Author: James Ostrowski

The progressive left is blathering about a living wage.  There are numerous fallacies at play here.  Suffice it to say that, by and large, your wages are determined by the customers who buy the goods and services you help produce.  If you work at a fast-food place and decry your wages, don’t blame the “greedy” employer; blame the “greedy” customers for not wanting to pay more for that burger and fries.  NBA owners are not less greedy than fast-food restaurant owners.  Rather, they have customers who place a higher value on the jump shot than on fast food.  Using the … Continue reading →

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Note: This is an excerpt from the new book, The Impeachment of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for High Crimes in Syria and Libya, by Michael Ostrowski and James Ostrowski (2016). What happened in Libya and Syria is simply a manifestation of a very dangerous mindset known as progressivism.  Progressivism amounts to a blind faith that government force can improve any given situation.  It is usually associated with domestic policy but progressivism also operates in foreign policy. Progressives ignore costs and consequences.  Progressives plunge into situations they do not understand, heedless of the consequences.  When progressives fail, they invariably attribute the failure to … Continue reading →

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This is an excerpt from the new book, The Impeachment of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for High Crimes in Syria and Libya, by Michael Ostrowski and James Ostrowski (2016). The American interventions into Libya and Syria happened in a troubled part of the world with numerous and seemingly intractable problems that were in many ways the result of prior unwise American foreign policy.  This is particularly true with Syria.  The Iraq War launched by George Bush in 2003 destabilized the artificial state of Iraq.  It is widely recognized that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who held Iraq together and under control by brute … Continue reading →

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Once again, race riots plague America, this time in Charlotte, a relatively prosperous and quiet city in North Carolina.  Not a good sign.  What can I say that hasn’t already been said?  Volumes. My main work as a writer at this point is to discover, analyze and expose the various mindsets that have us trapped in problems, unable to grasp some very obvious and sensible solutions to those problems.  I spent forty years trying to change things through the political process and by writing hundreds of articles that, in my opinion, diagnosed problems and proposed workable solutions.  The response, not … Continue reading →

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I refer to Mike Barnicle’s now-famous gotcha question of the clueless alleged libertarian candidate Gary Johnson on Morning Joe the other day: “what are you going to do about Aleppo [Syria]” To cut to the chase, I could just as well ask Mr. Barnicle what he’s going to do about Mr Barnicle.  I just finished Albert Jay Nock’s brilliant book, Our Enemy the State.  This is a book you probably never heard of but should have read in high school.  Nock, a radical antistatist, wrote: “The only thing [a person] can do to improve society is to present society with one … Continue reading →

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The latest attack on Donald Trump from Pravda (the mainstream media) is that we can’t trust him with the nuclear codes. Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw nukes. Hillary helped start illegal wars in Libya and Syria, resulting in murder and mayhem in those countries which continues to this day. For the details, see The Impeachment of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton: for High Crimes in Syria and Libya. In Syria, there was and is a serious risk of a military confrontation with Russia, one of the big three nuclear powers. Nuclear war is most likely to break … Continue reading →

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My election predictions are not primarily based on the polls.  When I picked John Kerry to win the Democratic nomination in 2004, he was I think fourth in the polls and had mortgaged his house.  When I picked Trump as a possible nominee in early July of last year, he was fourth or fifth in the polls.  Instead, I look at all of the facts and make a judgment based on decades of experience watching the American electoral circus. The mainstream media, which I now call Pravda, has, for the tenth time, pronounced Trump dead.  I am not convinced.  Calling … Continue reading →

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Note: This is an excerpt from The Impeachment of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for High Crimes in Syria and Libya, by Michael Ostrowski and James Ostrowski (2016). ************* American intervention in the Middle East did not start in Libya and Syria in the last five years. World War I marks the beginning of American involvement in the Middle East.   The Ottoman Empire had ruled the Middle East for about 600 years.  It is difficult to find evidence the Middle East was a major problem for the United States while it was ruled by the Ottomans. The first American intervention in the Middle East in modern … Continue reading →

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“War is the health of the state,” said Randolph Bourne.  “War is hell,” said General Sherman.  The war criminal Sherman was an expert in the subjects of hell and war.  When I was twelve, I attended my brother Mike’s graduation from St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute.  The year was 1970 and the Vietnam War was raging.  The commencement speaker, himself a hero of World War II, was, nevertheless, a man of peace. He blasted away at the war at some risk to his career as a judge in the very conventional and timorous world that was Buffalo in that era. That … Continue reading →

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The Cargo Cultists are not any less rational than the Progressives’s Cult of the State… We live in perilous times.  We do not know what is going to happen on any given day.  I am pretty good at predicting the future.  After all, before Ferguson, I predicted the rise of civil unrest in America due to racial tensions.  See, Progressivism, pages 17-18.  Alas, I am not sure where we will go from here. Here’s the problem.  There is a huge gulf between what is actually happening and the half-baked ideologies and irrational mindsets most of us use to understand what … Continue reading →

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There’s an old saying in libertarian circles: the GOP is the stupid party. The release of the House Committee report on Benghazi this week is the latest evidence in favor of this thesis. Since terrorists attacked a diplomatic compound and a CIA annex on September 11, 2012, Republicans have used the incident to engage in one their favorite sports, bashing Hillary. There’s a reason why the GOP has survived this long as a major party in spite of its lack of tangible accomplishments for decades. The party ostensibly is supposed to serve as a counterweight to the Democrats, the party … Continue reading →

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I could write a book about the Orlando shooting, its antecedents and its exploitation by the Progressive State of America.  Alas, that won’t be necessary.  If you understand two key concepts, you can unravel the whole puzzle very quickly.  If you don’t understand them, you will be quickly swept out to sea by a progressive rip tide, not ever knowing what hit you. First, the government creates its own demand.  Second, once you understand what progressivism is, you then immediately understand how progs robotically react to each new crisis. The government is perhaps the least understood institution because so far … Continue reading →

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The war on human beings who use, sell or possess drugs (private property), is, from the perspective of reason or morality, dead. Yet, it survives in political backwaters such as Buffalo and in the intellectual backwater of progressivism. The drug war is the classic progressive policy failure. The progressives invented it. They defend it. They sustain it and they prosecute it while often blaming Republicans for it. Since it is a progressive program, progressives can never bring themselves to admit its failure.  Any evidence of its failure is simply reinterpreted to justify even greater force, effort, and expenditure.  As I … Continue reading →

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The older I get, the more I think that politics is a battle of the dictionaries.  Whoever has the best words, wins. The political movement I have been active in for 35 years is the contemporary revival of the movement that is responsible for most of what is good about the modern world.  Alas, today we are stuck with the ungainly term “libertarian”.  Is that why we are getting our asses kicked in politics?  Don’t tell anyone, but I have a secret plan to recapture the beautiful and etymologically correct word that our movement was known by for a hundred … Continue reading →

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Note: This is an excerpt from Progressivism: A Primer on the Idea Destroying America (2014). Like government schools, Social Security is a failed program that nevertheless remains popular with the American people.  Why?  Keep in mind that progressivism is not a rational system of thought but a means to make progressives feel better about themselves and provide a (false) sense of control over a big, complex and often hostile world.  As such, the mindset necessarily excludes any notion that progressive programs might fail or might cost too much which, in the case of Social Security, is a critical issue.  If … Continue reading →

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