LIBERTARIAN BOOK CLUB: Organized Crime - The Unvarnished Truth About Government by Thomas DiLorenzo10/13/2017 We are a monthly book club for anyone who wants to learn more about Libertarianism. We will discuss each book's chapter/section in separate posts, so everyone will be able to read along at their own pace. We typically also focus on books which are available for free so that everyone can participate. Join the Private Facebook Group and follow us on Twitter as we seek to learn more about Libertarianism. Other books we've reviewed can be found here.
Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government by Thomas DiLorenzo
Located here for free. Politics and thieves, coercion and regulation, fascism and the Fed, centralization and liberty, workers and unions, trade and freedom, free-market achievements and government disasters in American history — this book covers it all! Section 1: Coercion and Regulation I thought his synopsis and examples from Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Control: How NOT to Fight Inflation was solid. I’ll be adding it to my reading list. Unfortunately, no AudioBook version! The “DiLorenzo’s Laws of Government” are pretty solid. I’ll need to expound on them later in a longer article and have them somewhere where I can share them easier when I’m arguing with people who want bigger government. They resounded with me as I think they will with others. • DiLorenzo’s First Law of Government- In government, failure is success. Welfare Bureaucracy, Government Schools, NASA tragedies and the Federal Reserve, etc. • DiLorenzo’s Second Law of Government- Politicians will rarely, if ever, assume responsibility for any of the problems that they cause with bad policies. • DiLorenzo’s Third Law of Government- With few exceptions, politicians are habitual liars. • DiLorenzo’s Fourth Law of Government- Politicians will only take the advice of their legions of academic advisers if the advice promises to increase the state’s power, wealth, and influence even if the politicians know that the advice is bad for the rest of society. I also agreed that the price control section was timely after the debate we just endured following Hurricane Irma. I've written EXTENSIVELY about it here on my Steemit blog. How is it that The Continental Congress wisely adopted an anti-price control resolution on June 4, 1778 but it's still up for debate the negative effects? That Resolution read: “Whereas it hath been found by experience that limitations upon the prices of commodities are not only ineffectual for the purpose proposed, but likewise productive of very evil consequences—resolved, that it be recommended to the several states to repeal or suspend all laws limiting, regulating or restraining the price of any Article.” If they knew price controls always failed 240 years ago, why is it even a question today? I blame education, or lack thereof. Chapter 3 Who Will Regulate the Regulators The logic on ‘providing more power to the Fed in order to prevent another Great Recession” was spot on: “One of the biggest governmental lies is that financial markets are unregulated and in dire need of more central planning by government. Laissez-faire is said to have caused the “Great Recession.” Fed bureaucrats have lobbied for some kind of Super Regulatory Authority to supposedly remedy this problem. Th is is all a lie because according to one of the Fed’s own publications (“The Federal Reserve System: Purposes and Functions”), the Fed already has “supervisory and regulatory authority” over the following partial list of activities: bank holding companies, state-chartered banks, foreign branches of member banks, edge and agreement corporations, U.S. state-licensed bank branches, agencies and representative offices of foreign banks, nonbanking activities of foreign banks, national banks, savings banks, nonbank subsidiaries of bank holding companies, thrift holding companies, financial reporting procedures of banks, accounting policies of banks, business “continuity” in case of economic emergencies, consumer protection laws, securities dealings of banks, information technology used by banks, foreign investment by banks, foreign lending by banks, branch banking, bank mergers and acquisitions, who may own a bank, capital “adequacy standards,” extensions of credit for the purchase of securities, equal opportunity lending, mortgage disclosure information, reserve requirements, electronic funds transfers, interbank liabilities, Community Reinvestment Act sub-prime lending “demands,” all international banking operations, consumer leasing, privacy of consumer financial information, payments on demand deposits, “fair credit” reporting, transactions between member banks and their affiliates, truth in lending, and truth in savings.” I had never heard of the non-profit libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute nor its annual product Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State. It outlines the annual effect of regulations on business in the United States. Just checking out the fact sheet was valuable. As someone who thinks government spending and the national debt are keystone issues of our time, I also want to check out Underground Government: The Off-Budget Public Sector, his book written with James Bennett in 1983. Maybe we can get that book into the hopper for the Book Club! Chapter 5: Our Totalitarian Regulatory Bureaucracy “In chapter 5 of F.A. Hayek’s 1944 classic, Th e Road to Serfdom, the Nobel laureate warned that the state need not directly control all or even most