MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

The Left’s Big Pitch: Embrace A Worse Life In The Name Of Equality

Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2022

President Joe Biden’s entire economic agenda is built around the notion of economic mediocrity rooted in a self-proclaimed higher justice. Paul Waldman of The Washington Post posited this week that Biden had launched an “economic policy revolution” rooted in fighting “inequality.” This would require “more active government intervention in the economy.” 

And we will all learn to love such intervention, because it will be done in the name of a higher value: equality. Not equality of rights, but equality of outcome; not equality of value, but equality of resources. The problem with this philosophy is that it removes the incentive for all that creates prosperity: work, creativity, thrift, responsibility. And removing that incentive means more misery for everyone.

Tyler Durden's Photo

BY TYLER DURDEN

TUESDAY, DEC 27, 2022 – 04:44 AM

Authored by Ben Shapiro via RealClear Politics,

This week, The New York Times released a long expose of the shortcomings of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. Long cherished as a crown jewel of Left-wing governmental policy, the NHS has been plagued by massive resource shortcomings, requiring rationing of critical infrastructure and care. Now, citizens are waiting up to 12 hours for ambulances. “It’s a near-crisis situation that experts say reveals a breakdown of the compact between Britons and their revered National Health Service,” the Times reported, “that the government will provide responsible, efficient health care services, mostly free, across all income levels.”

There can be only one excuse for such signal failure to serve the prosperity of your citizenry: the chimera of equality. This, in fact, is the clarion call of the Left: that human beings sacrifice well-being and prosperity on behalf of the cult of equal distribution of resources. Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, says as much in his book, “The Great Narrative”: we should dispense with economic measures like gross domestic product (GDP) in favor of “what matters most: climate action, sustainability, inclusivity, global cooperation, health and well-being.” In fact, says Schwab, “We might even find we can live with such a scenario quite happily!” The end goal will be ending “inequality and the unfairness that underpins it” by enshrining “universal provision of social assistance,” which will require that governments “rewrite some of the rules of the game and permanently increase their roles.”

Closer to home, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie says the same when he argues in favor of government nationalization of all wealth and then redistribution of that wealth on a per capita basis… every generation. This would amount to a complete rupture of property rights — and this in turn would mean the end of innovation, since societies that dispense with property rights and profit margins regress into stagnation and then economic collapse. But at least we will have achieved Bouie’s goal: equality! 

Indeed, members of the political Left are constantly asking citizens to simply reframe their perspectives on prosperity entirely.

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Israel helps Ukraine whitewash its Nazis

Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2022

It’s OK with US (government). It (you) is paying to support them.

Asa Winstanley and Ali Abunimah

https://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-helps-ukraine-whitewash-its-nazis/36911

A man in military uniform overlooks a desert
Wearing the “Wollfsangel” symbol used by Hitler’s fighters in World War II, Ukrainian Azov fighter Illia Samoilenko vists the Masada archelogical site in Israel. (AzovstalFam/Twitter)

Representatives of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion have been touring Israel to drum up support for the unit’s imprisoned fighters. They have been meeting with Israeli politicians and soldiers.

Azov intelligence officer Illia Samoilenko was released in a prisoner exchange with Russia in September.

He had been one of the hundreds of Azov fighters who surrendered in May at the end of the long Russian siege of the eastern city of Mariupol.

“Israel values freedom, values strength, Israel values honor. It’s the same things that we also value,” he told Israeli newspaper Haaretz this week.

Samoilenko also told The Times of Israel that “he sees Israel and Ukraine on the same side, the civilized battling the uncivilized in a struggle for the future of humanity,” the outlet summarized.

“We have prosperity, beautiful, prosperous, beautiful civilization, and they have medieval cavemen,” he said. It seems the “they” in this case are the Palestinians and the Russians, who Samoilenko regards as “uncivilized.”

Along for the Israeli tour with Samoilenko is Yulia Fedosiuk, the wife of an imprisoned Azov fighter and a far-right activist in her own right.

Both were on a charm offensive this week, as part of a wider push to whitewash Azov’s image in the West.

Three people in suits pose for a photo
Azov members Illia Samoilenko and Yulia Fedosiuk met with Naama Lazimi of Israel’s Labor Party. (AzovstalFam/Twitter)

Before Russia invaded Ukraine in February, it was widely acknowledged that the Azov Battalion promoted Nazi ideology.

