We can say this in the knowledge that over long periods the purchasing power of gold is remarkably stable, while those of fiat currencies are not. This is why everyone should examine their exposure to credit, which is always fiat usually with systemic risk thrown in (unless you hold cash notes). But we are all human, and from time to time worry that the headline values of our gold or silver might fall and we have missed a selling opportunity.

Having broken into new high ground, there is no doubt that there’s much speculation embedded in gold and silver prices. While we should not tie events together to tightly, this build up has been ahead of the BRICS summit in Kazan next week, with speculation that a new trade settlement currency backed by gold might be announced. Well, President Putin said on Friday that “talk of creating a single currency for the BRICS grouping was premature”. It is not ruled out, only it is not for this agenda

That would suggest that this coming week will see profit-taking in gold and silver and perhaps a shake-out of speculative longs as their stops are triggered on Comex. But Putin made his statement deferring the introduction of a new currency on Friday, after which gold and silver soared higher. It was probably wrong therefore to associate rising prices for gold and silver with speculation about a new BRICS currency.

The other material statement was that Putin was open to admitting new members. A few weeks ago, I suggested that this could be accelerated by creating a class of associate members as a stepping stone to full membership and I would take this to now be the case. Could that have been behind the surge in gold and silver?

We cannot know. But looking at last night’s Commitment of Traders figures for last Tuesday and adjusting for Open Interest since then it is clear that gold is now in overbought territory, but could go further.

A consolidation here would be the healthy outcome, at least from a technical point of view. We can bet that central banks and other statist interests would welcome the opportunity to pick up some cheap bullion, underwriting the market. And recently, Russia announced that it was in the market for silver bullion. That’s our last chart.

I wouldn’t rule out a back-test, maybe to $30.50 or so. But the bullish message of the chart is clear. And even that might not happen.

Reprinted with permission from MacleodFinance Substack.

While it is true that inequality makes the poor better off and that restricting inequality interferes with liberty, these are not the best arguments that defenders of the free market should use. They accept that inequality is bad, but we should reject this assumption. There is nothing bad about inequality.

People are unequal in every dimension of their being, including weight, height, muscle build, intelligence, and so on. This just the way the world is. Why should we try to change it? People who attempt this have a grudge against the world. They are not satisfied with the way God created it.

And of course they can’t succeed. As the great Murray Rothbard points out, absolute equality is impossible. No two places on earth, for example, offer precisely the same view.

If we shouldn’t defend the free market by arguing that it decreases equality, what should we do? Fortunately, there are many better arguments available. I’m going to list a number of them, but if you want more details, you should read Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market and Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action.

One of the best of these arguments is that the free market makes possible mutually beneficial gains from trade. If I have something that you want and you have something I want, we can make an exchange, so we are both better off. But what if our exchange makes someone else worse off? This question is a version of the “externalities” or “market failure” argument. The claim is that some of our activities, including trade, impose costs on others. If so, this indicates a failure to define property rights. Once we do so, the so-called “problem” dissolves.

This obviously raises another question. How do people acquire property rights? The best answer is given by Rothbard, further developed and extended by the great Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Everybody owns himself and, given that the earth starts out unowned, he can “mix his labor” with the land and thus acquire it.

Before leaving externalities aside, we should note another important argument. People who talk about externalities want the government to correct them, but what reason is there to think that the government will change things so that the supposedly “correct” amount is produced? There is every reason to think that the government will make matters worse.

There is an assumption that we have been making so far that should now be dropped. This assumption is that in deciding what sort of economic system to adopt, we have a choice. We can pick the free market, socialism, or some intermediate system that is a mixture of the free market and socialism. For any developed economy, this is not so, as Mises proved in his famous article “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (1920), expanded into his great book Socialism. Mises proved that without free market prices, economic calculation is impossible. Entrepreneurs cannot tell whether their investments are profitable. So, they are unable to use their resources efficiently. If they cannot do this, the economy will collapse into chaos.

Further, there is no third system intermediate between the free market and socialism. Interference with the market fails to achieve the ostensible goals of its supporters. Minimum wage laws create unemployment. Price controls lead to shortages. Faced with failure, the interventionists must either return to the free market or intervene again, in an effort to remedy the defects of the previous intervention. If this is continued, there will be no free market left. The result will be full-scale socialism, which has already been shown to be impossible.

How did the socialists and interventionists respond to Mises’s conclusive demonstration that their schemes cannot work? They denied the existence of economic laws that restricted what they could do. As Mises says in Human Action, “It is a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of the debates concerning the essence, scope, and logical character of economics to dismiss them as the scholastic quibbling of pedantic professors. It is a widespread misconception that while pedants squandered useless talk about the most appropriate method of procedure, economics itself, indifferent to these idle disputes, went quietly on its way.

In the Methodenstreit between the Austrian economists and the Prussian Historical School, the self-styled ‘intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern,’ and in the discussions between the school of John Bates Clark and American Institutionalism much more was at stake than the question of what kind of procedure was the most fruitful one.

The real issue was the epistemological foundations of the science of human action and its logical legitimacy. Starting from an epistemological system to which praxeological thinking was strange and from a logic which acknowledged as scientific–besides logic and mathematics–only the empirical natural sciences and history, many authors tried to deny the value and usefulness of economic theory. Historicism aimed at replacing it by economic history; positivism recommended the substitution of an illusory social science which should adopt the logical structure and pattern of Newtonian mechanics. Both these schools agreed in a radical rejection of all the achievements of economic thought. It was impossible for the economists to keep silent in the face of all these attacks.”

Thus, it’s the free market or nothing. We are fortunate that the only economic system is on that benefits everybody through the chance of making mutually advantageous exchanges.

This point leads to another argument we can use to defend the free market. In the free market, it’s to my advantage that others do well, because they can offer more goods and services to exchange. This will promote peace between nations. Why go to war with people who are making you better off?

Given the abundance of excellent arguments in favor of the free market, there is no need to use argument that accept the enemy’s premise that equality is a good thing. Let’s do everything that we can to support the genuine arguments in favor of the free market, as best expounded by Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises.

The woke position rests on a fundamental fallacy. This is that there is a fixed amount resources, so that if the rich have more, the poor have less. But this is wrong. Resources in the free market are not a fixed sum. So long as the economy is growing, everybody can benefit. The ‘protected’ can do better without taking away what the rich have earned. The economist Paul Rubin, who died last month, gives a good account of the fallacy: “Karl Marx called his system ‘scientific socialism’ Modern leftists advocate a similar ideology and call themselves ‘woke’ to indicate that they understand the world better than the rest of us. Yet the worldview of Marxists and woke leftists alike is fundamentally primitive.

Folk economics is the economics of people untrained in economics. It is the economic view of the world that evolved in our brains before the development of the modern economy. During this period of evolution, the economy was simple, with little specialization except by age and sex, no economic growth, no technological change, limited trade, little capital, and warfare between neighboring tribes.

Zero-sum thinking was well-adapted to this world. Since there was no economic growth, incomes and wealth didn’t grow. If one person had access to more food or other goods, or greater access to females, it was likely because of expropriation from others. Since there was little capital, a ‘labor theory of value’—the idea that all value is created by labor alone—would have been appropriate, and there was little need to protect capital through property rights. Frequent warfare encouraged xenophobia.

Adam Smith and other economists challenged this worldview in the 18th century. They taught that specialization of labor was valuable, that capital was productive, and that labor and capital could work together to increase income. They also showed that property rights needed protection, that members of other tribes or groups could cooperate through trade, that wealth could be created with the proper incentives, and that the creation of wealth would benefit everyone in a society, not only the wealthy. Most important, they showed that a complex economy could work with little or no central direction.

Marx’s economic system was based on the primitive worldview of our ancestors. For him, conflict rather than cooperation between labor and capital defined the economy. He thought that the wealthy became rich only by exploiting the poor, that all income came from labor, and that the economy needed central direction because he didn’t believe markets were good at self-correction. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the largest and most expensive social-science experiment ever conducted, proved Smith right and Marx wrong.

Members of the woke left want to return to policies based on this primitive economic thinking. One of their major errors is thinking that the world is zero-sum. That assumption drives identity politics, which sees, among other things, an intrinsic conflict between blacks and whites. The Black Lives Matter movement and Critical Race Theory foment racial antagonism and resurrect xenophobia. Leftists vilify ‘millionaires and billionaires’ like Bill Gates and Elon Musk as evil and exploitative. They should recognize them as productive entrepreneurs whose innovations benefit us all.

Dislike of the rich makes sense in a world where one can become rich only by exploiting others, but not in a society full of creativity and useful inventions. Changing tax laws to soak the rich makes sense with a labor theory of value, but not with a sophisticated understanding of continual investment and technological change.

Adopting counterproductive woke policies such as racial job quotas, high taxes, excessive regulation of business, and price controls on some goods may not send us all the way back to the subsistence economy of our ancestors. But if policies that penalize saving and investing and that involve excessive government control are adopted, social capital, wealth, and real income will decline. If we bow to this primitive ideology, there will be increased racial animosity and conflict, slow economic growth, and fewer inventions.”