of the means of production to exert totalitarian control over the economic life of a nation. He cited the example of Germany where, as of 1928, “the central and local authorities directly control 53 percent” of the German economy. In addition to this, wrote Hayek, private industry in Germany was so heavily regulated that the state indirectly controlled “almost the whole economic life of the nation.” It was through such totalitarian controls that Germany traveled down “the road to serfdom.” As Hayek further stated, “there is, then scarcely an individual end which is not dependent for its achievement on the action of the state, and the ‘social scale of values’ which guides the state’s action must embrace practically all individual ends.” In other words, government regulation was so pervasive that the pursuit of profit, driven by consumer preferences, was mostly replaced by the whims of regulatory bureaucrats.” Well Said: “First, construct a totally unrealistic theory of “perfect” competition that assumes away all real-world competition with assumptions of perfect information, homogenous products and prices, free or costless entry and exit from industry, and “many” firms. Second, compare real-world markets to this utopian Nirvana state and condemn the markets as “imperfect” or “failed. The third characteristic of market failure theories is to recommend intervention by presumably perfect government that is assumed to suffer from no failures and which will correct the failures of the market.” When I read that, it reminded me of this. Section 2 I read DiLorenzo's Real Lincoln which I highly recommend. I like how in chapter nine he describes Rod Blogajevich as an amateur crook compared to Honest Abe. It is not just a matter of businesses contributing to campaigns to get political favors but politicians using threat of regulations to extort contributions. Chapter 11 Good point on the housing bubble: “So when the Fed’s expansionary monetary policy caused the real estate bubble, the extraordinary increases in property values were accompanied by equally extraordinary property tax increases. (After the bubble had burst, local governments were eager to raise property tax rates so as not to lose property tax revenue." Chapter 12 “A principle of public choice economics is that politicians will always do all they can to disguise subsidies to less-than-meritorious groups, such as millionaire corporate farmers. If they can subsidize them through protectionism, or price supports, this is much preferred than simply writing the millionaire businessman a check.” Chapter 13 He discusses Hamilton and I recommend the Tom Woods vs Michael Malice debate (in which I side with Tom. Chapter 15 He expands a bit on the idea he expressed earlier of why exactly mainstream media is so pro-government. Section 3 I agree with DiLorenzo that secession, nullification, decentralization and localism is more effective at achieving liberty than nationalism or universalism, but it is important to understand, “Of course “states” don’t have rights; only individuals do." Since he understands that I think it is confusing that he keeps using the phrase. I definitely agree with him that repeal of the seventeenth amendment would greatly improve our situation. But that that seems highly unlikely to ever happen. Chapter 17 The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. I read this short book a few years ago and highly recommend it. Reclaiming the American Revolution: The Kentucky and Virgina Resolutions and their Legacy
Chapter 21
“The Lacrosse, Wisconsin Democrat newspaper advocate assassination when it editorialized in November of 1864 that “If Abraham Lincoln should be reelected for another term of four years of such wretched administration, we hope that a bold hand will be found to plunge the dagger into the tyrant’s heart for the public welfare.” (Does that violate the NAP?) Chapter 22 DiLorenzo basically says that Abraham Lincoln and Adolph Hitler were brothers from another mother. Chapter 23 He points out that governments are by far the worst killers in history and that in that regard Abraham Lincoln was worse than Pol Pot. Chapter 25 DiLorenzo eviscerates Paul Krugman, which is always fun. “Krugman is right about democracy in a sense: Democracy is essentially one big organized act of bullying whereby a larger group bullies a smaller group in order to plunder it with taxes. The “Civil War” proved that whenever a smaller group has finally had enough, and attempts to leave the game, the larger group will resort to anything—even the mass murder of hundreds of thousands and the bombing and burning of entire cities—to get its way.”
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Chapter 26 and 27 In these chapters he does still more debunking of the Lincoln mythology. I did notice though that he doesn't claim that the War of Northern Aggression was an unmitigated evil - just mostly evil with terrible consequences, but he does acknowledge that the abolition of slavery was the one positive outcome of the war. He also discusses how American government is both fascist and socialist. Chapter 30 – 33 These chapters are all about the evils of central banking. I agree completely and have nothing to add except that coincidentally yesterday, before reading chapter 30, I used a very similar article by DiLorenzo to counter a commenter on this post who was saying that all economists think the Fed is great and that basically Ron is a crank. That post and Brion's book should be of interest to anyone who liked that chapter. Ch 32 reminded me of this meme.
