By Liberty Report Staff Real free trade (and NAFTA is not free trade) produces a win-win for both parties to a transaction. After all, both parties are free to exchange, and free to reject the exchange. If exchange is chosen, it necessarily means that both parties are better off trading than not. When government gets involved with trade, by wielding force, the transaction becomes win-lose instead of win-win. Someone is being forced against his or her will somewhere. Someone benefits from the use of force, and someone else suffers. The loser may be one of the parties to the transaction (think Obamacare), or the losers may be hapless taxpayers, who have nothing to do with the transaction, but end up footing the bill for something. Whoever the loser happens to be, the key takeaway is that government force is always a bad thing. Donald Trump called NAFTA "the worst trade deal in history." It's definitely up there, and many of his voters were hoping that the "anti-establishment" Trump would take this New World Order trade deal (that has zero to do with actual free trade) off our backs. In 1993, Henry Kissinger wrote in the L.A. Times concerning NAFTA: “What Congress will have before it is not a conventional trade agreement but the architecture of a new international system...a first step toward a new world order.” NAFTA surrenders America's national sovereignty to faceless and unelected international bureaucrats. Unfortunately, as with Obamacare, Trump has let Americans down by by refusing to rid us of "the worst trade deal in history." To say that Trump will "re-negotiate" the trade deal means almost nothing. The New World Order structure stays in place, American sovereignty will still be given away, and a future U.S. President can just "re-negotiate" things right back to the way that globalists want it. "Re-negotiation" means that faceless international bureaucrats continue to run the show. As Gary North points out: As long as the bureaucrats remain in control of policy, which is forever unless NAFTA is abandoned by the US government, they don't care if Trump gets this or that point renegotiated. Enforcement will always be in the hands of the bureaucrats, and the bureaucrats ignore the politicians except on rare occasions. The politicians are not in charge. The bureaucrats are in charge. That's why NAFTA is a disaster. It is going to remain a disaster. President Trump .... America needs free trade.
We don't need re-negotiated government force. We don't need any force at all! We need freedom. Get out of NAFTA. By Liberty Report Staff We all remember seeing kids putting pictures of Michelle Obama's gross school lunches on social media. Well, it appears that President Trump is going to let schools opt-out of Michelle's central planning scheme. But even with this small tinkering, the central planning continues without a hitch. The wealth redistribution and income transfers of the National School Lunch Program get to continue. Republicans (you-know those supposed "limited government" guys) had the opportunity to squash the National School Lunch Program. But, just like The Dept. of Education, Obamacare, and every budget increase that's ever proposed, they didn't. Laurence Vance tells us: During the first two years of President Eisenhower’s first term, when the Republicans had absolute control of the government, the National School Lunch Program could have been killed while it was still in its infancy just like all the New Deal programs put in place by FDR and the Democrats. The Republicans made no attempt to do so. Just like they made no attempt to do so during the six years that they controlled the Senate when Reagan was president. It goes without saying (or at least should) that it is the responsibility of parents to feed their children, not the government.
Once you yield the critical role of feeding your kids to the government, you open the door for them to centrally plan what the kids eat, and give them the excuse to try to medicate ... vaccinate ... and any other parental responsibility that they can snatch away from you. Government is slick. They get you started young. Stand in line and wait for your ration of disgusting crony-corporatist "food." Dependence at an early age gets you ready for dependence at a later age. We have plenty of proof of that. After all, about half of Americans receive some form of government assistance today. You also get used to the famous government lines at a young age. When you're an adult, you get to stand in other long lines, with orders being barked out at you just the same. But this time you wait for the same government to grope you like no one in your life has ever groped you ... All to get on an airplane. A philosophic change on the role of government is critical for America to once again become the land of the free. But it takes going against the strong and relentless tide that seeks to convince you that dependency is your lot. We've got a ways to go. There's no question. But Liberty broke through before. It can surely happen again. Although the White House confirmed that Iran was living up to the 2015 JPCOA nuclear agreement, Congress is still moving forward with new sanctions against the country. Why? According to the Administration it's because they test missiles, support terrorists, and violate human rights.