You might raise an objection to this. Even if the economy is growing, and the minorities can gain without taking resources from the rich, why should they be satisfied with what they get? Can’t they demand more of the growing economic pie? The answer is that doing this will hurt them, not help them. The way in which the economy grows is by capital accumulation, and the great bulk of this takes place through the investments of the well off. Confiscation of the income and wealth of the wealthy will slow down or stop the rate of economic growth. This will make the “protected” worse off. The great Ludwig von Mises proposes a thought experiment that brings out this point vividly: “A law that prohibits any individual from accumulating more than ten million or from making more than one million a year restricts the activities of precisely those entrepreneurs who are most successful in filling the wants of consumers. If such a law had been enacted in the United States fifty years ago, many who are multimillionaires today would live in more modest circumstances. But all those new branches of industry which supply the masses with articles unheard of before would operate, if at all, on a much smaller scale, and their products would be beyond the reach of the common man. It is manifestly contrary to the interest of the consumers to prevent the most efficient entrepreneurs from expanding the sphere of their activities up to the limit to which the public approves of their conduct of business by buying their products.”

There is another way in which the woke movement undermines our economy, and this may be the most serious one of all. The conjuring up of grievances encourages blacks to hate whites. Being white is regarded by many left-wing revolutionaries as evil, and murderous violence will result from this.  As the great black economist Thomas Sowell points out: “Although much of the media have their antennae out to pick up anything that might be construed as racism against blacks, they resolutely ignore even the most blatant racism by blacks against others.

That includes a pattern of violent attacks on whites in public places in Chicago, Denver, New York, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Kansas City, as well as blacks in schools beating up Asian classmates – for years – in New York and Philadelphia.

These attacks have been accompanied by explicitly racist statements by the attackers, so it is not a question of having to figure out what the motivation is. There has also been rioting and looting by these young hoodlums.”

Let’s do everything we can to counter the woke plot to destroy our economy and to encourage the free market economic policies of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. That is the way to a prosperous economy in which all groups can live in harmony.

About the Author

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

The answer is quite clear. “Open borders” would be a disastrous mistake. The policy would subject the United States to hordes of people with alien ideologies and cultures. As the great Ludwig von Mises pointed out, it would have made no sense to allow immigration from Germany and Japan during World War II. “Neither does it mean that there can be any question of appeasing aggressors by removing migration barriers. As conditions are today, the Americas and Australia in admitting German, Italian, and Japanese immigrants merely open their doors to the vanguards of hostile armies.” We face exactly the same situation today. We have a hard enough problem coping with the alien ideologies and cultures that are already here. Why compound our problem?

The situation is even worse than we have so far portrayed. Because of the “woke” control that now prevails, members of “protected” groups such as racial minorities are immediately eligible for reparations, “set-asides,” affirmative action, and other schemes to mulct the American people. Why should our hard-earned tax money go to support people who have no ties to our country? As I said in 2015, “In other words, it’s bad enough we have to be looted, spied on, and kicked around by the state. Should we also have to pay for the privilege of cultural destructionism, an outcome the vast majority of the state’s taxpaying subjects do not want and would actively prevent if they lived in a free society and were allowed to do so?”

Aside from the “woke” problem, there is something else. Those who come here because of “open borders” can immediately benefit from the welfare state. A massive number of people could come here just to live from welfare payments. Why bankrupt our economy? The well-known free market economist Milton Friedman, hardly an extremist, said, “You cannot simultaneously have a free market and a welfare state.”

You might counter this by pointing out that welfare benefits aren’t very lavish. But this is true only if you are thinking of the standards of living of the American upper and middle classes. (Actually, though, these benefits are quite substantial and give the lie to claims that America has been marked by rising “inequality” in recent decades.) Because America is much more prosperous than the places the immigrants are coming from, living from American welfare payments would be a good deal for millions of potential immigrants.

Some fanatical libertarian supporters of “open borders” have come up with a response to this point that has to be characterized as one of the worst arguments in the past few decades. Robert Rector mentions this argument here: “The grant of citizenship is a transfer of political power. Access to the U.S. ballot box also provides access to the American taxpayer’s bank account. This is particularly problematic with regard to low-skill immigrants. Within an active redistributionist state, as Friedman understood, unlimited immigration can threaten limited government.

“Many libertarians respond to this dilemma by asserting that the real problem is not open borders but the welfare state itself. The answer: dismantle the welfare state. The libertarian Cato Institute pursues a variant of this policy under the slogan, ‘build a wall around the welfare state, not around the nation.’. . . Borders should be open, but immigrants should be barred from accessing welfare and other benefits. , , . In a recent debate with Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute, I pointed out this paradox. Griswold replied that the key was to grant amnesty and open borders now and work on ‘building a wall around welfare’ at some point in the future.” See this.

It has to be said that this is utterly stupid. It would be like saying that you need to take two medications. If you take only one, you’ll die. Therefore, you should take one of them and worry about getting the other one later.

There is yet another problem with “open borders,” that gets to the root of why we support the free market. As Mises again and again pointed out, the free market replaces the Darwinian struggle of the natural world, in which some animals survive at the expense of others. In the free market, people can benefit without harming others. There is a harmony of long term interests among people.

But with open borders this is no longer true. Immigrants will take jobs by undercutting American workers, because even very low paying American jobs are better than what they are getting in their home countries. This process will take place until wages reach a common level, and given the vast number of potential immigrants compared with American workers, the wage that results will be close to the immigrants’ standard. American workers could rightly say, “What about us? Your “free market” makes our condition worse.” But of course it isn’t the “free market” that does this. It’s “open borders,” which is an anti-market principle, that does this. Insisting that “open borders” makes everybody better off makes libertarianism seem ridiculous, because a great many people are hurt by the policy.

Some “left libertarians” will object that the free market does indeed mandate “open borders”. But it doesn’t. The libertarian non-aggression principle leaves it up to us to determine what to do in a society with so-called “public” property.

We need to confront another objection. Wouldn’t an attempt to close the border require that we lock up illegal immigrants in concentration camps? Wouldn’t this be a drastic infringement on their liberty? But a closed border doesn’t require this. All that we need to do is to build a wall and prevent immigrants from entering. We don’t have to jail them. All we need to do is to turn them away.

Also, building a wall would be easier if states can build walls around their own territory. This greatly reduces the cost of building a wall. Closing the border gives the people in each state or local community a choice about accepting immigrants. Closed borders and secession go hand-in hand

Let’s do everything we can to end the hoax of “open borders.” Doing so is a step in the preservation of Western civilization and the American heritage.

I spoke about the difference between the classical gold standard and the fake gold standard. This might seem a technical issue, but it’s one of vital importance. Joe Salerno, the leading contemporary Austrian School authority on monetary economics and Academic Vice President of the Mises Institute, explains:

“The historical embodiment of monetary freedom is the gold standard. The era of its greatest flourishing was not coincidentally the 19th century, the century in which classical liberal ideology reigned, a century of unprecedented material progress and peaceful relations between nations. Unfortunately, the monetary freedom represented by the gold standard, along with many other freedoms of the classical liberal era, was brought to a calamitous end by World War I.

Also, and not so coincidentally, this was the “War to Make the World Safe for Mass Democracy,” a political system which we have all learned by now is the great enemy of freedom in all its social and economic manifestations.

Now, it is true that the gold standard did not disappear overnight, but limped along in weakened form into the early 1930s. But this was not the pre-1914 classical gold standard, in which the actions of private citizens operating on free markets ultimately controlled the supply and value of money and governments had very little influence.

Under this monetary system, if people in one nation demanded more money to carry out more transactions or because they were more uncertain of the future, they would export more goods and financial assets to the rest of the world, while importing less. As a result, additional gold would flow in through a surplus in the balance of payments increasing the nation’s money supply.

Sometimes, private banks tried to inflate the money supply by issuing additional bank notes and deposits, called “fiduciary media,” promising to pay gold but unbacked by gold reserves. They lent these notes and deposits to either businesses or the government. However, as soon as the borrowers spent these additional fractional-reserve notes and deposits, domestic incomes and prices would begin to rise.

As a result, foreigners would reduce their purchases of the nation’s exports, and domestic residents would increase their spending on the relatively cheap foreign imports. Gold would flow out of the coffers of the nation’s banks to finance the resulting trade deficit, as the excess paper notes and checks were returned to their issuers for redemption in gold.

To check this outflow of gold reserves, which made their depositors very nervous, the banks would contract the supply of fiduciary media bringing about a monetary deflation and an ensuing depression.

Temporarily chastened by the experience, banks would refrain from again expanding credit for a while. If the Treasury tried to issue convertible notes only partially backed by gold, as it occasionally did, it too would face these consequences and be forced to restrain its note issue within narrow bounds.

Thus, governments and commercial banks under the gold standard did not have much influence over the money supply in the long run. The only sizable inflations that occurred during the 19th century did so during wartime when almost all belligerent nations would “go off the gold standard.” They did so in order to conceal the staggering costs of war from their citizens by printing money rather than raising taxes to pay for it.

For example, Great Britain experienced a substantial inflation at the beginning of the 19th century during the period of the Napoleonic Wars, when it had suspended the convertibility of the British pound into gold. Likewise, the United States and the Confederate States of America both suffered a devastating hyperinflation during the War for Southern Independence, because both sides issued inconvertible Treasury notes to finance budget deficits. It is because politicians and their privileged banks were unable to tamper with and inflate a gold money that prices in the United States and in Great Britain at the close of the 19th century were roughly the same as they were at the beginning of the century.

