Author: Jeff Deist

Can political arrangements be dissolved peacefully? Legally? At the ballot box? By referendum? Or by any other mechanism short of outright violence and civil war? According to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the answer to these questions is no. Speaking in California yesterday on the subject of immigration and sanctuary cities, he issued this remarkable statement that manages to upend the entire concept of federalism in just a few short sentences: There is no nullification. There is no secession. Federal law is the supreme law of the land. I would invite any doubters to go to Gettysburg, or to the tombstones of John … Continue reading →

The post Jeff Sessions Is All Wet appeared first on LewRockwell.

Please don’t fall for tax reform. It’s a con, and a shell game. It’s a promise every presidential candidate makes, including Trump. But we ought to be suspicious of grandiose talk about Congress reforming anything. Tax reform proposals always evade and obscure the real issue, which is the total cost– financial, compliance, and human– taxes impose on society. The fundamental questions about war and entitlements and state power go unasked. We never consider whether Congress really needs to spend more than $4 trillion in 2018, or how it managed to double federal spending in only 15 years. Since those questions are never seriously raised, every proposal necessarily pits various … Continue reading →

The post Don’t Fall for Tax Reform appeared first on LewRockwell.

The cliché is true: September 11, 2001, represents a defining American moment. Generation X and Millennials suddenly had their own day of infamy, just as their parents and grandparents had Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination. 9/11 marked the end of a relatively untroubled time in the US following the 1980 and 90s, and the beginning of a dark turn that continues to this day. Optimism, an enduring feature of the American psyche (rightly or wrongly identified as buncombe by Mencken) suddenly was in short supply. Lives were lost, along with innocence. But the innocence lost that day had less to … Continue reading →

The post Government Won on 9/11 appeared first on LewRockwell.

Murray Rothbard has been gone more than 20 years now, his brilliance, wit, and irreplaceable insights taken from us far too soon. At home in New York City over a Christmas break from his teaching duties at the University of Nevada, Rothbard accompanied his beloved wife Joey to her optometrist appointment on a bitterly cold day. A few moments later, on January 7th 1995, he was gone — lost to heart failure at the age of 68. What he left behind was not only a grieving wife, countless friends and colleagues, and fans of his work around the world. He … Continue reading →

The post An Uncompromising Optimist appeared first on LewRockwell.

Leftwing Vox.com recently published a welcome and thoughtful piece on the virtues of devolving political and legal power away from the federal government toward states and localities. This is exactly the kind of conversation honest Americans need to have if we are serious about preventing the kind of political violence witnessed recently in Charlottesville and Berkeley. One overriding feature of the culture wars is that each sides justifiably fears the other will impose its way of living through a winner takes all political system.Violence is a natural and predictable response to this, a means of circumventing the ballot box. The political class makes its living from … Continue reading →

The post Subsidiarity appeared first on LewRockwell.

[This talk was delivered at the 2017 Mises University.] Greetings to everyone at the Corax 2017 conference, and greetings also to the audience here at our annual Mises University. As you can see both events are happening simultaneously, so I couldn’t be with you in person this evening. But I very much appreciate being invited by Sofia and Martin to speak, and I would indeed have joined you in Malta any other week. And I admire Sofia and Martin for having the courage to leave Sweden and start this new venture in Malta, which by their account is not only warmer … Continue reading →

The post The Left Is Flipping Out appeared first on LewRockwell.

A new Rasmussen poll reports that a majority of voters think so, and it certainly feels that way. Since Donald Trump’s election in November, the pace and intensity of deeply divisive rhetoric has accelerated. Antifa and the Alt-Right are literally fighting in the streets. Combative talking heads on cable news, vicious social media exchanges, riots at universities, a bitter special election in Georgia, and even the shooting of a congressman have both sides rethinking the entire political process and talking about abandoning the “rule of law.” It is an uneasy time, a time for hard questions. Can politics really provide a solution … Continue reading →

The post Is America Really Coming Apart? appeared first on LewRockwell.

When Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe made his famous argument against democracy back in 2001, the notion that voting was a lousy way to organize society was still radical even among many libertarians. Virtually everyone raised in a western country over the past century grew up hearing “democracy” used as a synonym for wonderful, good, just, and valid. It takes a great deal of unlearning to overcome this as an adult, and to question the wisdom of representative government installed via democratic mechanisms. Fast forward to 2017, however, and the case against democracy is being made right in front of our eyes. … Continue reading →

The post Democracy, the God That’s Failing appeared first on LewRockwell.

