The Zero State Solution?

 by Joe Siano

In response to the recent Hamas and Israeli conflagration, China has trotted out the tired old “two-state solution” chestnut.

It’s time for some fresh thinking.  How about the no-state solution?

From the era of the  Seleucid occupation through the Nazi  “final solution”, the Western world has been set upon erasing Jewish culture if not eradicating the Jewish race entirely.
It stands to reason that the Jewish people would want a homeland, a safe haven of their own. 

But a state?

Visionary thinkers have long warned of the toxic nature of states.

In Common Sense, Thomas Paine stated that “government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government”.

With the benefit of another 200 years of hindsight, Murray Rothbard was unequivocal, “"The state is not a necessary evil, but an unnecessary one."

Behold the handiwork of states: wars, oppressions, genocides.  Those are only the worst of its sins.  Let’s not overlook economic dislocation, currency devaluation, destruction of wealth, curtailing productivity, censorship, intimidation, spying on citizens, and indoctrination of children.

James Buchanan, the father of Public Choice Economics, cautions that the state operates for the benefit of a select few.  “Government is not a benevolent social planner, but rather a collection of individuals pursuing their own self-interests.”  

Not that they are more or less evil, but when the Jewish state was born, it served the interests of its founders with the usual violence, force, and coercion, typical of all states, to the detriment of others.

Without getting into he-said, she-said here, the Palestinians seem to have some legitimate beefs with the holders of State Power.    This is not an indictment of the Jews.  It is an indictment of the State and its inevitable behavior.

Could they have done better is the question?  Could the Chosen People have chosen a better way?

Ancient Israel had a tradition of stateless local governance, guided by God's laws given to Moses.  But they tossed aside those laws in favor of the edicts of sinful men- Saul, David, and Solomen.

Samuel warned the people what to expect once they sacrificed autonomy to a powerful sovereign.

 

Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. 
He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots.  Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots.  He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.  He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants.  He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants.  Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use.  He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. 
When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
(Samuel 8 11-18 NIV)

This admonition suits today’s “democratic” welfare-warfare states quite well.

The rule of this central authority became so intolerable, that the nation was ultimately destroyed in civil war.

So, the question becomes, if one state is onerous enough, why a two-state solution?  Wouldn’t just be twice as bad?

Rothbard nailed the absolute evil of the state when he said, “ It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.”

The prophet Joel concurs:

For there I will sit in judgment

upon all the neighboring nations….

for their crimes are numerous.

Joel 4 12-13

 

Now is the moment for bold thinking.  By renouncing brutal statism, Isrrael, along with Palestinians, may fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy that His people will be

“a light to the nations,

that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth’”.

(Isaiah 49 6 NAB)

And then, perhaps, with the abolition of the state we may finally beat our “swords into plowshares” and our “spears into pruning hooks”.*   And perhaps, this would add new meaning to Christ’s prophecy that “salvation is from the Jews”.

We can only pray.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

To begin visualizing a stateless society, here are some thought starters.

·        Murray Rothbard, Anatomy of the State

·        David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom

·        Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State

·        Hans Herman Hoppe, Democracy, The God That Failed

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The State (Huh – Good God Y’all) What It Is Good For?

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“Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction.” 
- Paul Simon

*Isaiah 2 4  

** John 4 22

Bulls**t Walks

(Note: title censored so as not to violate anyone’s community standards)

by Joe Siano

Money talks.  Bullshit walks.

It walked in Motown last week.

And yes, money talks.

Mr. President, may I suggest some money talk that will resonate louder with American workers than walking a picket line?  

I guarantee that they would love to hear you say:

·        “I am ending the war on fossil fuel that makes it costly to drive your cars, heat your homes, and feed your families.”

·        “I am giving up my obsession with electric cars that causes your companies to make a few expensive, high-margin vehicles as opposed to many affordably priced cars.  This costs jobs.”

·        “I will no longer send untold billions to prop up the corrupt Ukrainian regime and to extend the war which I helped instigate. A war that enriches connected elites.  My bad.  Sorry”

·        “Let's get out of NATO.  Those rich European welfare states can pay for their own defense.  Hell, if Russia can’t lick Ukraine, how the hell can they whip Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and more?”

