You write that

“… the Zionists are more … dangerous than the Bolsheviks-Soviets-Communists.”

(Link to Jorge Besada’s article can be read here in its entirety.)

Let’s see. The Nazis murdered 11 million innocents.The Soviets and Stalin get “credit” for 20 million. The Chinese under Mao murdered 70 million. Pol Pot, another commie, 2 million. That’s a total of 92 million for the Bolsheviks-Soviets-Communists.

How many innocents have the Zionists murdered? None. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Murder is unjustified killing, and Israel has not murdered a single innocent?

How many innocents have the Zionists killed? (Killing, unlike murder, can be justified; murder is per se unjust). Well let’s see. According to the always reliable statistics suppled by Hamas, Israel has killed about 70,000 Gazans (that’s less than 1% of the death toll of the Bolsheviks-Soviets-Communists). Hamas does not distinguish between civilians and their terrorists in their report. Let’s suppose, arguendo, that Israel has killed 50% of each. So, the IDF has killed 35,000 non-combatants. This sound awful, although not nearly as bad as your Bolsheviks-Soviets-Communists.

But who is RESPONSIBLE for those deaths? Hamas, not the IDF! Hamas places rocket launchers, military hardware, in hospitals, schools, playgrounds, etc. Does the IDF immediately pulverize such places? No. Unlike most militaries, the Israely army first sends out leaflets, warning of impending bombing of such places. Hamas does not allow “its” people to leave. They want to increase the Gazan deaths so as to demonstrate the perfidy of Israel.

Not even the Nazis used the German population as shields in this manner. I’m shocked that you, an intelligent man, would say such a thing. Any interest in rescinding this untrue statement of yours?

Best regards,

Walter

Opposition to the U.S.-Israeli war against the Iranian government is nearly universal in the West. Polls show large majorities opposed in both the United States and Europe. Politicians across the spectrum, as well as the Pope, have called it strategically reckless and morally indefensible. These objections are serious. They are also wrong.

The ethical case in favor of pursuing this war against Iran is straightforward: bullies deserve to be punished, criminal dictators deserve to be overthrown, initiators of war deserve to lose them and totalitarian governments should be conquered.

The pragmatic argument in favor of this course of action is more complicated: The case is that the war is costly in terms of both treasure and human lives.

However, the central question isn’t whether this war carries costs. Every war does. All human action, in peace or in war, has a price. The question is whether the rewards outweigh the costs.

There are three key reasons as to why the benefits of the Iran war are greater than the costs:

1. The rights of Iranians need protection.

The rights to speak freely, assemble peacefully, practice one’s beliefs and participate in political life are not privileges granted by governments. They are universal human rights that belong to every individual regardless of nationality or where they happen to live.

For more than four decades, nearly 90 million Iranians have lived under a regime that systematically suppresses those basic human rights. Citizens can be imprisoned or even killed for criticizing the government, protesting in public, engaging in political opposition or advocating for greater freedom. Women have been imprisoned for removing a headscarf. Men have been executed for their sexual orientation.

When a government becomes the primary violator of its citizens’ rights, the principle of human rights does not stop at the border. Human rights belong to individuals, not states, and they do not become negotiable simply because the abuses occur within a particular country’s territory.

The international community cannot remain indifferent when millions of people are systematically denied their rights. At this point, to protect the rights of Iranians, there must be an intervention against the entity violating their rights—the Iranian government.

2. Iran’s government needs to be held accountable.

Critics of the war invoke the concept of “national sovereignty” like it’s a magic shield. Whatever a government does inside its own borders, the argument goes, is its own business.

That principle might apply to a legitimate government agreed to by its people, but the Islamic Republic of Iran is not one of them.

Governments derive their authority from a basic compact: Citizens grant the state its power, and the state protects their fundamental rights. The Islamic Republic broke that compact long ago with its violent suppression tactics, anti-freedom policies and outright mass murder of some 30,000 of its own citizens for protesting the regime.

Beyond Iran’s borders, the regime has spent decades funding and directing Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis; organizations responsible for mass civilian casualties in Israel and sustained instability across the broader Middle East. Iran’s government is not simply an authoritarian state that mistreats its own people. It is a state that has exported violence as a tool of regional policy.

