Steve Bannon on how war with Iran threatens the MAGA coalition

If you look at the three planks [of MAGA] - stop the forever wars, seal the border and deport the illegal alien invaders, and redo the commercial relationships in the world around trade deals and bring high value-added manufacturing jobs back here - they're [the Trump team] trying to shut all three down, but the one that they're obsessed with the most, which I find strange, is the forever wars.  They've got to be in the forever wars and in particular the Middle East.  And I'm a big supporter of Israel and I'm telling people, "hey, if we get sucked into this war which inexorably looks like it's going to happen on the combat side, it's not just going to blow up the coalition, it's also going to thwart what we're doing with the most important thing which is the deportation of the illegal alien invaders that are here.  If we don't do that, we don't have a country."  And just see right now that they're doubling and tripling down.

[...]

If we don't lance the bull over this, if you can't turn it around with Trump, the Trump team he has - people like you, myself; they're blessed to have these apparatuses.  If we can't do this now, it's not going to get done.  And so that's why, to me,... of everything we're doing: stopping the forever wars, redoing the commercial relationship with China to bring jobs back and sealing the border and sending home, deporting 10 million, which is going to be massive, almost like a civil war in these big cities, of all of those... to get our sovereignty back, the war we have to have now, the throwdown we have to have now is with the deep state.  We've looked away too often.  We're just kind of kicking the can down the road.  And if we can't do it now with Trump, it's not going to get done.

~ Steve Bannon, "Tucker and Steve Bannon Respond to Israel’s War on Iran and How It Could Destroy MAGA Forever," Tucker Carlson, 0:45 and 6:05 mark, June 16, 2025

Bertrand Russell on war

War does not determine who is right, only who is left.

~ Bertrand Russell

Jeffrey Sachs on why the U.S. opposes Russia and China

What do we have against Russia?  The fact of the matter is, Russia is big.  Russia is powerful.  And for that reason and that reason alone, or sufficiently, the U.S. would oppose Russia, just like the U.S. opposes China.  Now of course, maybe people listening to this would say, "That's crazy.  We oppose China because all of the terrible things they do."  Or "We oppose Russia because all of the terrible things they do."  I would take a different view of this which is, we make up stories about why we oppose big powers, but the basic reason we oppose big powers is that they are big.  They are an afront to our desire for what the political scientists in a fancy word call "primacy," or call "hegemony," or call "full spectrum dominance."  In other words, Russia is an afront to our ability to dictate circumstances.  China certainly is an afront to the U.S. ability to dictate circumstances in Asia.  For that reason alone, for the powers that be in Washington, that's completely antithetical to the American strategic purpose, which explicitly, for many, many years has been full spectrum dominance...  In other words, our purpose, as stated by the establishment, by the military industrial complex, is "We must be the unrivaled #1."

Jeffrey Sachs, "Jeffrey Sachs: The Dark Forces Pushing Trump Into War With Iran, & Ukraine/Russia New Escalation," Tucker Carlson, 7:15 mark, June 11, 2025

Promised Land on the first Irgun attacks

In Righteous Victims: A history of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001, Benny Morris writes that the Irgun Bombs of 1937 and 1938 “sowed terror in the Arab population and substantially increased its casualties. The bombs do not appear in any way to have curtailed Arab terrorism, but they do appear to have helped persuade moderate Arabs of the need to resist Zionism and to support the rebellion.”

The first Irgun attack occurred on November 11, 1937. Morris writes that the attacks were responsible for “killing two Arabs at a bus depot near Jaffa Street in Jerusalem, and wounding five. Three days later, on November 14, a number of Arabs were killed in simultaneous attacks around the country—a day that the Irgun thereafter commemorated as the ’Day of the Breaking of the Havlaga (restrain).’”

Morris also describes the events on July 6, 1938, when “an Irgun operative dressed as an Arab placed two large milk cans filled with TNT and shrapnel in the Arab market in downtown Haifa. The subsequent explosions killed twenty-one and wounded fifty-two. On July 15 another bomb killed ten Arabs and wounded more than thirty in David Street in Jerusalem’s Old City. A second bomb in the Haifa market—this time disguised as a large can of sour cucumbers—on July 25, 1938 killed at least thirty-nine Arabs and injured at least seventy. On August 26, a bomb in Jaffa’s vegetable market killed twenty-four Arabs and wounded thirty-nine.”

