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Successful entrepreneur and Founder of Thales Academy shows us the possibilities of education outside of the government bureaucratic grip. The future of education is indeed a great one.
By Chris Rossini
Yesterday, President Trump caught a lot of attention with his "Tariff Man" tweet:
At no point has anyone come to America to "raid the great wealth of our Nation." America has yet to be invaded by an incoming army, navy, or air force of any country. No one has come to "raid" or steal our property.
The biggest thieves that individual property owners in America have to worry about is the U.S. federal government itself and its central bank - The Federal Reserve. For it is they who have literally "raided" individual Americans over the last 100+ years. The federal government does it directly. It takes our money outright. The Fed is more insidious, and steals from us without most people even knowing it. By printing money out-of-thin-air, The Fed steals the purchasing power of the dollars that we work for. As prices rise for just about everything, always remember that it's The Fed that brings this about. Naturally, if our government and the Fed are the biggest takers of our paychecks, they're going to want to shift the focus off of themselves. Who is the easiest to blame? Put yourself in their shoes...How would you direct attention if you're feeding off of taxpayers to the tune of many trillions? Foreign boogeymen! Blame China, or Iraq, or Syria, or Russia, or Iran, or North Korea, or ..... The list never ends. It's always the foreign boogeymen that are to blame. This is just one more fiction that you can add to the mountain of propaganda that Americans consume every single day. But here's the real kicker... Even though local, state, and federal governments in America constantly rob us blind, President Trump adds yet another tax for Americans to pay --- Tariffs! Tariffs are paid by American consumers! They're not paid by China. They're not paid by Germany or the EU. They are paid by Americans. The president then adds insult to injury by literally bragging that BILLIONS of dollars are flowing into the U.S. Treasury as a result of the tariffs. That's our money!! Sadly (far too many) Americans have been duped and are actually happy that the government is taxing them even more. Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams would be sick! But what a marvelous trick the government has pulled ... Washington DC has figured out how to live off us with pinpoint precision. You do the work ... create the wealth .... and they take it away in ever increasing amounts. Free Trade is a win-win situation. One person agrees to exchange with another. Both are better off, otherwise they wouldn't trade. Nothing could be more simple to understand. To think that government taxing the American side of the trade is a benefit to Americans is the height of economic folly. It doesn't matter what any other government in the world does to their citizens. If they tax their citizens with tariffs, that's their problem, not ours. Our problem is when our government taxes us. The policy that we need is for our government to drop every tariff to zero. Whether or not other countries follow doesn't matter one iota to Americans. They can keep all their tariffs. That's their loss, not ours. We need our government off our backs, and out of our pockets. Isn't that what the "land of the free" was supposed to be in the first place?
In a major speech yesterday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo promised that the Trump Administration was creating a "new liberal international order," with the US re-asserting its "leadership." This sounds a lot like the old "new world order" promised by recently departed President George HW Bush. Is going back to the future really a good US grand strategy?
Many in Washington who are obsessing over the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi are silent on the thousands of civilians killed by US drones and are seeking conflict with Iran. Is this about principles...or just politics?
By Ron Paul
After a week of insisting that a meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Argentina was going to happen, President Trump at the last minute sent out a Tweet explaining that due to a Russia/Ukraine dispute in the Sea of Azov he would no longer be willing to meet his Russian counterpart. According to Trump, the meeting had to be cancelled because the Russians seized three Ukrainian naval vessels in Russian waters that refused to follow instructions from the Russian military. But as Pat Buchanan wrote in a recent column: how is this little dispute thousands of miles away any of our business? Unfortunately it is “our business” because of President Obama’s foolish idea to overthrow a democratically-elected, pro-Russia government in Ukraine in favor of what his Administration believed would be a “pro-Western” and “pro-NATO” replacement. In short, the Obama Administration did openly to Ukraine what his Democratic Party claims without proof the Russians did to the United States: meddled in a vote. US interventionism in Ukraine led to the 2014 coup and many dead Ukrainians. Crimea’s majority-Russian population held a referendum and decided to re-join Russia rather than remain in a “pro-West” Ukraine that immediately began discriminating against them. Why would anyone object to people opting out of abusive relationships? What is most disappointing about President Trump’s foreign policy is that it didn’t have to be this way. He ran on a platform of America first, ending foreign wars, NATO skepticism, and better relations with Russia. Americans voted for this policy. He had a mandate, a rejection of Obama’s destructive interventionism. But he lost his nerve. Instead of being the president who ships lethal weapons to the Ukrainian regime, instead of being the president who insists that Crimea remain in Ukraine, instead of being the president who continues policies the American people clearly rejected at the ballot box, Trump could have blamed the Ukraine/Russia mess on the failed Obama foreign policy and charted a very different course. What flag flies over Crimea is none of our business. We are not the policemen of the world and candidate Trump seemed to have understood that. But now Trump’s in a trap. He was foolish enough to believe that Beltway foreign policy “experts” have a clue about what really is American national interest. Just this week he told the Washington Post, in response to three US soldiers being killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, that he has to keep US troops fighting in the longest war in US history because the “experts” tell him there is no alternative. He said, “virtually every expert that I have and speak to say if we don’t go there, they’re going to be fighting over here. And I’ve heard it over and over again.” That is the same bunkum the neocons sold us as they lied us into Iraq! We’ve got to fight Saddam over there or he’d soon be in our streets. These “experts” are worthless, yet for some reason President Trump cannot break free of them. Well here’s some unsolicited advice to the president: Listen to the people who elected you, who are tired of the US as the world’s police force. Let Ukraine and Russia work out their own problems. Give all your “experts” a pink slip and start over with a real pro-American foreign policy: non-interventionism.
