Another day, another set of classified documents found in President Joe Biden’s possession. Just in case anyone missed the first two times that this is an inside job by the Democratic Party to ensure somebody besides Biden heads the party’s presidential ticket in 2024, a third cache of documents was revealed on Saturday.
They’re so committed to making this an ongoing news story they’re even working weekends. It’s a old but effective trick to make one event that happened years in the past seem like multiple events recurring in the present. “Breaking! Five more classified documents discovered! Gasp! Red alert!”
The most important thing to remember about all of these classified documents scandals is what they are not. And that is they are not any real concern for the public. The media and interested political operatives would have you believe these documents contain information so sensitive that their falling into the wrong hands could result in us all speaking Russian or Chinese. They don’t.
The truth is there are very few secrets national governments try to keep that allies and adversaries alike haven’t stolen. The government likes to portray itself as secretly protecting the public from all sorts of unseen danger, both state-sponsored and otherwise. “If you only knew what goes on behind the scenes, you’d be terrified,” they’d like you to think. Many of the bureaucratic rank and file believe this themselves.
In reality, most of what even the national security state does is cooked up nonsense to justify legions of government drones and billions per year in wasted spending. The histrionics over the discovery of compromised classified material is usually just political posturing. If it weren’t, then we’d have seen some significant consequences by now from the classified documents stored on Hillary Clinton’s infamous private server, which even podunk governments in Eastern Europe and Africa probably have their hands on by now. We haven’t and we won’t.
When the alarm over mishandling of classified documents is genuine, it isn’t for fear of any danger to the public. Everyone should realize that’s the last thing these people are concerned about. What they are concerned about is the real reason most of these documents get classified in the first place: the embarrassing to themselves or potentially incriminating information the documents may contain.
One of my favorite moments in the Star Trek movie franchise occurs near the end of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. The details of the plot aren’t important here, other than that the Klingon villain, Kruge, played by Christopher Lloyd, is holding Kirk, Spock, and an Enterprise landing party hostage on a planet that is in the process of destroying itself. Kruge threatens to doom himself and his hostages if Kirk doesn’t surrender something called, “the Genesis Device.”
Spock, who had died in the previous film, has been brought back to life by the Genesis device but is aging rapidly because of it and must get off the planet immediately or die. When Kruge has the rest of the landing party beamed up to his ship as prisoners, the following exchange occurs between Kirk and Kruge:
Kirk: Take the Vulcan, too.
Kruge: No!
Kirk: But, why?
Kruge: Because you wish it.
Kruge doesn’t know what is happening to Spock or why Kirk has an interest in getting Spock off the planet, especially considering he’d be Kruge’s prisoner. He only knows Kirk wishes it and anything Kirk desires is likely against his own interests.
What a wonderful analogy for so many of the figures who have stood up to oppose the Washington, D.C. empire over the past several years. I don’t agree on much with Donald Trump, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, or Bari Weiss. But it is apparent the empire fears and loathes these people and will do anything it can to destroy them.
Therefore, I am inclined to do whatever I can to defend them against the empire’s attacks. Should the empire deign to ask why I wouldn’t allow this collection of mercantilists, socialists, and statists (but I repeat myself) to be crushed, my answer is the same as Kruge’s:
“Because you wish it.”
The latest in this cast of opposition characters is self-described socialist Elon Musk. Musk claims to have purchased Twitter primarily to change its content moderation policies to allow for freer speech, something he claims is essential to “democracy.”
That all sounds wonderful to the average, miseducated American and there is good reason to believe Musk is sincere. He spent $44 billion on a company that currently makes $5 billion in gross revenues – and loses money. No likely combination of revenue growth or cost cutting will make this a wise business investment anytime soon.
Taking Musk at his word, it is worthwhile to unpack just what Musk is championing. On one hand, anything the empire is opposing this strenuously is on its face a good for the rest of us. But we should have open eyes about what Musk is offering in its place. There are several assumptions most people take for granted that need to be challenged. They include free speech, democracy, and liberty.
Musk evidently shares the empire’s stated ideal of democracy as an end in itself. In deciding whether to allow former President Trump to return to Twitter, Musk held a Twitter poll. When it came out in favor of allowing Trump’s return, Musk tweeted the results with the Latin phrase, “Vox Populi Vox Dei (“the voice of the people is the voice of God”).
