Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 2243

The Latest Victim of Omnipotent Government

Twenty-three-month-old Alfie Evans, passed away in a British hospital on Saturday. While the official cause of death was a degenerative brain disease, Alfie may have been murdered by the British health system and the British high court. Doctors at the hospital treating Alfie decided to remove his life support, against the wishes of Alfie’s parents. The high court not only upheld the doctors’ authority to override the parents’ wishes, it refused to allow the parents to take Alfie abroad for tr...

Worse Than the Fall of Rome

I had a fellow on my latest podcast, released Sunday, who insists that the world population will crash 90-plus percent from the current 7.6 billion to 600 million by the end of this century. Jack Alpert heads an outfit called the Stanford Knowledge Integration Lab (SKIL) which he started at Stanford University in 1978 and now runs as a private research foundation. Alpert is primarily an engineer.

At 600 million, the living standard in the USA would be on a level with the post-Roman peasantry...

Is It Legal?

Ft Collins, CO – “Is it ‘Legal?’”

I’ve written about this subject before, but the question keeps coming up in classes.

Inevitably someone asks:

“When this or that is going on, and this or that circumstance is extant, can I shoot this guy?

Is it ‘legal?’”

Such questions are meaningless and mostly irrelevant!

When you are compelled to shoot immediately in order to save your life, you won’t be asking yourself such silly questions!

When confronting a deadly threat, and you have no other viable op...

The War on Cash

The Adam Smith Institute have recently published my report “Killing the Cash Cow: Why Andy Haldane is Wrong on Demonetisation” on Andy Haldane’s proposal (“How low can you go?”) to abolish cash. [Disclosure: Andy and I are old friends and I criticize him reluctantly.] I think Andy has made some marvelous contributions to the economic policy debate since the onset of the Global Financial Crisis, but this isn’t one of them. Going further, I believe that those who advocate or who are even willin...

The Silence of the Skripals

There has been no recent reporting on the Skripal case in which a British-Russian double agent and his daughter were poisoned in Salisbury, England. There even seem to be attempts to change the public record of the case.

The British government alleged that the Skripals were poisoned by Novichok, a deadly nerve agent, and blamed Russia for it. There are stiill many open questions to ask but the British media, otherwise not afraid of ‘door stepping’,  are curiously uninterested. We already note...

The End Approaches

Do you have the nagging sense that our empire is in decline?

If so, don’t be embarrassed by it. Historically speaking, we’re in very good company.  Far larger and longer-lived empires than ours have come and gone over the millennia.

This was hit home for me on a recent trip. I scored a major “dad win” by taking my youngest daughter, Grace, to England for her 18th birthday (we live in Massachusetts, USA).

All on her own, Grace developed an abiding love of mythology at a very young age: Greek,...

Fascism

Fascism is fundamentally about economics – not racism. It is when Big Business “partners” with Big Government (it’s no accident we hear that word routinely now) to steal money rather than earn it through the free exchange of goods and services.

Examples include Elon Musk and his Tesla electric car operation – but also GM and the mainline car companies, who are just as guilty of “partnering” with the government as Tesla to mulct the citizenry for their benefit – even if their product (unlike...

The Errors of Classical Liberalism

Hey, those aren’t my words…

Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, edited by Jörg Guido Hülsmann and Stephan Kinsella.

Jesús Huerta de Soto has offered his contribution, with a piece entitled “Classical Liberalism versus Anarcho-Capitalism.”  In it, he captures one aspect of the error in classical liberalism very well and hints at – but doesn’t drive home – other, perhaps more important, considerations.

In this first decade of the twenty-first century, liberal...

Peace Breaks-Out in Korea!

We have been so conditioned by a lying media and political class to distrust everything we see that even now, the image of Kim Jong-Un walking with confidence alone across the border between the two Koreas to meet his counterpart from the South President Moon Jae-in creates more confusion than it does relief.

While the Twitterati are exploding with praise for President Trump, the reality is that the statesman here is Kim.  Trump deserves credit, a lot of credit, and the South Korean governmen...

False Flag Operations

False Flag is a concept that goes back centuries. It was considered to be a legitimate ploy by the Greeks and Romans, where a military force would pretend to be friendly to get close to an enemy before dropping the pretense and raising its banners to reveal its own affiliation just before launching an attack. In the sea battles of the eighteenth century among Spain, France and Britain hoisting an enemy flag instead of one’s own to confuse the opponent was considered to be a legitimate ruse de...