The G20 summit in Argentina has concluded. Are we better off? Will the temporary pause on new US/China tariffs hold? Anything positive from the brief Trump/Putin meet and greet? Missed opportunities? We break it all down in today's Liberty Report.
By Jeff Deist
Civility is the word of the moment. New stories lament the breakdown of civility in American society, while reports of Antifa street violence in cities like Portland raise uncomfortable memories for older Americans of 1960s riots. Editorial after editorial decries the loss of social cohesion and friendliness across the country, even within families. Pundits and politicians insist we must restore civility in politics. Otherwise we face a bleak and intensifying cold civil war: progressive vs. conservative, urban vs. rural, #metoo vs. Brett Kavanaugh, elites vs. populists, and Never Trumpers vs. Deplorables. Yet how do they propose to accomplish this? More politics, more elections, and more top-down edicts from Congress and the Supreme Court. Hillary Clinton, for instance, suggests civility will be restored only following successful midterm elections that places Democrats in control of Congress. And why not? The political world is all she knows, and the political world yields winners and losers, victors and vanquished. In her utterly politicized worldview, things will settle down only when the right people—her people—control US politics. Hers is a zero-sum world, always ruled by the political gang in power. We hardly should expect an America so wracked by politics to remain civil. But Ludwig von Mises understood a different world, one organized around property and trade rather than the state. To him, private property was the basis of any civilized society. Without that foundation, without property and a concomitant system of mutual exchange, he knew humans were destined to devolve into poverty, war, and anti-intellectual savagery. Property gives us prosperity, and therefore material abundance to live civilized lives beyond mere the subsistence that marked most of human history. Property rights give us the ability to accumulate capital, to invest in higher productivity, and to have a greater degree of certainty regarding the future. Civility cannot be sheared from the broader concept of civilization itself. Both words share the same Latin root civilis, which means relating to citizenship or public life. But it also means relating to others with courtesy, manners, and affability. If civilization is the sum total of a society and its culture, civility—or the lack thereof—is its building block, the positive or negative social traits exhibited by people in that society. Lew Rockwell, our Founder and Chairman, has a long career fighting for both civilization and civility. Along the way he met some of the brightest lights of our time or any time: Neil McCaffrey, Henry Hazlitt, Leonard Read, Percy and Bettina Greaves, Ayn Rand, Ludwig and Margit Mises, Ron and Carol Paul, and Murray and Joey Rothbard among them. So I'm sure you'll enjoy my recent interview with him. Read the rest at The Mises Institute.
This week President Trump threatened to cut subsidies to GM. But why single out one company? Cut ALL corporate subsides. They are very bad policy.
In a bizarre Wall Street Journal editorial yesterday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo argued that despite the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khoshoggi and Saudi Arabia's terrible human human rights record, we must remain joined at the hip because...Iran!
By Chris Rossini
The recent tax riots in France provide us with a reminder as to why governments all over the world have central banks at their disposal. The primary benefit for politicians is to have their very own printing press that spits out new money to pay for whatever the politicians want. Without the printing press, politicians would be forced to tax people directly. The people get the bill right away, and know that the bill is coming from the government. Take France's new scheme that substantially increases taxes on fuel. The people are getting hit directly with the tax, and they can see with their own eyes that it's the government who is hitting them. In this case, the direct tax has led to riots in the streets of France. Direct taxes are never popular. No one likes to see their earnings squandered away by bureaucrats. On the flipside, bureaucrats want as much of your earnings as they're able to take. That's why it's so popular (especially in the U.S.) to have a central bank (i.e. Federal Reserve) that creates new dollars out-of-thin-air to pay for every political scheme in the book. When the Fed creates new money, citizens are not directly presented with a bill. Instead, the newly printed dollars go to pay for the wars and welfare. Can you imagine if Americans received a bill in the mail for their portion of the 17th year of war in Afghanistan, or for all the "free" stuff that government hands out? Americans would literally go nuts if such a bill were to come. The bill does come, just in a very different way. Americans see the bill in rising prices for pretty much everything that they buy. They see the bill with having to get two jobs. They see the bill in a lower standard of living each year. Because the Fed creates money out-of-thin-air, the money that you currently have in your possession loses value. It buys less. That's how you pay. You're taxed without even knowing it! It's so sneaky that one of the champions of this reprehensible "system" once boasted that "not one in a million" people will ever figure out what is happening to them. When prices rise, the government can merely point to some made-up scapegoat. It's the greedy businessman ... It's the weather ... It's Putin! ... Whatever nonsense that happens to stick. Instead of Americans protesting government's endless taxation, they just complain that they can't make ends meet and blame whoever government wants them to blame (i.e., whoever government's mainstream media puts the target on). The government and The Fed are ripping us off ... Big time ... All the time. Be one of the '1 in a million' who understands this, and speak out against it. |
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