Within weeks of the outbreak of World War I, all belligerent nations departed from the gold standard. Needless to say by the war’s end the paper fiat currencies of all these nations were in the throes of inflations of varying degrees of severity, with the German hyperinflation that culminated in 1923 being the worst. To put their currencies back in order and to restore the public’s confidence in them, one country after another reinstituted the gold standard during the 1920s.

Unfortunately, the new gold standard of the 1920s was fundamentally different from the classical gold standard. For one thing, under this latter version, gold coin was not used in daily transactions. In Great Britain, for example, the Bank of England would only redeem pounds in large and expensive bars of gold bullion. But gold bullion was mainly useful for financing international trade transactions.

Other countries such as Germany and the smaller countries of Central and Eastern Europe used gold-convertible foreign currencies such as the US dollar or the pound sterling as reserves for their own domestic currencies. This was called the gold-exchange standard.

While the US dollar was technically redeemable in honest-to-goodness gold coin, banks no longer held reserves in gold coin but in Federal Reserve notes. All gold reserves were centralized, by law, in the hands of the Fed and banks were encouraged to use Fed notes to cash checks and pay for checking and savings deposit withdrawals. This meant that very little gold coin circulated among the public in the 1920s, and residents of all nations came increasingly to view the paper IOUs of their central banks as the ultimate embodiment of the dollar, franc, pound, etc.

This state of affairs gave governments and their central banks much greater leeway for manipulating their national money supplies. The Bank of England, for example, could expand the amount of paper claims to gold pounds through the banking system without fearing a run on its gold reserves for two reasons.

Foreign countries on the gold exchange standard would be willing to pile up the paper pounds that flowed out of Great Britain through its balance of payments deficit and not demand immediate conversion into gold. In fact by issuing their own currency to tourists and exporters in exchange for the increasing quantities of inflated paper pounds, foreign central banks were in effect inflating their own money supplies in lock-step with the Bank of England. This drove up prices in their own countries to the inflated level attained by British prices and put an end to the British deficits.

In effect, this system enabled countries such as Great Britain and the United States to export monetary inflation abroad and to run “a deficit without tears” — that is, a balance-of-payments deficit that does not involve a loss of gold.

But even if gold reserves were to drain out of the vaults of the Bank of England or the Fed to foreign nations, British and US citizens would be disinclined, either by law or by custom, to put further pressure on their respective central banks to stop inflating by threatening bank runs to rid themselves of their depreciating notes and retrieve their rightful property left with the banks for safekeeping.

Unfortunately, contemporary economists and economic historians do not grasp the fundamental difference between the hard-money classical gold standard of the 19th century and the inflationary phony gold standard of the 1920s.” See here.

Many people think that even if 100% reserve banking is desirable as an ideal, it would never work in practice. How could banks stay in business if they couldn’t lend their checking deposits? Doesn’t the supply of money need to expand as the economy grows? Murray Rothbard demolishes these objections with characteristic force:

“Certain standard objections have been raised against 100 percent banking and against 100 percent gold currency in particular. One generally accepted argument against any form of 100 percent banking I find particularly and strikingly curious: that under 100 percent reserves, banks would not be able to continue profitably in business. I see no reason why banks should not be able to charge their customers for their services, as do all other useful businesses. This argument points to the supposedly enormous benefits of banking; if these benefits were really so powerful, then surely the consumers would be willing to pay a service charge for them, just as they pay for traveler’s checks now. If they were not willing to pay the costs of the banking business as they pay the costs of all other industries useful to them, then that would demonstrate the advantages of banking to have been highly overrated. At any rate, there is no reason why banking should not take its chance in the free market with every other industry.

The major objection against 100 percent gold is that this would allegedly leave the economy with an inadequate money supply. Some economists advocate a secular increase of the supply of money in accordance with some criterion: population growth, growth of volume of trade, and the like; others wish the money supply to be adjusted to provide a stable and fixed price level. In both cases, of course, the adjusting and manipulating could only be done by government. These economists have not fully absorbed the great monetary lesson of classical economics: that the supply of money essentially does not matter. Money performs its function by being a medium of exchange; any change in its supply, therefore, will simply adjust itself in the purchasing power of the money unit, that is, in the amount of other goods that money will be able to buy. An increase in the supply of money means merely that more units of money are doing the social work of exchange and therefore that the purchasing power of each unit will decline. Because of this adjustment, money, in contrast to all other useful commodities employed in production or consumption, does not confer a social benefit when its supply increases. The only reason that increased gold mining is useful, in fact, is that the large supply of gold will satisfy more of the non–monetary uses of the gold commodity.

There is therefore never any need for a larger supply of money (aside from the non-monetary uses of gold or silver). An increased supply of money can only benefit one set of people at the expense of another set, and, as we have seen, that is precisely what happens when government or the banks inflate the money supply. And that is precisely what my proposed reform is designed to eliminate. There can, incidentally, never be an actual monetary “shortage,” since the very fact that the market has established and continues to use gold or silver as a monetary commodity shows that enough of it exists to be useful as a medium of exchange.

The number of people, the volume of trade, and all other alleged criteria are therefore merely arbitrary and irrelevant with respect to the supply of money. And as for the ideal of the stable price level, apart from the grave flaws of deciding on a proper index, there are two points that are generally overlooked. In the first place, the very ideal of a stable price level is open to challenge. Hoarding, as we have indicated, is always attacked; and yet it is the freely expressed and desired action on the market. People often wish to increase the real value of their cash balances, or to raise the purchasing power of each dollar. There are many reasons why they might wish to do so. Why should they not have this right, as they have other rights on the free market? And yet only by their “hoarding” taking effect through lower prices can they bring about this result. Only by demanding more cash balances and thus lowering prices can the dollars assume a higher real value. I see no reason why government manipulators should be able to deprive the consuming public of this right.

Second, if people really had an overwhelming desire for a stable price level, they would negotiate all their contracts in some agreed-upon price index. The fact that such a voluntary “tabular standard” has rarely been adopted is an apt enough commentary on those stable-price-level enthusiasts who would impose their ambitions by government coercion.

Money, it is often said, should function as a yardstick, and therefore its value should be stabilized and fixed. Not its value, however, but its weight should be eternally fixed, as are all other weights. Its value, like all other values, should be left to the judgment, estimation and ultimate decision of every individual consumer.” See here.

If we want a true gold standard, can we get back to it? Of course we can. The inflationary monetary policy we have today is the key to the financial elites control over us. Without it brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers couldn’t function. We must prevail, and we can prevail. As I said in 2002,

“The power to create money is the most ominous power ever bestowed on any human being. This power is rightly criminalized when it is exercised by private individuals, and even today, everyone knows why counterfeiting is wrong and knavish. Far fewer are aware of the role of the federal government, the Fed, and the fiat dollar in making possible the largest counterfeiting operation in human history, which is called the world dollar standard. Fewer still understand the connection between this officially sanctioned criminality and the business cycle, the rise and collapse of the stock market, and the continued erosion of the value of the dollar.

In fact, I would venture to guess that a sizeable percentage of even educated adults would be astounded to discover that the Federal Reserve does more than manage the nation’s money accounts, that, in fact, its main activity consists in actually creating money that distorts production and creates inflation and the business cycle. In fact, I would go further to suggest that many educated adults believe that gold continues to serve as the ultimate backing of our monetary system, and would be astonished to discover that our money is backed by nothing but more of itself.

We have our work cut out for us, to be sure, mainly at the educational level. We must continue to state the obvious at every opportunity, that the fiat system is exactly what it is, a system of paper money backed by nothing of real value. We must continue to point out that because of this, our economic system is not depression proof, but rather highly vulnerable to complete meltdown. We must continue to draw attention to the only long-term solution: a complete separation of money and state based on the commodity that the market has always chosen as money, namely, gold.

This takes us back to our original question: is the gold standard history? Is it so preposterously unrealistic to advocate it that we might as well move to on other things? It won’t surprise you that my answer is no. If there is one thing that a long-term view of politics teaches, it is that only the long-term really matters.

There will come a time when the current money and banking system, living off credit created by a fiat money system, will be stretched beyond the limit. When it happens, attitudes will turn on a dime. No advocate of the gold standard looks forward to the crisis nor to the human suffering that will come with it. We do, however, look forward to the reassertion of economic law in the field of money and banking. When it becomes incredibly obvious that something drastic must replace the current system, new attention will be paid to the voices that have long cast aspersions on the current system and called for a restoration of sound money.

Must a crisis lead to monetary reforms that we will like? Not necessarily, and, for that matter, a crisis is not a necessary precursor to radical reform. As Mises himself used to emphasize, political history has no predetermined course. Everything depends on the ideas that people hold about fundamental issues of human freedom and the place of government. Under the right conditions, I have no doubt that a gold standard can be completely restored, no matter how unfavorable the current environment appears towards its restoration.

What is essential for us today is to continue the research, the writing, the advocacy for sound money, for a dollar that is as good as gold, for a monetary system that is separate from the state. It is a beautiful vision indeed, one in which the people and not the government and its connected interest groups maintain control of their money and its safe keeping.