~ "The Beginning of the Israel-Palestine Conflict," Promised Land: The Jewish Museum of the Palestinian Experience

Wanted by the British government: Menachem Begin

Murray Rothbard on consumers, voters and knowledge

Consumers also take entrepreneurial risks on the market.  Many critics of the market, while willing to concede the expertise of the capitalist-entrepreneurs, bewail the prevailing ignorance of consumers, which prevents them from gaining the utility ex post that they had expected ex ante.  Typically, Wesley C. Mitchell entitled one of his famous essays: ‘The Backward Art of Spending Money.’  Professor Mises has keenly pointed out the paradox of interventionists who insist that consumers are too ignorant or incompetent to buy products intelligently, while at the same time proclaiming the virtues of democracy, where the same people vote for or against politicians whom they do not know and on policies which they scarcely understand.  

To put it another way, the partisans of intervention assume that individuals are not competent to run their own affairs or to hire experts to advise them, but they also assume that these same individuals are competent to vote for these experts at the ballot box.  They are further assuming that the mass of supposedly incompetent consumers are competent to choose not only those who will rule over themselves, but also over the competent individuals in society.  Yet such absurd and contradictory assumptions lie at the root of every program for ‘democratic’ intervention in the affairs of the people. 

In fact, the truth is precisely the reverse of this popular ideology.  Consumers are surely not omniscient, but they have direct tests by which to acquire and check their knowledge.  They buy a certain brand of breakfast food and they do not like it; and so they do not buy it again.  They buy a certain type of automobile and like its performance; they buy another one.  And in both cases, they tell their friends of this newly won knowledge.  Other consumers patronize consumers’ research organizations, which can warn or advise them in advance.  But, in all cases, the consumers have the direct test of results to guide them.  And the firm which satisfied the consumers expands and prospers and thus gains ‘good will,’ while the firm failing to satisfy them goes out of business.  

On the other hand, voting for politicians and public policies is a completely different matter.  Here there are no direct tests of success or failure whatever, neither profits and losses nor enjoyable or unsatisfying consumption.  In order to grasp consequences, especially the indirect catallactic consequences of governmental decisions, it is necessary to comprehend complex chains of praxeological reasoning.  Very few voters have the ability or the interest to follow such reasoning, particularly, as Schumpeter points out, in political situations.  For the minute influence that any one person has on the results, as well as the seeming remoteness of the actions, keeps people from gaining interest in political problems or arguments.  Lacking the direct test of success or failure, the voter tends to turn, not to those politicians whose policies have the best chance of success, but to those who can best sell their propaganda ability.  Without grasping logical chains of deduction, the average voter will never be able to discover the errors that his ruler makes.  

George J. Schuller, in attempting to refute this argument, protested that: ‘complex chains of reasoning are required for consumers to select intelligently an automobile or television set.’  But such knowledge is not necessary; for the whole point is that the consumers have always at hand a simple and pragmatic test of success: does the product work and work well?  In public economic affairs, there is no such test, for no one can know whether a particular policy has ‘worked’ or not without knowing the a priori reasoning of economics.

~ Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State (1962)

(As quoted by Lew Rockwell in "The Greatness of Man, Economy, and State," LewRockwell.com, June 4, 2025.  See also here under "E. Utility Ex Post.")

Kevin Duffy on modern warfare

Warfare today is all about pinning the “aggressor” label on the opposing side and claiming victim status.  This allows the self-proclaimed victim to act with impunity – civilians be damned – all in the name of “self-defense.”  Thus modern warfare is filled with an endless litany of false flag operations, baiting the other side into firing the first shot, preemptive strikes and sensationalized propaganda (usually involving “killing babies”) all meant to gain the moral high ground and justify cutting the dogs of war loose.

~ Kevin Duffy, "Gaza: What Would Rothbard Think?," The Libertarian Alliance, June 8, 2025

Fred Hickey on the stock market: "This is about as toxic a brew as I could ever imagine"

The combination of investor complacency in an environment with trade wars, out-of-control U.S. government spending, enormous deficits and debts, funding risks in a period of financial tightening, rising inflation, supply shortages, a likely economic recession, loss of faith in "U.S. exceptionalism," a declining U.S. dollar, risk of monetary debasement and a "massively overvalued stock market" (per investor extraordinaire Paul Singer) is about as toxic a brew as I could ever imagine.

Not only are investors extraordinarily complacent, the bear market rally since April 7 has encouraged them to return to taking enormous risks.  They're piling into the MAG 7 stocks, which have accounted for over half of the S&P 500's total market cap gains since the early April bottom.  Worse yet, they're pouring into all sorts of garbage stocks, grossly overpriced high-fliers and cryptos, including MicroStrategy (MSTR), CoreWeave (CRWV), Tesla (196 times falling earnings and with slumping auto deliveries), Palantir (PLTR - 600 P/E) and many more.  Investors have added a record $437 billion into U.S. ETFs this year, with the largest inflows occurring following market declines.  Believing that they cannot lose in the long run, they buy every dip (thanks Fed!).

