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Government central planners at the Federal Reserve, and everywhere else, all suffer from “physics envy.” They seek to model the un-modelable. Ron Paul discusses why the central planners always have, and always will, fail spectacularly.
Former UK Ambassador to Syria Peter Ford joins today's Liberty Report to share his vast experience in the region. He has notably deviated from the government/media narrative about the alleged Assad gas attack. How likely is it that Assad used gas? Why are inspectors being prevented from visiting the site? How is the "official narrative" holding up to increasing scrutiny?
The longest war in US history keeps going on and on. No end in sight. Not even an end-goal in sight. How did we get to this point? Scott Horton, author of Fool's Errand - Time to End the War in Afghanistan, joins today's Liberty Report in-studio to discuss this and the many other wars of the US empire.
Plans for an all-Arab occupying force in northeast Syria? New war authorization plans? Trying to maintain control of the media narrative? Trying to disengage? It seems Washington doesn't have a real Syria policy. Is grasping at straws a wise way to conduct foreign affairs? How about a real policy?
By Ron Paul
Over the weekend, President Trump celebrated firing more than 100 missiles into Syria by Tweeting, “Mission Accomplished!” They say if you cannot learn from history you are condemned to repeat it. So I guess we are repeating it. We all remember that “Mission Accomplished” was the banner behind then-President Bush as he gloated aboard a US navy ship that the war in Iraq had been won. After his “victory,” however, some 4,000 US military personnel were killed, perhaps a million Iraqis were killed, and the country’s infrastructure and social fabric were so badly destroyed that they probably can never be repaired. Actually, there is much about the US attack on Syria that reminds us of Iraq. With Iraq, the US moved in to start bombing before international inspectors had completed their mission to verify whether or not Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Had they been allowed to complete their mission and verify that he did not, imagine the suffering, death, and destruction that could have been avoided. In Syria, the US decided to start bombing before the international inspectors were even allowed to start checking claims that Assad gassed his own people in Douma. Why? What was the rush? Was Washington afraid they might not find Assad guilty? Who really benefits from US attacks on the Syrian government? There were reports that ISIS began making moves immediately after the air strikes. Do we really want to be al-Qaeda and ISIS’s airforce? Is that going to keep us safer? I remember when al-Qaeda was actually considered our enemy, not an ally in overthrowing the last secular government in the Middle East. Will Syria’s Christians be better off after the recent US attack? Just over a week ago Christians celebrated Easter in Aleppo for the first time in years. What changed? The Syrian army kicked out al-Qaeda, which had been occupying the eastern part of the city. So no, Christians will be much worse off if our “moderate terrorists” take control of Syria. If Syria really had sarin and other chemical weapons factories, does it make sense for the US to bomb the buildings and risk killing thousands by widely disbursing the poisons? Does it make sense to risk killing Syrian civilians with chemical weapons in retaliation for allegations that the Syrian government killed civilians with chemical weapons? No, it seems more like the phony “mobile WMD labs” we were told that Saddam Hussein had constructed. If the US knew Syria was manufacturing chemical weapons in the buildings they bombed, why not notify the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)? The OPCW had certified the very building the US bombed as chemical weapons free not that long ago. Why not just call them up and ask them to check it out? After all, they were just arriving in the country as the US started bombing. There are many more questions about President Trump’s terrible decision to again make war on Syria. For example, where is Congress? It was disgraceful to see Speaker Paul Ryan telling the President he needs no Congressional authorization to attack Syria. All Members of Congress take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution and the Constitution says that only Congress can declare war. Does that oath mean nothing these days? President Trump will come to regret the day he let the neocons take over his foreign policy. Their track record is abysmal. His attack on Syria was clearly illegal and should his party lose the House in November he may find his new fair-weather friends in the Democratic Party quickly turning foul.
Frequent Liberty Report guest Vanessa Beeley joins us today for a live update on the ground in Syria. What was the US attack like? The aftermath? What to expect next.