Of course, the American system has never assumed democracy is an end in itself. On the contrary, it includes many anti-democratic elements alongside the democratic ones. The reason for having a bicameral legislature, presidential veto, independent judiciary, and Bill of Rights is to protect individuals and constituent polities from democracy.
That’s what makes Musk’s Trump poll so ironic. He suggests a majority vote has something to do with free speech when the First Amendment was written to defend free speech against democracy. The 2nd Amendment was written to protect the right to keep and bear arms against democracy. And so on with all ten amendments in the Bill of Rights, the last to protect individuals from the accumulation of power even in one, central government, however democratically elected its representatives.
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jay Powell surprised no one on Wednesday by announcing the Fed has raised its target for the federal funds rate another 50 basis points to the 4.25% – 4.50% range. What did surprise the stock markets, based upon the sharp selloff following his remarks, was his statement,
“Restoring price stability is essential to set the stage for achieving maximum employment and stable prices over the longer run. The historical record cautions strongly against prematurely loosening policy. We will stay the course, until the job is done”
That’s basically what he has said during every public announcement since embarking on an historically steep round of interest rate hikes over the past six months. That this surprised investors indicates how deeply ingrained the “Fed put” has become in the psyche of the financial community. The stock markets continue to fluctuate below their all-time highs, therefore everyone assumes the Fed will announce a “pivot” at the next meeting, since it always in the past.
So, as each meeting approaches, the market begins to rally in anticipation of an announcement or even a hint of said pivot at Powell’s press conference. Then, Powell reads the same statement he has given after every previous meeting and the market sells off.
Needless to say, this is a terrible way for capital to be allocated, even given the existence of a central bank in lieu of a free market. But over a decade of zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) has trained investors to act even more irrationally and for equity prices to become even more separated from fundamentals than they have been in the past.
The Fed’s Balance Sheet
Ironically, Powell made another statement which is demonstrably false and is receiving no attention from investors or the financial media. He said, “In addition, we are continuing the process of significantly reducing the size of our balance sheet.”
The Fed has not significantly reduced its balance sheet. Let’s remember that in August 2019, the Fed’s balance sheet stood at approximately $3.7 trillion, down from its peak of $4.4 trillion 2014-17. The Fed reversed its modest tightening policy and began easing, increasing its balance sheet to $4.1 trillion by February 2020.
Once the Covid-19 lockdowns began, the Fed exploded its balance sheet to over $7 trillion in just three months, eventually taking the total to $8.9 trillion by March 2022.
One would think that “significantly reducing the balance sheet” would mean something more than Powell’s announced plan to reduce it by a mere $45 billion per month June-August 2022 and then by $90 billion per month every month thereafter. But the Fed hasn’t even managed to do that. As of this writing, the Fed’s assets still total almost $8.6 trillion.
In other words, while the Fed has raised the federal funds rate significantly this year, it has not attempted to reduce the supply of money. As a result, M2 has barely decreased since its peak of $21.8 trillion in March 2022. And without decreasing the money supply, the Fed cannot significantly reduce price inflation anytime soon.
While much of American politics in the 21st century has been dominated by foreign policy, the past two and a half years have not. The hysterical government response to Covid-19 forced Americans to shift their focus back home and grapple with basic questions of liberty in the face of an increasingly totalitarian state.
Former President Trump has a checkered record at best on Covid. While he maintains to this day locking down American “saved millions of lives,” he did ultimately leave that decision to the states, administratively, if not financially.
Unfortunately, while Republican governors were generally less severe in imposing lockdown policies and tended to begin easing them more quickly than Democratic governors, very few took a principled stand. Exceptions that rule were Governors Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Ron DeSantis of Florida.
Noem deserves top honors on principle for never locking down her state a single day. She also took the most libertarian approach to Covid vaccines, neither mandating them nor prohibiting businesses or other private organizations from mandating them on their own property.
DeSantis was the first governor to drop all statewide Covid restrictions and was more willing to use government power against the private sector in both prohibiting vaccine mandates and in combatting “woke” cultural issues according to the preferences of his supporters.