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. It's a scandal that few Westerners are even aware, or, if they are aware, they are not conscious, of the bloody reality that prevailed in China between the years 1949 and 1976, the years of communist rule by Mao Zedong. How many died as a result of persecutions and the policies of Mao? Perhaps you care to guess? Many people over the years have attempted to guess. But they have always underestimated. As more data rolled in during the 1980s and 1990s, and specialists have devoted themselves to investigations and estimates, the figures have become ever more reliable. And yet they remain imprecise. What kind of error term are we talking about? It could be as low as 40 million. It could be as high as 100 million or more. In the Great Leap Forward from 1959 to 1961 alone, figures range between 20 million to 75 million. In the period before, 20 million. In the period after, tens of millions more. As scholars in the area of mass death point out, most of us can't imagine 100 dead or 1000. Above that, we are just talking about statistics: they have no conceptual meaning for us, and it becomes a numbers game that distracts us from the horror itself. And there is only so much ghastly information that our brains can absorb, only so much blood we can imagine. And yet there is more to why China's communist experiment remains a hidden fact: it makes a decisive case against government power, one even more compelling than the cases of Russia or Germany in the 20th century. The horror was foreshadowed in a bloody civil war following the Second World War. After some nine million people died, the communists emerged victorious in 1949, with Mao as the ruler. The land of Lao-Tzu (rhyme, rhythm, peace), Taoism (compassion, moderation, humility), and Confucianism (piety, social harmony, individual development) was seized by the strangest import to China ever: Marxism from Germany via Russia. It was an ideology that denied all logic, experience, economic law, property rights, and limits on the power of the state on grounds that these notions were merely bourgeois prejudices, and what we needed to transformed society was a cadre with all power to transform all things. It's bizarre to think about it, really: posters of Marx and Lenin in China, of all places, and rule by an ideology of robbery, dictatorship, and death that did not come to an end until 1976. So spectacular has the transformation been in the last 25 years that one would hardly know that any of this ever happened, except that the Communist Party is still running the place while having tossed out the communist part. The experiment began in the most bloody way possible following the second world war, when all Western eyes were focused on matters at home and, to the extent there was any foreign focus, it was on Russia. The "good guys" had won the war in China, or so we were led to believe in times when communism was the fashion. The communization of China took place in the usual three stages: purge, plan, and scapegoat. First there was the purge to bring about communism. There were guerillas to kill and land to nationalize. The churches had to be destroyed. The counterrevolutionaries had to be put down. The violence began in the country and spread later to the cities. All peasants were first divided into four classes that were considered politically acceptable: poor, semi poor, average, and rich. Everyone else was considered a landowner and targeted for elimination. If no landowners could be found, the "rich" were often included in this group. The demonized class was ferreted out in a country-wide series of "bitterness meetings" in which people turned in their neighbors for owning property and being politically disloyal. Those who were so deemed were immediately executed along with those who sympathized with them. The rule was that there had to be at least one person killed per village. The numbers killed is estimated to be between one and five million. In addition, another four to six million landowners were slaughtered for the crime of being capital owners. If anyone was suspected of hiding wealth, he or she was tortured with hot irons to confess. The families of the killed were then tortured and the graves of their ancestors looted and pillaged. What happened to the land? It was divided into tiny plots and distributed among the remaining peasants. Then the campaign moved to the cities. The political motivations here were at the forefront, but there were also behavioral controls. Anyone who was suspected of involvement in prostitution, gambling, tax evasion, lying, fraud, opium dealing, or telling state secrets was executed as a "bandit." Official estimates put the number of dead at two million with another two million going to prison to die. Resident committees of political loyalists watched every move. A nighttime visit to another person was immediately reported and the parties involved jailed or killed. The cells in the prisons themselves grew ever smaller, with one person living in a space of about 14 inches. Some prisoners were worked to death, and anyone involved in a revolt was herded with collaborators and they were all burned. There was industry in the cities, but those who owned and managed them were