·        “Let’s stop policing the world.  Geoge Wahington warned America to avoid foreign “controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns”.  J.Q. Adams warned America against going ‘abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.’  Let’s listen to these guys and bring our brave young men and women home.” 

·        “Let’s end student loans that are just income transfers to the ivory tower elites who mock your values while saddling your kids with so much debt that they can't afford to marry, buy a home, and give you grandkids.”

·        “And let’s stop all this crazy borrowing and spending that’s destroying your savings and making your paycheck buy less, even if get a raise for a few more bucks..”

Mr. President, sir, If you were to say such common sense things to put more money in workers' pockets and make their paychecks go further, they would love you in Detroit.

Hate you in Ann Arbor but love you in Detroit.

But you can never speak such heresy because you are no longer Joe of Scranton or Joe of Claymont.  If you ever were.

You are now Joe of Hollywood, of Georgetown, of Brussels and Wall Street.

 Dear readers, please do not suppose that I am a partisan. The opposition offers little to no alternative.

The establishment of both parties endorses interventionism, global empire, military overreach, ever-increasing debt, central banking, a federal income tax, and phony-baloney fiat currency.  They quibble over marginal percentages within an astronomical budget and about who can use the Ladies' Room.

BFD 

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The Ronald vs The Donald

NoMo-Town

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction." 
- Paul Simon

 

 

The Economy Of the Saints

 by Joe Siano

Per Mises,  human beings take “deliberate action in “an attempt to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory one. We call such a willfully induced alteration an exchange.” (Human Action, p. 97; p. 9)

It is an “exchange” because the acting person invests time, effort, or treasure to affect improvement in condition.

An exchange is “profitable” when the acting person achieves the desired outcome.

“Profit” may be defined three ways.

An accounting profit is a simple calculation, typically expressed in monetary terms.  Let’s say a person invests $100,000 of his own money in a business and ends with $110,000.  We can say that he made a $10,000 accounting profit.

If we analyze the same from an economic profit perspective, we may discover that this person:

1. Might have put the same $100,000 in a 5% CD and made $5,000 with no risk or effort.
2. Put in 100 hours of labor to make this investment work.  If his labor is worth $50 an hour – he invested $5,000 of his time that he might have spent working for another employer.
3. Realized an economic profit is $0 because he could have achieved the same result by putting his money in the bank while working for someone else.

Then there is psychic profit which is subjective and cannot be measured in dollars.  The rewards of psychic profit are feelings of accomplishment, good conscience, and self-worth.

The following are bright stars in the constellation of heroes who sacrificed dearly for psychic profit – for truth, justice, and liberty. 

• The Founding Fathers put all on the line by signing the Declaration of Independence.  They pledged “To Each Other Our Lives, Our Fortunes, And Our Sacred Honor.”
• Whistleblowers Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning sacrificed their freedom to expose the crimes and duplicity of the warfare state.
• Democrats Robert Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard courted scorn by debunking their party’s orthodoxies and sacred cows.
• Ron Paul was subjected to ridicule and contempt by fellow Republicans for his steadfast commitment to fiscal responsibility, sound money, and opposition to illegal/unconstitutional war.
• “Mr. Republican”, Senator Robert Taft, forfeited party leadership and a presidential nomination for his refusal to endorse American participation in the European War of the 1940s and in Korea during the Cold War.
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn endured incarceration and exile for opposing Communism in his beloved homeland.
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man of God and of peace, paid the full Cost of Discipleship by giving his life in a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler.

One woman’s life journey vividly exemplifies the renunciation of earthly rewards for psychic gain.

Edith Stein was a thoroughly modern woman.  Independent and strong-willed, this daughter of an Orthodox Jewish family declared herself to be an atheist at 15.

Returning to Mises, he maintains that “Economics, as a branch of the more general theory of human action, deals with all human action, i.e., with man’s purposive aiming at the attainment of ends chosen, whatever these ends may be.” (Human Action, p. 880; p. 84)

Stein took purposeful action, she made deliberate “exchanges” focused on psychic profit. It might be said that she ascended Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Stein grew up in a comfortable “bourgeois” household.  Her physiological needs for food, safety and shelter were secure.  She had the love and support of a large family (11 kids!) and, like a modern woman, felt no need to marry to validate her self-worth.