What has been true for hundreds of years remains true today. The clearest path to the restoration of economic health is the free market undergirded by a sound monetary system. The clearest path toward economic destruction is for us to stop working toward what is right and true.” See here.

Let’s do everything we can to end the Fed and restore the real gold standard!

About the Author

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

How can they stop him from losing? Simple. If it looks like he’s losing, the elite forces will create enough fake ballots to ensure victory. Our corrupt courts won’t stop them. They have done this before, and they will do it again, if they have to.

I said the Democrats have done this before. The great Dr. Ron Paul explains one way they did this in 2020. The elite covered up a scandal that could have wrecked Biden’s chances:

“Move over Watergate. On or around Oct. 17, 2020, then-senior Biden campaign official Antony Blinken called up former acting CIA director Mike Morell to ask a favor: he needed high-ranking former US intelligence community officials to lie to the American people to save Biden’s lagging campaign from a massive brewing scandal.

The problem was that Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, had abandoned his laptop at a repair shop and the explosive contents of the computer were leaking out. The details of the Biden family’s apparent corruption and the debauchery of the former vice-president’s son were being reported by the New York Post, and with the election less than a month away, the Biden campaign needed to kill the story.

So, according to newly-released transcripts of Morell’s testimony before the House judiciary Committee, Blinken “triggered” Morell to put together a letter for some 50 senior intelligence officials to sign – using their high-level government titles – to claim that the laptop story “had all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.”

In short, at the Biden campaign’s direction Morell launched a covert operation against the American people to undermine the integrity of the 2020 election. A letter signed by dozens of the highest-ranking former CIA, DIA, and NSA officials would surely carry enough weight to bury the Biden laptop story. It worked. Social media outlets prevented any reporting on the laptop from being posted and the mainstream media could easily ignore the story as it was merely “Russian propaganda.”

Asked recently by Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) why he agreed to draft the false sign-on letter, Morell testified that he wanted to “help Vice President Biden … because I wanted him to win the election.” Morell also likely expected to be named by President Biden to head up the CIA when it came time to call in favors.

The Democrats and the mainstream media have relentlessly pushed the lie that the ruckus inside the US Capitol on Jan. 6th 2021 was a move by President Trump to overthrow the election results. Hundreds of “trespassers” were arrested and held in solitary confinement without trial to bolster the false narrative that a conspiracy to steal the election was taking place.

It turns out that there really was a conspiracy to steal the election, but it was opposite of what was reported. Just as the Steele Dossier was a Democratic Party covert action to plant the lie that the Russians were pulling strings for Trump, the “Russian disinformation campaign” letter was a lie to deflect scrutiny of the Biden family’s possible corruption in the final days of the campaign.

Did the Biden campaign’s disinformation campaign help rig the election in his favor? Polls suggest that Biden would not have been elected had the American electorate been informed about what was on Hunter Biden’s laptop. So yes, they cheated in the election.

The Democrats and the mainstream media are still at it, however. Now they are trying to kill the story of how they killed the story of the Biden laptop. This is a scandal that would once upon a time have ended in resignation, impeachment, and/or plenty of jail time. If they successfully bury this story, I hate to say it but there is no more rule of law in what has become the American banana republic.” See here.

But the main way the lection can be rigged is by fraudulent “voting.” It’s much easier to do this with digital scanning of votes than with old-fashioned ballot boxes.

Dr. Naomi Wolf explains how electronic voting machines make it easier to steal elections:

“People could steal elections in this ‘analog’ technology of paper and locked ballot boxes, of course, by destroying or hiding votes, or by bribing voters, a la Tammany Hall, or by other forms of wrongdoing, so security and chain of custody, as well as anti-corruption scrutiny, were always needed in guaranteeing accurate election counts. But there was no reason, with analog physical processing of votes, to query the tradition of the secret ballot.

Before the digital scanning of votes, you could not hack a wooden ballot box; and you could not set an algorithm to misread a pile of paper ballots. So, at the end of the day, one way or another, you were counting physical documents.

Those days are gone, obviously, and in many districts there are digital systems reading ballots.” See here.

This isn’t the first time the Left has stolen an election. It happened in the 2020 presidential election too. Ron Unz offers his usual cogent analysis:

“There does seem to be considerable circumstantial evidence of widespread ballot fraud by Democratic Party forces, hardly surprising given the apocalyptic manner in which so many of their leaders had characterized the threat of a Trump reelection. After all, if they sincerely believed that a Trump victory would be catastrophic for America why would they not use every possible means, fair and foul alike, to save our country from that dire fate?

In particular, several of the major swing-states contain large cities—Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Atlanta—that are both totally controlled by the Democratic Party and also notoriously corrupt, and various eye-witnesses have suggested that the huge anti-Trump margins they provided may have been heavily ‘padded’ to ensure the candidate’s defeat.” See here.

In a program aired right after Biden’s pitiful State of the Union speech, the great Tucker Carlson pointed out that Biden’s “Justice” Department has already confessed that it plans to rig the election. It will do this by banning voter ID laws as “racist.” This permits an unlimited number of fake votes:

“If Joe Biden is so good at politics, why is he losing to Donald Trump, who the rest of us were assured was a retarded racist who no normal person would vote for? But now Joe Biden is getting stomped by Donald Trump, but he’s also at the same time good at politics? Right.

Again, they can’t win, but they’re not giving up. So what does that tell you? Well, they’re going to steal the election. We know they’re going to steal the election because they’re now saying so out loud. Here is the Attorney General of the United States, the chief law enforcement officer of this country in Selma, Alabama, just the other day.

[Now Carlson quotes the Attorney General, Merrick Garland:]

“The right to vote is still under attack, and that is why the Justice Department is fighting back. That is why one of the first things I did when I came into office was to double the size of the voting section of the Civil Rights Division. That is why we are challenging efforts by states and jurisdictions to implement discriminatory, burdensome, and unnecessary restrictions on access to the ballot, including those related to mail-in voting, the use of drop boxes and voter ID requirements. That is why we are working to block the adoption of discriminatory redistricting plans that dilute the vote of Black voters and other voters of color.

[Carlson then comments on Garland:]

“Did you catch that? Of course, you’re a racist. That’s always the takeaway. But consider the details of what the Attorney General of the United States just said. Mail-in balloting, drop boxes, voter ID requirements. The chief law enforcement officer of the United States Government is telling you that it’s immoral, in fact racist, in fact illegal to ask people for their IDs when they vote to verify they are who they say they are. What is that? Well, no one ever talks about this, but the justification for it is that somehow people of color, Black people, don’t have state-issued IDs. Somehow they’re living in a country where you can do virtually nothing without proving your identity with a government-issued ID without government-issued IDs. They can’t fly on planes, they can’t have checking accounts, they can’t have any interaction with the government, state, local, or federal. They can’t stay in hotels. They can’t have credit cards. Because someone without a state-issued ID can’t do any of those things.

But what’s so interesting is these same people, very much including the Attorney General and the administration he serves, is working to eliminate cash, to make this a cashless society. Have you been to a stadium event recently? No cash accepted. You have to have a credit card. In order to get a credit card you need a state-issued ID, and somehow that’s not racist. But it is racist to ask people to prove their identity when they choose the next President of the United States. That doesn’t make any sense at all. That’s a lie. It’s an easily provable lie, and anyone telling that lie is advocating for mass voter fraud, which the Attorney General is. There’s no other way to read it. So you should know that. You live in a country where the Attorney General is abetting, in fact calling for voter fraud, and that’s the only chance they have to get their guy re-elected.” See here.

Because of absentee ballots, the voting can be spread out over a long period of time. This makes voting fraud much easier. Mollie Hemingway has done a lot of research on this topic:

“In the 2020 presidential election, for the first time ever, partisan groups were allowed—on a widespread basis—to cross the bright red line separating government officials who administer elections from political operatives who work to win them. It is important to understand how this happened in order to prevent it in the future.

Months after the election, Time magazine published a triumphant story of how the election was won by “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”  Written by Molly Ball, a journalist with close ties to Democratic leaders, it told a cheerful story of a “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes,” the “result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.”

A major part of this “conspiracy” to “save the 2020 election” was to use COVID as a pretext to maximize absentee and early voting. This effort was enormously successful. Nearly half of voters ended up voting by mail, and another quarter voted early. It was, Ball wrote, “practically a revolution in how people vote.” Another major part was to raise an army of progressive activists to administer the election at the ground level. Here, one billionaire in particular took a leading role: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg’s help to Democrats is well known when it comes to censoring their political opponents in the name of preventing “misinformation.” Less well known is the fact that he directly funded liberal groups running partisan get-out-the-vote operations. In fact, he helped those groups infiltrate election offices in key swing states by doling out large grants to crucial districts.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, an organization led by Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla, gave more than $400 million to nonprofit groups involved in “securing” the 2020 election. Most of those funds—colloquially called “Zuckerbucks”—were funneled through the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a voter outreach organization founded by Tiana Epps-Johnson, Whitney May, and Donny Bridges. All three had previously worked on activism relating to election rules for the New Organizing Institute, once described by The Washington Post as “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry.”

Flush with $350 million in Zuckerbucks, the CTCL proceeded to disburse large grants to election officials and local governments across the country. These disbursements were billed publicly as “COVID-19 response grants,” ostensibly to help municipalities acquire protective gear for poll workers or otherwise help protect election officials and volunteers against the virus. In practice, relatively little money was spent for this. Here, as in other cases, COVID simply provided cover.