Chapter 34
This chapter debunks the notion that the Federal Reserve is in any way libertarian just because Alan Greenspan was head of it once. Chapter 35 Debunks the myth that the Fed is in any way independent - Fed chairmen basically do the bidding of the president in order to maintain their jobs. President wants loose policy? President gets loose policy, and vice versa. I liked his discussion on the damage done by typical college economics textbooks, particularly Paul Samuelson's, which is most popular. Chapter 36 Explains how government caused the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. This is useful because people often try to blame DE-regulation when nothing could be further from the truth. As an aside, I found The Big Short an entertaining movie on the subject if you have not seen it, but it largely leaves unmentioned government as a cause and this chapter definitely fills in the blanks. Section 5 Chapter 47 Macroeconomists Discover Economics and Debunk the New Deal (Again) is probably the most intriguing to me. Seven decades of economists who have sold us the line that the New Deal and large-scale government spending is what got us out of the Great Depression. It took several decades but macroeconomic model builders, who consider themselves to be the elite of the economics profession, have finally discovered freshman-level principles of economics and have used that discovery to finally debunk FDR’s New Deal. (Beginning in the 1930s Austrian School economists like Henry Hazlitt recognized the truth about the New Deal: It made the Great Depression deeper and longer lasting.) The only wise thing to have done was to have allowed the liquidation of hundreds of overcapitalized businesses to occur, cut taxes and spending, and deregulate. Instead, the Fed increased the money supply by 100 percent in a failed attempt to create another bubble while the president and Congress implemented an explosion of government interventionism. That was the first time in American history that a depression was responded to with government interventionism rather than governmental retrenchment, and the result was a seventeen-year long Great Depression, the worst in history. The essay is solid and I'll need to look into Murray Rothbard's America's Great Depression to learn more. That mainstream macroeconomists and their modeling have come around against governmental interventionism during a depression is great. Now, if the citizenry can learn that before the next bubble pops. I foresee politicians and special interests will use the next crisis as an opportunity to line their pockets. CHAPTER 48 Will Socialism Make You Happier? The Trojan Horse of “Happiness Research”I hadn't heard of this statist argument before but basically "...statists around the world are changing their tune and saying that prosperity doesn’t really matter after all; what matters is how happy we are. And, they say, that is what government can be really, really good at—making us happy. Consequently, they argue, there should be no more limits on governmental powers, for limiting governmental powers will limit our very happiness." In the year this book was published, Bhutan was the 'Happiest' according to the UN-sponsored "World Happiness Report". Yes, Bhutan. This hellhole, ahem, I mean paradise: As an intelligence officer which has experience in this part of the world... No. This year's winner is Norway, which is much more beautiful and bearable.Source:WORLD HAPPINESS REPORT 2017 It's also a lot more socialist, which to be fair, is the point. It's edited by leftist academic Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, what else would you expect? As F.A. Hayek commented in The Road to Serfdom, the end of socialism was always egalitarianism; only the means changed over time, beginning with government ownership of the means of production and transforming to income redistribution through a welfare state and a “progressive” income tax. These happiness researchers never make any mention at all of the well documented pathologies created by welfare statism, such as the destruction of the work ethic, family breakup, the growth of dysfunctionality caused by a welfare state that removes people from the working population, etc. Thus, “happiness research” is part of a crusade to persuade the public that poverty and servitude to the state are superior to prosperity and freedom. It is a new version of what twentieth-century communists referred to as “socialism with a smiling face” during the last, dying days of totalitarian communism. Chapter 49 The Canard of “Asymmetric Information” as a Source of Market FailureGood information on the Nirvana Theory of Markets. I tried to look more into it, but it is unique to only this writing. Nirvana Fallacy— comparing real-world markets to an unattainable utopian ideal (perfect competition), and then denouncing markets because they fall short of utopia or Nirvana. Having “proven” that markets “fail,” the analyst then proposes government intervention under the assumption that no such failures will infect government. Markets may not be perfect, but government is assumed to be. Overall, I liked Section 5 the best. The ease at which he demystifies economic myths is extremely understandable. I just wish it was taken onboard by many voters who refuse to heed the empirical evidence against government intervention. Asymmetric information problem really applies to government not the free market: “In this case we are dealing with the well-established fact that, in their capacity as voters, people tend to be “rationally ignorant” of almost all of what government does. In fact, government is so pervasive that no human mind could possibly comprehend the tiniest fraction of one percent of what government in a country the size of the U.S. does. Consequently, special-interest groups dominate all democratic governments;” A related problem I think is that "public servants" are allowed to keep secrets from their supposed masters. Chapter 51 “Politicians perpetuate the myth of government job creation because the government jobs that are created are seen by the average voter, whereas the private-sector jobs that are destroyed (or never created) are not.” I.e. Hazlitt's seen and unseen as described in Economics in One Lesson Chapter 52 DiLorenzo shoots down the gender wage gap myth. Tom Woods has done a couple of shows on this subject as well, as I recall. Summary DiLorenzo lays out a decent criticism of how Government, corrupted by size and motive, has engaged in forceful and deceitful acts against the populace. To be honest, I really dislike collections of articles such as this and found in other "books". If an author is still alive, such collections are always better to be formed in to a true book that is able to cleanly explain a subject from start to finish. While DiLorenzo's articles are well written (and are quite often sourced with citations! Such a rarity among articles), the execution of the message would have been much better had he taken the time to write these out in to full chapters of their own. The topics covered in the book were good ones to discuss (though I think that the mentions of the Civil war would be better served in a separate book), but I do wish that the author had expanded more on the topics of taxation, subsidies, and the enforcement of victimless crimes. Overall a good read, and some articles were absolutely fantastic. If only the author could have written this out as an actual book and added another hundred pages or so, this could have been something especially fantastic. edit: I've decided to give the book 5 stars, from the original 4. I find that I often go back to the book to re-read certain articles when I come across various topics of discussion. I still wish that the author had written a proper book instead of just compiling a collection of his articles, though. 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I've provided a link to "Manners and Political Life" by Dr. George Friedman.