Both Noem and DeSantis were rewarded with landslides in 2022 after having won much narrower victories in 2018. Both correctly cited their stands for individual liberty during the pandemic as political risks that paid off in their acceptance speeches.
While Noem’s policies were much purer on these grounds, DeSantis is the governor of a much more populous and politically important state. Unsurprisingly, he has emerged as a credible challenger to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination for president.
Having listened to DeSantis’ stirring victory speech on November 9, I couldn’t help wondering what a DeSantis presidency might look like. While DeSantis is certainly a more polished politician and more disciplined person than Trump, and while I would have rather lived in Florida in January 2021 than California, I couldn’t help being concerned about DeSantis’ foreign policy instincts.
Like Governor Noem, DeSantis has had few opportunities to opine on foreign policy. Also, like Noem, DeSantis has on those occasions spouted generic, establishment rhetoric about the threat China represents.
More telling is DeSantis’ record in Congress, to which he was elected as a veteran and supporter of the Iraq War. DeSantis opposed Obama’s war ambitions in Syria, as did a lot of Republicans just because it was Obama. Otherwise, he sounded much more like a neocon.
He supported President Trump’s decision not to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2017 making all the arguments one might expect from any establishment Republican. DeSantis certainly isn’t Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, but he’s no Rand Paul, either.
Neither is Donald Trump, one would correctly argue, but here is the rub. Trump seems to have a genuine aversion to war that not only exceeds that of most of the politicians in his party, but even that of most of his supporters.
The biggest news coming out of the midterm elections is the failure of the Republican Party to win a more decisive victory. They had predicted a “red wave” since well back into 2021 (an immediate reason to be skeptical) but will at best have a modest advantage in the House and a razor thin majority in the Senate.
Not only were the Republicans denied a resounding victory, but the Democrats did better in a first term midterm election than either party has while holding the White House in decades. There is no denying this was a good night for the Democrats.
This has many scratching their heads. This election was supposed to be, at least in large part, a referendum on the massive damage done to the American economy and society in general by Covid tyranny imposed by Democrats. “Never forget what they did to you” said many a meme on social media in the days before the election, especially after Emily Oster’s infamous plea for amnesty.
There is only one problem with that narrative. Covid lockdowns and other mandates were, with a few notable exceptions, largely bipartisan.
Where resistance won
Where it was possible for Covid lockdowns to be put on the ballot, they were. Governor Kristi Noem, who never locked down her state a single day in 2020, improved upon her three-point victory in 2018 with a thirty-point trouncing of her Democratic rival on Tuesday.
During her victory speech, she said, “Here in South Dakota, we protected your constitutional rights. I trusted in you to use personal responsibility and take care of each other.” The vote totals speak for themselves.
The less libertarian but more well-known Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida also won in a landslide in traditionally purple Florida. Desantis was elected by a razor thin margin in 2018. As governor, he famously convened a panel of non-government epidemiologists in September 2020 and dropped all Covid restrictions based on their televised recommendations.
Governors Gregg Abbot of Texas and Kim Reynolds of Iowa, both of whom dropped Covid restrictions in early 2021, were re-elected by comfortable margins. Senator Rand Paul, who grilled Fauci during multiple congressional appearances, also won easily.
By contrast, Republican Lee Zeldin, whom some polling indicated had a real chance to defeat incumbent Democrat Kathy Hochul in deep blue New York, didn’t really compete on Tuesday. He was forced to campaign mostly on traditional Republican tough-on-crime talking points because that’s all he could do. He certainly couldn’t run a strident anti-lockdown campaign after failing to question lockdowns at all during 2020.
Congratulations to Elon Musk. He’s managed to get both the left and right furious with him over the course of a single week. He took a victory lap himself over this on Thursday, tweeting, “Being attacked by both right & left simultaneously is a good sign.”
Ironically, left, right, and Elon Musk himself are wrong about content moderation on Twitter being “a free speech issue.” Twitter is and always has been private property, even when it was publicly traded. It is not “the new public square.” This is commie talk.
Now, many would argue that the people previously running Twitter were communists themselves. There is good evidence this is true, including the admission by one of Twitter’s employees to a Project Veritas undercover journalist that the Twitter workforce is “commie as f—.” But the personal views of the employees, executive or otherwise, is not at issue. The company was and is privately owned by its shareholders.