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Doug Casey’s #1 Speculation for 2023 – International Man

Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2022

On the one hand, it should be cause for a revolution because it will actually turn people into serfs. But on the other hand, the average American has almost no understanding of economics. He has little grip on what’s going on and believes propaganda.

We’re going to get CBDCs in 2023, and this is one of the scariest things on the horizon.

https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-caseys-1-speculation-for-2023/

by Doug Casey

International Man: Will 2023 be the year of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)? Or will this terrible idea be consigned to the dustbin of history?

Doug Casey: CBDCs are a disastrous idea. But that’s never stopped “the elite” in the past. First, they did zero interest rates and negative interest rates, which I thought was metaphysically impossible. But they did it. Then they went to massive “quantitative easing,” a dishonest euphemism for money printing.

The next thing is going to be Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), which will give them unprecedented control over the finances of the average person.

On the one hand, it should be cause for a revolution because it will actually turn people into serfs. But on the other hand, the average American has almost no understanding of economics. He has little grip on what’s going on and believes propaganda.

We’re going to get CBDCs in 2023, and this is one of the scariest things on the horizon.

International Man: Will 2023 be the year uranium really takes off?

Doug Casey: Let’s recall the last uranium boom, which we were fortunate enough to catch back in 2001 to 2007. Uranium ran from $10 a pound up to $140 a pound. And that was in the days when the Russians and the Americans still had large nuclear weapon stockpiles, from which they recaptured lots of U-235 for use in reactors. That’s gone.

The West has become anti-oil, natural gas, and coal. It’s idiotically relying on wind and solar, which are totally unsuitable for mass power generation for an industrial civilization. However, I think that notwithstanding the semi-religious antinuclear dogma of many in the West, there’s going to be a nuclear renaissance, out of pure necessity. Hopefully, using fourth and fifth-generation nuclear technologies.

At the moment, uranium is about $50. I don’t doubt that it’s going to go to $100 or $150 and will take uranium stocks up with it, as it did the last time. So I’m very bullish on uranium.

International Man: What other macroeconomic and geopolitical trends do you see unfolding?

Doug Casey: These are a number of geopolitical trends unfolding.

First, let’s discuss China, the world’s biggest country.

There’s turmoil in China now, with large Chinese cities having been locked down due to the Covid hysteria. Perhaps it’s mainly a cover for Mr. Xi to crush revolutionary elements. Who knows? But that’s just one thing that China’s facing.

Most of their banks are bankrupt. All the money that Mr. and Mrs. Wu deposited over the years is very much at risk. That’s because banks have lent that money for schemes like the Belt and Road initiative, for building giant cities in the middle of nowhere, for building questionable highways and rail lines, and all sorts of showy infrastructure. Like most government projects, it will turn out to be a waste of capital.

The money that the banks used to finance those things is never coming home. So when Mrs. Wu goes to withdraw her money, she’s not going to get it unless the government prints a giant amount of yuan. She’ll be very angry. At that point, we may find that China is not a cohesive whole. It’s really, six, seven, or eight separate countries and that are kept together in good measure by force.

My guess is when the going gets tough, China could break up, as it’s done numerous times in the past. Will it coalesce again? Who knows? And what will Mr. Xi do about it? At this point, he’s got a tiger by the tail.

What do you do if you’re an authoritarian dictator with unsound communistic instincts? He’s going to tend to use force and coercion to hold things together. He’s not going to liberalize more—the reason why China had its tremendous boom during the first 20 to 30 years after Deng took over in 1980.

President Xi, like other dictators or authoritarian types, is going to clamp down more, not liberalize.

It’s something the people who belong to the World Economic Forum will approve of. It was very successful from their point of view on the Covid front…

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FBI COINTELPRO Is Back, And Worse Than Ever | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2022

The history of the FBI provides the best guide to the abuses that may be now occurring. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI carried out “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order,” a 1976 Senate report noted. The FBI’s Operation COINTELPRO involved thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government informants, to destroy activists’ marriages, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, white racist, and anti-war organizations. 

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/fbi-cointelpro-is-back-and-worse-than-ever/

by Jim Bovard

fbi agent cartoon

Elon Musk has opened the floodgates to expose the FBI’s latest war on Americans’ freedom of speech. The FBI massively intervened to pressure Twitter to suppress accounts and tweets from individuals the FBI disapproved of, including parody accounts. The FBI and other federal agencies also browbeat Facebook, Instagram, and many other social media companies.