A government that operates this way has no legitimate claim to the sovereignty protections it demands from the international community.

Along with protecting the basic rights of Iranians, the Iranian government must be punished and held accountable for the violations it has committed.

3. The United Nations cannot protect Iranians or hold Iran’s government accountable.

The institutions built to prevent governments from slaughtering their own citizens have a well-documented response to the Islamic Republic: They tend to write reports about it.

After the massacre of protesters in Iran earlier this year, the United Nations produced empty statements and no action. It formally urged Iran to impose an immediate moratorium on executions—a request the regime ignored entirely. The International Criminal Court in the Hague issued no indictments. The ICC is presumably too busy doing exactly that for Israeli leaders, who are mobilizing their country for self-defense.

Rights without enforcement are not rights. They are aspirations written on paper. Something must enforce rights, and the United Nations has shown it cannot and will not.

The United States and Israel stepped in when the United Nations and the international community refused to do so. For the first time in decades, the Iranian regime is facing real consequences, not empty condemnations.




Originally published here.

Read more

Read more

Here is the spoiler. The tiny Duchy of Grand Fenwick, a pos…

Read more

A great many libertarian leaders, loyal to every other aspect of the creed, lose their footing the moment the subject turns to war. They can recite the non-aggression principle in their sleep and then abandon it just when it matters most.

Start with Antiwar.com. Asked to explain itself, the site declares: “Our politics are libertarian: our opposition to war is rooted in Randolph Bourne’s concept that ‘War is the health of the State.’ With every war, America has made a ‘great leap’ into statism, and as Bourne emphasized, ‘it is during war that one best understands the nature of that institution [the State].’ At its core, that nature includes an ever-increasing threat to individual liberty and the centralization of political power.”

Bourne was a gifted writer and, on much else, a sound libertarian. Look at the load-bearing word in the site’s creed: its opposition to war is “rooted” in the claim that war fattens the state. The claim is true, and worth shouting from the rooftops. But a reliable tendency cannot by itself condemn a whole category of acts. Hospitals spread infection, but a man still has his broken leg set there. That war usually grows the state is reason to watch it warily, but not to fault the man fighting off an invader. From a genuine aspect of what war tends to do, Antiwar.com has rendered a blanket verdict on what war always is. A tendency has been mistaken for a principle.

Hand the microphone to Murray Rothbard, Mr. Libertarian himself, who drew the line his admirers at the site have erased: “My own view of war can be put simply: A just war exists when a people tries to ward off the threat of coercive domination by another people, or to overthrow an already-existing domination. A war is unjust, on the other hand, when a people try to impose domination on another people, or try to retain an already existing coercive rule over them.”

Defense on one side of the ledger, aggression on the other. A libertarian foreign policy fits within that single sentence.

Next, there is LewRockwell.com, whose masthead announces three commitments: “Anti-State, Anti-War, Pro-Market.” The first and third are beyond reproach. The middle one trips over its own author. Lew Rockwell has defended two American wars as just: the War of Independence in 1776 and the South’s part in the Civil War of 1861-1865, due to what he claims is the legitimacy of Southern secession. A masthead that forbids what its proprietor endorses is a masthead in want of editing.

Third, there is the Future of Freedom Foundation, which offers as a kind of catechism these lines from Frank Chodorov’s 1938 essay “When War Comes”: “Every day we must repeat to ourselves as a liturgy, the truth that war is caused by the conditions that bring about poverty; that no war is justified; that no war benefits the people; that war is an instrument whereby the haves increase their hold on the have-nots; that war destroys liberty.”

The Foundation salutes Chodorov as “arguably ... the most effective voice of isolationism.” Effective he was, and on most questions a genuine sage. But that one line, “no war is justified,” reads beautifully and ends in disaster. It throws over the right of self-defense, which is the bedrock upon which the whole libertarian structure rests. Tell a man he may not lift a hand against the aggressor at his door, and you have not made him peaceful. You have made him prey.

Fourth, there is the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Prosperity, by all means, but “peace” as the headline virtue is where the trouble starts. “Justice and Prosperity” would be far more honest, since justice every so often calls for a defensive war that no candid person would describe as peaceful. Ron Paul himself knows this, whatever his institute’s letterhead says. The Congressional Record reveals that, on Dec. 4, 2001, Paul called for legislation authorizing, in his words, “the President to issue letters of marque and reprisal to appropriate parties to seize the person and property of Osama bin Laden and any other individuals responsible for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.”