According to the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), Georgia received more than $31 million in Zuckerbucks, one of the highest amounts in the country. The three Georgia counties that received the most money spent only 1.3 percent of it on personal protective equipment. The rest was spent on salaries, laptops, vehicle rentals, attorney fees for public records requests, mail-in balloting, and other measures that allowed elections offices to hire activists to work the election. Not all Georgia counties received CTCL funding. And of those that did, Trump-voting counties received an average of $1.91 per registered voter, compared to $7.13 per registered voter in Biden-voting counties.

The FGA looked at this funding another way, too. Trump won Georgia by more than five points in 2016. He lost it by three-tenths of a point in 2020. On average, as a share of the two-party vote, most counties moved Democratic by less than one percentage point in that time. Counties that didn’t receive Zuckerbucks showed hardly any movement, but counties that did moved an average of 2.3 percentage points Democratic. In counties that did not receive Zuckerbucks, “roughly half saw an increase in Democrat votes that offset the increase in Republican votes, while roughly half saw the opposite trend.” In counties that did receive Zuckerbucks, by contrast, three quarters “saw a significant uptick in Democrat votes that offset any upward change in Republican votes,” including highly populated Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, and DeKalb counties.

Of all the 2020 battleground states, it is probably in Wisconsin where the most has been brought to light about how Zuckerbucks worked.

CTCL distributed $6.3 million to the Wisconsin cities of Racine, Green Bay, Madison, Milwaukee, and Kenosha—purportedly to ensure that voting could take place “in accordance with prevailing [anti-COVID] public health requirements.”

Wisconsin law says voting is a right, but that “voting by absentee ballot must be carefully regulated to prevent the potential for fraud or abuse; to prevent overzealous solicitation of absent electors who may prefer not to participate in an election.” Wisconsin law also says that elections are to be run by clerks or other government officials. But the five cities that received Zuckerbucks outsourced much of their election operation to private liberal groups, in one case so extensively that a sidelined government official quit in frustration.

This was by design. Cities that received grants were not allowed to use the money to fund outside help unless CTCL specifically approved their plans in writing. CTCL kept tight control of how money was spent, and it had an abundance of “partners” to help with anything the cities needed.

Some government officials were willing to do whatever CTCL recommended. “As far as I’m concerned I am taking all of my cues from CTCL and work with those you recommend,” Celestine Jeffreys, the chief of staff to Democratic Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich, wrote in an email. CTCL not only had plenty of recommendations, but made available a “network of current and former election administrators and election experts” to scale up “your vote by mail processes” and “ensure forms, envelopes, and other materials are understood and completed correctly by voters.”

Power the Polls, a liberal group recruiting poll workers, promised to help with ballot curing. The liberal Mikva Challenge worked to recruit high school-age poll workers. And the left-wing Brennan Center offered help with “election integrity,” including “post-election audits” and “cybersecurity.”

The Center for Civic Design, an election administration policy organization that frequently partners with groups such as liberal billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, designed absentee ballots and voting instructions, often working directly with an election commission to design envelopes and create advertising and targeting campaigns. The Elections Group, also linked to the Democracy Fund, provided technical assistance in handling drop boxes and conducted voter outreach. The communications director for the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, an organization that advocates sweeping changes to the elections process, ran a conference call to help Green Bay develop Spanish-language radio ads and geofencing to target voters in a predefined area.

Digital Response, a nonprofit launched in 2020, offered to “bring voters an updated elections website,” “run a website health check,” “set up communications channels,” “bring poll worker application and management online,” “track and respond to polling location wait times,” “set up voter support and email response tools,” “bring vote-by-mail applications online,” “process incoming [vote-by-mail] applications,” and help with “ballot curing process tooling and voter notification.”

The National Vote at Home Institute was presented as a “technical assistance partner” that could “support outreach around absentee voting,” provide and oversee voting machines, consult on methods to cure absentee ballots, and even assume the duty of curing ballots.

A few weeks after the five Wisconsin cities received their grants, CTCL emailed Claire Woodall-Vogg, the executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, to offer “an experienced elections staffer that could potentially embed with your staff in Milwaukee in a matter of days.” The staffer leading Wisconsin’s portion of the National Vote at Home Institute was an out-of-state Democratic activist named Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein. As soon as he met with Woodall-Vogg, he asked for contacts in other cities and at the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Spitzer-Rubenstein would eventually take over much of Green Bay’s election planning from the official charged with running the election, Green Bay Clerk Kris Teske. This made Teske so unhappy that she took Family and Medical Leave prior to the election and quit shortly thereafter.

Emails from Spitzer-Rubenstein show the extent to which he was managing the election process. To one government official he wrote, “By Monday, I’ll have our edits on the absentee voting instructions. We’re pushing Quickbase to get their system up and running and I’ll keep you updated. I’ll revise the planning tool to accurately reflect the process. I’ll create a flowchart for the vote-by-mail processing that we will be able to share with both inspectors and also observers.”

Once early voting started, Woodall-Vogg would provide Spitzer-Rubenstein with daily updates on the numbers of absentee ballots returned and still outstanding in each ward­­—prized information for a political operative.

Amazingly, Spitzer-Rubenstein even asked for direct access to the Milwaukee Election Commission’s voter database: “Would you or someone else on your team be able to do a screen-share so we can see the process for an export?” he wrote. “Do you know if WisVote has an [application programming interface] or anything similar so that it can connect with other software apps? That would be the holy grail.” Even for Woodall-Vogg, that was too much. “While I completely understand and appreciate the assistance that is trying to be provided,” she replied, “I am definitely not comfortable having a non-staff member involved in the function of our voter database, much less recording it.”

When these emails were released in 2021, they stunned Wisconsin observers. “What exactly was the National Vote at Home Institute doing with its daily reports? Was it making sure that people were actually voting from home by going door-to-door to collect ballots from voters who had not yet turned theirs in? Was this data sharing a condition of the CTCL grant? And who was really running Milwaukee’s election?” asked Dan O’Donnell, whose election analysis appeared at Wisconsin’s conservative MacIver Institute.

Kris Teske, the sidelined Green Bay city clerk—in whose office Wisconsin law actually places the responsibility to conduct elections—had of course seen what was happening early on. “I just don’t know where the Clerk’s Office fits in anymore,” she wrote in early July. By August, she was worried about legal exposure: “I don’t understand how people who don’t have the knowledge of the process can tell us how to manage the election,” she wrote on August 28.

Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich simply handed over Teske’s authority to agents from outside groups and gave them leadership roles in collecting absentee ballots, fixing ballots that would otherwise be voided for failure to follow the law, and even supervising the counting of ballots. “The grant mentors would like to meet with you to discuss, further, the ballot curing process. Please let them know when you’re available,” Genrich’s chief of staff told Teske.

Spitzer-Rubenstein explained that the National Vote at Home Institute had done the same for other cities in Wisconsin. “We have a process map that we’ve worked out with Milwaukee for their process. We can also adapt the letter we’re sending out with rejected absentee ballots along with a call script alerting voters. (We can also get people to make the calls, too, so you don’t need to worry about it.)”

Other emails show that Spitzer-Rubenstein had keys to the central counting facility and access to all the machines before election night. His name was on contracts with the hotel hosting the ballot counting.

Sandy Juno, who was clerk of Brown County, where Green Bay is located, later testified about the problems in a legislative hearing. “He was advising them on things. He was touching the ballots. He had access to see how the votes were counted,” Juno said of Spitzer-Rubenstein. Others testified that he was giving orders to poll workers and seemed to be the person running the election night count operation.

“I would really like to think that when we talk about security of elections, we’re talking about more than just the security of the internet,” Juno said. “You know, it has to be security of the physical location, where you’re not giving a third party keys to where you have your election equipment.”

Juno noted that there were irregularities in the counting, too, with no consistency between the various tables. Some had absentee ballots face-up, so anyone could see how they were marked. Poll workers were seen reviewing ballots not just to see that they’d been appropriately checked by the clerk, but “reviewing how they were marked.” And poll workers fixing ballots used the same color pens as the ones ballots had been filled out in, contrary to established procedures designed to make sure observers could differentiate between voters’ marks and poll workers’ marks.

The plan by Democratic strategists to bring activist groups into election offices worked in part because no legislature had ever imagined that a nonprofit could take over so many election offices so easily. “If it can happen to Green Bay, Wisconsin, sweet little old Green Bay, Wisconsin, these people can coordinate any place,” said Janel Brandtjen, a state representative in Wisconsin.

She was right. What happened in Green Bay happened in Democrat-run cities and counties across the country. Four hundred million Zuckerbucks were distributed with strings attached. Officials were required to work with “partner organizations” to massively expand mail-in voting and staff their election operations with partisan activists. The plan was genius. And because no one ever imagined that the election system could be privatized in this way, there were no laws to prevent it.

Such laws should now be a priority.” See here.

Let’s do everything we can to publicize the steal. That way, we have a chance to prevent it.