If you don't want to read it all, then just scroll down and read the part under the heading "Authenticity." As you read it, think of examples of politicians and other public figures who foment animosity and who seem to see the "other side" not as well intended opponents but as enemies. Be honest with yourself: think of some both from the other side and from your own side. Can you? Then be even more honest with yourself: Do you respect those who disagree with you? Can you discuss political issues without becoming angry and eventually slinging insults? Even if someone else does it to you, do you refrain from responding in kind? I watch Facebook discussions frequently, and I must say that it isn't only some of our politicians who create division and discord. Many of our fellow average citizens engage in hostility toward the other side--and reward politicians who do the same. Therein lies our greatest challenge as a nation. Democrats aren't our greatest challenge. Republicans aren't our greatest challenge. Donald Trump isn't our greatest challenge. Hillary Clinton isn't our greatest challenge. The truth is that all four of these thrive on hostility, but they aren't thriving on their own hostility. They are thriving on the anger and hostility of an electorate that uses the ballot box to reward them for their intransigence. In a sense, the political discourse among our citizens--not our politicians--is the most fundamental problem. We pride ourselves less on coming together to forge solutions and more on on our ability simply to prevent the other side from accomplishing anything. We spend less time trying to improve our own side and more time trying to show that we're not as bad as the other side. Republicans cannot complain that Democrats call them "ignorant" when so many Republicans call Democrats "un-American." Democrats cannot complain that so many Republicans call them "baby killers" when so many Democrats blanketly label all Republicans "racist." If you want to know which side is at fault, look at your own. If you want to see a person who is at fault--or at least could do better--then look in a mirror. The next time you find yourself disagreeing with someone, try to understand what the other person is really saying. Do this without simultaneously trying to decide how to respond. The most important thing, after all, isn't your response; it's your listening. When you do finally respond, discuss issues and facts, not each other. The issues are important, and solutions are desired. Your opinion of someone's character is neither important nor desired. The point isn't for you to win an argument against an enemy, which, even if it occurred, would serve no purpose other than your own vanity. If you really want to win an argument though, I assure you that you're more likely to do so when you and the other party respect each other than when you do not. At the end of the day, if disagreement persists, then guess what: That's okay. This is America, where the right to disagree is Constitutional. Learn from the exchange, and move forward with dignity. Even though you disagree with each other, you may have helped to create the trust and space necessary for solutions to eventually take hold. Read George Friedman's Full Column Here
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We are a monthly book club for anyone who wants to learn more about Libertarianism. We will discuss each book's chapter/section in separate posts, so everyone will be able to read along at their own pace. We typically also focus on books which are available for free so that everyone can participate. Join the Private Facebook Group and follow us on Twitter as we seek to learn more about Libertarianism.
Other books we've reviewed can be found here. The great historian of classical liberalism strips away the veneer of exalted leaders and beloved wars. Professor Ralph Raico shows them to be wolves in sheep's clothing and their wars as attacks on human liberty and human rights. In the backdrop of this blistering and deeply insightful and scholarly history is the whitewashing of "great leaders" like Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, FDR, Truman, Stalin, Trotsky, and other collectivists. They are highly regarded because they were on the "right side" of the rise of the state. But do they deserve adulation? Raico says no: these great leaders were main agents in the decline of civilization in the 20th century, all of them anti-liberals who used their power to celebrate and enhance state power. The book can be found here Free! It is striking how history seems to repeat itself continually. Reading through this book, it is very easy to see parallels drawn between the effects of foreign policy (and interventionist leaders) then and what we deal with now as an effect of the War on Terror (and certainly what is coming from that). I was interested from the intro pp 29-30, the man Raico names as the founder of anarcho- capitalism: “Unsurprisingly, the most thoroughgoing of the liberal revisionists was the arch-radical Gustave de Molinari, originator of what has come to be known as anarcho-capitalism. In his work on the Great Revolution of 1789, Molinari eviscerated the founding myth of the French Republic. France had been “proceeding gradually and organically towards liberal reform in the later eighteenth century; the revolution put an end to that process, substituting an unprecedented expansion of state power and a generation of war. The self-proclaimed liberal parties of the nineteenth century were, in fact, machines for the exploitation of society by the now victorious predatory middle classes, who profited from tariffs, government contracts, state subsidies for railroads and other industries, state-sponsored banking, and the legion of jobs available in the ever-expanding bureaucracy.” Chapter 1This chapter Illustrates a lot of hypocrisy. British government saw German violation of Belgium sovereignty as an aggression that could not stand, overlooking their own long history of violating others' sovereignty. In fact, Raico argues that it was the British example that gave Germany the idea in the first place. This reminded me of American concern toward Russian alleged tampering in US elections, but no commiserate concern with the CIA' long history of tampering with the outcome of other countries' elections including Russia's. Chapter 2“In a way, Churchill as Man of the Century will be appropriate. This has been the century of the State —of the rise and hypertrophic growth of the welfare-warfare state — and Churchill was from first to last a Man of the State, of the welfare state and of the warfare state.” I remember at the start of Trump's presidency conservatives applauding Trump bring back to the Oval Office a bust of Churchill that Obama had apparently removed. Appropriate perhaps but definitely NOT a good omen. I will be recommending this chapter in the future with anyone who speaks well of Churchill. Here is another good resource.