Thus far, most of the American corporate media has ignored or downplayed the story, known as the Twitter Files. Since many of the individuals who the FBI got squelched were pro-Trump, the violation of their rights is a non-issue (or a cause for quiet celebration). At this point, it is difficult to know whether the scant reaction to the Twitter Files is the result of political bias, collective amnesia, or simply a total ignorance of American history.

The history of the FBI provides the best guide to the abuses that may be now occurring. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI carried out “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order,” a 1976 Senate report noted. The FBI’s Operation COINTELPRO involved thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government informants, to destroy activists’ marriages, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, white racist, and anti-war organizations. The FBI let no corner of American life escape its vigilance; it even worked to expose and discredit “communists who are secretly operating in legitimate organizations and employments, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and Boy Scouts.”

While many people are aware of how the FBI hounded Martin Luther King Jr. and pressured him to commit suicide, that was not even the tip of the iceberg of the FBI’s racial persecution. Almost any black organization could be targeted for illegal wiretaps. One black leader was monitored largely because he had “recommended the possession of firearms by members for their self-protection.” At that time, some southern police departments and sheriffs were notorious for attacking blacks who stood up for their civil rights.

The FBI office in San Diego instigated violence between the local Black Panthers and a rival black organization, US (United Slaves Inc.). Agents sent forged letters making accusations and threats to the groups purportedly from their rivals, along with crude cartoons and drawings meant to enrage the recipients. Three Black Panthers and one member of the US were killed during the time the FBI was fanning the flames. A few days after shootings in which two Panthers were wounded and one was killed, and in which the US headquarters was bombed, the FBI office reported to headquarters: “Efforts are being made to determine how this situation can be capitalized upon for the benefit of the Counterintelligence Program.” The FBI office bragged shortly thereafter: “Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego…it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this [FBI] program.”

The FBI set up a Ghetto Informant Program that continued after COINTELPRO and that had 7,402 informants, including proprietors of candy stores and barbershops, as of September 1972. The informants served as “listening posts” “to identify extremists passing through or locating in the ghetto area, to identify purveyors of extremist literature,” and to keep an eye on “Afro-American type bookstores” (including obtaining the names of the bookstore’s “clientele”). The informants’ reports were stockpiled in the FBI’s Racial Intelligence Unit. The FBI also created a national “Rabble Rouser” Index, a “major intelligence program…to identify ‘demagogues.’”

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Manipulation! Four Ways The Mainstream Media Lied To Us In 2022

Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2022

Journalists are supposed to inform the public. That is the job of what has been referred to as the Fourth Estate. They are supposed to expose the crimes of the state against the people. But something is very wrong with our mainstream media. Journalists and their institutions have upended their traditional roles and decided to side with the political power against the people. We are just beginning to see the ugly truth with the release of the Twitter Files, but more importantly in the mainstream media reaction to what should be the biggest story of the century: silence.

Please consider a year-end, tax-deductible donation to the Ron Paul Institute: http://ronpaulinstitute.org/support/

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https://rumble.com/v22yn7q-manipulation-four-ways-the-mainstream-media-lied-to-us-in-2022.html

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The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : Omnibus shows Congress’s Priorities: Authoritarianism and War

Posted by M. C. on December 29, 2022

Similarly, every Republican President in recent years—including two who had a Republican-controlled Congress for at least part of their term—supported huge increases in welfare state spending. Most Democrats only pretend to oppose warfare and most Republicans only pretend to oppose welfare to appease their parties’ respective bases.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2022/december/26/omnibus-shows-congress-s-priorities-authoritarianism-and-war/?mc_cid=b0f98b3294&mc_eid=4e0de347c8

written by ron paul

Those hoping for a Christmastime government shutdown were once again disappointed when Congress passed a 4,000-page, $1.7 trillion omnibus appropriations bill that few, if any, Representatives and Senators read before voting on. The Republican leadership celebrated this bloated monstrosity because it spends $858 billion on warfare while “only” spending $772.5 billion on welfare.

No one should think Republican insistence on more warfare than welfare spending means Democrats oppose the warfare state. Under President Biden and a Democrat-controlled Congress, “defense” spending has increased by 4.3 percent over the last two years. Similarly, every Republican President in recent years—including two who had a Republican-controlled Congress for at least part of their term—supported huge increases in welfare state spending. Most Democrats only pretend to oppose warfare and most Republicans only pretend to oppose welfare to appease their parties’ respective bases.

