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U.S. Foreign Policy Isn’t Even REMOTELY Explained By Stupidity…

Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War

By 

Mises.org

October 4, 2019

Lindsey A. O’Rourke
Cornell University Press, 2018
330 pages

Lindsey O’Rourke has given us a devastating indictment of the foreign policy of the United States during the Cold War and after. O’Rourke, who teaches political science at Boston College, is not a principled non-interventionist in the style of Ron Paul. To the contrary, she sympathizes with the “Offensive Realism” of John Mearsheimer, under whom she studied at the University of Chicago. Accordingly, she does not oppose the efforts of states to increase their power over other states but rather regards this as inevitable.

Her argument is that a key element of American foreign policy has failed to achieve its purpose. The United States has often aimed at “regime change,” both overt and covert. The latter type of regime change has been especially unsuccessful, and, to show that this is so, the bulk of the book analyzes in detail a number of instances of covert regime change during the Cold War.

She states her conclusion in this way: “The vast majority of America’s overt and covert regime changes during the Cold War did not work out as their planners intended. Washington launched these regime changes to resolve security-oriented interstate disputes by installing foreign leaders with similar policy preferences. American experiences during the Cold War, however, illustrate that this was often quite difficult in practice. Thirty-nine out of sixty-four covert regime changes failed to replace their targets, and because America’s role in most of these failed attempts generally did not remain a secret, they further soured Washington’s already negative relationship with the target state. Even nominally successful covert operations — where the US-backed forces assumed power — failed to deliver on their promise to improve America’s relationship with the target state.”

Readers of Ludwig von Mises will at once recall this pattern of argument. Just as Mises argues that economic interventions such as minimum wage laws fail to achieve the stated goals of their proponents, so does O’Rourke maintain that regime change, especially of the covert variety, suffers from the same flaw. Again, just as Mises does not challenge the stated goal of higher wages without unemployment, so does O’Rourke accept the goal of an increase in the power of the United States.

In order to grasp the way O’Rourke reaches her conclusion, we must first understand her use of terms. By “regime,” she means “either a state’s leadership or its political processes and institutional arrangements.” A covert regime change “denotes an operation to replace the political leadership of another state where the intervening state does not acknowledge its role publicly. These actions include successful and failed attempts to covertly assassinate foreign leaders, sponsor coups d’état, influence foreign democratic elections, incite popular revolutions, and support armed dissident groups in their bids to topple a foreign government.”

We have so far stressed how Mises and O’Rourke argue in a similar way, but now a crucial difference requires our attention. Mises showed by a priori reasoning that intervention must fail, but O’Rourke does not do this. She says instead that a detailed examination of many cases shows that the covert regime changes in fact tend to fail.

A few examples will illustrate how she proceeds. In the beginning years of the Cold War, the United States tried to “rollback” Communist regimes in Eastern Europe through covert operations. “The Anglo-American operations in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania … were doomed to failure from the start. As early as October 1945, MGB (Russian Ministry for State Security) counterintelligence officers captured Latvian infiltrators carrying Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) codebooks and radios. Forcing the infiltrators to collaborate, the MGB was able to provide false intelligence and identify the time and location of future infiltrations. Ultimately, Soviet forces set up two fictional resistance movements, which the United States and the United Kingdom covertly supported until 1954.”

Operations in Southeast Asia succeeded no better. Notoriously, “although the 1963 US-backed coup in South Vietnam successfully overthrew [Ngo Dinh] Diem’s government, it still did produce the results the planners had hoped for. Contrary to policymakers’ predictions, the leaders who took over after Diem were unstable, unpredictable, and incompetent, which in turn hampered South Vietnam’s ability to defend itself without US assistance and encouraged the Viet Cong to escalate their attacks.”

Covert regime change was likewise ineffective in Latin America. “To combat the [Dominican Republic’s] chronic political volatility, Washington backed General Rafael Trujillo’s authoritarian regime after he seized power in a 1930 coup. By the late 1950s, however, US leaders began to question Trujillo’s increasingly erratic and brutal rule. Concerned that his regime might spark a popular revolt similar to the one that had toppled Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Eisenhower authorized a covert campaign to overthrow Trujillo in 1960. But the operation misfired. Trujillo was assassinated in 1961, but his fall brought his equally cruel son to power, which in turn led to a series of coups.”

