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Who’s Really Getting Punished?

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I find it interesting how President Obama intends to punish Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad for his purported use of chemical weapons against Syrian rebels. It provides a fascinating insight into the collectivist mindset. To punish Assad, Obama says that he will use his military to “degrade” Assad’s military. That inevitably means that Obama will bomb certain segments of Assad’s military, such as artillery or armor units. That means that inevitably there will be Syrian troops who are killed by Obama’s forces, but not necessarily the troops who participated in the alleged chemical attacks. They will be other troops who serve in Assad’s military forces. So, the way that Obama’s mind works, by killing and destroying a segment of Assad’s military Obama will be punishing Assad himself. It’s sort of like a bee hive — kill some of the drones and you hurt the queen and the hive. But keep in mind that every single one of those Syrian troops, most of whom are ...

We Must Not Be the World’s Policeman

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Even if everything Secretary of State John Kerry says about chemical weapons in Syria were true, the evidence would prove only that Bashar al-Assad committed crimes against civilians. It would not prove that the U.S. government has either the moral or legal authority to commit acts of war. These issues must be kept separate. We have reason to be skeptical of Kerry’s case — why did President Obama try to stop the UN inspection? — but if it were otherwise, the case for U.S. military intervention still would not have been made — even if authorized by Congress. No one appointed the United States the world’s policeman. The government’s founding document, the Constitution, does not and could not do so. Obama and Kerry have tried hard to invoke “national security” as grounds for bombing Syria, but no one believes Assad threatens Americans. He has made no such statements and taken no threatening actions. He is engulfed in ...

Gabriel Kolko Revisited, Part 1: Kolko at Home

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Part 1 | Part 2 An earlier generation of libertarians was interested in Gabriel Kolko, a historian of the Left. Who was he? Born in 1932 in Paterson, NJ, historian Gabriel Kolko studied at Kent State, the University of Wisconsin, and Harvard University (PhD: 1962). From 1970 until his retirement he taught history at York University in Toronto, where he remains Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus. In Wealth and Power in America (1962) he reflected on persistent poverty in the United States. Other works in American economic history followed. Thereafter, events moved Kolko increasingly into issues of war and peace. Gifted with a definite independence of thought, he was generally seen as part of the New Left. Kolko’s vision of American economic history overlapped with, but differed from, that of other New Left historians. William Appleman Williams, for example, divided American history into three ages: Mercantilism (1740-1828), Laissez Nous Faire (1819-1896), and Corporation Capitalism (1882 to present). By the early ...