Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 2152

The No Fly License

The Orwellian spin cycle is picking up speed.

From “parking services” – i.e., the government worker who puts parking tickets under your car’s windshield wiper – to the “shared responsibility payments” being extorted by the IRS on behalf of the health insurance mafia as punishment for declining to be mulcted by the insurance mafia – to the “upgraded” driver’s licenses being pushed on people, without which you’ll be degraded by not only being  denied permission to leave the country, you’ll be...

Why Is Inequality Wrong?

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl
Princeton University Press, 2018
xii + 337 pages

Radical Markets has at least one virtue. The book contains many unusual proposals, and I propose to concentrate on one of the strangest of these. Eric Posner, a legal scholar, and Glen Weyl, a principal researcher at Microsoft, call for speculative boldness, and they have given us that; but sound argument is another matter.

The authors agree w...

Back in Saigon

Trinh Cong Son, the great song writer, poet and soul of Saigon, said that he got his heart and mind revving each morning by watching frantic life unfurling all around him, while sitting in a sidewalk cafe. Lesser Vietnamese do exactly the same, however, for to be among one’s own kind is practically an hourly necessity here. The second they’re free to do so, most head straight for the nearest café, eatery or beer joint, which is, still, most likely on the sidewalk, or open to it.

At the next t...

America is Addicted

The best way to think about the role of sanctions in American foreign policy is to regard it as an addiction.

Think about it. The inability to change the behavior of even the most rinky-dink nations must be enormously frustrating to those at the helm of the world’s lone superpower. This leads, not surprisingly, to the search for ways to assuage this sense of failure and reassure Americans of their perpetual global dominance. Sanctions fit the bill perfectly. First, because they can be sold as...

Eyewitness to the Soviet Invasion

Half a century ago today, I watched as Soviet tanks rolled into my native Czechoslovakia to suppress the slight relaxing of the odious repression that was necessary to maintain a purported socialist paradise. “Prague Spring,” as the loosening of tyranny was called, ended before the summer was over.

The seeds of the Prague Spring 1968 sprouted at the Expo67 in Montreal. The Czech Pavilion was exquisite with long lines the entire time of the fair.  The Czech artists, engineers and builders brou...

The Panic Among the Elites

As I talked about on Friday’s livestream, the panic among the elites is palpable and their actions to try and hold back the popular repudiation of their control systems are increasingly erratic and desperate.

It is a reflection of Donald Trump’s own style in some respects, who is using this to sow chaos domestically while pursuing an incomprehensible foreign policy, which, at this point seems to serve no one in particular.

The U.S. empire is going through its death throes.  People like John B...

The Trump Administration and Iran

Like President Reagan, President Trump seems to be anti-Iranian. But perhaps this is only in appearance. While the former drew up a secret alliance with Imam Khomeini, the latter may be dealing with ex-President Ahmadinejad in the same way. This is Thierry Meyssan’s heterodox theory.

On 16 August 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the creation of the « Iran Action Group » tasked with coordinating US policies after their withdrawal from the 5+1 nuclear agreement (Joint Comprehensiv...

Genocide of the Greek Nation

The political and media coverup of the genocide of the Greek Nation began yesterday (August 20) with European Union and other political statements announcing that the Greek Crisis is over. What they mean is that Greece is over, dead, and done with. It has been exploited to the limit, and the carcas has been thrown to the dogs.

350,000 Greeks, mainly the young and professionals, have fled dead Greece. The birth rate is far below the rate necessary to sustain the remaining population. The auste...

Battlefield America

“A government which will turn its tanks upon its people, for any reason, is a government with a taste of blood and a thirst for power and must either be smartly rebuked, or blindly obeyed in deadly fear.”—John Salter

Police in a small Georgia town tasered a 5-foot-2, 87-year-old woman who was using a kitchen knife to cut dandelions for use in a recipe. Police claim they had no choice but to taser the old woman, who does not speak English but was smiling at police to indicate she was friendly,...

The Individual, Society, and the State

Since I have been associated several times with the position ‘there are only individuals,’ I begin with a confession: No, this is not my position, I have also never and nowhere represented it. Only someone who has never read a word of mine, and instead projects and claims a supposedly classical liberal or libertarian position as being mine, can associate me with it.

That the whole is more than the sum of its parts is a principle of Gestalt psychology to which I feel bound. But this principle...