Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 2142

The Forever War

Shop all books by Pat Buchanan [image error]

“It is time for this war in Afghanistan to end,” said Gen. John Nicholson in Kabul on his retirement Sunday after a fourth tour of duty and 31 months as commander of U.S. and NATO forces.

Labor Day brought news that another U.S. serviceman had been killed in an insider attack by an Afghan soldier.

Why do we continue to fight in Afghanistan?

“We continue to fight simply because we are there,” said retired Gen. Karl Eikenberry who preceded Gen. Nicholson.

“Absent...

Now We Know

So now we know what ‘the resistance’ really is. It’s the establishment. It’s the old political order. It’s that late 20th-century political set, those out-of-touch managerial elites, who still cannot believe the electorate rejected them. That is the take-home message of the bizarre political spectacle that was the burial of John McCain, where this neocon in life has been transformed into a resistance leader in death: that while the anti-Trump movement might doll itself up as rebellious, and e...

Productivity

The only possible output of this system is extortion as a way of life.

As the accompanying chart shows, productivity in the U.S. has been declining since the early 2000s. This trend mystifies economists, as the tremendous investments in software, robotics, networks and mobile computing would be expected to boost productivity, as these tools enable every individual who knows how to use them to produce more value.

One theory holds that the workforce has not yet learned how to use these tools,...

Gstaad Rot

GSTAAD—The pastoral heaven of this place can get very dull during the summer months. Green hillsides, neat farmsteads, pleasing breezes, and meadows bright with wildflowers amid great white-capped mountain peaks are no substitute for pretty women or intellectual company. This is the bad news. The good is that the nouveaux riches and terribly vulgar do not appear during the summer, they’re too busy sweating it out in the South of France or in Marbella. Alas, they show up during the winter mont...

Healing Libertarian Rifts

Tom Woods and Michael Malice discuss “Healing Libertarian Rifts.”  They are reviewing an earlier discussion hosted by Malice between Woods and Matt Welch.

There is discussion between Woods and Malice about this rift – let’s say the rift is between the Mises / Rothbard (meaning Rockwell) wing and the Cato / Reason (meaning Koch, although I think they recently disavowed this label) wing.  Woods asks “if we can resolve it, that’s valuable.”

Malice offers a key comment at about the 8:50 minute ma...

Unfit to a T

Sitting in two airports last week, in Paris and Riga, it suddenly occurred to me that I had not seen a single person who was smartly, let alone elegantly, dressed (I do not exclude myself from this stricture; I have never been elegant in my life). Indeed, if there is one thing that unites mankind today it is casual slobbery in dress.

This is rather odd, considering that so many people seem to spend a lot of their spare time shopping for clothes. The fact is, though, that however much time the...

When ‘Tokyo Rose’ Ran for President

Although the memory has faded in recent years, during much of the second half of the twentieth century the name “Tokyo Rose” ranked very high in our popular consciousness, probably second only to “Benedict Arnold” as a byword for American treachery during wartime. The story of Iva Ikuko Toguri, the young Japanese-American woman who spent her wartime years broadcasting popular music laced with enemy propaganda to our suffering troops in the Pacific Theater was well known to everyone, and her t...

The Dumbest Thing Ever Said about Trade

Our Country was built on Tariffs, and Tariffs are now leading us to great new Trade Deals – as opposed to the horrible and unfair Trade Deals that I inherited as your President. Other Countries should not be allowed to come in and steal the wealth of our great U.S.A. No longer! ~ President Donald Trump

President Trump has said some dumb things. And when it comes to the subject of trade, he has said some really dumb things:

You only have to look at our trade deficit to see that we are being ta...

McCain’s Legacy in Ukraine

Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean John McCain is done killing people he hated.  Since McCain was a hate-filled troll whose life was spent dodging responsibility for his actions it follows that he worked to his dying breath to cover up his crimes and the crimes of his compatriots.

And the conflict in Ukraine is one of those crimes.  Over the weekend Donetsk People’s Republic leader Alexander Zakharchenko was assassinated in Donestk.  Want to get an idea of just how insanely biased U.S. repor...

Too Large, Too Corrupt, Too Reckless

And so the sun seems to stand still this last day before the resumption of business-as-usual, and whatever remains of labor in this sclerotic republic takes its ease in the ominous late summer heat, and the people across this land marinate in anxious uncertainty. What can be done?

Some kind of epic national restructuring is in the works. It will either happen consciously and deliberately or it will be forced on us by circumstance. One side wants to magically reenact the 1950s; the other wants...