Letters of marque, the seizure of persons and property, and the hunting of bin Laden across the globe are many things, but peaceful is not among them.

Four organizations, one mistake repeated four times. The truth is that libertarianism stands against aggressive war, the war of the initiator, the war waged to conquer or to keep an unjust grip on a subject people. It has never objected to defensive war and never will. It objects just as fiercely to the deliberate killing of innocents, on any side and under any flag, because repelling an aggressor never licenses the murder of his civilians.

Erase that distinction and “anti-war” quietly becomes pacifism in libertarian dress; pacifism blown up to the scale of a nation. A libertarian may, of course, be a pacifist, should his conscience demand it, but their philosophy requires nothing of the kind.

None of this is a matter of slogans for us. We have argued the case at length in a study of what we call Rothbard’s “foreign-policy paradox,” in which the very universalism that forbids the killing of a foreign innocent in wartime ought, carried through honestly, to permit the rescue of that same innocent from slaughter at the hands of his own government. Rothbard balked at that second step, and the four organizations above balk at the first. The libertarian principle they all profess to serve is steadier than any of them.

Picture the thing at its simplest: Country A attacks Country B without cause. B fights back. Both are now “at war,” and the antiwar purist, counting only the noun “war,” drops them in the same file. The libertarian, however, reads the verbs: A initiated, B defended.

Suppose Canada or Mexico were to invade the United States tomorrow morning. The president could repel the attack immediately, the Constitution squarely behind him, and Congress could argue later about the wider war. No one calls that aggression.

Anyone can condemn Washington’s adventures, but the libertarian principle only holds when one can still name aggression for what it is, even when the victim is politically unfashionable.

Here, the mask slips. The antiwar passion of these libertarians is directed, time and again, at Israel, and seldom at the parties that attacked Israel. A man who opposes war as such, all of it, in every instance, would have no earthly reason to keep training his guns on one side of a Middle Eastern fight while waving the other through. One might expect even-handedness from so principled a pacifism, but one would be expecting too much.

This selectivity is no abstraction to the authors of these lines.

After Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, one of us, Walter E. Block, said plainly that Israel had the right to ward off the assault, which is to say, to fight a just war by Rothbard’s own definition, with the obvious proviso that the innocents of Gaza not be deliberately harmed. For saying so, Block was stripped of the unpaid senior fellowship he had held at the Mises Institute for the better part of a lifetime. LewRockwell.com, whose masthead we analyzed a few paragraphs ago, walled him off from more than a hundred articles he had written for it. The self-styled heirs of Rothbard had excommunicated a man for taking Rothbard at his word.

The episode has been set down in full in an essay on what the affair laid bare about the libertarian movement’s fragility. We will not reiterate it here. The point for present purposes is narrower and sharper: An “antiwar” libertarianism that too often excuses the aggressor, reserves its moral fury for the defender and at last turns that fury on its own founders has inverted the very doctrine it professes to inherit from Rothbard.


Originally published here.

Jacob's Ledger

A non-professional economist, professional legal thinker, digital nomad, and investor. Exploring the crossroads of law, markets, and global policy. https://gravatar.com/passionateb941705344

Read more

MSN mentions in this regard: “Donald Trump’s ability to change his mind, backtrack, announce one thing and then its opposite, issue a powerful ultimatum and then retract.”

Here is another example; the Wall Street Journal condemns him as follows: “After Denouncing U.S. Intervention, Trump Topples Foreign Leaders.” This newspaper continues: “In front of a packed chamber of Arab political and business leaders last May, President Trump declared that the era of American-led regime change was over… For years, Trump denounced Washington’s ‘forever wars’ and warned against toppling foreign regimes by force…”

States MS Now: “Trump promised to end ‘regime change.’” Now he’s urging Iranians to topple their government.” But, after these leaders murdered some 30,000 people in cold blood, Donald Trump retracted, out of concern for their safety. See, you just can’t trust Trump to stick to his views.

