. No public law granting privileges to specific persons or functions exists in this society. There is only private law (and private property), equally applicable to each and everyone. No one is permitted to acquire property by means other than through original appropriation of previously un-owned things, through production, or through voluntary exchange, and no one possesses a privilege to tax and expropriate. Moreover, no one is permitted to prohibit anyone else from using his property in order to enter any line of production he wishes and compete against whomever he pleases.
Daily Bell: How would law and order be provided in this society? How would your ideal justice system work?
Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: In a private law society the production of law and order – of security – would be undertaken by freely financed individuals and agencies competing for a voluntarily paying (or not-paying) clientele – just as the production of all other goods and services. How this system would work can be best understood in contrast to the workings of the present, all-too-familiar statist system. If one wanted to summarize in one word the decisive difference – and advantage – of a competitive security industry as compared to the current statist practice, it would be: contract.
The state operates in a legal vacuum. There exists no contract between the state and its citizens. It is not contractually fixed, what is actually owned by whom, and what, accordingly, is to be protected. It is not fixed, what service the state is to provide, what is to happen if the state fails in its duty, nor what the price is that the “customer” of such “service” must pay. Rather, the state unilaterally fixes the rules of the game and can change them, per legislation, during the game. Obviously, such behavior is inconceivable for freely financed security providers.
NEW YORK, NY — After the devastating reports came out that star New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers had suffered what is suspected to be a season-ending injury to his Achilles tendon, experts immediately expressed belief that the injury was a result of Rodgers being unvaccinated.
“Taking the vaccine would have likely prevented this,” said Dr. Arthur MacArthur, a sports physician who has never treated Rodgers. “Research that we just came up with a few moments ago indicates there is a new COVID-19 variant that specifically attacks tendons and ligaments, particularly in the ankle. So Aaron Rodgers, due to his unvaccinated state, clearly came down with a sudden case of what we are referring to, as of right now, ‘COVID ankle.'”
The excitement around the Jets had grown to a fevered pitch this offseason after the team acquired Rodgers, a Super Bowl winner and 4-time MVP, from Green Bay. The Jets made the move against the advice of members of the scientific community, who argued Rodgers’s mere unvaccinated presence would likely result in the death of the entire team. “He has not been vaccinated against the virus everyone has received protection from,” said one concerned scientist. “This obviously puts the protected people at severe risk from the person who isn’t protected. It’s science.”
At publishing time, the Jets vowed to press onward, despite the setback. “We lost the guy who gave us any realistic chance of having a great season,” said Head Coach Robert Saleh. “But at least we won’t have to spend all day, every day around someone who dares to be unvaccinated.”
Why has the eurozone lagged the United States and other developed economies in recent years? The enormous stimulus packages, including the 2009 Growth and Job Plan, the Juncker Plan, the New Green Deal, and the Europe Next Generation, are proving that central planning only delivers poor growth, elevated debt, and now high inflation.
If there is a lesson for the United States and the rest of the world, it is that massive central planning does not deliver growth and that governments do not lead economic development and innovation. The eurozone would benefit from a supply-side, bottom-up approach to the economy. Unfortunately, it is doubling down on central planning.
The eurozone economic figures show the risk of stagflation, and the short-term impact is clear in Germany and France, but it extends to the rest of the countries.
Why has the eurozone lagged the United States and other developed economies in recent years? The enormous stimulus packages, including the 2009 Growth and Job Plan, the Juncker Plan, the New Green Deal, and the Europe Next Generation, are proving that central planning only delivers poor growth, elevated debt, and now high inflation.
The ECB’s latest figures show that monetary aggregates are starting to moderate, but inflation remains high and, in the latest print, is rising.
Consensus estimates of GDP growth in 2023 stand at 0.6% with inflation above 5%, according to Bloomberg, and it is important to remember that core inflation continues to be three times higher than the target of price stability.
Lagarde’s inflation messages seem clear, but the ECB’s target must be met. and interest rate increases are here to stay, although the market estimates that the ECB will start lowering interest rates by 2024. The problem is that the eurozone is only betting on rate hikes to moderate inflation, while governments continue to spend billions of euros on so-called Next Generation Funds and deficits that mean more inflation or taxes in the future.
