Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 523

Against Michelle Wu’s Anti-Market Real Estate Proposal

“If Chairman Wu were in power when Henry Ford was ruining the blacksmith, horse training and saddle making industries, she would have taxed the latter and subsidized the former. How about when computers took out the typewriter, carbon paper, and correction fluid (Wite-Out) industries?”

Madame Chairman Michelle Wu, Mayor of Boston, Massachusetts, has been supportive of offering a tax subsidy to landlords who convert their commercial real estate to residential units.

Why, pray tell, is she interfe...

Colorado Ruling Makes Trump a Frontrunner

Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 in part because the public hated his opponents more than him. Under the pall of the Russia probe he fell in polls for years. Then the probe fell apart, and Trump rose again. Heading into the week of the 2020 election, Trump’s approval rating was near his personal all-time high, approaching 45%.

But the frenetic months-long period that followed, between Election Night and the disaster of January 6th, dropped him down to 33%. The wounds were self-inflicted. ...

Substack’s Nazi Problem

Apparently, there’s a “Nazi problem” on Substack.

I wasn’t aware of this. And I spend a decent amount of time on the site. I publish there myself, and I follow a good number of writers there. I initially went because of the promise to allow free speech on topics that had been actively censored on other social-media platforms, and I have stayed because of that free speech, but also because of the quality of discourse there. It tends to be much more civil and thoughtful than on other platforms.

Bu...

America’s Stagflationary Mess

There can be no doubt that the US economy is struggling with a serious bout of stagflation (a period of high inflation rate and slow economic growth), and that’s notwithstanding the foul-ball GDP print for Q3 2023. Fully half of the reported 4.9% annualized real GDP gain was due to a huge inventory buildup (+1.32%), health care (+0.33%) and government spending (+0.79%). We’d suggest these items are neither stable from quarter to quarter nor the ingredients of what actually fuels rising living st...

The Fed’s Empire of Speculation and the Echoes of 1929

Speculation has its own expiration dynamics, and they don’t depend on us recognizing speculative excess for what it is. They will unravel the excesses regardless of what we think, hope or deny.

The Federal Reserve has so completely normalized speculative excess that these extremes are no longer even recognized as extremes. Rather, they are simply “the way the world works.” This Empire of Speculation is complex and plays out on multiple levels.

The primary mechanism is obvious to all: whenever th...

The Greatest Gift For All

My traditional Christmas column goes back to sometime in the 1990s when one of my occupations was being a newspaper columnist. It has been widely reprinted at home and abroad. Every year two or three readers write to educate me that religion is the source of wars and persecutions. These readers confuse religion with mankind’s abuse of institutions, religious or otherwise. The United States has democratic institutions and legal institutions to protect civil liberties. Nevertheless, we now have a ...

Bergoglio’s Approval of Blessings for Homosexual ‘Couples’ Shows He Is a Servant of Satan

When the devil tries to persuade us to sin, he emphasizes the supposed good of the evil action he wants us to do, while overshadowing the aspects that are necessarily contrary to God’s commandments. He does not say to us: Sin and offend the Lord who died for you on the Cross, because he knows that a normal person does not want evil in itself, but that he usually does evil under the appearance of good.

This strategy of deception invariably recurs. To induce a mother to have an abortion, Satan doe...

Believe It or Not

My, my, how the years pass by. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve written a Christmas piece for Takimag, but the years have passed in an eye blink. Recently I asked myself, why do bad things happen to good people? (Well, not very good people, but well-intentioned.) This question has occupied thinkers throughout the ages. People who do not believe in a good God should logically have no problem with the existence of evil. In my case, I very much believe in God, and it has served me well during a ve...

Free Banking: Myth and Reality

Surely, it is now apparent that central banks are guilty of mismanaging the economy. By slashing interest rates to zero and in some cases to an unnatural minus figure, then flooding financial systems with currency-equivalent credit conjured out of nothing followed by rapidly increasing interest rates in an attempt to stem the consequences, central banks have bankrupted themselves and much of their entire economies. 

Even though hapless economists and money managers are still in thrall to them, c...

Fake Pandemic Triggers Worldwide Economic and Social Collapse

The unspoken truth is that a non-existent pandemic has provided a pretext and a justification to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire planet into a spiral of mass unemployment, bankruptcy, extreme poverty and despair.

Destabilizing the social, political and economic structure of 190 sovereign countries cannot constitute  a “solution” to combating a novel coronavirus which mysteriously emerged in Wuhan, Hubei Province (PRC), in late December 2019.

That wa...