The Omnibus appropriates a $44.5 billion giveaway to Ukraine. This brings the total US spending on Ukraine’s military to over $100 billion – approximately 50 percent more than Russia’s entire military budget! This money is spent in a conflict that does not affect US security, yet one that would likely have not occurred were it not for prior US meddling in the region.

The Omnibus bill provides $11.3 billion for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a $569.6 million increase and $524 billion above the President’s request. According to the Democratic leadership, the funding increase is so the FBI can better fight “extremist violence and domestic terrorists.”

The public recently learned what the FBI considers an appropriate way to fight “extremism,” with the release of emails between Twitter officials and the FBI. These memos show the Bureau was working with Twitter—and almost certainly other social media companies—to suppress certain stories, such as Hunter Biden’s laptop, and points of view, such as skepticism regarding masks, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates. The bureau even used taxpayer funds to reimburse Twitter for the costs of implementing these “requests.” Government officials working with private companies to silence American citizens is a clear violation of the First Amendment.

This is hardly the first time the FBI has violated the constitutional rights of American citizens. In fact, since its founding the Bureau has targeted political activists and leaders such as Martin Luther King, whose agenda was considered “extreme” or “dangerous” by the Bureau’s corrupt leadership. The idea of a national police force with the power to target Americans because of their political beliefs would have horrified the drafters of the Constitution. The federal government has no constitutional authority over criminal law except for cases of piracy, counterfeiting, and treason. Libertarians, constitutional conservatives, and progressives who still care about civil liberties should join together to defund the FBI.

The fiscal year 2022 omnibus appropriations bill expands government, reduces liberty, and increases government debt, forcing the Federal Reserve to monetize more debt leading to more price inflation. Our political elites prioritize militarism abroad and authoritarianism at home over addressing the problems facing the American people like the Federal Reserve’s destructive monetary policy. This will fuel growing discontent with the political system. As the economy continues to worsen and the attempt to run the world continues to result in failures, the discontent will grow until the welfare warfare system collapses and, hopefully, a new error of liberty peace and prosperity dawns.

Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.
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Watch “Privacy Myths DEBUNKED!” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on December 29, 2022

https://youtu.be/LNPqjcP7b7k

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The Price Of Sophistry | The Z Blog

Posted by M. C. on December 29, 2022

That truth in the current crisis is that the clever arguments and complex logical constructs of the last half century contained no truth value. The sophist of our age profited greatly from their arguments, but the result is the ungovernable mess that is modern America.

https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=28897

Z Man

In modern usage, the terms sophism and sophistry are used interchangeably with “inaccurate” or “deliberately misleading.” A sophist is someone who relies upon fallacious arguments or reasoning to win a debate. Someone can be accused of sophistry because they are too stupid to see the flaws in their reasoning. Other times they are accused of deliberately misleading arguments. The motivation is malice rather than stupidity or carelessness.

This negative view of sophistry was not always so. We get the word from the Greeks who used the word to mean teacher. A sophist hired himself out to rich families to instruct their sons in philosophy, math, rhetoric and music. The ability to debate in public was an important skill for an ambitious Athenian, so educating your children to be convincing orators was a primary goal of rich parents. A good sophist was one who was good at making convincing arguments.

Our negative view of this also comes from the Greeks. The reason we know about Socrates is we have the writings of Plato, who tells us Socrates was opposed to sophistry in his day. He thought arguments had to be logically sound and factually accurate, rather than just convincing. Of course, Socrates was forced to drink poison by the Athenians, because he was condemned for undermining public virtue. It turns out that the truth does not always set you free.

The reason any of this matters is that in democratic societies, there is a tension between these same two claims. On the one hand, winning the crowd is vital to democratic politics and the marketplace. This was true in ancient Athens and it is true on social media today. On the other hand, we are a society that believes deliberate deception is wrong, so factual accuracy is important. Winning the crowd through deceptive means is viewed as immoral.

This tension has been at the heart of mainstream conservative politics. One camp, the Straussians, think that winning the argument, which in politics means winning elections, is all that matters. The alternative camp insists that being right is what matters, even if it is not always popular. The former camp is correct that the goal of politics in a democratic system is to win elections, but the other side is also right that winning elections means nothing if the result is bad policy.