We should not be surprised that credit in the eurozone is falling along with monetary aggregates. The entire burden of monetary normalization is falling on the productive sector, families, and businesses, while many governments continue to increase deficit spending.
The figures for growth in the eurozone are very poor, but they are even worse when we take into account that Ireland’s progress, as shown by Eurostat, almost entirely explains the most recent upward revision. What does the eurozone do? Instead of incentivizing the economic freedom model, it subsidizes the intervened ones.
The economy is expected to grow slightly in 2023, plagued by high inflation, rising interest rates, and lower exports. The Next Generation funds have no discernible marginal or multiplier effect.
The weak state of manufacturing and service indices confirms this fear. PMIs show a widespread negative trend in new orders and investment.
RTX, one of the largest weapons firms in the US, is currently being sued alongside Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics for “aiding and abetting war crimes and extrajudicial killings” by selling weapons to the Saudi-led coalition waging war in Yemen. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the victims of two coalition bombings in Yemen — one for a wedding in 2015 and another for a funeral in 2016.
According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), in October 2015, the Al-Sanabani family was readying to celebrate a relative’s wedding when a coalition jet bombed the area, killing 43 Yemenis, including 13 women and 16 children. A year later, coalition jets dropped a US-manufactured GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bomb on a crowded funeral, killing over 100.
The lawsuit alleges that western-manufactured bombs have killed over 25,000 civilians since the beginning of the NATO-backed war nearly eight years ago.
US weapons maker RTX, formerly known as Raytheon Technologies, scrubbed a multibillion deal with Saudi firm Scopa Defense earlier this year over “concerns” that the latter was pursuing business with sanctioned Russian and Chinese companies, according to people familiar with the deal that spoke with the Wall Street Journal(WSJ).
In 2022, RTX and Scopa signed a memorandum of understanding to build a factory in the kingdom for air defense systems to protect Riyadh from airstrikes. The plan reportedly called for installing radars and multiple air defense systems with an investment of $25 billion in the kingdom and $17 worth of sales.
Image source: Breaking Defense
The owner of Scopa, Mohamed Alajlan, told the WSJ that his company has no deals with sanctioned Russian companies and that any deals with Chinese firms “are limited to securing raw materials such as copper or rubber for use in producing ammunition and armored vehicles.”
“We don’t work with any companies that have international sanctions,” Alajlan told the WSJ, adding that the decision by RTX to scrub the deal was “rushed, illogical, and even irrational.”
Alajlan, who also chairs the Saudi-Chinese Business Council, is the heir of a prominent Saudi family that for decades has imported Chinese textiles to the kingdom.
According to the WSJ, the “unease” over Scopa’s alleged ties to sanctioned Russian and Chinese companies “was a deciding factor for an advisory board of retired US military officers to resign from the Saudi company.” Furthermore, the daily claims Scopa fired its chief executive “who had raised the sanctions concerns with his company’s owner and US officials.”
In the past decade, the censorship industrial complex has gained considerable momentum and institutional support. Elite support for censorship is so entrenched that the Harvard Kennedy School published a commentary in September 2022 titled, “Mis- and disinformation studies are too big to fail.”
In the past decade, the growth of the Internet and social media has brought with it a dramatic uptick in populist sentiment. Legacy institutions have declared war against populism, referring to its claims as “misinformation” or “disinformation” and calling on the government or government-adjacent actors (herein referred to as “the censors”) to clamp down on such claims as they spread across the Internet like wildfire. The censors rarely decline these opportunities to silence criticism, justifying the censorship as a matter of “national security.”
More than other Western nations, the United States champions freedom of speech. But it has frequently failed in its aspirations, beginning in 1798 with the Alien and Sedition Acts. There are countless examples since then of the US failing to adhere to its core value system, too many to recount in one brief article.
The Internet Lets Claims Spread Like Wildfire
Beginning with the Arab Spring in 2010, the extent to which social media could foster grassroots campaigns against perceived tyranny or injustice became increasingly apparent. Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst, has commented on such phenomena at length in his book, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millenium.