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As a classic film buff I appreciated the mention of the book Screening History. I knew pro-British propaganda was prevalent in Hollywood films of the time. I did not fully realize they were completely orchestrated by an agent of the British government operating out of Rockefeller Center. Great quote by Raico: “A moral postulate of our time is that in pursuit of the destruction of Hitler, all things were permissible. “Yet why is it selfevident that morality required a “crusade against Hitler in 1939 and 1940, and not against Stalin? At that point, Hitler had slain his thousands, but Stalin had already slain his millions.” “Churchill’s policy of all-out support of Stalin foreclosed other, potentially more favorable approaches: “There is no doubt whatsoever that it would have been in the interest of Britain, the United States, and the world to have allowed—and indeed, to have encouraged—the world’s two great dictatorships to fight each other to a frazzle. Such a struggle, with its resultant weakening of both Communism and Nazism, could not but have aided in the establishment of a more stable peace."" Advice that I think translates well to the ME today. Raico argues that Churchill's interest was not in destroying Naziism but in making sure Germany itself would never again become a rival power and therefore he had no interest in helping dissidents within Germany. Churchill's objective was not to win the war, but to utterly destroy Germany. Raico also argues that German war crimes documented at Nuremberg pale in comparison to the war crimes committed by Churchill. Chapter 3Having just spent the last 72 hours debating people about Hiroshima, I am not going to say much about that part of that chapter other than to say I agree with Raico's assessment that Harry Falseman is the worst war criminal who ever lived. The chapter title reminds us that polls of historians consistently rank Falseman among the second tier of presidents as a "near great" but Raico convincingly argues on this chapter that he was one of, if not in fact, the worst. So many of the evils and problems we face today stem from 1947: “Meanwhile, the organs of the national security state were being put into place. The War and Navy Departments and the Army Air Corps were combined into what was named, in Orwellian fashion, the Defense Department. Other legislation established the National Security Council and upgraded intelligence operations into the Central Intelligence Agency . . . “Truman began the “special relationship” between the United States and Zionism. Franklin Roosevelt, while not blind to Zionist interests, favored an evenhanded approach in the Middle East as between Arabs and Jews. Truman, on the other hand, was an all-out champion of the Zionist cause . . . In the end, the part of Truman’s legacy with the greatest potential for harm is NATO.” Chapters 4 and 5I have not much to add other than agreement: Yes, communism and communists are bad. I would just mention that Darrow certainly seemed to disagree at the end of our last book when he talked about private property being divided up among the proletariat. Chapter Five makes a good point about how the left in Germany and elsewhere condemn Naziism to the exclusion of all other evils, including Soviet Communism and the Allies terror bombing of Germany. Relevant to today when you see politicians and MSM rightly condemning white supremacists in Charlottesville but relative silence regarding Antifa. Raico argues that while historians and the public tend to condemn without justification Germans as a whole for Nazi atrocities, they don't criticize the Russian or Chinese people for even worse Communist atrocities. Raico mentions German reunification. I recall in an old interview with Jeffrey Tucker, Hans Herman Hoppe talked about how it ended up being a large-scale wealth redistribution scheme due to the fact that the two countries being reunited were (1) a relatively prosperous capitalist country vs. (2) a dilapidated communist failed state. This resulted in the reunified country as a whole becoming overall more socialist, not only due to the redistribution that immediately took place to "rehabilitate" the East, but also due to the addition of East German citizens who had essentially been conditioned throughout the past half-century to support socialistic policies. Hoppe proposed instead that East and West Germany should have remained separate countries so that East Germany would have been forced to adopt laissez-faire policies in the absence of the West German subsidization of their economy. I think it would be a good idea for our group to read some Hoppe in the near future. Chapter 6Tsarist Russia was bad, but the Bolshevik Revolution unleashed bureaucratic collectivism far more reactionary and oppressive than what had gone before. "We have with Trotsky and his comrades in the Great October Revolution the spectacle of a few literary-philosophical intellectuals seizing power in a great country with the aim of overturning the whole economic system — but without the slightest idea how an economic system works.” Y'all need Mises! Communism = slavery: “Hadn’t Marx and Engels, in their ten-point program for revolutionary government in The Communist Manifesto, demanded as point eight, “Equal liability for all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture”? Neither Marx nor Engels ever disavowed their claim that those in charge of “the workers’ state” had the right to enslave the workers and peasants whenever the need might arise.” Chapter 7In this chapter, Raico reviews a book that sounds just awful. “For how does the rationale for NATO in its past or presently expanding forms meet Washington’s criterion of “extraordinary emergencies”? How can an alliance already lasting half a century count as “temporary”? How indeed. Do we presently have “as little political connection” with foreign countries as possible?” No, we do not. “ It was back “in 1819, when the American Board of Foreign Missions decided to evangelize the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands. The “donation of tens of millions of dollars to foreign missions “prefigured the governmental aid projects of the mid-twentieth century. "To argue in this fashion is to blot out, for whatever reason, the basic distinction between civil society, based on voluntarism, and the state, based on coercion.” “McDougall confutes the current shibboleth of the urgent need for the United States to spread “democracy” throughout the world. Other peoples may democratically choose anti-liberal regimes. In any case, what business is it of ours?”