Given this sorry record, the question naturally arises: why did the United States, again and again, pursue covert regime change? O’Rourke’s own explanation is along realist lines: nations see regime change as a way to enhance their power, and the pursuit of increased power is a constant in the international system. “I argue that states pursue regime change for motives akin to the ones that Realist scholars have provided to explain war … there is no single security motive driving states to intervene, and operations may have multiple overlapping motives. Nevertheless, the security motives that drove the United States to intervene can be grouped into three ideal types: offensive, preventive, and hegemonic. Each aimed to increase America’s relative power in a different way.”

If a key thesis of realist theory is right, though, regime change is unlikely to succeed. “[O]ne of the central tenets of Neorealism is that the specific composition of a state’s domestic leadership is irrelevant for explaining its international behavior because great powers behave in similar predictable patterns given their relative share of material power and geostrategic position.” If this is true, the newly installed government after a regime change is unlikely to shift its foreign policy in the way the intervening state wants. But states, avid for power, persist in this mistaken policy. (For this argument to work, O’Rourke’s claim about the predictable patterns of great powers must apply also to smaller powers since most efforts at regime change are not directed at great powers.)

O’Rourke criticizes other explanations of the pursuit of regime change, and her criticism strikes at the heart of democratic peace theory, a frequent rationale for an interventionist foreign policy. “According to normative variants of DPT [democratic peace theory], democracies do not go to war with other democracies, because liberal norms shape how democratic policymakers view one another and choose to resolve conflict.” If this hypothesis were correct, we would expect a democratic United States to support other democracies. But if covert operations are taken into account, this hypothesis fails. “American covert operations habitually violated norms of justified intervention: Washington installed brutal dictators. It broke international law. It collaborated with many unsavory organizations, including … numerous groups known to have committed mass killings.”

O’Rourke, one gathers, hopes that the United States will learn from the failure of covert regime change and instead pursue the inevitable grasp for power in a more rational manner. In this, she resembles her mentor John Mearsheimer, who hopes that America will abandon ideological crusades in favor of “offshore balancing.” Those of us who, like Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul, favor a noninterventionist foreign policy will not be satisfied with this. Instead, we need to ask deeper questions. Is the pursuit of power in the international system indeed inevitable? Does it not depend rather on human free choice? If so, the time has come to abandon completely a failed policy. “Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?”

From LewRockwell.com, here.

Some Overseas Americans May Soon Lose Access to Banking Services

Congress and the IRS Declare War on Overseas Americans

By 

Nestmann.com

October 2, 2019

A fundamental injustice of US tax law is that it discriminates against the approximately nine million Americans who live in other countries.

These citizens must continue filing US tax and information reporting returns, even if they’re paying tax in their resident countries. Any local businesses they’re associated with become ensnared into the spiderweb of US tax laws. (The only other country that imposes similar rules is the totalitarian dictatorship of Eritrea.)

With the enactment of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) in 2010, things got even worse for overseas Americans. The law requires foreign banks and other financial institutions with US customers to act as unpaid informants for the IRS. If they fail to do so, US-source income they have in the form of interest, dividends, rents, and similar payments becomes subject to a 30% withholding tax.

FATCA’s working assumption is that all Americans with investments outside the US are tax evaders, including those who live full-time overseas. But that’s simply nonsense. For instance, the most popular destination for Americans living abroad is Canada. As many as two million US citizens live there. The top combined federal and provincial income tax rate in Canada can approach 50%. In one province – Newfoundland and Labrador – the top combined rate is 51.3%.

Does Canada sound like a tax haven to you?

Despite FATCA’s flawed premise, the IRS has ratcheted up the pressure on foreign financial institutions (FFIs) to enforce it. Unsurprisingly, most FFIs don’t want anything to do with the law. They’ve closed hundreds of thousands of accounts held by US citizens instead.