subjected to ever tighter restrictions: forced transparency, constant scrutiny, crippling taxes, and pressure to offer up their businesses for collectivization. There were many suicides among the small- and medium-sized business owners who saw the writing on the wall. Joining the party provided only temporary respite, since 1955 began the campaign against hidden counterrevolutionaries in the party itself. A principle here was that one in ten party members was a secret traitor. As the rivers of blood rose ever higher, Mao brought about the Hundred Flowers Campaign in two months of 1957, the legacy of which is the phrase we often hear: "Let a hundred flowers bloom." People were encouraged to speak freely and give their point of view, an opportunity that was very tempting for intellectuals. The liberalization was short lived. In fact, it was a trick. All those who spoke out against what was happening to China were rounded up and imprisoned, perhaps between 400,000 and 700,000 people, including 10 percent of the well-educated classes. Others were branded as right wingers and subjected to interrogation, reeducation, kicked out of their homes, and shunned. But this was nothing compared with phase two, which was one of history's great central planning catastrophes. Following collectivization of land, Mao decided to go further to dictate to the peasants what they would grow, how they would grow it, and where they would ship it, or whether they would grow anything at all as versus plunge into industry. This would become the Great Leap Forward that would generate history's most deadly famine. Peasants were grouped into groups of thousands and forced to share all things. All groups were to be economically self-sufficient. Production goals were raised ever higher. People were moved by the hundreds of thousands from where production was high to where it was low, as a means of boosting production. They were moved too from agriculture to industry. There was a massive campaign to collect tools and transform them into industrial skill. As a means of showing hope for the future, collectives were encouraged to have huge banquets and eat everything, especially meat. This was a way of showing one's belief that the next year's harvest would be even more bountiful. Mao had this idea that he knew how to grow grain. He proclaimed that "seeds are happiest when growing together" and so seeds were sown at five to ten times their usual density. Plants died, the soil dried out, and the salt rose to the surface. To keep birds from eating grain, sparrows were wiped out, which vastly increased the number of parasites. Erosion and flooding became endemic. Tea plantations were turned to rice fields, on grounds that tea was decadent and capitalistic. Hydraulic equipment built to service the new collective farms didn't work and lacked any replacement parts. This led Mao to put new emphasis on industry, which was forced to appear in the same areas as agriculture, leading to ever more chaos. Workers were drafted from one sector to another, and mandatory cuts in some sectors was balanced by mandatory high quotas in another. In 1957, the disaster was everywhere. Workers were growing too weak even to harvest their meager crops, so they died watching the rice rot. Industry churned and churned but produced nothing of any use. The government responded by telling people that fat and proteins were unnecessary. But the famine couldn't be denied. The black-market price of rice rose 20 to 30 times. Because trade had been forbidden between collectives (self-sufficiency, you know), millions were left to starve. By 1960, the death rate soared from 15 percent to 68 percent, and the birth rate plummeted. Anyone caught hoarding grain was shot. Peasants found with the smallest amount were imprisoned. Fires were banned. Funerals were prohibited as wasteful. Villagers who tried to flee the countryside to the city were shot at the gates. Deaths from hunger reached 50 percent in some villages. Survivors boiled grass and bark to make soup and wandered the roads looking for food. Sometimes they banded together and raided houses looking for ground maize. Women were unable to conceive because of malnutrition. People in work camps were used for food experiments that led to sickness and death. How bad did it get? In 1968 an 18-year-old member of the Red Guard, Wei Jingsheng, took refuge with a family in a village of Anhui, and here he lived to write about what he saw: "We walked along beside the village… Before my eyes, among the weeds, rose up one of the scenes I had been told about, one of the banquets at which the families had swapped children in order to eat them. I could see the worried faces of the families as they chewed the flesh of other people's children. The children who were chasing butterflies in a nearby field seemed to be the reincarnation of the children devoured by their parents. I felt sorry for the children but not as sorry as I felt for their parents. What had made them swallow that human flesh, amidst the tears and grief of others — flesh that they would never have imagined tasting, even in their worst nightmares?" The author of this passage was jailed as a traitor but his status protected him from death and he was finally released in 1997.