About the Author

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

You could be at risk of being pilfered by officialdom anytime you sit behind a steering wheel. Between 2001 and 2014, lawmen seized more than $2.5 billion in cash from sixty thousand travelers on the nation’s highways—with no criminal charges in most cases, according to the Washington Post. Federal, state, and local law enforcement have institutionalized shakedowns on the nation’s highways to the point that “forfeiture corridors are the new speed traps,” as Mother Jones observed.

Police can almost always find an excuse to pull someone over. Gerald Arenberg, executive director of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, told me in a 1996 interview, “We have so damn many laws, you can’t drive the streets without breaking the law.” The Washington Post reported that police set up “rolling checkpoints on busy highways and pulled over motorists for minor violations, such as following too closely or improper signaling,” and “looked for supposed ‘indicators’ of criminal activity, which can include such things as trash on the floor of a vehicle, or abundant energy drinks.”

In Tenaha, Texas, authorities confiscated $3 million from motorists passing through East Texas. The names of the court filings capture Tenaha’s rapacity, such as State of Texas v. One Gold Crucifix. “The police had confiscated a simple gold cross that a woman wore around her neck after pulling her over for a minor traffic violation. No contraband was reported, no criminal charges were filed, and no traffic ticket was issued,” the New Yorker noted. If drivers “refused to part with their money, officers threatened to arrest them on false money laundering charges and other serious felonies,” an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit charged. Tenaha police stopped a twenty-seven-year-old black man who worked as a chicken slicer in an Arkansas Tyson plant and fleeced him of $3,900 after accusing him of “driving too close to the white line.” After the police warned Jennifer Boatright that they would take custody of her children if she refused to surrender the thousands of dollars she carried to buy a used car, she burst into tears and thought: “Where are we? Is this some kind of foreign country, where they’re selling people’s kids off?” The American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit and the Texas legislature compelled the town to cease the abusive seizures in 2012. However, most victims never got their property back.

In 2016, Muskogee County, Oklahoma, deputy sheriffs hit the sirens and pulled over a forty-year-old Burmese refugee driving down Highway 69 for a broken taillight. Eh Wah, a naturalized US citizen living in Dallas, was the manager for a Christian rock band that had been on tour raising more than $50,000 for a Thai orphanage and a Christian college in Burma. Police found the money and a drug dog alerted, so the money was seized—even though Wah had papers documenting his mission and the source of the income. No drugs were found on Wah’s vehicle, but a Muskogee deputy later insisted, “The fact that in this particular case we didn’t find drugs doesn’t mean it was a false hit” by the dog. Wah was interrogated and threatened for six hours; he was told, “You are going to jail tonight.” It was a terrifying experience for someone whose English was shaky and who fled a nation where the police were tyrannical. The sheriff’s department kept the money but let Wah travel on. Five weeks after he left Oklahoma, Wah was charged with “acquiring proceeds from a drug activity, a felony.” The primary “evidence” was the dog’s alert. The Oklahoma perfidy was torpedoed by Dan Alban, an Institute for Justice attorney who has thwarted many outrageous cash seizures. Alban took Wah’s case and told the Muskogee Phoenix that the timing of the charge suggests, “They were trying to strong-arm Eh Wah so that he would give up the money in the civil forfeiture case in exchange for a plea deal in the criminal case.” On the same day the Washington Post published an article on the case, Muskogee County dropped the charge and promised to send a full refund.

Perverse incentives propel plunder. Police in many states use confiscated property to pay their own salaries, bonuses, and vacations. A Missouri police chief said that forfeiture money was “like pennies from heaven . . . that get you a toy.” Federal agencies partner with local and state law enforcement to enable them to evade state laws limiting seizures of private property. Under a program euphemistically called “equitable sharing” (which sounds better than “shared plunder”), local and state law enforcement agencies retain most of the property they seize when they team up with the feds.

In South Carolina, police keep 95 percent of the assets they commandeer. Drivers’ cash is routinely seized after they are stopped for picayune offenses. As the Greenville News reported,

Ramando Moore was cited for having an open container [of alcohol] in Richland County in 2015; he lost $604. Plexton Denard Hunter was pulled over for a seatbelt violation in 2015 in Richland County and had $541 seized. Tesla Carter, another seatbelt violation, this time in Anderson in 2015. She lost $1,361.

Most police seizures of cash involved less than a thousand dollars—a trivial amount for serious drug traffickers. “Black men . . . represent 13 percent of the state’s population. Yet 65 percent of all citizens targeted for civil forfeiture in the state are black males,” according to a 2019 investigation by South Carolinian newspapers.

In Phelps County, Missouri, police have seized millions of dollars in cash and property from people traveling on Interstate 44. Two-thirds of Phelps County forfeiture victims have Hispanic names. Phelps County deputies justify seizures simply by asserting that the owners are shady characters—with evidence such as “driving a rental vehicle . . . bloodshot eyes, nervousness or even air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror.” Drivers were commonly stopped for failing to signal before changing lanes, another tell-tale sign of drug trafficking. Phelps County police “almost never file state criminal charges against those whose cash they seize, nor does it make big drug seizures during these stops targeting cash,” reported a 2020 investigation by St. Louis Public Radio.

In 2021, the feds partnered with local police to commence robbing armored cars. Though thirty-six states have legalized marijuana for recreational or medical use, federal law continues to prohibit engaging in cannabis transactions. Local police in California and Kansas began stopping and searching armored cars owned by Empyreal Logistics, which transported cash from licensed marijuana dispensaries. More than a million dollars was taken and split between local and federal lawmen. The Federal Bureau of Investigation justified the seizures because the proceeds were derived from narcotics crimes or money laundering—even though state law in California explicitly permits the transport of money from legal cannabis operations. In May 2022, the feds and California police departments agreed to return the seized money after Empyreal signed a settlement declaring, “San Bernardino deputies are not highway robbers as previously reported in the media.” Alas, the official statement did not deter a local paper, the Riverside Press-Enterprise, from summarizing the resolution: “The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department has agreed to stop operating like highway robbers.”

Forfeiture is a rigged game in which low-income Americans suffer worst. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in 2017, “These forfeiture operations frequently target the poor and other groups least able to defend their interests in forfeiture proceedings.” Similarly, Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett declared in a 2014 dissent, “Civil forfeiture . . . now disproportionately ensnares those least capable of protecting themselves, poor Texans who usually capitulate without a fight because mounting a defense is too costly.” “Due process” in forfeiture cases often depends solely on the media coverage an abuse receives. Sporadic government defeats are no consolation to forfeiture victims who cannot afford a lawyer to fight for their rights.

Almost two hundred and fifty years ago, Arthur Lee of Virginia aptly proclaimed, “The right of property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive the people of this, is to deprive them of their liberty.” But increasingly, private property is something that officialdom merely tolerates until they concoct some pretext to seize it.

If police can detain and plunder Americans as they please whenever people drive down the road, all the other rights and liberties in the Constitution are of scant consolation. And if politicians and the Supreme Court don’t care enough to end the forfeiture travesty, all their other claims of devotion to freedom are not worth a tinker’s damn.

Because of this, the American government, now headed by brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers, wants to destroy him. In what follows, I’ll explain the facts of the case and why they are important and detail the persecution of Assange.

Chris Hedges outlines what is at stake:

“The nearly 15-year-long persecution of Julian, which has taken a heavy toll on his physical and psychological health, is done in the name of extradition to the U.S. where he would stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917 Espionage Act, with a potential sentence of 170 years.

Julian’s “crime” is that he published classified documents, internal messages, reports and videos from the U.S. government and U.S. military in 2010, which were provided by U.S. army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. This vast trove of material revealed massacres of civilians, torture, assassinations, the list of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and the conditions they were subjected to, as well as the Rules of Engagement in Iraq. Those who perpetrated these crimes — including the U.S. helicopter pilots who gunned down two Reuters journalists and 10 other civilians and severely injured two children, all captured in the Collateral Murder video — have never been prosecuted.

Julian exposed what the U.S. empire seeks to airbrush out of history.

Julian’s persecution is an ominous message to the rest of us. Defy the U.S. imperium, expose its crimes, and no matter who you are, no matter what country you come from, no matter where you live, you will be hunted down and brought to the U.S. to spend the rest of your life in one of the harshest prison systems on earth. If Julian is found guilty it will mean the death of investigative journalism into the inner workings of state power. To possess, much less publish, classified material — as I did when I was a reporter for The New York Times — will be criminalized.” See here.

It’s important that we understand in detail what was in the WikiLeaks documents. In an article published in March, 2020, the 10^th anniversary of their publication, Arjun Walla gives us some of the highlights:

“Last month marked the 10th anniversary of WikiLeaks’ publication of the Collateral Murder video. The video shows how two Apache helicopters murdered 11 Iraqi people including two Reuters journalists. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.  This is one of the publications Julian Assange is being indicted for espionage. He faces 175 years in a US jail if extradited from the UK.  WikiLeaks obtained the video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers. WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information it receives. They analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source material and spoke to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident.

WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work

After the video was released, one of the soldiers involved in the incident, Ethan McCord, said the following:

“If you feel threatened in any way, you’re able to engage that person. Many soldiers felt threatened just by the fact that you were looking at them, so they fired their weapons on anybody that was looking at them because they (I) felt threatened. We were told if we were to fire on anybody, and if it were to be investigated, that ‘officers will take care of you.’ ”

“We were told by our battalion commander to kill every m***** f****** on the street.  Many soldiers would not do that, we decided we were going to shoot into the rooftops of buildings because, if you didn’t fire, the NCOs in your platoon would make your life hell.”