This conflict is at the heart of this back and forth between Michael Anton and Paul Gottfried over natural rights and traditionalism. Anton is a Straussian so he is therefore unencumbered by logic and factual accuracy. He simply wants to convince people that a society rooted in natural rights is the only choice, if America is going to hold together for much longer. Gottfried and others point out that natural rights do no exist and therefore they cannot be a foundation for anything.

What you see in the back and forth is that Gottfried in his short responses is describing things with as much accuracy as possible. He makes a descriptive claim, while Anton, in his lengthy responses, makes prescriptive claims. One side describes things as they are, while the other side argues for how they should be. Anton believes he is in the right because his proposition would solve the problem of governing a majority-minority society, while Gottfried is right because he is factually correct.

This conflict between the descriptive and the prescriptive is turning up in the dissident critique of the conservative movement. Conservatives argue that they are upholding the constitution and the natural rights tradition in America. Dissidents point out that no matter how elegant the arguments are in favor of conservatism and its natural rights foundation, the results, to this point, have been disastrous. In other words, the facts contradict the claims, no matter their intent.

The shadow over all of this, of course, is the purging of the paleocons from conservatism by the neocons and their Straussian enablers. Free from facts and reason, the winners in that struggle were able to conjure the history they needed to support their prescriptive claims, which solved a problem for conservatives. Like a python, they swallowed the Civil Rights Movement whole and digested it into their theories of the founding and their natural rights arguments.

That bit of history is what hangs over the back and forth between Gottfried and Anton and it is what hangs over the dissident critique of conservatism. The neocons and their Straussian enablers won the argument, but to what end? What was the point of winning the argument if the result was the present catastrophe? Anton would like to reframe this as the old neocon versus paleocon dispute, but no amount of words can conceal the elephant in the room. His side won the battle and lost the war.

In the end, this is the lesson of sophistry. It can only flourish in a culture that sees winning the argument as an end in itself. This is the curse of democracy, which brought down ancient Athens and is bringing down the New Athens. The truth is like a corpse in that it can never be truly concealed. The sophists think they can weigh the truth down with words, but like the body bobbing to the surface after the spring thaw, the truth eventually reemerges into the life of a society.

That truth in the current crisis is that the clever arguments and complex logical constructs of the last half century contained no truth value. The sophist of our age profited greatly from their arguments, but the result is the ungovernable mess that is modern America. Like Havel’s green grocer, we must now live in the truth which means shedding the sophistry that has led us to the present catastrophe. The truth may not set us free, but it will keep us from being erased from the book of life.

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Monetary Freedom Instead of Central Banking – The Future of Freedom Foundation

Posted by M. C. on December 29, 2022

The boom-bust cycles of inflations and recession and the political use of money-creation to serve the deficit spending needs of governments will never be effectively and permanently ended until central banking has been ended. Monetary matters must be fully returned to the market process of competitive supply and demand.

https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/monetary-freedom-instead-of-central-banking/

by Richard M. Ebeling

The United States and most of the rest of the world are, once again, in the midst of an inflationary crisis. Prices in general are rising at annualized rates not experienced by, especially, the industrialized countries of North America and Europe for well over 40 years. More than 50 percent of the U.S. population is under 40 years of age, meaning that half of the people in the country have never experienced in their life time a period of rising prices such as is now occurring.Monetary central planning is no more desirable or workable than any other form of government central planning.
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It is not surprising, therefore, the shock that it has had for so many. There was a period of time in the late 1970s when price inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), was going up at an annualized rate of nearly 15 percent. That was the highest since during the American Civil War, more than a hundred years earlier. So, the nearly 9 percent price inflation in the summer of 2022 was something totally new for the average American family.

Prices do not all rise by the same amount at the same time

It is worth keeping in mind that the headline CPI number is only a statistical averaging of a selected group of individual prices chosen to reflect the representative purchases of an “average” urban American family in terms of the goods purchased and their relative amounts in a hypothetical “basket” of items. Break that down into the subcategories of different goods and services, and many of these subgroups of goods have been registered as rising much more or noticeably less than the general CPI number. For instance, in August of 2022, fuel oil prices were almost 69 percent higher than a year earlier, while food prices in general were between 11 and 13 percent above where they were in August of 2021. Housing prices were “only” 6 percent above 12 months earlier.

But any way that it is looked at, this is a new experience for most Americans used to an average rise in prices of only 2 to 3 percent a year for much of the last four decades. It is one thing to be a bit irritated because something that cost, say, $100 last year costs $102 today. But it is another matter entirely when what cost $100 last year may now cost $133 or even $169. When that is happening not to just one or two or three significant items in a basket of purchased goods but to many or most of what is regularly being bought, “inflation” becomes a budgetary crisis for many families across the country.