Edith spent her young adult years pursuing Maslow’s fourth level of need – Esteem – prestige, professional advancement, and the admiration of her peers.  She invested her all in attaining advanced degrees, scholarly publishing, and building an academic career.  This was particularly daunting in the university world of early twentieth-century Germany where women were unwelcomed.

Yet she prevailed and thrived.  Then tossed it aside.  She made a deliberate but costly exchange to ascend to the level of Self-actualization.                              

Stein, the Jewish, atheist, and careerist, experienced a profound and radical spiritual conversion.  She discovered ultimate truth and meaning in the words of her fellow Jew, Jesus of Nazareth.  She followed Jesus all the way to becoming Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, a vowed Carmelite nun.

Sister Teresa made a deliberate and mindful economic transaction.  She exchanged all that was valuable to Edith Stein - career, possessions, professional recognition, status, and independence – to find interior peace and meaning beyond the things of this world.  True psychic profit

As a Jew, and then as a Catholic, Stein became a double enemy of the Third Reich.  The Nazis gassed her at Auschwitz.    The former Edith Stein is now venerated as Saint Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

She went from being a “modern” woman to being an eternal woman.

This is the economy of the saints.  They go all-in because truth matters.  They do the right thing, cost be damned.  They seek the higher ground.

Vanity of vanities!  All things are vanity! (Ecclesiastes 1 2)

What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?  (Matthew 16 26)

 

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction." 

- Paul Simon 

The Old Bastard Returns.....Again

by Joe Siano

Your faithful correspondent was conceived via an illicit union of a 24-year-old homeless veteran and a teenage high school dropout.  “Dad” bolted.  His child was born in a charity hospital for “girls in trouble”.

Hence, he's a “bastard”.

 This went down some 67 years ago.  Thus, he is also old.

The OB returns from two years of blogging retirement because he has something to share.

Much has gone down during TOB’s long ride on Earth.

• Ike’s Military Industrial Complex speech
• The New Frontier
• MLK’s “Dream”
• Flower Power & The Summer of Love
  
• Morning in America
• The New World Order
• The little black dress
• 911 & “Mission Accomplished”
• MAGA
• BLM, Me-Too, and the Age of Woke 

Change is constant, "Some Forever, not for better".

Tom Woods holds that no matter who you vote for, you always get John McCain – a tax-gobbling, war-mongering globalist.  We may be going in circles, but the spiral is downward.

What’s to be done?  Let me suggest prayer.

Seriously.

In The Drama of Atheist Humanism*, Henri de Lubac surveys three toxic philosophies that poisoned the twentieth century and plague the world to this day.  Lubac explores these ideas through the lens of three nineteenth-century tentpole philosophers: Karl Marx, Auguste Comte, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

The kernel of Marxism is dialectical materialism, a Godless proposition that envisions history as an epic of ongoing class struggles.  Marx’s God is the tool of cynical oppressors.

In Marx' day the struggle was economic, between capital (the bourgeoisie) and labor (the proletariat).  Marxist economics failed miserably in countries large and

small, killing millions. Undeterred, the Marxists of the Frankfort School retooled the program to make it about countless of every day “oppressions” – men over women, whites versus blacks, straights versus gays, cis versus trans, and so on and so forth.  Woke Neo-Marxism infects workplaces, ruins careers, stifles free expression, and makes casual conversation awkward – sometimes even dangerous.

Nietzsche had nothing but contempt for the Christian virtues of humility, charity, for love of the poor weak, and downtrodden.   His worldview is that the superior man, the Übermensch, exists to dominate, if not to bury the meek who pollute the human gene pool.  Humanity will never blossom to its full potential as long as it tolerates these parasites.

Nietzsche provided the philosophical underpinnings for Nazism and every White Supremacist movement since.  He justified social Darwinism for tyrants who in their assent to glory, crush the powerless underfoot.

Comte is the father of positivism, the teaching that the only truth is that which can be empirically / scientifically verified.  For positivists belief in ineffable God is not only foolish, but also dangerous and counterproductive.  

Positivists exalt scientists and “experts” as the doyens of demonstrable

truth.   Their ideal world is governed by the technocrats in Brussels, Beijing, and DC that locked the world down during COVID.  They populate the cult of scientism. As early as 1941, James Burnham warned of this in The Managerial Revolution.

