Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 2427

The Fed’s Political Power

The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve Peter Conti-Brown Princeton University Press, 2016xiv + 347 pages .

Peter Conti-Brown, a legal historian who teaches at the Wharton School, would sharply dissent from Ron Paul’s wish to End the Fed. He never cites Mises or Rothbard, and the only Austrian work that he mentions, hidden away in an endnote, is Vera Smith’s The Rationale of Central Banking and the Free Banking Alternative. Nevertheless, Austrians will find Conti-Brown’s...

Lost Causes on the Left

“Everything meaningful that’s ever happened in the world, any change, any improvement comes about because of optimism. The pessimists don’t get anything done. They’re naysayers. You have to see the potential for change. And you’ve got to see it not in terms of the moment but in terms of the long view, the long haul.” — Mel Leventhal

Mel Leventhal was involved in the civil rights movement in the deep South in the mid-1960’s. He was part of Martin Luther King’s inner circle, but because he was...

The US Deliberately Created a Police State

Doug Casey, Jeff Thomas, and Nick Giambruno recently discussed a critical topic—the rise of a police state in the former “free” world.

Nick Giambruno: In my experience, the US has some of the most aggressive police in the world. I first noticed this when I started traveling many years ago.

I’ve also noticed that law-abiding citizens are more likely to encounter the police in the US. Both of these trends are accelerating.

What happened to “the boys in blue”—the friendly cop on the beat that ev...

US Airstrikes Wipe Out Entire Families

The United States is killing entire families in Raqqa, Syria, and enabling Saudi Arabia to do the same in Yemen.

In June of this year, the U.S. led a campaign to retake the city of Raqqa from ISIS fighters while the Russian and Syrian militaries were also attempting to do the same thing. In the first week of fighting, U.N. war crimes investigators warned that the U.S. had already killed 300 civilians from air strikes alone in that seven day period.

Rather than heed that warning, the U.S. has...

Freud the Con Man

Freud said that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious—provided, of course, that the traffic was directed by him. His work has always seemed to me more like soothsaying than science, which perhaps explains its popularity in the 20th century, with its need for pagan mystics masquerading as rationalists. Neither the plausibility nor the persuasiveness of Freud’s speculations accounts for his influence on so many intelligent and well-educated people for so long; rather it was the convolut...

YouTube Economically Censors

Former US Congressman Ron Paul has joined a growing list of independent political journalists and commentators who’re being economically punished by YouTube despite producing videos that routinely receive hundreds of thousands of views.

In a tweet published Saturday, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange tweeted a screenshot of Paul’s “Liberty Report” page showing that his videos had been labeled “not suitable” for all advertisers by YouTube’s content arbiters.

YouTube economically censors former...

Why Google Made the NSA

Read Part I

Mass surveillance is about control. It’s promulgators may well claim, and even believe, that it is about control for the greater good, a control that is needed to keep a cap on disorder, to be fully vigilant to the next threat. But in a context of rampant political corruption, widening economic inequalities, and escalating resource stress due to climate change and energy volatility, mass surveillance can become a tool of power to merely perpetuate itself, at the public’s expense.

...

Lost Causes on the Right

I came to political awareness in the height of the anti-Communist movement in 1956.

I was brought into the conservative movement at a lecture by the Australian anti-Communist physician Fred Schwarz. I have told my story in a collection of reminiscences by 82 libertarians, I Chose Liberty. You can read it here (pages 239ff.).

Historians usually date the rise of the conservative political movement in the United States with the 1948 hearings that were triggered by Whittaker Chambers’ accusation...

A Philosopher of Crisis

Review of Jeffrey C. Herndon, Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Order (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 216 pp. $39.95.

Many people, I suspect, find themselves in this position. They have heard that Eric Voegelin is a great philosopher of history, much esteemed by such eminent conservatives as Willmoore Kendall, Russell Kirk, and Mel Bradford, and that he and Leo Strauss rank as the most influential political theorists of the contemporary American Right.1 They eager...

Another Way Uncle Costs Us

The fuel delivery system in a new car costs more than the entire engine used to.

And still does – if you’re lucky enough to own a V8-powered American car or truck built before the mid-1990s. If you do, you can usually buy a brand-new/manufacturer-warranted crate engine for about $2,000.

Compare that with the cost of a modern car engine’s direct-injection fuel delivery system – resorted to as a way to eke out another 2-3 MPGs vs. port fuel injection.

You don’t want to know . . .

If you ever ha...