Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 2156

Can America Ever Come Together Again?

If ex-CIA Director John Brennan did to Andrew Jackson what he did to Donald Trump, he would have lost a lot more than his security clearance.

He would have been challenged to a duel and shot.

“Trump’s … performance in Helsinki,” Brennan had said, “exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors.’ It was … treasonous.”

Why should the president not strip from a CIA director who calls him a traitor the honor and privilege of a security clearance? Or is a top-secret clearance an entitlement...

Cryptocurrency’s Real Problem

Vitalik Buterin, a powerhouse in crypto, the mastermind behind the Ethereum network, effectively denounced those obsessed with the price of crypto and its possibility for breeding derivative financial instruments, tweeting recently “I think there’s too much emphasis on BTC/ETH/whatever ETFs, and not enough emphasis on making it easier for people to buy $5 to $100 in cryptocurrency via cards at corner stores. The former is better for pumping price, but the latter is much better for actual adop...

Striking Back

There’s more than meets the eye to President Donald Trump’s decision to revoke the security clearances that ex-CIA Director John Brennan enjoyed as a courtesy customarily afforded former directors. The President’s move is the second major sign that Brennan is about to be hoisted on his own petard. It is one embroidered with rhetoric charging Trump with treason and, far more important, with documents now in the hands of congressional investigators showing Brennan’s ringleader role in the so-fa...

Colorado Is Going After Jack Phillips

Jack Phillips, the Christian baker who prevailed at the U.S. Supreme Court after declining to create a custom wedding cake for a gay couple, filed a lawsuit in federal court late Tuesday suing the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

Phillips and his attorneys at the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) say the Commission has revived its campaign against him following June’s high court decision, singling Masterpiece Cakeshop out for disparate treatment on the basis of their religious beliefs.

“The s...

Anything Is Nice

In October 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the executive mansion. This was an unprecedented move. No African-American had ever been asked to dine with the president, and while neither Roosevelt or his staff said much of the event, it was surely done in the spirit of reconciliation and Roosevelt’s desire to be “the people’s president.” Reaction to the visit was mixed. The pro-Republican press tended to support Roosevelt’s unexpected gesture while Demo...

Our ‘Prosperity’

Nowadays, trade and “prosperity” are dependent on currencies that are created out of thin air via borrowing or printing.

So here’s the story explaining why “free” trade and globalization create so much wonderful prosperity for all of us: I find a nation with cheap labor and no environmental laws anxious to give me cheap land and tax credits, so I move my factory from my high-cost, highly regulated nation to the low-cost nation, and keep all the profits I reap from the move for myself. Yea for...

Before Public Roads

American Roads Started as Private Businesses

Even the U.S. Department of Transportation has to admit, the first major U.S. roadways were not built by the government:

The privately built Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike Road was the first important turnpike and the first long-distance broken-stone and gravel surface built in America according to formal plans and specifications. The road’s construction marked the beginning of organized road improvement after the long period of economic confu...

An Argument

Google’s market power traces back to patents. Google has allegedly levered this economic power into politics by slanting its algorithms of search toward Hillary Clinton and away from Donald Trump. Google influences the presentation of political information. Among social media platforms, shadowbanning is another way to influence political discourse. A third way is the outright banning of platforms such as that of Alex Jones.

Reporter Allum Bokhari writes “Facebook claims to have boosted voter...

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

Sarah Jeong, a new member of the New York Times editorial board, came under fire from right-wing outlets recently for her Twitter history. On July 14, 2014, Jeong tweeted, “oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.” On November 28, 2014, she wrote, “Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.” And on December 23, 2014, she festively proclaimed, “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the su...

‘FDA Approval’

Charging the price of an expensive car for a garden-variety amino acid, one we eat every day.

A year ago, the Food and Drug Administration ( FDA) approved a “drug” called Endari to treat sickle cell disease, which afflicts about 100,000 Americans of African descent and around 25 million more outside the US. Price tag: $28,000 a year.

So what is Endari? Anything approved by the FDA legally becomes a “drug.” But some have noted this “drug” is just a higher dose of L-glutamine, a common amino ac...