~ Fred Hickey, "Toxic Combination," The High-Tech Strategist, p. 2, June 2, 2025

Murray Rothbard on civilians and war

But "aggression" only makes sense on the individual Smith-Jones level, as does the very term "police action."  These terms make no sense whatever on an inter-State level.  First, we have seen that governments entering a war thereby become aggressors themselves against innocent civilians; indeed, become mass murderers.  The correct analogy to individual action would be: Smith beats up Jones, the police rush in to help Jones, and in the course of trying to apprehend Smith, the policy bomb a city block and murder thousands of people, or spray machine-gun fire into an innocent crowd.  This is a far more accurate analogy, for that is what a warring government does, and in the twentieth century it does on a monumental scale.  But any policy agency that behaves this way itself becomes a criminal aggressor, often far more so than the original Smith who began the affair.

~ Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, "War and Foreign Policy," p. 335

Murray Rothbard on how libertarians view war

Libertarians favor liberty as a natural human right, and advocate it not only for Americans but for all peoples.  In a purely libertarian world, therefore, there would be no “foreign policy” because there would be no States, no governments with a monopoly of coercion over particular territorial areas.  But since we live in a world of nation-states.  And since this system is hardly likely to disappear in the near future, what is the attitude of libertarians toward foreign policy in the current State-ridden world? 

Pending the dissolution of States, libertarians desire to limit, to whittle down, the area of governmental power in all directions and as much as possible… 

Specifically, the entire land area of the world is now parcelled out among various States, and each land area is ruled by a central government with monopoly of violence over that area.  In relations between States, then, the libertarian goal is to keep each of those States from extending their violence to other countries, so that each State’s tyranny is at least confined to its own bailiwick.  For the libertarian is interested in reducing as much as possible the area of State aggression against all private individuals.  The only way to do this, in international affairs, is for the people of each country to pressure their own State to confine its activities to the area it monopolizes and not to attack other States or aggress against their subjects.  In short, the objective of the libertarian is to confine any existing State to as small a degree of invasion of person and property as possible.  And this means the total avoidance of war.  The people under each State should pressure “their respective States not to attack one another, or, if a conflict should break out, to withdraw from it as quickly as physically possible.

~ Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, "War and Foreign Policy," pp. 331-332

1919 (published posthumously)

Murray Rothbard on modern war vs. pre-modern war

It was not always thus.  During the Middle Ages, the scope of wars was far more limited.  Before the rise of modern weapons, armaments were so limited that governments could – and often did – strictly confine their violence to the armies of the rival governments.  It is true that tax coercion increased, but at least there was no mass murder of the innocents.  Not only was firepower low enough to confine violence to the armies of the contending sides, but in the pre-modern era there was no central nation-state that spoke inevitably in the name of all inhabitants of a given land area.  If one set of kings or barons fought another, it was not felt that everyone in the area must be a dedicated partisan.  Moreover, instead of mass conscript armies enslaved to their respective rulers, armies were small bands of hired mercenaries.  Often, a favorite sport for the populace was to observe a battle from the safety of the town ramparts, and war was regarded as something of a sporting match.  But with the rise of the centralizing State and of modern weapons of mass destruction, the slaughter of civilians, as well as conscript armies, have become a vital part of inter-State warfare. 

Suppose that despite possible libertarian opposition, war has broken out.  Clearly, the libertarian position should be that, so long as the war continues, the scope of assault upon innocent civilians must be diminished as much as possible.  Old-fashioned international law had two excellent devices to accomplish this goal: the “laws of war,” and the “laws of neutrality” or “neutral’s rights”…  In short, the libertarian tries to induce the warring States to observe fully the rights of neutral citizens.  The “laws of war,” for their part, were designed to limit as much as possible the invasion by warring States of the rights of civilians in their respective countries.  As the British jurist F.J.P. Veale put it: 

The fundamental principle of this code was that hostilities between civilized peoples must be limited to the armed forces…  It drew a distinction between combatants and non-combatants by laying down that the sole business of the combatants is to fight each other and, consequently, that non-combatants must be excluded from the scope of military operations.

In the modified form of prohibiting the bombardment of all cities not in the front line, this rule held in Western European wars in recent centuries until Britain launched the strategic bombing of civilians in World War II. Now, of course, the entire concept is scarcely remembered, since the very nature of modern nuclear warfare rests upon the annihilation of civilians.

~ Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, "War and Foreign Policy," pp. 332-334

1973

Murray Rothbard on the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971

Of all the recent wars, none has come closer – though not completely so – to satisfying these three criteria for a “just war” than the Indian war of late 1971 for the liberation of Bangla Desh.  The government of Pakistan had been created as a last terrible legacy of Imperial Britain to the Indian subcontinent.  In particular, the nation of Pakistan consisted of imperial rule by the Punjabis of West Pakistan over the more numerous and productive Bengalis of East Pakistan (and also over the Pathans of the North-West Frontier).  The Bengalis had long been yearning for independence from their imperial oppressors; in early 1971, parliament was suspended as a result of Bengali victory in the elections; from then on, Punjabi troops systematically slaughtered the civilian Bengal population.  Indian entry in the conflict aided the popular Bengali resistance forces of the Mukhti Bahini.  While taxes and conscription were, of course, involved, the Indian armies did not use their weapons against Bengali civilians; on the contrary, here was a genuine revolutionary war on the Bengali public against the Punjabi occupying state.  Only Punjabi soldiers were on the receiving end of Indian bullets.

~ Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, "War and Foreign Policy," p. 336

Patrick Barron on Trump's protectionist promises

 Within a week’s time, protectionists claim that tariffs will generate more tax revenue (including the absurd claim that the tax revenue will be paid by foreign exporters), protect and/or repatriate manufacturing jobs to American shores, punish trading partners who don’t “play by the rules”, make America more self-sufficient in key industries, and not cause prices to rise.  Whew!  That’s quite a lot of promises, and they conflict with one another.  For example, will tariffs generate tax revenue or cause production to be repatriated to America?  You can’t have it both ways. 

Probably the most galling claim is that the protectionists want to force the rest of the population to buy only American products in order to benefit stockholders and workers in key industries.  There is no recognition that this claim cannot be fulfilled unless whatever benefit accrues to key industries must come at the expense of everyone else.  In other words, protectionists tout the concentration of benefits and keep quiet about the diffusion of cost.  But the costs are there, even if widely diffused.  Protectionism really isn’t a theory of betterment for all but a claim that certain people in certain occupations are special.  They must be paid more handsomely than the market, meaning you and me, wishes to pay.

~ Patrick Barron, "The Protectionists Have No Theory," Going Postal, June 5, 2025

Elon Musk on the Big Beautiful Bill

I'm sorry, but I just can't stand it anymore.  

This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. 

Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong.  You know it.

~ Elon Musk, tweet, June 3, 2025

(Reported in "Elon Musk slams Trump's spending bill: Here's what to know," CNBC, June 3, 2025)

Tom Woods on the U.S. government debt crisis

By now you probably know my opinion on all this: the debt problem is not going to be solved.  Almost nobody cares about it, and even people who profess to care are not nearly prepared to take the kinds of steps that need to be taken. 

It will eventually resolve itself in the form of a severe crisis.  Until then, nothing is going to be done. 

I am not normally a pessimist, as I think is obvious enough from my tone on the Tom Woods Show, but on this I know I'm right.

That doesn't make politics entirely useless: there are issues other than debt, and there's been positive movement on a handful of those.  But the spending problem will not be brought under control before the crisis.  That should be obvious.

~ Tom Woods, June 3, 2025

Mike Whitney on Trump's trade war with China

One of the oddities of the tariffs dust-up, was the fact that the Trump team never anticipated China’s retaliatory response.  It’s actually amazing.  The administration lives in such an information bubble that they thought China would cave in after their comical “Liberation Day” announcement.  What were they thinking? 

We know what Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent was thinking because he made a number of public statements that the US had an edge on China because ‘we were the deficit country.’  Here’s what he said in an interview on CNBC: 

“We are the deficit country.  They sell almost five times more goods to us than we sell to them.  So, the onus will be on them to take off these tariffs.  They’re unsustainable for them.”  He cited estimates that China could lose 5-10 million jobs if tariffs persist, highlighting China’s economic vulnerability. 

This is idiocy.  This is like saying that the ragamuffin panhandler on the street-corner has the advantage over the flush businessman with millions in the bank.  The US is $36 trillion in debt while China has a $3 trillion surplus!  How does ‘being broke’ give us ‘the advantage’.  We’re lucky that China still accepts our currency at all, and yet, our Treasury Secretary thinks that being destitute gives us the “upper hand”.  A man like this should not be Treasury Secretary.

~ Mike Whitney, "Re-thinking U.S.-China Relations After the Tariffs Shipwreck," The Unz Review, May 20, 2025