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Russia: The Old-New Official Enemy

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It is impossible to overstate the stakes involved in the latest controversy over Russia. They involve trillions of dollars in warfare largess to the tens of thousands of bureaucratic warfare-state parasites who are sucking the lifeblood out of the American people. Ever since the advent of the U.S. national-security state after World War II, America has needed official enemies, especially ones that induce fear, terror, and panic within the American citizenry. When people are fearful, terrified, and panicked, they are much more willing, even eager, to have government officials do whatever is necessary to keep them safe and secure. It is during such times that liberty is at greatest risk because of the propensity of government to assume emergency powers and the proclivity of the citizenry to let them have them. That’s what the Cold War was all about. The official enemies were communism and the Soviet Union, which was an alliance of nations that had Russia at its center. U.S. ...

Don’t Forget JFK’s Fight with the CIA

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Weighing in against President-Elect Donald Trump in his disagreement with the CIA over alleged Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election, the Wall Street Journal’s Shane Harris writes, “Donald Trump has picked a fight with the Central Intelligence Agency over Russian hacking of American elections, an unprecedented move for an incoming president.” (Emphasis added.) The likely reason that Harris employed the term “incoming” is that it enables him to avoid addressing the big elephant in the room — President Kennedy and his fight — actually his war — against not only the CIA but also another major component of the national-security state — the military establishment. Kennedy came into office as a standard cold warrior. That is, like most Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, he had bought into the notion that had been inculcated into the American people since the end of World War II — that America’s wartime partner and ally, the Soviet Union (i.e., Russia), was coming to ...

Power to the People: John Lennon’s Legacy Lives On

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“You gotta remember, establishment, it’s just a name for evil. The monster doesn’t care whether it kills all the students or whether there’s a revolution. It’s not thinking logically, it’s out of control.” — John Lennon (1969) Militant nonviolent resistance works. Peaceful, prolonged protests work. Mass movements with huge numbers of participants work. Yes, America, it is possible to use occupations and civil disobedience to oppose government policies, counter injustice and bring about change outside the confines of the ballot box. It has been done before. It is being done now. It can be done again. For example, in May of 1932, more than 43,000 people, dubbed the Bonus Army—World War I veterans and their families—marched on Washington. Out of work, destitute and with families to feed, more than 10,000 veterans set up tent cities in the nation's capital and refused to leave until the government agreed to pay the bonuses they had been promised as a reward for their services. The Senate voted ...

Economic Ideas: Adam Ferguson and Society as a Spontaneous Order

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One of the most cherished misunderstandings, if not delusions, of the social engineer – the individual who would presume to attempt to remake society through conscious and planned design – is the confident belief that he (and those like him) can ever know enough to successfully remold mankind and human institutions. An appreciation of how limited is our individual knowledge ...

Economic Ideas: Bernard Mandeville and the Social Betterment Arising from Private Vices

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One of the major turning points in social and economic understanding emerged in the 1700s with the theory of social order without human design. Before the eighteenth century, most social theory presumed or took as a working assumption that human society had its origin and sustainability in the creation of social institutions through either “divine” intervention, or by human ...