By Doug French
Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, included ten planks required to create a socialist dictatorship. Number five on the list is “Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.” America’s Federal Reserve satisfies this requirement, especially the modern version, which grows exponentially in size, scope, and power, engineering financial repression “for governments to increase tax income and domestically-held debt.”1
While socialism continues to creep from university classrooms to replace once-upon-a-time laissez-faire in everyday America, opioid use has grown to be termed an epidemic.
By J.L. Collins
Those who live paycheck to paycheck are slaves. Those who carry debt are slaves with even stouter shackles. Don’t think for the moment their masters don’t know it.
Rigid pay scales, high dues, lousy pension system: Membership has its privileges.
The New Jersey Education Association, the state chapter of the largest teachers union in the country, boasted more than 200,000 members and $154 million in revenue last year. You might think it focuses on helping teachers become more effective and making the public schools better—especially now, with more than 80% of the state’s districts still not offering full-time in-person instruction 13 months after the pandemic began.
A major hurdle to the adoption of bitcoin is that while the average person may be at least open to the idea that fiat money is not the ideal, they still struggle to see a difference between fiat money and cryptocurrency. And this lumping together is not just held to the average adopter but includes many brilliant household names such as Peter Schiff and Elon Musk. This widespread conflation of cryptocurrency and fiat currency comes from two vital misunderstandings: a lack of an understanding of what exactly fiat is and a lack of understanding of value’s subjectivity.
By Robert Aro
The Fed’s balance sheet could easily be replaced with the phrase abracadabra; truly, there is little else in the world which works as magically as it does. Often cited, seldom understood, few seem to realize that as the balance sheet expands, so too does the power of this central bank at the expense of the entire nation.
By Joseph Dunsay
Scientists and health professionals are once again sticking their noses into other people’s business, and the business at hand is one that most people prefer to keep private. Those familiar with the research know that the gender role a person follows results from a combination of nurture and nature. The dynamic is complicated. Genetic variety translates to a range of influences on nature side even though some underlying biological parts of being male are nearly universal. On the nurture side, a person’s physical and social environment can influence how a person expresses gender identity.
On July 26, 1948, President Truman issued Executive Order 9981 abolishing discrimination “on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin” in the United States Armed Forces. This action eventually resulted in the desegregation of the United States military. Historians praise Truman for his foresight but generally ignore that state action that preceded and drove this change.
One of the challenges in looking at income and wealth data is getting a sense of how different demographic groups are affected.
It's relatively easy to find median income and wealth data over time for the entire population, for example. But then problems of interpretation immediately present themselves. For example, if the data is household data, what are we to make of things if the household compositions has changed over time?
Trump has made some cuts here and there. Unfortunately much of the savings from those cuts went straight to the military which is a massive vehicle for crony capitalism despite what some people want to believe. Additionally we hear rumblings of “infrastructure” deals in the works. Perhaps this is where Nancy Pelosi and President Trump come together. Hooray. More money spent. Government expanded yet more.
The Nordic model is far from socialist. Bernie Sanders has single-handedly brought the term “democratic socialism” into the contemporary American political lexicon and shaken millions of Millennials out of their apathy towards politics.
When people remember or discuss the address, they most often recall his warning against political parties, his admonition to avoid entangling foreign alliances, and his insistence that “religion and morality are indispensable supports” to political prosperity. But we often read right over an even more poignant warning in Washington’s address; a warning we failed to heed to our own detriment.
By Michael Maharrey
According to a study by the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, since 2001, America’s wars have cost $5.6 trillion. That equates to $23,000 per taxpayer. This is more than three times the Pentagon estimate – which still comes in at a staggeringly high $1.5 trillion.
Study author, Neta Crawford said the Pentagon’s failure to account for much of the cost of waging war accounts for the discrepancy between official numbers and the study.
“War costs are more than what we spend in any one year on what’s called the pointy end of the spear,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “There are all these other costs behind the spear, and there are consequences of using it, that we need to include.”
According to Newsweek, the study includes costs for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, along with support for allies in the battle against extremist groups, mostly eastern European countries such as Croatia, Georgia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. It also factors in a trillion dollars for the care of veterans who may have received injuries in the conflicts. But the study did not account for U.S. military assistance outside of these countries against ISIS, such as Tunisia, the Philippines or Egypt.
So, war has cost you even more than $23,000 over the last two decades.
I wonder how many people would support these military interventions if they had actually had to write a $1352.94 check every year for the last 17 years?
War is not only costly in financial terms. As James Madison put it, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.”
“War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
Read the rest at tenthamendmentcenter.com and thelibertarianinstitute.org.
Originally published August 27, 2018.
Michael Maharrey is the communications director for the Tenth Amendment Center. He also runs GodArchy.org, a site exploring the intersection of Christianity and politics. Michael is the author of the book, Our Last Hope: Rediscovering the Lost Path to Liberty. You can visit his personal website at MichaelMaharrey.com, like him on Facebook HERE and follow him on Twitter @MMaharrey10th.
By Lee Enochs
Recently America's Defense Department announced that it has suspended $300 million in funding to Pakistan over what it calls the government's failure to take action against terrorists.
This suspension of aid is part of President Trump's broader cessation of funding to Pakistan which the President announced this past January.
Trump and his administration believe Pakistan is not doing enough to curtail the terrorist activities of the Taliban and other extremist organizations that the Trump administration says are flourishing in Pakistan with the approval of its government.
"Due to a lack of Pakistani decisive actions in support of the South Asia Strategy," the $300 million was redirected to "other urgent priorities" before those funds were set to expire on September 30, U.S. Army spokesperson Lt. Col. Koné Faulkner told NPR.
While I personally commend President Trump for cutting off the gravy train from Pakistan, the subject of foreign aid in general should be called into question.
With the national debt now soaring over $21 trillion dollars, the United States cannot afford to continue to dole out endless cash payments to foreign governments.
Also, it is time for the Trump administration to pull America's military out of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and cease attempting to fulfill the NeoCon dream of promoting its vision of globalist nation building abroad.
While cutting Pakistan off from receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in American taxpayer generated money, we need to reconsider our entire approach to foreign aid and foreign interventionism.
Lee Enochs is a political writer and pundit who currently lives in Southern California. Lee’s limited government articles and Op-Ed’s have appeared in newspapers and magazines across the country. Lee is also the author of the book, “The Case for Rand Paul.”