By Jacob G. Hornberger
As the April 17 deadline for filing income tax returns and paying federal income taxes approaches, it is important that we all remind ourselves of an important point: Income taxation and the Internal Revenue Service are irreconcilable with the principles of a free society. Another way to put it is this: If you’re living in a society in which the government wields the power to seize the fruits of your earnings, you are not living in a free society, no matter how convinced you are. Americans lived without income taxation for more than a century. They also lived in a society in which there was no welfare state and no warfare state. No Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, welfare, food stamps, public housing, drug laws, immigration controls, public schooling, Pentagon, military-industrial complex, CIA, NSA, FBI, EPA, DEA, SEC, Homeland Security, ICE, or most of the other myriad agencies of the welfare-warfare state. It was that way of life that defined an American. That’s what Americans defined as freedom. That’s what made the United States the most unusual society in history (notwithstanding the horrible exception of slavery). Succeeding generations of Americans give it all up in favor of socialism, interventionism, and imperialism. They embraced and adopted the variation of socialism known as the welfare state. They embraced and adopted the totalitarian structure known as a national-security state. They embraced and adopted drug laws, which are the hallmark of tyrannical regimes. They embraced and adopted the regulated, controlled, and managed economy. They embraced foreign wars, foreign interventionism, partnerships with dictators, coups, assassinations, torture, and other practices long employed by dictatorial regimes. And of course they embraced and adopted the means by which all of this statism is funded — income taxation and, also, to large extent, the Federal Reserve System, which fraudulently taxes people’s income and wealth through inflation. Today, many Americans are coming to the realization of what has happened to our country with respect to foreign wars, empire, and foreign interventions. They’re growing sick and tired of perpetual war. They’re starting to figure out that empire, interventionism, and militarism were no part of the founding principles of our nation. They are seeing what empire and foreign interventionism are doing to our rights, freedoms, and economic well-being here at home. They are beginning to think. They are beginning to question. The same holds true on the drug war. More and more Americans are “waking up” and seeing the horrible destructiveness and immorality of this government program. Unfortunately, however, all too many Americans have not yet come to the same realization with respect to the welfare state, the managed economy, the Federal Reserve, and, of course, the income tax and the IRS. The fact is: You have the natural, God-given right to keep everything you earn. You also have the natural, God-given right to decide what to do with your own money. Your money belongs to you, not the government. To achieve a genuinely free society, the income tax needs to be cast into the dustbin of history, along with the immoral and destructive welfare-warfare state apparatuses that it funds. This article was originally published at The Future of Freedom Foundation.
What if, back in 2008, when Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and many others were toppling like dominoes, someone said to you: “If you think this is bad, wait another decade, and an even bigger financial crisis will loom.” It would have been hard to believe, but it would have been correct. The same policies that created the 2008 crash were adopted and an even bigger bubble is now here. Ron Paul discusses.
By John J. Duncan, Jr.
In the days leading up to the Congressional vote on whether to go to war in Iraq years ago, Fortune Magazine had an article headlined “We Win – What Then?” The article said a prolonged war in Iraq would make American soldiers “sitting ducks for Islamic terrorists.” Another national magazine at that time, U.S. News and World Report, had an article headlined, “Why the Rush to War?” Now that war has been frequently referred to as possibly the greatest foreign policy mistake in US History. The night before the Iraq war vote, a television station in Knoxville had a poll showing 74 percent in favor of the war, 9 percent against, and 17 percent undecided. I was one of six Republicans who voted against going to war, and for three or four years, that certainly was the most unpopular vote I ever cast. But slowly, slowly, slowly, it became my most popular vote. We were basically conned into that war by a group called Neo-Cons, so-called neoconservatives, who George Will once described as being “magnificently misnamed” because they were really the “most radical people in this City,” meaning Washington. In addition to our disaster in Iraq, we have now been at war in Afghanistan for 17 years, seemingly permanent, forever wars that have cost us trillions of dollars and caused many thousands of Americans to be killed or maimed. What a waste. President Reagan once said we should never go to war unless there were no other reasonable alternatives and then only as a very last resort. We have had too many leaders who never went to war themselves, such as the new National Security Advisor, John Bolton, who seem far too eager for others to go to war so these chicken-hawks can feel more important or think of themselves as modern day Winston Churchills. Now we seem to be rushing into another war in Syria. I am thankful that conservatives like Tucker Carlson and Pat Buchanan are questioning this new rush to war. At some point, with a $21 trillion national debt, we have to realize there are limits to American power. Civil wars and really terrible things are happening all over the world – in Africa – in the Middle East – and other places all the time. As President Kennedy said in one of his most famous speeches at the University of Washington, with only four percent of the world’s population, “we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity – and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.” Most of the time, a military solution is the worst solution. There are many other ways we can help people who have been harmed through humanitarian, religious, or charitable organizations, or through the United Nations. As Pat Buchanan wrote, President Trump is being “goaded into war,” and that Congress should “debate our objectives in this new war and how many new casualties and years will be required to defeat the coalition of Syria, Russia, Hezbollah, Iran, and the allied Shiite militias from the Near East.” Tucker Carlson said we need to ask some skeptical questions now at least in part because Secretary Mattis said in February that we have absolutely no proof that Assad used the chemical weapons he was accused of using last year. He added there is no real proof Assad did the chemical attacks this time because such an attack would really help only the rebels fighting Assad, and they also have chemical weapons, rebels who have been described as Islamic terrorists but who we are supporting. Mr. Carlson pointed out that Assad had no reason or incentive to use chemical weapons in a civil war his government had basically already won. President Trump was elected in large part because he promised to get us out of these unnecessary wars in the Middle East. Almost everything we have done in the Middle East over the last many years has been wrong. There has been fighting going on there for several thousand years. Throughout history, other wars have been started over incidents or information that turned out to be false or greatly exaggerated. We do not need nor can we afford to get into another trillion dollar war in the Middle East without first making sure it is absolutely in America’s interest to do so and that it will not make the Middle East even more messed up and chaotic than it already is. Rep. Duncan (R-TN) is a Member of the Ron Paul Institute Advisory Board. |
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