How many people died in the famine of 1959–61? The low range is 20 million. The high range is 43 million. Finally in 1961, the government gave in and permitted food imports, but it was too little and too late. Some peasants were again allowed to grow crops on their own land. A few private workshops were opened. Some markets were permitted. Finally, the famine began to abate and production grew. But then the third phase came: scapegoating. What had caused the calamity? The official reason was anything but communism, anything but Mao. And so the politically motivated roundup began again, and here we get the very heart of the Culture Revolution. Thousands of camps and detention centers were opened. People sent there died there. In prison, the slightest excuse was used to dispense with people — all to the good, since the prisoners were a drain on the system, so far as those in charge were concerned. The largest penal system ever built was organized in a military fashion, with some camps holding as many as 50,000 people. There was some sense in which everyone was in prison. Arrests were sweeping and indiscriminate. Everyone had to carry around a copy of Mao's Little Red Book. To question the reason for arrest was itself evidence of disloyalty, since the state was infallible. Once arrested, the safest path was instant and frequent confession. Guards were forbidden from using overt violence, so interrogations would go on for hundreds of hours, and often the prisoner would die during this process. Those named in the confession were then hunted down and rounded up. Once you got through this process, you were sent to a labor camp, where you were graded according to how many hours you could work with little food. You were fed no meat nor given any sugar or oil. Labor prisoners were further controlled by the rationing of the little food they had. The final phase of this incredible litany of criminality lasted from 1966 to 1976, during which the number killed fell dramatically to "only" one to three million. The government, now tired and in the first stages of demoralization, began to lose control, first within the labor camps and then in the countryside. And it was this weakening that led to the final, and in some ways the most vicious, of the communist periods in China's history. The first stages of rebellion occurred in the only way permissible: people began to criticize the government for being too soft and too uncommitted to the communist goal. Ironically, this began to appear precisely as moderation became more overt in Russia. Neo-revolutionaries in the Red Guard began to criticize the Chinese communists as "Khrushchev-like reformers." As one writer put it, the guard "rose up against its own government in order to defend it." During this period, the personality cult of Mao reached it height, with the Little Red Book achieving a mythic status. The Red Guards roamed the country in an attempt to purge the Four Old-Fashioned Things: ideas, culture, customs, and habits. The remaining temples were barricaded. Traditional opera was banned, with all costumes and sets in the Beijing Opera burned. Monks were expelled. The calendar was changed. All Christianity was banned. There were to be no pets such as cats and birds. Humiliation was the order of the day. Thus was the Red Terror: in the capital city, there were 1,700 deaths and 84,000 people were run out. In other cities such as Shanghai, the figures were worse. A massive party purge began, with hundreds of thousands arrested and many murdered. Artists, writers, teachers, scientists, technicians: all were targets. Pogroms were visited on community after community, with Mao approving at every step as a means of eliminating every possible political rival. But underneath, the government was splintering and cracking, even as it became ever more brutal and totalitarian in its outlook. Finally in 1976, Mao died. Within a few months, his closest advisers were all imprisoned. And the reform began slowly at first and then at breakneck speed. Civil liberties were restored (comparatively) and the rehabilitations began. Torturers were prosecuted. Economic controls were gradually relaxed. The economy, by virtue of human and private economic initiative, was transformed. Having read the above, you are now in a tiny elite of people who know anything about the greatest death camp in the history of the world that China became between 1949 and 1976, an experiment in total control unlike anything else in history. Don't tell me that we've learned anything from history. We don't even know enough about history to learn from it. This article was originally published at The Mises Institute and is excerpted from The Death Camps of Communist China By Chris Rossini Sadly, the current Pope doesn't appear to have an affinity for individual liberty and voluntary interactions between individuals. In fact, his understanding of libertarianism is sorely lacking. Libertarianism is rooted in the idea that no one (and no group) may aggressively use violence against anyone else. Violent force is