Raico makes a great point about foreign aid I had not fully considered that applies just as well to other countries:
“Our half-century of experience with foreign aid has been almost a total loss." The method used, government-to-government aid, is intrinsically statist. The blunder continues today, as “we attempt to teach ex-Soviet peoples how to be good capitalists through the medium of government grants administered by government agencies for the benefit of our own and foreign bureaucracies” You can't spread capitalism by giving stuff away. Raico is almost as brutal toward Margaret Thatcher as he was Churchill: “Why, incidentally, is this lady, who pressed the first Bush to go to war in the Gulf and was the last-ditch friend of Gorbachev and last-ditch foe of German reunification . . ." Though Raico differs from Hoppe on reunification. Chapter 8This chapter consists of mini-reviews of a number of books on World War I. I was a bit confused by Raico's review of Niall Ferguson's "Pity of War." Most of Raico's book is critical of Anglo-centric bias in twentieth century military historiography, and this chapter ends the same for example when he argues that the real "Belgian atrocities" were what Belgians did in the Congo, NOT what Germans did in Belgium. But in the beginning of the chapter he takes exception to Ferguson's thesis that it would have been better had Great Britain stayed out of the war. I didn't really get Raico's point there. The book that sounds most interesting to me is “Richard Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation." Progressive Protestants rejected old line Calvinism and embraced utopian socialism and formed the National Council of Churches. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson became their idols. Julia Ward Howe, composer of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” frequently addressed their meetings: “A favorite line, of course, was “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” The progressive Protestants saw World War I as a continuation of the great crusade for righteousness that was the American Civil War . . On the day that national registration for the draft began, Wilson addressed a reunion of Confederate veterans. He told them that God had preserved the American Union in the Civil War so that the United States might be “an instrument in [His] hands... to see that liberty is made secure for mankind.” Regrettably, here, as before and ever after, the grandsons and great-grandsons of the valiant Confederate soldiers who resisted the North’s invasion of their country took the side of their former mortal enemies. In a kind of Stockholm syndrome, of identifying with the aggressor, they identified with the Union and disproportionately supported and fought and died in its wars. That strange anomaly continues to this day." I gather there that he has in mind that some of the most ardent supporters of the Military Industrial Complex are in states that were part of the former Confederacy. (See Lindsey Graham in South Carolina for example, the first state to secede). Chapter 9 A review of a book on World War I: "The British, naval blockade of Germany in the First World War belongs to the category of forgotten state atrocities of the twentieth century, of which there have been many." Of Winston Churchill, Herbert Hoover wrote, “The Prime Minister was a militarist of the extreme old school who held that the incidental starvation of women and children was justified if it contributed to the earlier ending of the war by victory.” I can't tell you how many war mongers tell me similar things today about US war in the Middle East. I never before heard the argument that the suffering from hunger in their early, formative years caused the enthusiasm of German youth for Nazism later on, but that was interesting. Chapter 10
This chapter is a review of John T Flynn's "The Roosevelt Myth."
Albert Jay Nock said that FDR's death was the greatest public improvement since the Bill of Rights. Flynn argued that Roosevelt established Mussolini style fascism in America and then manufactured a war with Japan to distract from the un sustainability of his economic system. When the Japanese sunk a US gunboat on the Yangtze River Flynn wondered what that gunboat was doing there. Turns out it was convoying Standard Oil tankers. FDR personally acted to destroy Flynn's career and used the IRS and the FBI to harass and intimidate him. More people were unemployed in 1938 than when Roosevelt was elected in '32. William F. Buckley had started out as an AnCap under the influence of Frank Chodorov but became a conservative statist because the thought the threat of the Soviet Union and communism necessitated taxation and a national security state. As a result, Buckley personally blackballed Flynn's career. One evil aspect of FDR that Raico/Flynn does not get into is the internment of Japanese-Americans. In another book club I am in, we are currently reading Rothbard's Betrayal of the American Right, which goes into quite a bit more detail on this if anyone is interested. Chapter 11In this chapter Raico reviews Justus Doenecke's book, Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939–1941. It sounds like a good book. Not having read it I don't have much to add so I will just make two book recommendations. (Not for our club, just in general.): Doenecke (and thus Raico) cites Scot Berg's biography of Charles Lindbergh. I read it a few years ago, and it is mammoth but well worth checking out. I mentioned before Rothbard's Betrayal of the American Right, which covers much of the same ground but from firsthand experience. This Article fits nicely. Chapter 12 This chapter is a review of T. Hunt Tooley's "Western Front." Tooley has been a frequent guest on Tom Wood's show and if you like this chapter I recommend those episodes.
