Author Archive | Lew Rockwell

After Ron gave this speech, 25 Republicans followed his lead in voting against the keystone of the current police state, the Patriot Act, which was enough to defeat it. Now the two parties will pass it with a majority, not needing 2/3rds as they did for their rush job, but this was still a great moment, and indicative of popular resistance as well. Ron is the only member of the current Congress to have opposed the original Patriot Act, so—as usual—he has huge moral authority. (Thanks to Travis Holte)

cross-posted from the Lew Rockwell blog

I never thought I’d say, Good for Pat Robertson, but the religious neocon turns out to be more religious than neocon, at least in the area of marijuana. He now advocates legalization. Pat, now you need a heart-to-heart with Ron Paul on other drugs, and war, too.

UPDATE Thanks to all those who have sent me this inspiring example of legalization from below.

cross-posted from the LewRockwell.com blog

That is when the inflationist, bankist, Fedist Republican leadership in the House will give Ron Paul his due—chairman of the monetary subcommittee (or, rather, part of his due, since seniority means he should be chairman of the full committee).

I think they will not dare deny it to him, though they might try to keep a “tight leash on him,” as one Boehner-Cantor staffer so charmingly put it. But no matter what they choose—chairmanship, leash, or no chairmanship—the leadership will lose. Ron is already a far bigger figure than Boehner or Cantor. Not in the power to threaten or use violence—a power Ron does not want, and does not believe in—but in the power to raise up a peaceful army for sound money and sound banking. If they try anything, Boehner-Cantor will only diminish themselves.

cross-posted from the LewRockwell.com blog

Bow down or be punished. That is the holiday message of the TSA. If a plebian enters the gulag zone at the airport, and then refuses to submit to either the Chertoff radiation-scanner and its naked photo, or the full-body feel-up, and decides to opt out of flying, he will be detained for interrogation, and not allowed to leave. If the human being leaves the gulag zone, in disobedience to the Blue Shirts, he will be fined $11,000, and perhaps arrested too.

the anti-earmarks issue is a fraud. It’s a neocon trick, pushed by the Club for Growth and similar groups. It’s a way for the neocons to seem to be against spending while not actually being against it, and it’s a way to strengthen the presidential dictatorship against the legislature. Once again, earmarks are not spending; they allocate spending, to local pork rather than presidential pork. Ron Paul, of course, does it right. He is willing, as a representative, to request earmarks in appropriations for his constituents’ local projects, but votes against the spending itself. Continue Reading →

Here’s an interesting piece from WaPo-owned Slate on the anti-Fed movement, which includes trimmers and phonies as well as the real deal. The good guys mentioned include Ron Paul, Jim Grant, Kevin Duffy, and the godfather, Murray Rothbard. Thanks to Bethany McLean for this sentence:

Murray Rothbard, the controversial libertarian economist who many consider the intellectual father of the anti-Fed movement, wrote in 1994 (The Case Against the Fed) that if the Fed were to be abolished, then “the banks would, at last, be on their own, each bank responsible for its own actions. There would be no lender of last resort, no taxpayer bailout [italics mine].”

Now, “controversial” typically means Don’t Read, but Murray’s genius, productivity, and writing ability have made him a colossus 15 years after his untimely death. He was always that, of course, but now people recognize it, in the freedom movement and the Austrian School, which is at its core Misesian-Rothbardian. Thanks to the Mises Institute, all Murray’s works are available for free on the web, with more to come. Continue Reading →

Actually, it’s just Republican eyewash, since the federal government does massive “off-budget spending.” That is, the official deficit is always far smaller than the increase in the national debt. I do not believe there is any political solution to what the evil entity in DC has foisted on us, nor am I fan of process reform in general, but here is one idea that, if it could ever be enacted by some fairy godmother, would make sense: freeze the national debt. But even that wouldn’t cure our ills. We need to follow Ron Paul’s advice and end the wars and the empire. That is step one to fiscal and moral sanity.

cross-posted from the LewRockwell.com blog

Ron Paul won easy reelection in the 14th district of Texas with almost 77% of the vote. (His opponent, a police chief, had signs that said, “Tell Dr. No he has to go.” No one took up my suggestion for opposing signs: “Send the cop to the donut shop.”

If the Republicans weren’t dishonest, and entirely in the pocket of the big banks, Ron Paul would be taking Barney Frank’s place as chairman of the finance committee. Not satisfied with blocking him there, they have even kept him out of the chairmanship of the monetary policy subcommittee, as Barney has frequently remarked. The first time the Republicans erased Ron’s seniority; the second time, they imported a congressman from another committee to take the job; the third time, they temporarily abolished the subcommittee. This time, I think they would fear the backlash, so Ron will probably be chairman. If so, I can’t wait for his hearings on the QE2, the gold, the business cycle, and much else.

cross-posted from the LewRockwell.com blog

Is “I Want Your Money” a truth-telling slogan of neocon Republicans? No, it’s their charge at liberal Democrats (who also want your money and have made their own lying films by the boatload) in a new agitprop documentary. The movie features a cast of thousands, or so it seems, of big-government conservatives, and the trailer opens with a cartoon Reagan lecturing a cartoon Obama that redistribution is theft. Well, of course, it is. But every single thing the government does is redistributive, from you to Lockheed or Social Security or Karzai or the CIA. 

Ronald Reagan was a big-government conservative if there ever was one, massively increasing spending, borrowing, and taxes (he cut taxes once and raised them six times), while telling folksy lies along the way. Oh, and he gave us Alan Greenspan. Obama should be tossed out, of course, but the Gingrich-Huckabee chickenhawks are hardly the appropriate replacements. Republicans are just Bugsy Siegel to the Democrats’ Al Capone. Well, that’s unfair. Black-market businessmen Siegal and Capone provided useful products to willing customers despite the federal crime syndicate.

cross-posted from the LewRockwell.com blog

USA Today loves to run lifestyle features that purport to show how we are living, what we are doing, what we like and what we don’t like – premised on a collectivist assumption that all our preferences can be tracked and characterized with these aggregate claims.

Most of the time, these features are silly. It’s not really true that we are all listening to Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, or tweeting what we had for breakfast.

However, the other day, the paper offered a roundup of how the great recession has affected American life. The business cycle is one of those forces that does indeed affect everyone, so perhaps it makes sense to examine what the paper had to say.

The trends are gleaned from US Census data, which provide a look at how economic downturns can devastate a society, and offer a glimpse into a theme that the Austrian tradition has long emphasized. Economics isn’t just about trade statistics, retail sales or GDP. It is the very pith of life.

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