This philosophical troika were more than non-believing atheists. They are anti-theists, actively denouncing belief in a deity as an impediment to human flourishing.  Their philosophies are quasi-religions promising heaven on earth.  Each of these secular faiths mandates a governing elite that treats its followers as cannon fodder to progress while holding opponents in contempt.

Concurrent with these goings-on, Pope Leo XIII had a Job-like vision of Jesus conferring with Satan. 

In this vision, Christ gave Satan license to put His Church to the test. This vision convinced Pope Leo that the threats to humanity were demonic.  The antitheist philosophical climate in Europe supported his contention.  This vision inspired him to compose the Prayer to St. Michael, which was prayed following every Traditional low Mass.

Much of the Western world is swallowing a rancid cocktail of these three poisons – served up by the global elite in the arts, media, academia, and corporate executive suites.

My readers are likely to be active in the fight for liberty.  Activism is great.  Do not quit nor get discouraged.  However, I advise you to enlist the warrior angel to your cause.

It can’t hurt. It might even help.

 

 

 

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Lenin To the Left of Me – Troksky to the Right

*Expensive on Amazon but free to read on Internet Archives.

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction." 
- Paul Simon

 

Labor Day? Why Should Labor Take The Credit?

 by Joe Siano

Who works hard?  Bees and beavers work hard.

Busy bees.

Busy beavers.

Who is a more tireless worker than the mighty ant?  Hour after hour these little guys lug heavy loads into their labyrinth colonies without stop.

But what do bees, beavers and ants have to show for millennia of unceasing effort?  Nothing.  Their kind has made zero progress in millions of years. Their lives have not changed a bit.  The Galapagos Tortoise is as well off but does absolutely nothing.

Humans themselves labor unceasingly in slave and command economies for little more than the bare necessities needed to work another day.

Why dedicate a major holiday to “Labor” when it appears to be ineffective in improving the lives of laborers?

Labor is but one of the four economic factors in the production of “goods”.  Goods are those products, tangible or intangible, that make human life more enjoyable.  The factors are Land, Labor, Capital and Entrepreneurship.

Land is what God or nature has bequeathed us.  It was once the most important source of wealth.  That is why the warrior class – kings and nobility – held the land and became wealthy while their workers – slaves, serfs, peasants – labored for little material gain.     As technology and industry surpassed land as key economic engines, the power, prestige and wealth of the landed aristocracy diminished.

Labor, Capital and Entrepreneurship are the human factors of production.

Undoubtedly Labor combined with Land produced the most rudimentary consumption items – basic foodstuffs, shelter from the elements and clothing.

“Capital” represents the tools that save labor and make labor more productive.   Capital is created by sacrifice and savings, refraining from immediate consumption.  These savings are invested to create new tools which further multiply the fruits of labor.  Early examples include the wheel, oxcarts, plows, fishing nets, millstones and wine presses.   

Capital accumulation, that is more sacrifice, savings and investment make for better tools and technologies which make for a materially richer society. 

Capital creation also involves risk.  What if the new technology does not work as hoped?  What if someone builds a better mousetrap while you are building yours?  What if the market moves on – consumer tastes change – and you are stuck with a device that efficiently produces something that no one wants?

This element of risk opens the door for entrepreneurs and capitalists.

Entrepreneurs are the visionaries who see a societal or human need that is not adequately met and envision a profitable solution to meet that need.

Capitalists assume the risk of underwriting entrepreneurial visions by investing their savings (deferred consumption) to transform dreams into real goods and viable businesses.  Sometimes they succeed.  More often, they fail.    To compensate for the many failures that he may endure, the professional capitalist looks to win big with his successes.

The material progress of society is not so much driven by Labor as it is by:

·        Sacrifice – deferred consumption – to accumulate resources for investment

·        Capital accumulation – a sufficient pool of “surplus” wealth to invest in risky but potentially useful new ideas

·        Entrepreneurs – people with the insight, imagination and inventiveness to propose new tools to improve lives

·        Capitalists – risk-takers with the resources and stomach to make big bets on speculative endeavors

These entrepreneurs and capitalists create the companies, build the plants and the infrastructure to employ legions of workers ranging from highly paid executives and techno-wizards all the way through to clerks, janitors and laborers.  Each of these people contribute value to the enterprise and are rewarded accordingly.  However, the enterprise in which they work would never exist without Capital Accumulation, Entrepreneurial visionaries, and Capitalist investors.