Tooley writes:
"Most of all Social Darwinism—really, just Darwinism — which taught the eternal conflict among the races and tribes of the human as of other species. The press and popular fiction, especially “boys’ fiction,” glorified the derring-do of war, while avoiding any graphic, off-putting descriptions of what combat actually inflicts on men, much as the U.S. media do” This reminded me of a poignant docudrama (below) that I saw several years ago and highly recommend. I have had discussions like this with some alt-right who insist tribalism and conflict are inherent to human nature but I am not sure it is not more learned behavior. Raico cites Christopher Hedges "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning." I read this book several years ago. As I recall it is pretty short and you can finish it off in a couple of hours. This really pisses me off: “Especially ecstatic were the intellectuals, who viewed the war as a triumph of “idealism” over the selfish individualism and crass materialism of the trading and shop keeping spirit (i.e., free market capitalism.) Tooley also utilizes "Robert Higgs’s conceptual framework in his seminal Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government.” I have not read that one, but it sounds like it might be a good one for us to read in the future. SummaryThroughout the book, Raico illustrates the (avoidable) problems that got us in to these "great" wars (that seem to have been forgotten by history and overlooked by modern historians with their love of these blood thirsty leaders and the policy they set forth). It is striking how history seems to repeat itself continually. Reading through this book, it is very easy to see parallels drawn between the effects of foreign policy (and interventionist leaders) then and what we deal with now as an effect of the War on Terror (and certainly what is coming from that). Raico is not one to make things up, and lists countless citations and footnotes at the end of every chapter (some of these going on for 30 pages). His attention to detail is much appreciated. The content is fantastic in addressing these topics thoroughly and illustrating how these wars were completely avoidable, these men are no heroes of history, and much of what we've been told or lead to believe about all of this is simply false. Throughout the book, Raico talks of "isolationism", much like others from the previously named "Old Right", in place of the more fitting (which he admits to at times in the book) term "non-intervention". I understand that throughout the early 20th century (and still today), the term "isolationism" or "isolationist" is used to criticize and mislabel one who supports non-interventionism. Still, it is puzzling to me why Raico and similar authors use this term despite knowing better today. Overall, the content in this book is fantastic, and the citations numerous (some chapters contain 30 pages of citations and footnotes on the citations, as Raico gives page numbers and even quotations). My only complaint is that this is a series of essays and book reviews, and not a true book in itself. I personally loathe this style of book writing (though it is a double-edged sword, as much like with Tom DiLorenzo's fantastic book Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government, it gets the information out there quickly and saves the author a good deal of time, but, in my opinion at least, it makes the book far less enjoyable). I scratch my head and wonder why it is that there are book reviews mixed in with expanded articles that Raico has written. The content is always great, but such formatting makes it harder on the reader to follow through with the author at times, I think. The content of the book is easily 5 stars, but I had to sadly knock a star off because of the way the book was formatted, by including book reviews in with expansive essays. This book is a very insightful and worthwhile read for anyone interested in history or US foreign policy, but it could have really been golden if Raico were to have sit down and write it cover to cover as a traditional book. Raico has given numerous lectures on the history of US foreign policy, and these can be found easily on YouTube if one is interested. Additionally, Raico at times discusses the "Old Right", and one may be inclined to believe that he is talking about Republicans or the collective pre-1950's Right-Wing (which is far from the case), so I would suggest reading Murray Rothbard's Betrayal of the American Right if you're not familiar with this small circle of Libertarians and Classical Liberals. If you're a fan of this book, I'd suggest listening to the Dangerous History Podcast, found here Follow libertyLOL on your favorite social media sites:FacebookYoutube Tumblr Pintrest Countable: Government Made Simple Steemit blog on a blockchain Patreon Gab.ai libertyLOL's Liberty Blog RSS Feed We also run a couple twitterbots which provide great quotes and book suggestions: Murray Rothbard Suggests Tom Woods Suggests Jason Stapleton Suggests Progressive Contradictions MORE FROM LIBERTYLOL:
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Economics departments have their problems -- which is why Liberty Classroom has an entire course critiquing a typical textbook, chapter by chapter.