That the platform is widely popular has given rise to the notion, especially among those aggrieved by being censored or banned, that one has a right to be on the platform and express one’s views, based on a right to free speech. Musk says he bought the platform to protect free speech on this supposedly “public forum.”
Let’s take a moment to consider what is a Twitter account. A Twitter account is a bundle of code, residing on a physical server, created and maintained by Twitter employees. It interacts with various applications that combine to make up the Twitter platform, all also created and maintained by Twitter employees or vendors.
In other words, the Twitter platform, each individual Twitter account, and all the other software and hardware that combine to make Twitter run are the products of the labor of other people. Ultimately, all this labor is paid for by private owners just like the labor in a clothing factory or a supermarket. And no one can have a “right” to the labor of other people.
By way of preemption, please spare me the “but it uses tax funded infrastructure to operate!” I shouldn’t have to point out that if one applies that standard across the board to all businesses the commies win. I’m all for abolishing publicly funded infrastructure and making every business provide their own, but until that happens, I want as much private property and capitalism as possible.
Every argument against government healthcare or the welfare state in general rests upon the principle that no person can have a right to the labor of another. There is no ambiguity here. You don’t have a right to a Twitter account. Period.
Corporatism vs. Captialism
When I make this argument, I’m often told by midwits I don’t understand the difference between corporatism and capitalism. The thrust of this argument is that the existence of the regulatory state, particularly the FCC and other federal agencies, create a government-controlled market that gives advantages to preferred corporations over others. I am very aware of this argument and agree wholeheartedly. I’ve written extensively about the damage FDR’s New Deal continues to do to the American business environment.
The problem is that argument doesn’t apply to this situation. Nothing stopped me from joining MeWe, Parler, Gab, Gettr, or even former President Trump’s own platform, Truth Social. If the 74 million people who voted for Trump did likewise, then every one of those platforms would have more U.S. users than Twitter, which has 70 million.
Instead, these same people cry out for the government to regulate Twitter like a public utility – most of which are terrible precisely because they’re regulated like public utilities – rather than simply availing themselves of the costless opportunity to create accounts on competing platforms.
They also have the prerogative of deleting their accounts on Twitter, Facebook, or any other platform whose policies offend them. If they could all coordinate their activities to vote for Donald Trump on the same day, they could certainly coordinate their activities to delete their Facebook accounts on the same day. This would deal a devastating blow to the platform without an iota of government intervention, which would do no good and much harm anyway.
The Public Accommodation Concept
The idea that private companies which sell products to the public or “accommodate” the public on their premises are subject to government regulation of their policies has its roots, at least in this country, in the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century. And as almost everyone conveniently forgets, that civil rights movement was dominated by socialists and communists.
That’s not to say there wasn’t a problem that needed to be addressed, but the communists, following the advice of Marcuse and other critical theorists, made sure they dominated the movement as a front in the war to abolish capitalism. That is why it is not surprising that the idea of “public accommodation” was central to the solution they came up with.
If you can’t abolish private property – the communists’ ultimate goal – the next best thing is to water it down. And that’s just what the public accommodation concept did. It made private property not entirely private anymore since the owner could no longer dispose of it as he or she saw fit. It was now at least partially owned by the public, since the public could override the owners’ decisions about who was allowed on the property.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act works just fine without Titles II and VII. The market certainly would solve the problem of discrimination on private property. In fact, it had already begun to do so, even in the Deep South, as evidenced by the existence of Jim Crow laws prohibiting integration. Had some restaurants and other hospitality businesses not tried to integrate, there would have been no need of passing those laws in the first place.
Both partisan censorship and racial discrimination on private property are odious. The latter was arguably much worse, since as long as I tweet or post like a good little commie, Twitter and Facebook will let me remain on their platforms. But a black man in 1960 Alabama wasn’t staying at a restricted hotel no matter what he said or did, even if his only other choice was to sleep in a morgue with the stiffs.
Regardless, it is a property owner’s unqualified right to exclude anyone he or she wants. Once you begin making exceptions, you are working with the communists, intentionally or not, to dilute private ownership itself.
