Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 95

It Was Never About Hostages. It Was Never About Hamas.

Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that freeing the Israeli hostages in Gaza was not his top priority, suggesting instead that defeating Hamas should take precedence over a hostage deal.

“We have many objectives, many goals in this war,” Netanyahu said. “We want to bring back all of our hostages. That is a very important goal. In war, there is a supreme objective. And that supreme objective is victory over our enemies. And that is what we will achieve.”

Nothing the prime minister said here is t...

The Enemy of My Enemy

One of the most effective thought-terminating clichés is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” It is particularly effective because it works on both people who are, let’s say, not extraordinarily intelligent, and on more intelligent people, people who you wouldn’t expect to fall for such simplistic tricks.

It is especially effective in hyper-polarized sociocultural environments, like the one we’re in currently, where people feel like they need to be on one or the other side of whatever.

If you’r...

The Magic Trick

In 1791, the first Secretary of the Treasury of the US, Alexander Hamilton, convinced then-new president George Washington to create a central bank for the country. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson opposed the idea, as he felt that it would lead to speculation, financial manipulation, and corruption. He was correct, and in 1811, its charter was not renewed by Congress.

Then, the US got itself into economic trouble over the War of 1812 and needed money. In 1816, a Second Bank of the United Sta...

Understanding The Importance of Justice

To many economists, questions of justice are not relevant to the study of free markets. In most situations where people try to invoke arguments about “justice,” they are concerned with distributive justice. Their aim is to address questions of wealth distribution and income inequality. They argue that “social justice” requires the state to redistribute wealth.

In this context, Friedrich A. Hayek depicted “social justice” as a meaningless slogan—a mantra wielded by political activists to avoid ha...

Spain’s Blackout Shows the Regime Can’t Be Bothered With Affordable, Reliable Power

There’s a lot of conflicting information about the immediate cause of the recent mega-blackouts in Spain and Portugal. The governments in those countries claim the causes are “still unclear” after the largest blackouts in history. Given the rather spotty record of truth-telling by national governments, I suspect the causes of the blackouts are clear to those who are in a position to know.

What we on the outside do know, though, is that Spain and Portugal, like most European states, have spent ye...

Who Are Democrats Blaming for Their Unpopularity?

Since their decisive losses across the board in the 2024 elections, the Democratic Party has been searching for a way forward and a way to fix its growing unpopularity.

The party has been dogged by continued negative polling figures, with an ABC News-Washington Post-Ipsos poll released last month showing 69% of people believe the Democratic Party is out of touch with most people’s concerns.

An NBC News Stay Tuned Poll released last month showed that when asked which party fights for people like ...

Pandemic & War Needed for Financial Reset?

I remember reading an October 2019 issue of Forbes about how Italy was already insolvent and would never get out of its debt trap.

A debt trap occurs when economic growth and population demographics—not enough young people to take care of retired people—become grossly insufficient to finance a society’s growing debt (private and public).

At the time I wondered how international banking institutions would deal with Italy’s pending debt crisis. Then along came COVID-19, which seemed to justify a f...

Trump Is Destroying America, but He Is Making Israel Great

Presidents, like corporate CEOs and everyone else, have a limited span of control.  They can’t know everything or focus on everything.  Most presidential decisions are just acceptances of subordinate’s decisions. I know it.  I have been there.  I have seen it, both the President of the United States and the CEOs and boards of corporations are dependent on information that comes from below. And often in the case of government the information from below is from outside.

We are now witnessing this ...

McCarthyism – Political Payback

Last week I published a long article exploring the history of Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, whose anti-Communist crusade dominated our politics of the early 1950s. His activities gave rise to “McCarthyism” as a term of abuse and despite the passage of three generations, that expression still seems so widely used today that it has its own 14,000 word Wikipedia article.

In February 1950 McCarthy received huge media attention when he began giving public speeches denouncing the alleged dangers ...

Tariff and Spend

President Trump has proposed using the revenue from his increased tariffs to lower or even eliminate income taxes — with a priority on removing Americans making less than 200,000 dollars a year from the tax rolls. Exempting more Americans from income taxes — and lowering taxes on other Americans— is certainly a worthwhile endeavor. However, replacing income taxes with tariffs may have negative consequences for the very Americans President Trump wants to help.

Replacing with tariffs what the gove...