for defending oneself only. Where to begin with the Pope's latest statements? Somehow, Pope Francis sees American universities as bastions of libertarianism. Tom DiLorenzo at LewRockwell.com takes that myth apart: Pope Francis recently delivered another mean-spirited, hateful diatribe about the “grave risks associated with the invasion of . . . libertarian individualism at high strata of culture and in university education.” The Pope also believes that even more regulations should be applied to the financial markets. In other words, the Pope erroneously believes that government force can be used for the betterment of society. It cannot. Ryan McMaken of The Mises Institute dispels this mistaken idea: The Pope has also repeatedly suggested that he believes financial markets are essentially unregulated and that many of the the world's regimes are laissez-faire minimalist states. Obviously, such claims can easily be shown to be empirically false. The financial sector is one of the most heavily regulated worldwide, and the governments in the richest countries in the world — the United States included — spend approximately one-fifth of total GDP on government welfare programs alone. Indeed, when it comes to government spending on health care — not private spending, mind you — the United States — that supposed bastion of "free-market" thinking — is the fourth highest in the world. If the Pope really wanted to stick it to Wall Street, he'd call for the abolition of all government regulations. The Pope would call for Wall Street to compete in a free market. After all, the free market is the harshest regulator in the world. It plays no favorites and shows no mercy to anyone. Wall Street would fight against such an idea to the death! Wall Street firms (and every other major corporation) welcome "government regulations". "Regulators" can be bought and controlled. That's so much easier than competing in a free market. There are so many government regulations that hardly anyone can keep up. Even the government itself must pick and choose which regulations it's going to enforce. Creating more regulations does nothing except hurt small business and entrepreneurs who don't have the money to hire an army of lawyers to decipher them all. Government regulations are the best friend of big business. Finally, the Pope goes full collectivist on us. Tom DiLorenzo again: In his latest attack on free societies the pope denounced libertarianism as a “selfish ideal” and a “fallacious paradigm that minimizes the common good.” Libertarianism teaches that “only the individual gives value to things,” ... He then repeated every collectivist’s mantra that “the libertarian individual denies the value of the common good.” For good measure, he also threw in the standard leftist line that freedom supposedly causes the “marginalization of the more vulnerable majority.” To say that libertarianism is a "selfish ideal" is rather odd, since it means no aggressive violence against others. Libertarianism means "live and let live".
The ideal of libertarianism is "I keep my hands off of you and your property, and you keep your hands off of me and my property." Allow anyone to use aggressive violence and society must necessarily fall apart. Make aggressive force "legal" and you merely expedite the process. Finally, only individuals have the ability to value since only individuals think. We value things subjectively. One person may value (A) with every fiber of his being, while another hates (A) and a third person can care less either way. Hundreds of millions (literally) have died at the hands of dictators who murdered for the "common good". Live and let live...and hands off. Peace. Libertarianism isn't complicated, and it surely is not to be feared (unless of course you have a lust for power). With all the free literature available on the ideas of liberty and voluntaryism, one hopes the Pope Francis someday finds his way to some of it.
By Kurt Nimmo
The Donald is bombing so many countries so often, he’s running out of bombs. “Critical munitions shortfalls are my top war-fighting concern,” says US Pacific commander Admiral Harry Harris. “We must maintain our capability to operate in contested environments.” “Priorities include long-range and stand-off strike weapons, anti-ship weapons, advanced air to air munitions, theatre ballistic/cruise missile defence, torpedoes, naval mines, and a Cluster Munitions replacement.” This is nothing new. Obama ran out of bombs, too. In December, 2015 CNN reported: As the U.S. ramps up its campaign against the Islamist terror group in Iraq and Syria, the Air Force is now “expending munitions faster than we can replenish them,” Air Force chief of staff Gen. Mark Welsh said in a statement. Lockheed has added a third shift at its plant, which employed 325 workers as of February, and is now at “maximum capacity,” said one executive familiar with the issue. The company announced in February that it will add 240 workers by 2020 and expand the facility, which also produces a 2,000-pound air-to-surface stealthy missile.