A Colossal Strategic Error
The Civil Rights Act didn’t stop with racial discrimination. Once the boundaries of private property had been breached, the government charged in to start making all sorts of other rules. The public accommodation concept underlies the Americans with Disabilities Act, which required every business at the time to make physical changes to their properties to accommodate people with disabilities, whether they could afford to or not. Those that couldn’t went out of business.
Everything people despise about the modern office environment, with its ludicrous rules purporting to prevent sexual harassment, racial discrimination, age discrimination, or any number of other supposed offenses, all spring from the idea that the owners of businesses that serve the public don’t have all the rights of other property owners.
It also underpins the Christian baker being forced to bake the gay wedding cake. It’s all the same principle.
One could argue social media is already even worse, and that its stifling environment is the result of government coercion. I don’t agree for two reasons.
First, speech on social media platforms is still far freer than it is in any corporate office. I have facetiously lamented many times that I had never been suspended or even warned by a single platform during my illustrious, anti-government career (I recently erased this black mark from my record). In the corporate world, I would have been called into HR and/or fired for hundreds of the things I’ve said on Twitter and Facebook this year alone.
Second, I don’t believe the executives at Facebook or Twitter feel coerced by the government. Libertarians would like to believe they do, but an honest evaluation of Mark Zuckerberg’s comments about being contacted by the FBI before banning the Hunter Biden laptop story can only conclude he welcomes the FBI partnership. Note that they didn’t have to tell him what specific content to ban. Zuck wasn’t intimidated at all. It was more like, “Thanks for the heads up, we’re on it!”
The argument that there is anything to be done about social media censorship is an argument that unregulated markets don’t work. Anarcho-capitalists especially should agree with this. Does anyone think that in a society without government censorship wouldn’t exist? Of course it would. The same impulses that motivate governments to censor and people to support governments censoring would motivate people in anarchatopia. There would be only one solution there: the market.
And I’m sorry, it is not good enough to rant against social media censorship as a free speech issue and mumble under one’s breath or in the fine print that one does not want government intervention against it. Libertarians should know full well that 95% of the people listening will assume they do.
Neither are the arguments that social media companies “aren’t really private companies” helpful to our cause. Let’s be honest. These are just rationalizations for infringing their property rights. And our enemies already have plenty of those. They don’t need our help.
All arguing the free speech or “public square” angle does is help build the consensus the commies will use for the next great incursion into private property. There is nothing to gain by making these arguments and plenty to lose.
Hampered as it is, the market still provides ample opportunity for people to fight social media censorship without infringing the property rights of those perpetrating it. Anyone making this a free speech issue is both mistaken in principle and playing right into the hands of the communists. If you believe in private property and freedom, this is an opportunity to champion it in the face of adversity. Waffling now will be disastrous.
It is one week until the U.S. mid-term elections and some members of the Regime seem worried that, for once, elections might actually have consequences. The smart money still says that if there is a “red wave” on November 8, Republicans will enter Congress next January and do precisely nothing about what has happened to the American people over the past 32 months. Criticism of the Ukraine War is as likely to be of the “Biden is not tough enough on Putin” variety as it is cutting off the Ukraine Gravy Train to Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
Still, there are some signs insiders are worried something different may be afoot, as demonstrated by the plea for “amnesty” in The Atlantic by Covid Regime propagandist Emily Oster. According to this alternative reality take, “We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”
No, “we” need do no such thing. The lies, tyranny, and aggression all ran one way during the pandemic – towards those who, it turns out, were never “in the dark.” Whether those mandating lockdowns, masks, and later vaccines were honestly mistaken – “mistaken” seems wholly inadequate here – or acting in bad faith and with malice aforethought should be the subject of a formal investigation.
We have been subjected to six straight years of investigations into hoaxes and hobgoblins, from the nonexistent “Russa collusion” to the inconsequential Ukrainian “quid quo pro” to the farcical “insurrection.” It is past time for an investigation into the real crimes against humanity perpetrated against the American people under the pretense of fighting Covid-19.
Such an investigation would include sworn testimony as to the origins of the virus itself, whether or not data supporting lockdowns and vaccine mandates were knowingly corrupted and/or whether data contraindicating same were knowingly suppressed.
