Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 236

Environmentalism and the Los Angeles Fires

The fires in Los Angeles have been the most devastating in the city’s history. A full account of the causes of the conflagration can’t be attempted here, but in this week’s column, I’d like to talk about the responsibility of environmentalism for what happened.

By “environmentalism,” I mean a movement that is hostile to human beings, their private homes, and to industrial growth. Some of its advocates want to do away with people altogether. Instead, environmentalists want to preserve the natural...

Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game — The Bank of North Dakota Model

North Dakota is staunchly conservative, having voted Republican in every presidential election since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. So how is it that the state boasts the only state-owned bank in the nation? Has it secretly gone socialist?

No. The Bank of North Dakota (BND) operates on the same principles as any capitalist bank, except that its profits and benefits serve the North Dakota public rather than private investors and executives. The BND provides a unique, innovative model, in which public ow...

Has the Storm Arrived?

In my last column, I wrote about the new Independence Day, Jan. 20. This is when a corrupt and tyrannical administration exits Washington, D.C., for Delaware beaches or unwatchable and dying left-wing cable news shows.

Such a housecleaning is long overdue. Thanks to former (that has a nice ring to it) President Joe Biden, America has 10-15 million new illegal aliens, mostly young men of military age, from virtually every country across the globe.

Biden upped the national debt to over $36 trillio...

Extremes Become More Extreme, Then Revert to the Mean

A fatal bout of runaway instability becomes inevitable when “extraordinary emergency measures” become permanently essential to keep the bubbles from popping.

A funny thing happens as policies intended to fill financial potholes transition from “temporary emergency measures” to “we need to keep doing this to stabilize the status quo”: extremes get more extreme as what were once viewed as extraordinary policy measures required to keep the rickety system from collapsing become the “New Normal.”

Of ...

Another Door Opens

If past is prologue, Mr. Trump lacks the acumen to carry out his ambitious agenda. The first problem is management style. In his first term, Mr. Trump was a poor administrator because of his mercurial, polarizing style and a general indifference to facts and the hard work of governance. — Jack Goldsmith, The New York Times

Thus spake one Shawn McCreesh of The New York Times, America’s all-wise, all-knowing font of everlasting rectitude. But to answer his question, why blah blah: Donald Trump is ...

Can Trump Fix Our Broken Foreign Policy?

By the time most of you read this column, we will have a new US President. Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated for his second term today at 11:30 AM, Eastern time, and many Americans are hopeful that the disastrous foreign policy of the past four years under Biden will be improved. There is good news and bad news.

First the good news. It is no surprise that Trump’s appointees to foreign policy and national security positions are to the person very hawkish on China. However Trump, as he often doe...

Make America Whole Again

Sometimes the universe laughs at us. Other times, in the words of famed psychologist Carl Jung, it winks.

Jung coined the term “synchronicity” in the 1950s to describe seemingly unrelated events that coincide in improbable ways, yet hold some significance in our lives. Seeing a number repeatedly, running into an old friend unexpectedly, hearing a song you were singing when you turn on the radio—these are all examples of what Jung would describe as “winks from the cosmos.” Today, as we honor the ...

Dealing With the Bad Wolf

Americans have completed their long goodbye to Joe Biden.  After a life spent cheerleading and facilitating wars, interventions, conflict and corruption, Biden blew through money that wasn’t there, declared a constitutional amendment that doesn’t exist, and took credit for a joint Israel/Hamas interim pause in the wholesale slaughter in Gaza that could and should have been approved 13 months ago, but for the fact that Biden, Blinken and Sullivan wished to continue that slaughter.

Over a year ago...

The Sky Is Falling

Governments are in the flimflam business.

Pared down to the bare essentials, governments can be very useful in passing and enforcing a small number of very basic laws. These laws should be limited to policing those who would seek to aggress against others, or their property. Governments may also have a value in providing protection from invasion – organizing an army of able-bodied people to address this collective problem, if and when it occurs.

And that’s about it. Beyond that, the private sect...

For Inauguration Day, Open Federal Files and Give Truth a Chance

Federal agencies classify trillions of pages of documents each year—enough secrets to fill 20 million filing cabinets. Washington politicians and federal agencies routinely blindfold American citizens on the most important and most reckless decisions the government takes. As President Joe Biden told Special Counsel Robert Hur in late 2022, “We over-classify everything…. And 99.9% of it has nothing to do with anything I couldn’t pick up and read out loud to the public.”

The change in presidential...