Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 2370

The Unstated Logic of Every Every Minimum-Wage Law

A deputy sheriff pays a visit to a small business. He confronts the owner.

DS: I see you got a “help wanted” sign in your window.

Owner: That is correct.

DS: How much is the starting wage?

Owner: The federal minimum wage.

DS: We got a local minimum wage of $15 an hour.

Time to buy old US gold coins

Owner: I cannot afford that much.

DS: That don’t cut it with me, boy. The city government says you got to pay a living wage.

Owner: I already do. All of my employees are alive.

DS: You trying to ma...

Arrest the Usual Princes!

What’s going on in Saudi Arabia?  Over 200 bigwigs detained and billions of ‘illegal profits’ of some $800 billion confiscated.

The kingdom is in an uproar.  The Saudi regime of King Salman and his ambitious 32-year old son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,  claim it was all part of an ‘anti-corruption’ drive that has Washington’s full backing.

Utter nonsense.  I’ve done business in Saudi Arabia since 1976 and can attest that the entire kingdom with its thousands of pampered princes and prin...

What You’re Not Being Told

According to the Washington Post’s Fareed Zakaria, in order to understand how traditionally secular Muslim countries became hubs of radicalization in recent years, you need just one example: Saudi Arabia. Zakaria explains:

“In Southeast Asia, almost all observers whom I have spoken with believe that there is another crucial cause [behind the ‘cancer’ of Islamic extremism] – exported money and ideology from the Middle East, chiefly Saudi Arabia. A Singaporean official told me, ‘Travel around A...

Bundy Trial Delayed Again

The trial of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his two sons has again been delayed, this time for at least a week, after it was revealed that the FBI had a camera pointed at the Bundy Ranch.

U.S District Judge Gloria Navarro says that during the delay, she’ll consider whether the defendants should still be detained, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The trial of Cliven Bundy, his two sons Ryan and Ammon, and a fourth defendant, Ryan Payne, was set to begin at the beginning of October,...

Is Prepping Really Useless?

Many people misconceive preppers and it’s hard to blame most of them, considering shows like Doomsday Preppers are so popular. But, when a writer misconceives preppers, and, worse, uses a single prepper convention to attempt to diagnose a whole country, well, it’s harder to excuse.

Stephen Marche, novelist and writer for Esquire, attended this year’s Ohio Preppers and Survivalist Summit held in Bowling Green, Ohio.  Then he wrote a piece for the Guardian entitled: “America’s midlife crisis: l...

Dangerous Territory

Luther and His Progeny: 500 Years of Protestantism and Its Consequences for Church, State, and Society, edited by John C. Rao

This will be interesting….

With this post, I begin my exploration of this book edited by Rao.  The title is self-explanatory. My intent is not to get into the theology, but to examine the impact on society and what this meant (and means) for the growth of the state.

Of course, I recognize that I cannot publicly conduct this examination without theological blowback; do...

Real Motive Behind Saudi Purge Emerges

From the very beginning, there was something off about Sunday’s unprecedented countercoup purge unleashed by Mohammad bin Salman on alleged political enemies, including some of Saudi Arabia’s richest and most powerful royals and government officials: it was just too brazen to be a simple “power consolidation” move; in fact most commentators were shocked by the sheer audacity, with one question outstanding: why take such a huge gamble? After all, there was little chatter of an imminent coup th...

Why I Love Libertarian Halloween

Ghosties and ghoulies, three-leggedy beasties, and things that go bump in the night.

–    From old Scottish poem

For almost my entire life, my favorite holiday has been Halloween, a preference having nothing to do with “trick-or-treating” nor dressing up in costumes. What has long attracted me to the All Saints’ Eve festivities is the fact that my participation was without parental supervision. Kids trick-or-treated with their friends or, as seen in the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis, older...

Ignorance Versus Stupidity

One of the most challenging and important jobs for an economics professor is to teach students how little we know and can possibly know. My longtime friend and colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell says, “It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” Nobel laureate Friedrich August von Hayek admonished, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” The fact that we have gross ignorance a...

The ‘Lost Cause’ of Bolshevism

A century ago this week, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia ushered in a century of mass murder, starvation, summary execution of millions of people, destruction of ancient social institutions, wars, a vast network of death camps, and the evisceration of liberty, at one time, of a third of the planet.

According to the New York Times, we should be mourning the passage of this era and all of its promises of a better life for all.

You read that correctly.

For the past few months, leading up to t...