The existence of alternative treatments for Covid would have legally prohibited the issuance of any Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the Covid vaccines, developed in record time under the government program known as “Operation Warp Speed.” Were alternative treatments prohibited and their proponents deplatformed to ensure these EUAs could be issued? Did people die who otherwise could have been successfully treated had these alternative treatments been made available?
These questions need to be answered. Both Anthony Fauci and his co-conspirators along with deplatformed experts like Robert Malone, M.D. and Peter MCullough, M.D. must be put under oath and questioned, preferably on live television so the American public can judge for themselves who is telling the truth and who is not.
Throughout 2021, Rep. Thomas Massie publicly asked the CDC to change information on its website indicating the Pfizer mRNA vaccine was effective for those previously infected with Covid-19 because the FDA’s review of Pfizer’s clinical trial data clearly showed it wasn’t (pg. 30). To this writer’s knowledge CDC website was never corrected. The Pfizer vaccine was among those later mandated by President Biden for large swaths of the U.S. workforce.
Massie, those he spoke with at the CDC, and the person(s) responsible for refusing to correct the false claims must be put under oath and questioned. If fraud was committed, charges should follow.
These are just a few of the egregious lies, distortions, and obfuscations perpetrated against the public in support of the Covid Regime. Studies in support of the government mandates were intentionally flawed. Even the integrity of the data has been called into question. Both freedom and the future of science itself depend upon these issues being settled once and for all via an adversarial process with penalties for lying.
The government response to Covid-19 was the most egregious assault on liberty in modern history. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed forever. The U.S. economy is approximately 5 million jobs short of the number that would have been created to employ its growing population had the lockdowns never occurred.
An as yet unknown number of people died as a direct result of lockdowns and vaccine mandates. That number must be established and those responsible for the deaths held accountable if the investigation shows they acted in bad faith.
We are constantly regaled with the vapid, “we must ensure this never happens again” after a mass shooting or other tragedy, always in support of new government power that will punish the innocent and do nothing to achieve the stated goal.
For once, that hackneyed appeal is appropriate. What must never happen again is the dystopian nightmare visited upon Americans by their federal, state, and local governments over the past two years. The only way to ensure that is to hold those responsible for it accountable. It is time for due process, not amnesty.
Back in the 1990s, there was this new phenomenon called “the internet.” It grew exponentially. Entrepreneurs saw the business potential for reaching more customers than they had ever dreamed they could reach through conventional methods. Consumers had more choices of every conceivable product – including information – than they ever had in history.
Like all technological advances, it produced big winners and big losers. Vast fortunes were made by those who built businesses that worked better on the internet. Vast fortunes were lost not only by those internet commerce replaced, but also by those who went long on businesses that didn’t work on the internet – Pets.com being the most infamous example.
The internet revolution was much like the industrial revolution in this respect. It advanced human flourishing in general exponentially but was decried by all those it damaged economically. Many brick and mortar retailers were put out of business, just as the automobile put blacksmiths out of business.
Legacy media faced annihilation. They were no longer the gatekeepers of information. The new generation of internet users had access to information from all over the world at the click of a mouse, including information previously filtered, spun, or suppressed by legacy media. There was a point at which those who had long decried its information gatekeeping and establishment propaganda gleefully counted down the days until the New York Times went bankrupt.
Governments didn’t like the internet much, either. Untaxable interstate commerce was replacing taxable brick and mortar commerce. Republican Congressmen lamented the internet was so new they didn’t know who to regulated it. And, of course, no government has ever liked the free flow of information. That’s why a First Amendment was necessary over two hundred years ago.
The current war on the free flow of information over the internet is led by the political left, but it didn’t start there. Long before conservatives were being deplatformed for opposing wokism, the political right was after internet publishers for criticizing the war on terror. Julian Assange is only the highest profile example. Online porn has also been targeted by the right since the internet’s earliest days.
As with laissez faire capitalism, it seemed like those who stood to lose had two choices: adapt or die. But there was a third choice: call in the government. And that’s just what all those who stood to lose did.
The decades-long destruction of America’s laissez faire free market was accomplished in much the same way.