With their local accounts closed, many overseas Americans increased their reliance on US accounts. But US banks and brokerages have started to close accounts owned by non-resident citizens as well. These include Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, Merrill Lynch and Wells Fargo. In the US financial institutions that still accept business from non-resident citizens, the minimum account values have increased astronomically. Millions of overseas Americans are now effectively locked out of banking relationships anywhere in the world.

What’s more, because the SEC forbids solicitations by US mutual funds to individuals living outside the US, it’s become nearly impossible for non-resident citizens to own them.  In addition, US citizens generally can’t purchase non-US mutual funds without disastrous tax consequences. As a result, Americans living abroad are effectively locked out of all mutual funds, US or non-US.

Another way Congress and the IRS have made life miserable for overseas Americans is to make it practically impossible for them to retire in their adopted countries. For instance, contributions to a foreign pension plan are usually tax-deductible in the country offering it. And growth in the plan is generally tax deferred. But in most cases, the US Tax Code doesn’t offer a deduction for the contribution and taxes the growth in the plan. Overseas Americans often wind up paying two sets of income tax on their pensions: one to the US and a second to their adopted countries. Similarly, US citizens generally can’t own foreign life insurance policies that have a cash value without disastrous tax consequences.

The situation for many Americans living abroad got even worse after Congress enacted President Trump’s tax reform bill in 2017. The law lowers tax rates for both individuals and domestic corporations. But anyone with deferred profits in what the Tax Code refers to as a CFC or controlled foreign corporation (a foreign corporation with more than 50% US ownership), is subject to a mandatory one-time repatriation tax of 15.5%. For less liquid assets like real estate, the tax rate is 8%.

The problem is especially acute for overseas Americans who use foreign corporations as a savings vehicle and have no intention of repatriating the profits to the US. For instance, many Canadians use corporations to operate small businesses and set up pension plans. Net profits in these corporations are taxable in Canada only when they’re distributed. The repatriation tax confiscates a portion of deferred profits of these corporations owned by US citizens, with no provision in Canadian law to offset the tax. Up to 15.5% of the profits are subject to double taxation.

As bad as conditions are now for US citizens living abroad, they’re about to get even worse. In just one country – France – the Banking Federation has warned its members they must close as many as 40,000 additional accounts held by US citizens living there by the end of the year. Many of them are held by “accidental Americans;” individuals born in the US who left the country as children or born to US parents in France. By law, they’re US citizens, although according to the Banking Federation, they “lack any concrete link with the United States, where they no longer reside.”

Indeed, the European Banking Federation, which represents around 3,500 European banks, told the US Treasury that up to 300,000 more US citizens living in Europe could lose access to banking services by the end of the year.

The law forcing their hand is FATCA, which requires FFIs to provide the IRS with the Social Security Numbers of their US citizen customers. Until now the IRS has waived this requirement in certain cases. The waiver ends December 31, 2019. But accidental Americans often don’t have SSNs and often find it difficult to come up with the required documentation to get one.

Since Congress and the IRS have declared war on overseas Americans, it’s no wonder why the number of US citizens expatriating – giving up their citizenship and passport – has skyrocketed in recent years. Unless Congress ends or substantially modifies citizenship-based taxation, that’s the only alternative overseas Americans have to live normal lives in their adopted countries.

Reprinted with permission from Nestmann.com.

From LRC, here.

Mohammedanism Appeasement: The ‘Paradox of Tolerance’ IN ACTION…

The genius of the ‘Islam is right about women’ stunt

Posters bearing that message have appeared in a town in Massachusetts. No one knows how to react.

ALAA AL-AMERI

26th September 2019

Trolling the woke left has become a popular pastime. It can be clever and funny, but it can just as often be a crude attempt to elicit outrage for its own sake. Rarely, however, does something show up that is easily dismissed as ‘trolling’, but which is so remarkably incisive and apt that it rises not only to the level of satire, but borders on civil disobedience.

Think of Posie Parker’s billboards quoting the dictionary definition of the word ‘woman’. The power of such acts comes from two things. First, they acknowledge – usually with irreducible simplicity – that something that went without saying a moment ago has suddenly become unsayable. Secondly, the outrage they provoke does not come from any epithet, caricature or insult, but rather from having the nerve to draw the viewer’s attention to an act of cognitive dissonance that we are all engaging in, but would rather not acknowledge.

