Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 2430

Are Any of Them Libertarian?

It’s back to school time.

Time then to answer an important question. Vouchers, charter schools, education saving accounts, tuition tax deductions, and tuition tax credits: Are any of them libertarian?

Vouchers are continually touted by some libertarians as a way for parents to send children to the school of their choice instead of a dangerous and destructive public school. Government at some level provides a voucher worth a certain amount that parents can use to pay all or part of their child...

The Weaponization of History and Journalism

In the United States, facts, an important element of truth, are not important. They are not important in the media, politics, universities, historical explanations, or the courtroom. Non-factual explanations of the collapse of three World Trade Center buildings are served up as the official explanation. Facts have been politicized, emotionalized, weaponized and simply ignored. As David Irving has shown, Anglo-American histories of World War 2 are, for the most part, feel-good histories, as ar...

Life Is Still Beautiful in Rural France

For the price of a Motel 6, Jonathan Revusky and I have three floors in Florensac, a village of 5,000 in southern France. This house is older than the USA, for sure, with raw wooden beams in the ceilings, stone floors, twisting stairs, odd angled walls, and an entrance to the bathroom so low, the owner had to pad the top casing, lest her guests be knocked out cold.

A small couch has a café crème floral design on a faded indigo background. Plopped on top are three cushions of red, red and Prus...

It’s Can Kicking Time

You have to hand it to the Donald. He speaks his mind. This week he dropped an unwelcome stink bomb on Capitol Hill during his Phoenix rant Tuesday night. If Mexico won’t pay for my wall, he seemed to say, then Congress will—-even if I have to shut down the Imperial City to extract the first $1.6 billion of seed money:

“We’re going to get our wall,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Phoenix. “If we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall.”

The Mexican Wall waste an estimated $2...

Your Cellphone, Please

Bad enough that we are required by law to present our “papers” – government-issued ID cards, egregiously mislabelled as driver’s licenses – whenever a government bullyboy so demands. Just as in the former East Germany, just as in the former Soviet Union – and in another place whose name it’s hardly necessary to mention.

But in those places – in those times – tyranny was limited somewhat by technology.

In our time, the technology available to tyranny is almost limitless – and the laws which us...

Jackson Hole

The Jackson Hole gathering of central bankers and other economics big shots is on again. They all still like themselves very much. Apart from a pesky inflation problem that none of them can get a grip on, they publicly maintain that they’re doing great, and they’re saving the planet (doing God’s work is already taken).

But the inflation problem lies in the fact that they don’t know what inflation is, and they’re just as knowledgeable when it comes to all other issues. They get sent tons of nu...

Don’t Be Bamboozled Over Fascism

Dear Class of 2021:

As you begin your college career you will inevitably become confused about the subject of “fascism,” which has been in the news quite a bit recently.  On the one hand, you will be taught that there is nothing more evil, more insidious, more despicable than fascism and fascists.  You might even be invited to become a member of “antifa,” the violent criminal gang that sets buildings and cars on fire, clubs people with baseball bats, sprays mace in their faces, throws cinder...

There Is a Conspiracy

In the United States “conspiracy theory” is the name given to explanations that differ from those that serve the ruling oligarchy, the establishment or whatever we want to call those who set and control the agendas and the explanations that support the agendas.

The explanations imposed on us by the ruling class are themselves conspiracy theories. Moreover, they are conspiracy theories designed to hide the real conspiracy that our rulers are operating.

For example, the official explanation of...

The Blockchain Is a Brilliant and Important Invention

Last month Alt-Market.com founder Brandon Smith warned that Bitcoin may not be all that it’s cracked up to be in terms of its purported anonymity:

For years, one of the major original selling points of bitcoin was that it was “anonymous.” It always surprised me that so many people in the liberty movement bought into this scam. Surely after the revelations exposed by Edward Snowden and organizations like Wikileaks, it is utterly foolish to believe that anything in the digital world is truly “a...

Prove You’re Not a Bigot

“Who are you?”

– The Caterpillar, in Lewis Carroll’s, Alice in Wonderland

As the American franchise of Western Civilization tumbles into the dust-bin of history, I sometimes wonder whether – were it possible – the ghosts of Jefferson, Franklin, Sam Adams, and other “Founding Fathers,” might be willing to engage in a conversation over what they helped to create. There has probably been no comparable group of such intelligent, well-educated, creative, prescient minds that has tried to design t...