The nation-state correctly perceives in revolutions a threat to its existing foundations and deploys various methods to crush dissent. Western nations do not typically deploy the military against the masses or declare martial law. The US has taken a different but directionally similar approach, whereby law enforcement and intelligence agencies form cozy partnerships with private actors, such as social media platforms, financial institutions, and other digital intermediaries.
After the Great Recession, populist movements, like Occupy Wall Street on the Left and the Tea Party movement on the Right, garnered dramatic support across Western nations. As with most populist movements, a significant number of the activists embraced ideas branded as “conspiracy theories” by the established order. Rather than examining these allegations, the established order preferred to label the entire movement “crazy” or “conspiratorial.”
Since the movements began, there has been a significant convergence of Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party thought leaders. It is no coincidence that, despite their different politial affiliations, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Michael Shellenberger often sound like Tucker Carlson, Dan Bongino, and Donald Trump when it comes to criticizing the government and legacy institutions. Each of these men has been personally targeted by the censorship industrial complex.
The Twitter Files Expose the Censorship Racket
On March 9, 2023, Michael Shellenberger delivered his testimony to the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which he titled “The Censorship Industrial Complex.” In sixty-eight pages, Michael Shellenberger outlines how “Americans taxpayers are unwittingly financing the growth and power of a censorship-industrial complex run by America’s scientific and technological elite.” He also discusses how the Twitter Files documents “have revealed a large and growing network of government agencies, academic institutions, and nongovernmental organizations that are actively censoring Americans citizens, often without their knowledge.”
Nor is there any realistic way to shove her offstage for a replacement. The appointed veep switcheroo gambit — shoehorning Gavin Newsom in there and then elevating him as Kamala quits — looks un-sellable. He’s turned California into a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape of flash-mob thievery, car-jacking, medical lunacy, and wildfire mismanagement. The videos of California mayhem play on social media 24/7. He’d never get confirmed by Congress.
“If a politician does a ‘favor’ for a crime boss, and the crime boss pays the politician’s wife, it’s still bribery. If the crime boss pays the politician’s crackhead son on account of the favor, it’s still bribery.” — Jeff Childers, the Coffee & Covid blog
Just as a janky investment can turn catastrophically ruinous in the finance world, “Joe Biden” has transmuted from an asset to a liability for the Party of Chaos as we enter the season when things get real. Just weeks ago, the phantasm in the White House could do nothing wrong, despite doing absolutely everything wrong in the thirty-two months he’s haunted the Oval Office. But now, an odor of rot and sulfur trails his every bumbling misstep while his maunderings from the podium set off alarms in party HQ. What to do, indeed…?
As of five minutes ago, “JB” was still pretending to run for reelection, which, of course, was a bamboozle that only the Wokester rank-and-file, hoaxed into an epic psychotic rapture, might swallow. The “president’s” stage managers run a “campaign committee” on next-to-zero contributions, you see, but all it really does is send out millions of algo-concocted, drivel-filled emails five times a day to keep the big pretend going while the DC Blob desperately looks for a way out.
Ever since the fabled Laptop from Hell entered stage left, the un-raptured of the land have been exposed to gales of evidence that “Joe Biden” ran a family influence-peddling racket as veep, and that it likely has something to do with the extravagant mess spawned in Ukraine. The crude and lawless labors of the DOJ and the FBI to cover all that up have been failing lately as a harsh music of blown whistles ominously cleaves the dank night air over the Potomac swamp.
The coming House impeachment inquiry, with its extraordinary subpoena powers, can easily un-confuse these matters as Rep Comer (R-KY) goes after the Biden family bank records. The equation is pretty straightforward: Millions of dollars rattling around the coffers of “Joe” and Jill, and Jim and Frank, and the Biden kids and grand-kids divided by the low six-figure salaries of a senator and vice-president, times, say, the $20 to $50-million inflows of revenue (for no discernible services rendered) from Ukraine, Russia, China, Kazakhstan, and Gawd-knows how many other entities arguably hostile to the USA’s interests through Hunter Biden’s multitudinous shell companies. It’s called money-laundering.
MCViewPoint 