The idea of Labor Day is a socialist contrivance, based upon the erroneous Labor Theory of Value.  The Labor Theory of Value holds that the value of a product is determined by the time and energy invested to make a product. This is absurd.  If I were to invest a year of my life building a house that falls down or a car that does not run – they are worthless despite my earnest efforts.

Value exists only in the buyer's eyes.  Value creation consists of solving consumer problems or meeting their needs.  A successful business is one that can do so profitably.

Socialism has nothing to say about how goods are produced or consumer needs met.  Its sole concern is with the distribution of proceeds.  Thus, it is unsustainable.   Without an eye on producing consumer value, there will soon be no proceeds to distribute.

Only a decentralized and free market society can create the conditions that have produced near-universal access to automobiles, air-travel, cell phones, indoor plumbing, TVs, computers, refrigerators, washers, dryers – you name it.  Only under the regime of private property and privatized reward and loss will humanity thrive.

The condition of having decentralized governance and free markets is called Liberty.

It is Liberty, not Labor that that is the kernel of human advancement.

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Wasted Labor Day

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction." 
- Paul Simon

Afghanistan - A Fool's Errand Comes to an End

 by Joe Siano

Four years ago, Scott Horton of Antiwar.com published Fool’s Errand, a scathing and meticulously documented indictment of America’s tragic misadventure in Afghanistan.

Following 911, the United States learned that the attack’s mastermind, Osama Bin Laden, was hiding in Afghanistan.  Bin Laden was a non-state actor, responsible for nearly 3,000 deaths and almost twice as many injured in the events of that day.

Representative Ron Paul proposed a limited response to this aggression by introducing a bill of Marque and Reprisal in the House of Representatives on October 10, 2001.  Letters of Marque and Reprisal are the Constitutionally prescribed remedy to address acts of individuals, living beyond our borders, who perpetrate acts of violence on the U.S. or its citizens.

This approach did not suit the tastes of Vice President Dick Cheney and his band of warmongers.  They pushed President and George W. Bush to demand that Afghan authorities hand Bin Laden over to the U.S. or suffer the consequence of a full-scale invasion and occupation of their country. 

This was a cynical and disingenuous request made for propaganda purposes only.  Cheney’s crew knew that it was impermissible under Islamic law and custom for the Afghan government to surrender a brother Moslem to infidels (non-Moslems).  Thus, they fabricated a rationale for a  second war in the Middle East alongside the foray in Iraq.

Horton recounts how the Afghan government wanted no parts of Bin Laden in their country. They made multiple offers to turn him over to the Americans discretely, thus sidestepping religious scandal.  America’s Neo-conservative foreign policy establishment ignored these overtures so as to continue its mission of nation-building to transform this ancient culture into a Western-style liberal democracy.

If the capture or assassination of Bin Laden was America’s true goal, our mission in Afghanistan should have ended in May 2011 when he was killed by Navy Seals.  Yet the war continued for another ten years until the recent announcement of U.S. withdrawal earlier this month and the immediate collapse of the Afghan government.

Despite his death, Bin Laden won.  Once again Horton describes the brilliant rope-a-dope that Bin Laden

drew us into.  Afghanistan is the "graveyard of empires".   The Soviets wasted ten tragic years warring in Afghanistan ultimately fleeing with their tails between their legs.  Many contend that this costly war contributed heavily to the collapse of the Soviet Union

Bin Laden correctly foresaw that the United States would sink into the same quagmire as our Russian rivals upon commencement of hostilities in said country.  Being a much wealthier and more powerful nation than the U.S.S.R., The United States was able to spend twice the time banging its head against the wall before our humiliating exit.  Ironically, the same Taliban that just KOed the U.S. is the same Taliban that we helped to organize, arm and finance during their war with the Soviets.  Back then they were the good guys.  We called them freedom fighters.

What motivated the United States to enter, stay and sacrifice so much in this “fool’s errand”.  Was it simply quixotic idealism? Or stupidity? Or greed? 