The result is that those who attempt to explain why the act is offensive end up simply tying themselves in knots, while revealing that they have never given a moment’s thought to the position they find themselves defending. This seems to generate even more anger, with the inevitable online mob quickly joined by politicians, journalists and other public figures, eager to see that the heretic is made an example of.

At their best, these acts of public disobedience are examples of real-life Winston Smiths pointing out to the rest of us that ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four’. Their persecutors, like his, are those who know and fear the truth of Smith’s next sentence: ‘If that is granted, all else follows.’

The example of perfectly crafted dissent that I’d like to submit here appears in this video from Massachusetts local TV news, showing some reactions to the fly-posting of white sheets of paper bearing the statement ‘Islam is right about women’. The reactions are deeply revealing. Nobody can clearly point out why they object to the statement – indeed, nobody seems to object to the statement at all on its face. Yet most seem to express offence at it – if a little unconvincingly.

The reason for their dilemma is obvious enough to anyone who has been paying attention. Western society has managed to convince itself (at least in public) that any statement criticising any aspect of Islam is, by definition, bigotry. As a result, Western societies have effectively decided to enforce Islamic restrictions on blasphemy, and called it ‘tolerance’.

Continue reading…

From Spiked, here.

I, PENCIL: The Invisible Hand of God versus The Visible Paw of Government

Only Liberty Can Produce a Pencil

By Gary North

August 31, 2011

Back in 1958, Leonard E. Read wrote what has become the most popular essay ever written in defense of the free market. It was better than Frederic Bastiat’s 1850 essay on a broken window as destructive, not productive. It was as clever as Bastiat’s humorous petition of the candlemakers calling for laws against the ruinous competition from the sun. Milton Friedman recommended it highly.

Leonard Read’s delightful story, “I, Pencil,” has become a classic, and deservedly so. I know of no other piece of literature that so succinctly, persuasively, and effectively illustrates the meaning of both Adam Smith’s invisible hand — the possibility of cooperation without coercion — and Friedrich Hayek’s emphasis on the importance of dispersed knowledge and the role of the price system in communicating information that “will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do.”

For over half a century, this essay has stuck in the collective craw of Keynesians, who regard the free market as in need of government regulation and extensive government ownership of natural resources. But Keynesians tend to write turgid, incomprehensible articles. They do not have the gift of satire. One Keynesian has attempted to refute Read’s essay by an appeal to government ownership of forests and government regulation of industry. This is what made pencils possible, he says.

So, I have updated Read’s essay.

WE, PENCILS

Our Family Tree, as Told to Gary North

My grandfather told Leonard Read the story of his family tree back in 1958. Despite being notoriously sharp, he was a kindly fellow, always trying to make his point without sticking it to anyone. So, he neglected to mention certain aspects of the family tree that nobody in the family has been proud of. I have decided to be more forthright.

Grandfather began with the obvious. We pencils spend most of our time helping people discover the obvious.

I am a lead pencil — the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write. Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that’s all I do.

Grandfather always liked to be humble. But he was really proud of his heritage. We all are. He explained why.

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me — no, that’s too much to ask of anyone — if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because — well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.

We pencils are really highly complex, but we look simple. What is true of us is true of everything that looks simple right down to a biological cell. Everything is irreducibly complex. But grandfather had a way with words.

My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!

Once grandfather got going, nobody could get him to stop. He really knew how to lay it on! When it comes to hidden complexity, he always said, “If you’ve got it, flaunt it!”

The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto? These legions are among my antecedents.

Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces. People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. How many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill’s power!

Don’t overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation.

Once in the pencil factory — $4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine — each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat — atop — a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this “wood-clinched” sandwich.

My “lead” itself — it contains no lead at all — is complex. The graphite is mined in Ceylon [Sri Lanka]. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships. Even the lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth — and the harbor pilots.

OK, enough’s enough. You get the idea. This complexity is beyond the power of anyone to explain, let alone centrally plan.

Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.

