26 August 2011 – 26 November 2011
alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.
Thomas Jefferson
Letter to John Taylor
26 November 1798
Credit expansion cannot increase the supply of real goods. It merely brings about a rearrangement. It diverts capital investment away from the course prescribed by the state of economic wealth and market conditions. It causes production to pursue paths which it would not follow unless the economy were to acquire an increase in material goods. As a result, the upswing lacks a solid base. It is not a real prosperity. It is illusory prosperity. It did not develop from an increase in economic wealth [i.e. the accumulation of savings made available for productive investment]. Rather, it arose because the credit expansion created the illusion of such an increase. Sooner or later, it must become apparent that this economic situation is built on sand.
Ludwig von Mises
The Causes of the Economic Crisis (1931)
The solution to the problem is equally simple. First, in order to limit Fed discretion, the dollar must be made convertible to a weight unit of gold by congressional statute … Second, the government must at the same time be prohibited from financing its deficit at the Fed or in the banks – both at home or abroad. Third, only in the free market for true savings – undisguised by inflationary new Federal Reserve money and banking system credit – will interest rates signal to voters the consequences of growing federal government deficits.
“Monetary Reform: The Key to Spending Restraint”
The Wall Street Journal (26 April 2011)
The Decade Since 11 September 2001: Letter Nos. 144-147
What Hath Our Stupid and Evil Rulers Wrought?
To what depths have today’s rulers sunk? At the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945-46, Anglo-American élites subjected the most senior henchmen of Adolph Hitler, the murderers of millions, to something resembling the rule of law and a fair trial. In 1962, the Israeli secret service, Mossad, captured Adolph Eichmann (who during the Second World War managed the mass deportation of Jews to extermination camps) in Argentina and spirited him to Israel. He faced 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity and war crimes, and is the only person executed in Israel after conviction by a civilian court. Yet earlier this year, the U.S. Government didn’t even consider the pretence of due process and a fair trial according to the rule of law. Instead, its military planned and executed the premeditated murder of Osama bin Laden (who, among other things, masterminded the murder of ca. 3,000 people on 11 September 2001).
Do Westerners deny any distinction between justice and revenge? Does the chasm that separates Law and Gospel completely elude them? It’s imperative that a mass murderer, be he a National Socialist or an Islamic (or Christian or Jewish) fanatic or anybody else, receive a fair trial NOT because he “deserves” natural justice (in the British sense) or due process (in the American sense), but because if he does then chances are very good that ordinary people charged with lesser offences – particularly people who are neither white, Anglo-Saxon nor Protestant – will, too. But if the mass murderer isn’t subjected to the rule of law, then who else won’t be? Where’s the dividing line? If we take the rule of law seriously, then no person is above the law. But if we don’t, then agents of the state inevitably rise above the law (see, for example, Steven Greenhut, But America IS a Police State and Glenn Greeenwald, A Prime Aim of the Growing Surveillance State).
Before 2 May 2011, one might have assumed that a graduate of Harvard Law School named Barack Obama would be at least dimly aware of these fundamental distinctions. But his Remarks by the President on Osama Bin Laden dispelled any such illusion. Obama said:
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