On the heels of the recent and swift collapse of the Afghan government, the Inspector General’s office issued a report, What We Need To Learn: Lessons From Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction.  According to The Federalist this report, “found that many of the failures had to do with a complete lack of understanding in regards to Afghan culture and the ‘social landscapes’ of the region”.

Per the report: “Rarely did U.S. officials have even a mediocre understanding of the environment, much less how it was responding to U.S. interventions.”  “U.S. programs empowered malign actors and exacerbated preexisting inequities, undermining the legitimacy of the Afghan government they were intended to bolster”.

Again, per the Federalist story: “Ambassador Ryan Crocker affirmed this, telling SIGAR, ‘The ultimate point of failure for our efforts wasn’t an insurgency. It was the weight of endemic corruption.’”

Down to the bitter end, it appears that America’s leadership class had no clue.  General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confessed surprise admitting that the collapse “did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.”

Stupidity, incompetence and naivety played a big part in this disaster.  

These are the people we depend upon to protect us from “all enemies, foreign and domestic” .  Think about that.

Greed coupled with gullibility are even more prominent factors.

Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, pointed out years ago that the goal in Afghanistan "is to have an endless war not a successful war," in order to "wash money out of the tax bases of the United States...into the hands of the transnational security elite."

Dwight Eisenhower, America’s last war-hero President warned in his farewell address of the corrupting power of the military-industrial complex.

“Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”

A Newsweek Op-ed declares that the, “Taliban Didn't Win in Afghanistan, the Defense Contractors Did”.  This piece references the aforementioned Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction report to document massive financial investment of $145 billion – largely to civilian contractors  - to rebuild Afghanistan as well as $837 billion to actually fight the war.  The outcome:

·        1,114 allied troops dead

·        20,666 of America’s finest young men and women injured

·        At least 66,000 Afghan troops killed

·        48,000 Afghan civilians killed and another 75,000 injured

·        Untold billions of dollars in U.S. arms and military equipment left in the hands of our enemy. 

Following World War I, a war of unprecedented bloodshed and misery,  H. C. Englebrecht and F.C. Hannigan, published Merchants of Death, their groundbreaking expose of the International armament industry.  The Mises Institute points out that this study “was co-authored by the founder of Human Events, the conservative weekly. So this is no left-wing screed against profiteering. It is a careful and subtle, but still passionate, attack on those who would use government to profit themselves at the expense of other people's lives and property.”

The synopsis continues,” This book is a wonderful example of what Rothbard called the ‘Old Right’ in its best form. The book not only makes the case against the war machine; it provides a scintillating history of war profiteering, one authoritative enough for citation and academic study. One can see how this book had such a powerful effect.”

And what role does naivety play in all of this?  Americans are good-hearted people who, for the most part, want to make the world a better place.  They trust their leaders to be just and moral actors, doing what they believe to be for the greater good of America in particular and humanity in general.  This is their fatal blind spot,

The democratic model that we have tried to graft onto Afghanistan, Iraq and Viet Nam does not typically produce those types of leaders.

Hans Herman Hoppe demonstrates that in mass democracies, demagogues rise to the top of the political pyramid.  When selecting candidates for high office, the kingmakers of both American political parties ask themselves: “Who is the smartest bad guy?  Who has the most demagogic talent?  Who is a magnificent briber, liar, cheater and all the rest of it.”  He concludes: “Under democratic conditions, especially on the central level, it is almost impossible that a decent person will ever be elected to a higher rank.”
(PDF p 145)

It's one thing when corrupt local politicians swindle money and award bogus no-bid contracts to friends.  It is quite another when supposed statesmen  prevail upon the good-will of the people to enrich the death merchants while killing and maiming thousands.

This is murder plain and simple.  For this, they should be called to account.

During the heady Tea Party uprising of 2010 and 2011, many Partiers told me that they liked Ron Paul’s domestic agenda but objected to his foreign policy.  Too bad.  If America had gotten on board with his gospel of non-interventionism and moderation in response to offenses, think about how many lives would be saved, pain and injuries averted, and money saved to invest in productive uses.  America and the entire world would be safer, healthier and more prosperous

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction." 
- Paul Simon