Grandfather was always self-effacing. He admitted that most of these workers were not interested in owning more pencils. Yet, because they could trade their labor for money, they worked hard to create bits and pieces of the components that make a pencil.

There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to which I earlier referred.

It has been said that “only God can make a tree.” Why do we agree with this? Isn’t it because we realize that we ourselves could not make one? Indeed, can we even describe a tree? We cannot, except in superficial terms. We can say, for instance, that a certain molecular configuration manifests itself as a tree. But what mind is there among men that could even record, let alone direct, the constant changes in molecules that transpire in the life span of a tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable!

Most pencils like to believe in miracles. Pencils are just like people in this regard. And a pencil would be a miracle indeed, if there were no voluntary cooperation among people, no contracts, and no exchange. But, when you get down to it, everyone who has any simple item in his pocket has a pocket full of miracles.

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies — millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human masterminding!

Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.

Grandfather was never one to waste an important point. (I’ve got a million of ’em!)

The above is what I meant when writing, “If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing.” For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand — that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive masterminding — then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.

All of us family members agree with grandfather’s assessment of our genealogy. But there is a strange thing. We still find that people find it difficult to accept our genealogy.

SKELETONS IN THE FAMILY CLOSET

Every family has a dark side to it if you look back far enough. Grandfather admitted it upfront but passed over it quickly. He mentioned that he came from either northern California or Oregon. He wasn’t sure which. Our family branch — get it? Like I said, I’ve got a million of ’em — grew up on land owned by the U.S. government. Some of the family members were owned by the U.S. Forest Service. The others were owned by the Bureau of Land Management. The two agencies have never cooperated very well. When you talk about turf wars in government, it’s literal in their case.

Back in 1935, Forest Service adopted a policy of putting out all fires within a few hours of their discovery. This was adopted by the National Park Service, a third government agency overseeing timber.

In 1972, the National Park Service reversed the older policy, adopting the “let it burn” approach. But this was adopted after almost 40 years of fire-free growth of trees and underbrush. Then, in 1988, about 800,000 acres of Yellowstone Park burned to the ground. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The National Park Service policies giveth, and the National Park Service policies taketh away. Blessed be the name of the National Park Service” (except inside the Bureau of Land Management).

The U.S. government owns 30% of the nation’s land. The U.S. government owns anywhere from 40% to 85% of all land in the dozen Western states. This does not include land owned by state and local governments.

The government leases timber land to private corporations that have no stake in the future of the land. They never know if they will be top bidders in 25 years. So, they strip as much of the land as the agencies allow.

Employees of these agencies have no direct stake in the profitability of the corporations, so they do not make their decisions based on customer demand. They make their decisions in terms of adding more power to their agencies.

This leads to irrationally priced wood. This has been a problem with family members in our lineage. We never really know what we’re worth. It’s bad for a pencil’s self-image, let me tell you. For all I know, I am the offspring of some Swiss bank payoff to a government bureaucrat by a corporate deal-maker.

Our family is not one of the main branches. The main branches in the West are in Washington State. The trees there are managed on privately owned land. Weyerhaeuser has owned the land ever since 1900. It is the largest privately owned forest of timber on earth.

Then there is Georgia Pacific. It owns huge tracts of land in the southeast. It is owned by Koch Industries, a privately held corporation. From 1927 to 2005, it was a publicly traded company. Today, outsiders have little say in how the timber is managed. Pricing is set between customers who buy wood products and corporate entrepreneurs who get the best prices customers offer. The corporate owners have personal economic incentives to keep the trees healthy and growing. They want to keep making profitable deals.

A pencil who can trace his lineage back to one of these firms knows what he is worth. He knows he’s legitimate.

People who are involved in making the components of pencils in the United States are the graduates of tax-funded schools. They used pencils in their youth, but the skills they needed to learn pencil-making used to be taught at home by mothers in about five years or fewer. After that, students can educate themselves. Anyone who doubts this needs to investigate Dr. Art Robinson’s curriculum.

Some managers need to know how to read and do basic arithmetic. These skills are available through curriculum materials that are free of charge online today. The model is Khan Academy. The next generation of pencils will be better than ever. They will be computer designed.