Another failed missile test by Kim and the Hermit Kingdom has prompted Trump to mobilize a fleet of Grey Eagle drones in South Korea. Each Grey Eagle drone costs $31.2 million.
The deployment means a whole lot of Hellfire missiles will be needed.
Good news for Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing. Not so good for civilians in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Afghanistan.
“Evidence gathered on the ground in East Mosul points to an alarming pattern of U.S.-led coalition airstrikes which have destroyed whole houses with entire families inside,” Donatella Rovera, Senior Crisis Response Adviser at Amnesty International, told Newsweek in March. “The high civilian toll suggests that coalition forces leading the offensive in Mosul have failed to take adequate precautions to prevent civilian deaths, in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.” According to Airwars, the US has conducted over 20,000 airstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, dropped 79,649 bombs and missiles, and killed at minimum 3,164 civilians as of April 30.
This article was originally published at Another Day In The Empire.
Congress has reached agreement on a stop-gap spending bill through September. Why did they all agree? There is lots of money for everyone! What's in the bill? Let's see...
By Ron Paul
The Federal Reserve has pumped about $5.5 Trillion of new money into the economy, just since the 2008 financial crisis. In addition to destroying the value and purchasing power of the dollars that we all hold, this new money creates massive distortions throughout the economy. The bigger the distortions, the bigger the financial crisis that must follow. This is not going to end well. I discuss on CNBC's "Trading Nation" below: By Ron Paul
Congress ended the week by passing a continuing resolution keeping the government funded for one more week. This stopgap funding bill is designed to give Congress and the White House more time to negotiate a long-term spending bill. Passage of a long-term spending bill has been delayed over objections to Republican efforts to preserve Obamcare's key features but give states a limited ability to opt out of some Obamacare mandates. This type of brinkmanship has become standard operating procedure on Capitol Hill. The drama inevitably ends with a spending bill being crafted behind closed doors by small groups of members and staffers and then rushed to the floor and voted on before most members have a chance to read it. These “omnibus” spending bills are a dereliction of one of Congress’s two most important duties — allocating spending. Of course, Congress long ago abandoned another primary duty — preventing presidents from launching military attacks without first obtaining a congressional declaration of war. The uncomfortable question raised by Congress’s abrogation of these two key functions is whether a republican form of government is compatible with a welfare-warfare state. The answer seems to be “no.” Congress’s dysfunctional spending process is an inevitable result of the government’s growth. It is simply unrealistic to expect Congress to fund the modern leviathan via a lengthy and open process that allows individual members to have some say in how government spends their constituents’ money. The dysfunctional spending process benefits the many politicians eager to avoid accountability for government spending. The rushed process allows these politicians to say they had to vote for the spending bills. Often, these big spending bills include a promise to cut spending in the future. Like tomorrow, the promised spending cuts are always a day away. If government continues to expand, the economy will continue to stagnate, social tensions and violence will increase, and more power will be concentrated in the hands of the president, bureaucrats, and a select few members of Congress. The only way to avoid this is for Congress to shut down most of the federal government, starting with bringing the troops home and drastically cutting the military-industrial complex’s budget. Congress must also close all unconstitutional federal agencies and programs, and wind down federal entitlement programs. A good place to start is the Department of Education. The Federal Reserve must be audited and then ended. The root of the current crisis is neither political nor economic but philosophical. Too many have bought into the lie that government can protect us from life’s misfortunes and stamp out evil around the world without endangering our liberty, our safety, and our prosperity. Convincing a critical mass of people to reject big government is key to our success. The breakdown of the congressional appropriations process, combined with hyper-interventionism via the Federal Reserve and foreign policy, suggest we are in the last stages of the welfare-warfare state. Whether this system’s inevitable collapse completes our descent into authoritarianism or leads to a restoration of limited, constitutional government and free markets depends on how effective those of us who know the truth are in spreading the ideas of liberty. |
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