Rising prices are the effect of an earlier monetary action

What is missed in all of this is that the general rise in prices is a symptom and not the cause of the problem. We all know that if we take someone’s temperature, the number registered on the thermometer indicating a fever is not the cause of that fever; it is merely telling us that person’s body temperature is above what is considered “normal.” It does not explain or answer what is behind the “read” on the thermometer.

Suppose that someone has a regular income of $1,000 and that he spends, say, $500 on commodity “x,” $250 on commodity “y,” and $250 on commodity “z.” If this is all the money at his disposal and he wants to increase his spending on commodity “y” to $300, then he must reduce his purchases by $50 on either commodity “x” or commodity “z,” or some reduced combination of the two. He might draw down previously accumulated cash holdings or borrow the $50 from someone else. But in the former case, there will be a point at which he has drawn down all his available cash, and he must therefore restrict his overall purchases to his regular $1,000 income. If he borrows the money, it means that the lender must reduce a loan to another borrower by $50.

Whether it’s an individual or a community of individuals, the total sum of money available to that person or group of individuals sets the maximum of dollars offered in exchange for desired goods and services, as a whole. Only if the number of dollars in the hands of that individual or community increases can the demand for and prices of one or more goods rise without some complementary decline in money demand for some other good(s). Overall “price inflation” cannot occur over any sustained period of time without a preceding or contemporaneous increase in the total amount of money in the economic community of buyers and sellers.

The gold standard served as a “check” on inflation

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“Putin Has Misread the West And if He Doesn’t Wake Up Soon, Armageddon Is Upon Us” |

Posted by M. C. on December 29, 2022

In other words, by his inaction Putin has convinced Washington and its European puppet states that he doesn’t mean what he says and will endlessly accept ever worsening provocations, which have gone from sanctions to Western financial help to Ukraine, weapons supply, training and targeting information, provision of missiles capable of attacking internal Russia,

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2022/12/19/putin-has-misread-the-west-and-if-he-doesnt-wake-up-soon-armageddon-is-upon-us/

Dear friends, This website is read by many and supported by few.  I ask those readers who have never contributed to consider responding to this last request of 2022.

“Putin Has Misread the West And if He Doesn’t Wake Up Soon, Armageddon Is Upon Us”

Mike Whitney Interviews Paul Craig Roberts

https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/putin-has-misread-the-west-and-if-he-doesnt-wake-up-soon-armageddon-is-upon-us/

Question 1—You think that Putin should have acted more forcefully from the beginning in order to end the war quickly. Is that an accurate assessment of your view on the war? And—if it is—then what do you think is the downside of allowing the conflict to drag on with no end in sight?

Paul Craig Roberts—Yes, you have correctly stated my position. But as my position can seem “unAmerican” to the indoctrinated and brainwashed many, those who watch CNN, listen to NPR, and read the New York Times, I am going to provide some of my background before going on with my answer.

I was involved in the 20th century Cold War in many ways: As a Wall Street Journal editor; as an appointee to an endowed chair in the Center for Strategic and International Studies, part of Georgetown University at the time of my appointment, where my colleagues were Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor, and James Schlesinger, a Secretary of Defense and CIA director who was one of my professors in graduate school at the University of Virginia; as a member of the Cold War Committee on the Present Danger; and as a member of a secret presidential committee with power to investigate the CIA’s opposition to President Reagan’s plan to end the Cold War.

With a history such as mine, I was surprised when I took an objective position on Russian President Putin’s disavowal of US hegemony, and found myself labeled a “Russian dupe/agent” on a website, “PropOrNot,” which may have been financed by the US Department of State, the National Endowment for Democracy, or the CIA itself, still harboring old resentments against me for helping President Reagan end the Cold War, which had the potential of reducing the CIA’s budget and power. I still wonder what the CIA might do to me, despite the agency inviting me to address the agency, which I did, and explain why they went wrong in their reasoning.

I will also say that in my articles I am defending truth, not Putin, although Putin is, in my considered opinion, the most honest player, and perhaps the most naive, in the current game that could end in nuclear Armageddon. My purpose is to prevent nuclear Armageddon, not to take sides. I remember well President Reagan’s hatred of “those godawful nuclear weapons” and his directive that the purpose was not to win the Cold War but to end it.

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