As for illiterate workers outside the United States who helped make me, they picked up the necessary skills through apprenticeship. This was funded by their employers, not taxpayers.

The components that made me what I am were shipped by rail. These were built with government money in the late 1860s. But the trees where the really successful family members grow up are in Washington State. They were sold to Weyerhaeuser in 1900 by James J. Hill, who built the Great Northern Railway without government money.

Of course, patents were the basis of some ancient developments that shaped pencils way back when. The patent system confers monopoly grants of privilege to inventors for a few years. That’s rarely talked about these days.

Corporations have contributed to the creation of my family tree, but these are no more the product of state action than churches are. There is limited liability protection for both, according to voluntary agreement.

My family tree, just like yours, is the product of mostly voluntary agreements. From time to time over the last 150 years, people with badges and guns have intervened to tell other people making pencil parts what to do. They always do this on the basis of their perceived self-interest. I think there would be a lot more pencils serving a lot more users if people with badges and guns had just stayed out of it. They are all pen users. Don’t put your trust in pen users.

If you understand the genealogy of a pencil, you should be immunized against Marxism, Keynesianism, and the other isms that teach that central planning is required to enjoy the blessings of liberty.

Sadly, the story of I, Pencil is not taught in tax-funded schools. It is not taught in state-accredited universities. It is taught online.

August 31, 2011

From LRC, here.

Ron Paul: Placating Neocons Is a Fool’s Errand!

Will More US Troops in Saudi Arabia Make America Great?

By 

Ron Paul Institute

September 24, 2019

President Trump deserves credit for resisting the war cries from neocons like Sen. Lindsey Graham and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo after last week’s attack on two Saudi oil facilities. Pompeo was eager to blame Iran because he wants war with Iran and anything that can trigger such a war is fine with him. So he put the president in a difficult spot by declaring Iran the culprit: suddenly the president’s options in the media and in Washington were limited to “how to punish Iran.”

A week has now passed since the attack and Pompeo’s rush to judgment has been shown for what it was: war propaganda. That is because there has still been no determination of who launched the attack. Yemen’s Houthis took responsibility right away and Iran denied any involvement. We have seen nothing to this point that contradicts this.

President Trump likely understands that a US war on Iran will be his undoing as president. Who knows, maybe that’s what his closest advisors want. But according to a Gallup poll just last month, only 18 percent of Americans were in favor of military action against Iran. Seventy-eight percent of Americans – including 72 percent of Republicans – want the president to pursue diplomatic efforts over war. Iran has made clear that any attack on its territory will trigger a total war. The Middle East would be engulfed in flames and the US economy would be in the tank. Suddenly we’d see Democrat challengers pretending to be antiwar!

The message to Trump is pretty clear – war with Iran would be deeply unpopular – and it seems clear he understands the message. Just hours after his Secretary of State put the US on war footing with Iran, President Trump was forced to walk back Pompeo’s aggression. When asked about going to war with Iran, President Trump said, “Do I want war? I don’t want war with anybody.”

Unfortunately, with pressure on President Trump to “do something” even as Iran has not been found to have been behind the attack, the president has settled on two measures – one pointless and the other dangerous. On Friday Trump announced yet even more sanctions on Iran, leaving many of us to wonder what is possibly left to sanction. He also announced a deployment of US military forces to Saudi Arabia of a “defensive nature.” Why should the military be sent to “defend” one of the wealthiest and most repressive countries on earth? It is hard to see how putting US service members into harm’s way – into a war zone – to defend Saudi Arabia can in any way make America great again. I believe most Americans would agree.

President Trump should immediately cancel the order to send US troops to Saudi Arabia and should immediately remove what troops are already on Saudi soil. Then the Saudis would understand that they must end their aggression against Yemen.

Attempting to placate the neocons is a fool’s errand because they are never satisfied even up to and including war. The tide is turning in America – and even in Washington – against Saudi Arabia. After the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and a catastrophic four-year Saudi war on Yemen, no American politician is any longer in the mood to stick his or her neck out to defend Saudi Arabia. President Trump would be wise to use caution: it’s always dangerous sticking one’s neck out when the Saudi government is around.

From LRC, here.