“This happens on a daily basis, destroying vans full of children, the destruction of the Iraqi people happens on a daily basis.” See here.

The WikiLeaks documents also showed how the US military and the CIA manipulate the banking and financial system. Arjun Walia is again on top of this:

“I recently came across an article published on MintPress News. It was written by Whitney Webb, who is a staff writer for MintPress News and has contributed to several other independent, alternative outlets. Her work has appeared on sites such as Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire among others. She also makes guest appearances to discuss politics on radio and television. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.

In her article, she references a leaked military manual on “unconventional warfare” that was recently highlighted by WikiLeaks. The U.S. Army states that major global financial institutions — such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — are used as unconventional, financial “weapons in times of conflict up to and including large-scale general war,” as well as in leveraging “the policies and cooperation of state governments.”

The rest of her article is posted below:

The document, officially titled “Field Manual (FM) 3-05.130, Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare” and originally written in September 2008, was recently highlighted by WikiLeaks on Twitter in light of recent events in Venezuela as well as the years-long, U.S.-led economic siege of that country through sanctions and other means of economic warfare. Though the document has generated new interest in recent days, it had originally been released by WikiLeaks in December 2008 and has been described as the military’s “regime change handbook.”

WikiLeaks’ recent tweets on the subject drew attention to a single section of the 248-page-long document, titled “Financial Instrument of U.S. National Power and Unconventional Warfare.” This section in particular notes that the U.S. government applies “unilateral and indirect financial power through persuasive influence to international and domestic financial institutions regarding availability and terms of loans, grants, or other financial assistance to foreign state and nonstate actors,” and specifically names the World Bank, IMF and The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as well as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), as “U.S. diplomatic-financial venues to accomplish” such goals.

The manual also touts the “state manipulation of tax and interest rates” along with other “legal and bureaucratic measures” to “open, modify or close financial flows” and further states that the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) – which oversees U.S. sanctions on other nations, like Venezuela — “has a long history of conducting economic warfare valuable to any ARSOF [Army Special Operations Forces] UW [Unconventional Warfare] campaign.”

This section of the manual goes on to note that these financial weapons can be used by the U.S. military to create “financial incentives or disincentives to persuade adversaries, allies and surrogates to modify their behavior at the theater strategic, operational, and tactical levels” and that such unconventional warfare campaigns are highly coordinated with the State Department and the Intelligence Community in determining “which elements of the human terrain in UWOA [Unconventional Warfare Operations Area] are most susceptible to financial engagement.”

The role of these “independent” international financial institutions as extensions of U.S. imperial power is elaborated elsewhere in the manual and several of these institutions are described in detail in an appendix to the manual titled “The Financial Instrument of National Power.” Notably, the World Bank and the IMF are listed as both Financial Instruments and Diplomatic Instruments of U.S. National Power as well as integral parts of what the manual calls the “current global governance system.”

Furthermore, the manual states that the U.S. military “understand[s] that properly integrated manipulation of economic power can and should be a component of UW,” meaning that these weapons are a regular feature of unconventional warfare campaigns waged by the United States.” See here.

I mentioned that the US seeks global hegemony, and its closest ally in this futile and deadly quest is Britain. The WikiLeaks document showed how close their on-going collaboration really is, as Mark Curtis reveals:

“Whitehall’s special relationship with Riyadh is exposed in an extraordinary cable from 2013 highlighting how Britain conducted secret vote-trading deals with Saudi Arabia to ensure both states were elected to the UN human rights council. Britain initiated the secret negotiations by asking Saudi Arabia for its support.

The Wikileaks releases also shed details on Whitehall’s fawning relationship with Washington. A 2008cable, for example, shows then shadow foreign secretary William Hague telling the U.S. embassy that the British “want a pro-American regime. We need it. The world needs it.”

A cable the following year shows the lengths to which Whitehall goes to defend the special relationship from public scrutiny. Just as the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War was beginning in 2009, Whitehall promised Washington that it had “put measures in place to protect your interests”.

It is not known what this protection amounted to, but no U.S. officials were called to give evidence to Chilcot in public. The inquiry was also refused permission to publish letters between former U.S. President George W. Bush and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair written in the run-up to the war.

Also in 2009, then Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised the prospect of reducing the number of British nuclear-armed Trident submarines from four to three, a policy opposed in Washington. However, Julian Miller, an official in the UK’s Cabinet Office, privately assured U.S. officials that his government “would consult with the U.S. regarding future developments concerning the Trident deterrent to assure there would be ‘no daylight’ between the U.S. and UK.” The idea that British decision-making on Trident is truly independent of the U.S. is undermined by this cable.

The Wikileaks cables are rife with examples of British government duplicity of the kind I’ve extensively come across in my own research on UK declassified files. In advance of the British-NATO bombing campaign in Libya in March 2011, for example, the British government pretended that its aim was to prevent Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s attacks on civilians and not to overthrow him.

However, Wikileaks files released in 2016 as part of its Hillary Clinton archive show William Burns, then the U.S. deputy secretary of state, having talked with now Foreign Secretary Hague about a “post-Qaddafi” Libya. This was more than three weeks before military operations began. The intention was clearly to overthrow Gaddafi, and the UN resolution about protecting civilians was simply window dressing.

Another case of British duplicity concerns Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean, which is now a major U.S. base for intervention in the Middle East. The UK has long fought to prevent Chagos islanders from returning to their homeland after forcibly removing them in the 1960s.

A secret 2009 cable shows that a particular ruse concocted by Whitehall to promote this was the establishment of a “marine reserve” around the islands. A senior Foreign Office official told the US that the “former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve.”

A week before the “marine reserve” proposal was made to the U.S. in May 2009, then UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband was also conniving with the U.S., apparently to deceive the public. A cable reveals Miliband helping the U.S. to sidestep a ban on cluster bombs and keep the weapons at U.S. bases on UK soil, despite Britain signing the international treaty banning the weapons the previous year.

Miliband approved a loophole created by diplomats to allow U.S. cluster bombs to remain on UK soil and was part of discussions on how the loophole would help avert a debate in Parliament that could have “complicated or muddied” the issue. Critically, the same cable also revealed that the U.S. was storing cluster munitions on ships based at Diego Garcia.” See here.

The CIA was so angered by Wikileaks that its director, Mike Pompeo, plotted to kill him. Philip Giraldi gives us the inside story:

“In an April 2017 speech, Donald Trump’s new CIA Director Mike Pompeo said “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence. It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” It was a declaration of war. The label “non-state hostile intelligence service” is a legal designation which more-or-less opened the door to non-conventional responses to eliminate the threat. CIA Stations where WikiLeaks associates were known to be present were directed to increase surveillance on them and also attempt to interdict any communications they might seek to have with Assange himself in the embassy. A staff of analysts referred to as the “WikiLeaks Team” worked full time to target the organization and its leaders.

At the top level of the Agency debate over more extreme options prevailed, though there were legitimate concerns about the legality of what was being contemplated. In late 2017, in the midst of the debate over possible kidnapping and/or assassination, the Agency picked up alarming though unsubstantiated reports that Russian intelligence operatives were preparing plans to help Assange escape from the United Kingdom and fly him to Moscow.

CIA responded by preparing to foil Assange’s possible Russian-assisted departure to include potential gun battles with Moscow’s spies on the streets of London or crashing a car into any Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange to seize him. One scenario even included either blocking the runway or shooting out the tires of any Russian plane believed to be carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow. Pompeo himself reportedly favored what is referred to as a “rendition,” which would consist of breaking into the Ecuadorian Embassy, kidnapping Assange, and flying him clandestinely to the U.S. for trial. Others in the national security team favored killing Assange rather than going through the complexity of kidnapping and removing him.” See here.

Fortunately, the plot failed. But now it looks like Assange will be shipped to the US, where this ill man, who suffered a stroke in a British jail, faces a dire fate. Let’s do everything we can to prevent this and to honor this true American hero.

About the Author

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

At hazard of melting a few feminist, LGBTQ — and other currently uncategorized snowflakes — I would suggest that these OG young ladies are embracing their honest, basic, biological genetic nature in the face of a hostile and self-destructive culture.

Now being rather strangely in touch with several of the above, particularly the feminist branch — because I was raised by my mother, grandmother, and their stalwart aid, Helen Kovachik — I can speak with experience and a reasonable amount of credibility.

In particular, my mother, a successful Broadway actress ( “Having Wonderful Time“ etc.), gave up her career, worked as a chef, and then a teacher and finally a college professor in order to raise me.

She was a great mom and so I should have realized the implications when she told me every once in awhile that she would have much prefered to stay at home, keep house and raise a bunch of kids, even in preference to her Broadway career.

I always thought that was interesting but I failed to take it seriously until I got my second datapoint.

For convenience we can call that second datapoint Myra. She was a successful women’s rights attorney and best friends with Steve Goldberg, another quirky gambling legend straight out of the late 20th century. That’s why, along with my last wife Chrissy, we were having a comped lunch at Donald Trump’s Atlantic City Taj Mahal before it went bankrupt.