The attack on a Christmas market in Berlin earlier this week, apparently carried out by a Pakistani immigrant*, is just the latest in a series of violent and disturbing terrorist incidents in Germany. The event raises uncomfortable questions about immigration, culture clashes, Islam, and identity: what does it mean to be German, rather than someone who merely lives in Germany? It also raises pragmatic questions about how to provide physical security in public spaces, given such dramatic failures by the German government. Libertarians can duck these questions, or dismiss them. We can sniff about how everyone is an individual, how Islam … Continue reading →

The post Open Borders Are Deadly appeared first on LewRockwell.

Coverage of central banks and monetary policy in popular financial media outlets like Bloomberg, Financial Times, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, and The Economist is almost uniformly bad. The reporting and analysis are superficial, and the writers tend to assume facts, not in evidence. The same myths repeat themselves ad nauseam: the Fed’s vaunted “independence” must be kept sacrosanct; the obvious and proper purpose of monetary policy is monetary stimulus; Ph.D. central bankers hold special technical knowledge which us average folks should not question; and central bank decisions are wholly unpolitical. These myths are used to prop up trite and superficial conclusions, always with the implication that “everyone knows” X, Y, and Z are true about … Continue reading →

The post Austrians at the Fed? appeared first on LewRockwell.

[Excerpt from the Dallas-Ft. Worth Mises Circle, November 5.] Silver Lining: The Media has Lost Control of the Narrative I want to talk about some of the silver linings in this awful election, and one of the most obvious is this: technology really has allowed us to override the media gatekeepers, challenge the official narrative, consume real news and real facts, and threaten the political establishment’s grip on public opinion. The information genie is out of the bottle, and it’s not going back. In the digital world, people are abandoning what Tom Woods calls the 3×5 index card of allowable … Continue reading →

The post Time To Rebrand Libertarianism appeared first on LewRockwell.

I recently was invited to speak at the annual convention of the Texas Libertarian Party and was struck by how libertarians cling to an outdated and counterproductive conception of the political landscape. In particular, many libertarians remain wedded to a misguided understanding of what the threat to liberty really is, where it comes from, and thus how we ought to fight against it. That’s why we’re still saddled with clichéd 1980s phrases like “neither Left nor Right,” “low-tax liberals,” and even the cringeworthy “capitalist means, socialist ends”—all in evidence among the literature describing libertarianism on tables in the convention hall. … Continue reading →

The post Progressives Are Left and Right appeared first on LewRockwell.

People of goodwill naturally attempt to make sense of terrible events like today’s bombings in Brussels, to help themselves address the psychological discomfort that occurs when seemingly incomprehensible violence occurs. We have a hard time processing the world where random bombs go off and kill peaceful travelers in airports or subway stations because it threatens our equilibrium and sense of personal well-being. This discomfort has intensified in our era of 24-hour global news, whereas just a few generations ago our ancestors simply didn’t know about all the trouble in the greater world. The world seems more dangerous today, regardless of whether it … Continue reading →

The post A Better Approach to Terrorism appeared first on LewRockwell.

Asking wealthy elites to provide opinions about central banking generally results in reticence on their part. After all, many billionaires became rich or stay rich only because the global economy has been “financialized” — which is to say the particular assets they hold (generally controlling equity stakes in companies) have artificially high values because of monetary policy. Many of the super rich understand, at least on some level, that the wealth they’ve accumulated seems uneasily out of proportion to the value they’ve created simply by selling high and buying low in the casino. Even elites who made their money the old … Continue reading →

The post The Undeserving Rich appeared first on LewRockwell.

[This appears appears in the November–December 2015 issue of The Austrian.] I’d like to speak today about what political correctness is, at least in its modern version, what it is not, and what we might do to fight against it. To begin, we need to understand that political correctness is not about being nice. It’s not simply a social issue, or a subset of the culture wars. It’s not about politeness, or inclusiveness, or good manners. It’s not about being respectful toward your fellow humans, and it’s not about being sensitive or caring or avoiding hurt feelings and unpleasant slurs. … Continue reading →

The post PC Is Commie appeared first on LewRockwell.