A month ago, Europe was facing a prospective humanitarian disaster. Having no substantial natural energy resources of its own and having virtually eliminated its nuclear power capabilities, its loss of Russian energy imports threatened to leave hundreds of millions in the freezing cold.
The good news is Europe does have a plan to muddle through this winter. They have stockpiled enough reserves to avoid disaster this year, as long as it is not abnormally cold, and Russia doesn’t cut off what gas it is still exporting to Europe before the weather breaks.
The bad news is Europe has a plan to muddle through this winter. That they will be able to avoid catastrophe means there is no reason the war can’t continue through next summer. Even war cheerleader CNN admits there may be a much bigger problem next winter, but for now Ukrainians and Russians will continue to die before their time.
And while Europe won’t have an historic calamity on its hands, things will still be bad there, especially for the most vulnerable. Just as with Covid lockdowns, the laptop and latte class will repeat vapid slogans like “We’re all in this together” while people on the margins struggle with choices the former can’t even fathom, like between energy and food, or medicine.
So, in addition to the deaths on the battlefield and collateral civilian deaths, many will die of cold in Europe this winter who wouldn’t have otherwise.
The Biden administration continues to support Ukrainian President Zelensky’s position to fight the Russians until they relinquish all former Ukrainian territory, including Crimea. Western media continues to bolster this departure from reality. Last week, Newsweek described Biden’s statement that Putin “could just flat leave, and still probably hold his position together in Russia,” as “an off-ramp” for Putin, but one he probably would not take.
The last part is true. Putin isn’t going anywhere. Neither is the Russian army suffering major losses of territory. As Colonel Douglas Macgregor said during his appearance on Tom Mullen Talks Freedom, Russia controls a “banana-shaped” band of territory from the Luhansk Oblast (roughly “province”) to Kherson, north of Crimea, and down to the sea along that line. 95 percent of Ukraine’s GDP is produced in this Russian-controlled territory.
“We’re a rich country, we can afford to…,” says your average liberal. Complete the sentence however you wish. “Guarantee every American healthcare.” “Guarantee every American a college education.” “Provide a home for an unlimited number of immigrants who require food, clothing, and shelter the moment they cross our borders.”
But how did the United States become so rich? No one ever asks politicians that one, simple question. Forcing them to answer it would be illuminating. The likely first answers would be vague references to “democracy,” but that doesn’t jibe with reality. If anything, America became rich in spite of democracy, not because of it. Most of the Constitution is devoted to checking democracy at every turn.
Eventually, politicians might get around to the “land of opportunity” narrative. And it is true that the United States offered native-born and immigrant Americans opportunity unavailable anywhere else.
Opportunity to do what?
It’s as if no one even wants to say it anymore. The opportunity offered was to pursue one’s individual self-interest, unmolested by and mostly free of the larceny of any king, commissar, or legislature. America became rich operating under Adam Smith’s principle of the invisible hand of the market, which says that people pursuing their narrow selfish interests in an environment where property rights are protected will do more good for society than people attempting to advance some “common good.”
It worked. It still works, to the extent it’s allowed. When people have the opportunity to keep the money they earn and dispose of it as they see fit, they produce more goods for others to consume. What they don’t spend on consumption becomes capital used to expand productive capacity and produce even more goods for others to consume.
This is what made America rich and built the modern, technological world we have the privilege of living in today. In 1888, at the peak of libertarian American society, the government collected about 3 percent of GDP in taxes and ran a 50 percent surplus. President Grover Cleveland fought a decade-long war during his nonconsecutive terms to reduce tariffs, saying government surpluses invited “mischief.”
Before the Progressive Era, Americans kept almost everything they earned and employed it in the pursuit of their own happiness, not some politician’s five-year plan. They invested in or entered new industries without licenses, unencumbered by regulatory agencies, free to innovate as they saw fit. Figuring out a way to provide more for your fellow Americans at a lower cost made you rich. Simply working hard and saving responsibly made you comfortable.
In a word, what made America the richest country in the world wasn’t free speech, freedom of religion, or the right to vote. It was capitalism, as laissez faire as it has ever existed anywhere, before, or since. The protection of property rights and relatively free markets resulted in an accumulation of capital we’re still benefiting from today. It didn’t fall from the sky. It was saved and invested by people pursuing their individual interests. That’s what works.