But being "too capitalist" certainly isn't one of them. According to students at Tufts University, though, that's precisely the problem. One student complains that all she hears in her economics course is "profit, profit, profit." "We got so disconnected from the social side of it—that our economic system is supposed to benefit society," she says. Someone hasn't been studying. Profit is how a business determines whether it is serving society or not. There are countless resources that can be combined in a countless number of ways, to produce a countless number of consumer goods. How can a business know whether it's using scarce resources in the most value-productive way? And once it knows what to produce, how can it know whether it's producing that thing in a way that's least wasteful? Profit. Profit ratifies the firm's production and allocation decisions. Loss encourages the firm to rethink the whats and hows of its production decisions. This way, waste persists for as little time as possible. There's more: "Theories like these," says an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper, referring to the assumptions behind their economics courses, "regard individuals as able to make deliberate, calculated choices to serve their own interests, instead of seeing happiness as communal." There is precisely zero in mainstream economics -- these kids even have me defending mainstream economics! -- that assumes people's happiness can't involve other people. It's almost like these kids are searching for something to be offended by, instead of -- for a change -- shutting up and listening to ideas they've never been exposed to before. How can the Tufts economics department improve? By being more like the economics department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, students say, which has "professors who focus on feminism and queerness in their economic research, teaching topics such as the economic and social benefits of legally recognizing queer marriages and the impact of fertility decisions and household work on the economy." Translation: if what I'm studying doesn't affirm me and my prejudices, it must be invalid. Thus we have the most closed-minded people in human history lecturing everyone else about openness and tolerance. Our own courses on economics don't cover "queer marriages," but they sure do explain how the world works. Not to mention they smash the fallacies you run into all over your Facebook feed. Haven't joined us yet? For shame! Check out LibertyClassroom! Tom Woods Follow libertyLOL on your favorite social media sites:FacebookYoutube Tumblr Pintrest Countable: Government Made Simple Steemit blog on a blockchain Patreon Gab.ai libertyLOL's Liberty Blog RSS Feed We also run a couple twitterbots which provide great quotes and book suggestions: Murray Rothbard Suggests Tom Woods Suggests Jason Stapleton Suggests Progressive Contradictions MORE FROM LIBERTYLOL:
With the lack of any quality reporting covering the gunman attack outside of a Las Vegas casino last night, the information void is unsurprisingly filled with speculation and conspiracy.
Natural News posted this article, titled Five things that just don’t add up about the Las Vegas mass shooting. The only one I find even remotely peculiar is #2. With that said, I think everyone should go read Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Market Manipulator. Bloggers are slaves to money, technology, and deadlines. Publishing content for contents-sake. Don't believe everything you read in blogs. Except ours. This Natural News article is reminiscent of the idea that blogs should always be writing SOMETHING.
But here are my thoughts:
#1) Dozens of concert-goers reported the presence of multiple shooters Everyone reports this following active shooter events. "There were multiple shooters from different angles." Most of it is because of the panic Adrenaline and inability to cope during these high-stress event can, and most often does create inaccurate reporting. In this case, all the towers in the area would provide for a LOT of echo, making the victims believe it even more so. #2) Who warned concert-goers they were “all going to die” a full 45 minutes before the shooting started?
I saw this 21-yr old's interview this morning. If someone actually was saying "you're all going to die", was she arrested? If so, interview her.
More likely, she was just escorted out. I'd be interested to see if they at least called in her license for disorderly conduct. #3) The weapon you hear on videos was FULL AUTO, which is almost impossible to acquire through legal means It probably was a fully automatic firearm. Even with admitted surrounding echo, it was too rapid for a bump stock or a trigger rotator. Bump stocks were found in his room, but he would have had to been Lee-Harvey-Oswald-fast to shoot as fast as I saw/heard (no conspiracy pun intended). These are automatic weapons are illegal. While I don't wish harm on anyone, I'd almost rather he used an RPG. I mean, those are illegal too. Killing people is also illegal. Quit trying to make things illegal and think you are solving problems. You're not. #4) Why were the exits blocked, trapping victims like rats in a maze? The Exit Blocking reports were in Orlando Night Club shooting as well (4:50 into this video) Until I see a POS admit he locked doors, I'm not buying it. First rule of intelligence or information gathering: Initial Reports are Always Wrong. I'll just assume that reports are either still wrong or panic was too great and the victims were inaccurate. #5) Why did the shooter have as many as 10 firearms in his room? No conspiracy or oddity here. Dude was trying to kill people. ONE MORE QUESTION: Why is ISIS claiming responsibility for the Las Vegas massacre? Of course ISIS is claiming responsibility. It helps their recruiting, emboldens those in their ranks who believe they are capable. Also, ANTIFA claimed responsibility too. It's win-win-win to claim responsibility for all of the world's ill wills. Reports are now suggesting that ANTIFA literature was found in his room as well. Let's not turn this thing into "Russia Hacked the Election!" until we get solid reporting. The Blogosphere will be quick to publish content speculating without any proof. In the end when that happens, we all lose. The worst conspiracy theory I've heard is that he was likely an MK Ultra patient who was programmed to change the US public narrative from 'People in Catalonia should be free if they want to be free' and focus is on 'Gun Control is necessary'. Come on, people! Don't believe everything you read online folks. Everything should be viewed through a critical lens. Even libertyLOL... Thoughts and prayers don't do a thing to comfort anyone right now. If someone wants to help, they should write a damn check. Follow libertyLOL on your favorite social media sites:FacebookYoutube Tumblr Pintrest Countable: Government Made Simple Steemit blog on a blockchain Patreon Gab.ai libertyLOL's Liberty Blog RSS Feed We also run a couple twitterbots which provide great quotes and book suggestions: Murray Rothbard Suggests Tom Woods Suggests Jason Stapleton Suggests Progressive Contradictions MORE FROM LIBERTYLOL:
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