Superfluous Man
Banned

Ron Paul Institute by Adam Dick Oct 3, 2024 It was wonderful news to many people last week when word came that Julian Assange would speak publicly this week. For a long time it seemed that such a day would never come as Assange suffered in harsh conditions in a British prison under the threat of extradition to the United Sates where he would likely remain captive in similar harsh conditions until death. The good news came in June that Assange had struck a deal to return as a free man to his home country of Australia. Yet, Assange did not come out in public to speak after returning to Australia. He focused on recovering the best he could from the torment imposed on him for exposing the US government’s dirty secrets, including related to wars. In his introductory remarks as his Tuesday testimony at a Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg, France, Assange addressed his recent maltreatment and his ongoing effort to recover from it, stating:

By David Stockman October 5, 2024 JD Vance is no slouch as a debater. We’d think even Tim Walz would grant that much after getting shellacked last night by the Donald’s running mate. We will also grant that both men were civil, even midwestern “nice”. But that just goes to prove that most of the blame for the nastiness that pervades the current political process in America, and which has thereby buried the real issues, lies with the Donald. He’s just an incorrigibly bombastic, ill-mannered lout who substitutes name-calling, slogan-checking and bragging for anything that even remotely sounds like a policy discussion. Of course, when it comes to silencing the real issues you can add to the mix the fact that the mainstream media faithfully shunts aside anything outside the UniParty’s “Overton Window” of permissible discussion.

Ron Paul Institute by Adam Dick Oct 2, 2024 Donald Trump likes to talk about how he puts America first. Last night, Trump’s presidential race running mate J.D. Vance made it clear that Vance has other priorities. In answer to the first question of the vice-presidential debate, Vance asserted that his allegiance is to Israel first. Indeed, he suggested that America does not even come in second. Here is how Vance responded to debate moderator Margaret Brennan’s question of if Vance would “support or oppose a preemptive strike by Israel on Iran”:

Mises Wire Carus Michaelangelo 10/04/2024 Tags: Big Government, Bureaucracy and Regulation, U.S. History, War and Foreign Policy Donald Trump’s ascendancy in the Republican Party fissured the GOP. Increasingly alienated, the GOP’s neoconservative wing flocks more and more to the Democrats. To anyone who grew up accustomed to viewing Democrats as the peace party, a Democrat presidential candidate celebrating the endorsement of Dick Cheney is mind-bending. But while some in the GOP increasingly reject nation-building and democracy-promotion as pillars of foreign policy, others have sought to bridge the gap between foreign policy restraint and interventionism. Matthew Kroenig and Dan Negrea’s book, We Win, They Lose: Republican Foreign Policy and the New Cold War, represents one such attempt.

Mises Wire Thomas J. DiLorenzo 10/03/2024 Labor unions are exempted from federal antitrust laws including the Sherman Antitrust Act, which outlaws “conspiracies in restraint of trade.” This is not a bad thing: Everyone should be exempted from antitrust laws. They are an assault on property rights and because their rulings are so arbitrary they are incompatible with justice and fairness. They are also a tool of rent-seeking businesses who practice “lawfare” by routinely suing their superior competitors for dropping their prices, improving their products, and serving their customers better than they do. When they can’t (or won’t) compete in the marketplace they resort to antitrust lawsuits to harass their competitors instead of better serving their customers. They have been a drag on the American economy for more than130 years. A strike by a labor union is nothing if not a restraint of trade. The media are all in a huff today about the dockworkers’ strike that has shut down all of the ports on the east coast from Maine to Texas. Billions of dollars of foreign imports of just about everything are sitting there, restraining trade! And when supply is reduced the effect is to make prices higher than they would otherwise be. It is essentially the same effect of a giant price-fixing conspiracy by American merchants. There is no such price-fixing conspiracy, but we will be observing the effects of one in some industries! The economic effects of the dockworkers’ strike are essentially the same as some of the effects of protectionist tariffs. The purpose of all protectionism is to restrain trade that comes from other countries, which is exactly what the dockworkers’ strike is doing. The purpose of the strike is to acquire higher wages (and to eliminate automation) and not protectionism, but it will have the effects of protectionism while it lasts.

by Stephan Kinsella October 1, 2024 The 2024 Annual Meeting of the PFS (Sept. 19, 2024 to Sept. 24, 2024, Bodrum, Turkey) has recently concluded. Videos and audio for the presented speeches and panels will be provided shortly on the PFS 2024 Youtube Playlist and Property and Freedom Podcast. Below is a video containing Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe‘s remarks on Javier Milei, excerpted from the panel discussion “Dürr, Müller, Fusillo, Bagus, Hoppe, Roundtable: What to Make of Milei” (Sat. Sept. 21, 2024).