Myra told us she had her dream job but she was unhappy and seriously depressed. Now Myra’s dream job was, as she described it, “suing abusive husbands into the gutter or putting them in jail.” But, she said, feminism had betrayed her.

“How so?” I asked.

“Feminism told me I could only be happy if I had a career. I now realize that was a lie, a big lie. My inner voice is telling me I should have gotten married, and been a home-maker raising children.

“My clock has been ticking for years and I’ve been ignoring it in favor of the feminist ideal. I’m afraid it’s too late for me now. All I can see ahead is a lonely old woman.”

She went on to tell us that a majority of her friends, mostly successful professional women, felt similarly.

So, my mom wasn’t alone. How about you?

And, do you have to have a job to be a feminist?

I suspect a lot of that notion has something to do with what the government-corporate-complex learned from putting Rosie the Riveter to work during WWII, particularly the advantages of being able to tax the female half of the population as well as the male half. That’s a conspiracy theory for another time. But consider Marilyn Waring’s “If Women Counted” — or a TED TALK right from the lady herself.

My grandmother was a militant feminist, marched for the right to vote and never held a job a day in her life.

So where did the part of feminism that goes far beyond “equal pay for equal work” and the right to vote come from?

Chrissy’s daughter got a college scholarship and partied it away but she learned something important anyway. “All my Women’s Studies profs were man-haters. I like men,” she told me.

Now, of course, not all young women feel that way. How many who do feel that way won’t admit to it? After all, they would be betraying today’s pseudo-feminism and a big chunk of everything they’ve been indoctrinated to believe about being a modern woman.

But that’s only the first half of the tragedy.

The second-half is that current American culture, in addition to emasculating men in subtle and not so subtle ways, has made it almost impossible to be a Tradhusband, that is, a bread-winner who can afford to support a stay-at-home Tradwife and family.

It’s the taxes.

Even in the ’90s, my friend and sometimes mentor James Libertarian Burns, wanted to be married rather than “indulge in victimless crimes with his hooker,” as he delicately put it. But although he had a decent casino income, he never felt he could afford the stay-at-home wife and kids he wanted. Sadly, he never married.

In the 50s and 60s, the historical period most Tradgirls (I know, I’m being “un-woke“) favor, it was possible for one breadwinner to support the whole family.

But even 30 years ago according to The Family Research Council, taxes had increased so much that in a two-parent family – – –

One parent worked to support the family, the other to support the government.

So, even before the Turn of the Century, the result of supporting government was that there was rarely a stay-at-home mother and the average teen hadn’t had an uninterrupted ten minute conversation with either parent in the last month. Half the teens had used tobacco, two thirds had used alcohol, and one third “illegal” drugs. -CNN & COMPANY, 19 Oct 1995

In a rather extraordinary effort to overcome this, my son and his wife arranged their working schedules so that one of them could always be home with my granddaughter. The result was that they were rarely home and awake at the same time. They eventually divorced, explaining that, in keeping their daughter safe, they’d become strangers.

So girls, if you want to have babies, thanks to Uncle Sam and his mimics, you have a better than 50/50 chance of ending up raising them on your own. And you won’t be able to be a stay-at-home mom because you’ll need at least one job.

And that’s the true Tradwife Tragedy.

What are you going to do about it?

In this case I’m asking because I don’t have a clue and I’m hoping some of you problem-solvers out there do.

“Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin… Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money and control credit, and with a flick of a pen they will create enough to buy it back.”

~ Josiah Stamp

(Lew Rockwell)—Sometimes things seem so complicated, that most simply avoid any effort to understand the problems facing them. Very little of anything is too complicated or too complex for any thinking individual to understand, so breaking things down to a level that is more easily understandable is often necessary for clarity. These efforts can be helped along by those with knowledge about important issues, who take the time to explain them in such a manner, that little expertise is necessary to figure out the basis of the matter at hand.

A great impediment to this dilemma, is the fact that the State has over many decades, attempted, and most successfully, to dumb-down the population at large, by taking over the ‘schooling’ of each generation almost from birth until full adulthood and beyond, thereby harming the intellect of large numbers of ‘society’ to such an extent, as to effectively negate meaningful dialogue.

The result of this manufactured and manipulated outcome, has been the plotted creation of a blind, ignorant, and indifferent population, with voluminous propaganda being used as a tool of deception. This has led to mass slavery, even though the crowd for the most part, still believes due to extreme gullibility and brainwashing, that they are somehow free. This solidifies the statement made by Von Goethe, that “None are so enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.”

This country is the epitome of this reality, but few recognize the existence and scope of the extreme uncertainty confronting us, and the dire consequences of the mass inaction of the herd in the face of the staggering challenges ahead.

Our plight, at least in the economic and financial sense, has been recently explained by David Rogers Webb, in his documentary, “The Great Taking.” This is very well done so far as explaining much of what has happened, how it happened, and the players involved on Wall Street, in government and by so-called ‘law-makers,’ political regulators, corporate heads, and the central bankers, whose ability to create unlimited sums of currency has plunged this country into economic hell. A lot of what he is saying in this production is spot on, and does get very technical concerning the structuring of assets so as to place ownership of nearly everything intangible on earth in the hands of the few at the top of the banking cabal.

Where he completely fails, is in his very confused ideas concerning the solutions to this takeover plot. On one hand, he nails the problems, but on the other, he destroys all his efforts due to his gross ignorance and misunderstanding of government and the power structures bent on controlling everything. It is astounding to me that Webb understands so much about the corruption, dishonesty, and intricate criminal workings of those who control the ‘money,’ but fails miserably in his assessment of how to go about fixing these problems.

This is not uncommon, as most everyone seeks solutions from outside themselves, and inside the very failed system that has always been the problem. This is of course backward, but by accepting the system and attempting to change and reform it using that same system, negates any risk or responsibility of the individual, and places all efforts on ‘trusting’ others to be honest and noble for the benefit of the evil and moronic idea of the ‘greater good.’  Let’s just get ‘better people’ in government; let’s tell government not to seek power or expand; let’s just ‘educate’ the ruling class, because they really do not want this, but only inherited this ownership layer of power.

“They (Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Royals, Presidents) did not design this, they did not put it into motion, they have allowed the juggernaut to continue; they are not particularly capable people.”

All we have to do according to Webb, is push the ‘awareness’ of the insanity of wanting to control everything, to the top levels of all the “muscle,” (politicians, agency heads, corporate heads, CIA, military brass, etc.) who enforce the criminal behavior of the real rulers, so that they will see the error of their ways, because “they did not know anything about this” plot. So all we have to do is reach people at high levels, in order to expect them to save us.

With Webb’s thinking, we do not need to get rid of this heinous system, all we need to do is repair it. We do not need a privately-owned central bank, (of course not) we need to have a central bank run like a ‘public’ utility, or in other words, the government should run the central bank and return all profits to the ‘public’ (government) and for the support of that same government. This is what I would refer to as a socialistic, communistic, nationalistic, and fascist, utopian monetary plan, based on pure fantasy.

According to Webb, “We have to have government. We have to have someone to ‘operate’ society.” “Anarchy and chaos; (opposites) we can’t have that.” His notion is that everything has to be done ‘legally,’ which only means by the forced and enforced rules of the State. All we have to do is to make government smaller, limited, and beneficial to humanity. Ah, so simple?

Enough of this poppycock, love and respect of the evil State, its laws, and the expectation that by informing the ruling class that it is not being good, that they will understand their complicity in evil, and voluntarily reverse everything they have done perpetually throughout history, and only act as benevolent masters and ‘leaders,’ ministers of peace for humanity, and lowly saints of man. All this nonsense means is that a full reliance on educating the near top level of rule, so that they will speak out against what is happening; those high level politicians, billionaires, corporate heads, and banking magnates, and then the ‘system’ will repair itself for the betterment of mankind.

All assets on earth are on the chopping block, as all assets are coming under the control of the ruling master class. The electronic takeover of all monetary, credit, and debt systems, total control the internet, and the all-consuming growth of artificial ‘intelligence,’ are going ahead full steam, and once in place universally, once all monetary transactions are digital, once CBDCs and other central bank monetary units (fed coins, etc.) are in place, and when currencies are cleared and controlled from a global central source or sources, the total loss of control by individuals, will be the result. All property will be subject to confiscation and management by the State, including the very lives of the sheep.

The bankers own the earth, (and all politicians) and will never give up their power to create money out of thin air, and without limit. Even if government was to somehow take over the monetary system and control the central bank, a joke to be sure, it would never rectify this gross corruption, or act in favor of the people. The entire system is the problem; government is the problem, so in order for any escape from this insanity, in order to ever regain any aspect of real freedom, this entire system, all of it, must be abolished.

Nothing of value can ever come from seeking redress from the same government that is the oppressor of humanity. No government or ruling class controlling government, will ever limit its own power in favor of individual sovereignty, for that would automatically negate any need of government or rule. No government or rule should exist, as it is completely immoral for any man to rule another by force. The natural state of  man is to be free, and this is the responsibility of each and every individual; each and every one of you.

“Between the government which does evil and the people who accept it – there is a certain shameful solidarity.”

Victor Hugo

Reference links:

• The Great Taking
• The End of the World as We Know It
• Harmonizing central bank digital currencies for cross-border transactions