According to the New York Times: “As the president threatens to wipe out Iran and attacks the pope, even some former allies and advisers are questioning whether he has grown increasingly unbalanced, describing him as ‘lunatic’ and ‘clearly insane.’”

The Washington Post piles on: “Trump keeps changing his timeline for ending the Iran war. The president has repeatedly suggested that the conflict was nearing a conclusion while simultaneously escalating threats against Tehran.”

There is a very famous quote, attributed to John Maynard Keynes, that is very apropos in this context: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” That applies to President Trump, in spades.

Consider, first, tariffs. Now, to be sure, there is no economic case to be made on behalf of this mercantilist nonsense. Adam Smith wrote brilliantly about this bit of economic illiteracy. There are few issues upon which the entire economics profession is more united than its dismissal. One of the important reasons for the success of the US economy is that we constitute a gigantic free trade area. If tariffs could bring about prosperity, we should allow each state to set them up against all the others. They do this in Canada, which is one reason why they are relatively poor, despite a vast amount of natural resources, and a highly skilled labor force.

According to the New York Times: “As the president threatens to wipe out Iran and attacks the pope, even some former allies and advisers are questioning whether he has grown increasingly unbalanced, describing him as ‘lunatic’ and ‘clearly insane.’”

The Washington Post piles on: “Trump keeps changing his timeline for ending the Iran war. The president has repeatedly suggested that the conflict was nearing a conclusion while simultaneously escalating threats against Tehran.”

There is a very famous quote, attributed to John Maynard Keynes, that is very apropos in this context: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” That applies to President Trump, in spades.

Consider, first, tariffs. Now, to be sure, there is no economic case to be made on behalf of this mercantilist nonsense. Adam Smith wrote brilliantly about this bit of economic illiteracy. There are few issues upon which the entire economics profession is more united than its dismissal. One of the important reasons for the success of the US economy is that we constitute a gigantic free trade area. If tariffs could bring about prosperity, we should allow each state to set them up against all the others. They do this in Canada, which is one reason why they are relatively poor, despite a vast amount of natural resources, and a highly skilled labor force.

In boxing, if the head shots are not working, go to the belly. If that does not suffice, attack the opponent’s head, once again. Keep switching from the jab to the cross. The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray. Trump’s best laid plans were all fine and dandy, until the enemy reacted to the first few forays, that is, with their Hormuz tactic.

“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

It cannot be denied that at one moment, Donald Trump is threatening to blow Iran back into the stone age. At another point in time, he is offering a two-week pause, if this murderous regime shows some vestige of reason. When they do not, when they continue to insist upon their sovereign right to produce a nuclear weapon, he takes an altogether different tack. This is blameworthy? No, it is a reasonable response to different conditions.

Then there are his dealings with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. At one point, he called him out for the socialist that he is. But on another occasion, Donald Trump invited this communist to the White House. You can’t get more of a boomerang than that. Perhaps the president can charm the mayor out of pursuing economic policies that have led to disaster and impoverishment everywhere they have been tried. Just think of East and West Germany, North and South Korea. You can’t get more of an almost perfectly controlled experiment than that. Then there is the fact that a significant part of the Cuban population, and that of Venezuela under Maduro, has emigrated in response to the dirigisme economic policies imposed therein. Will Mamdani ever learn? Perhaps, with Trump’s different treatment of him upon these occasions. That is the behavior of a madman?

Has anyone ever heard of the good cop bad cop routine? It must work at least some of the time, otherwise it would not be employed in practically every police movie we have seen. Well, Mr. Donald employs both roles at different times, and is unfairly castigated for substituting one type of policy for another.

“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

Nor can we ignore his numerous hirings and firings. Is he the first boss who has ever employed someone who looked to be a good candidate, but it did not work out later on? Hardly. Yet, Mr. Trump is roundly condemned to engaging in this practice and virtually no one else is so treated.

Then, too, Mr. Trump ran for office on a peace platform, promising no more endless wars. If what is now occurring in Iran is not a war, it is coming awfully close. Is this yet another instance of whimsical and erratic behavior? Superficially, yes. But a moment’s reflection will acknowledge that the world when he campaigned for the presidency is not exactly the one which we now occupy. Iran was begging for a war; and Donald, a nice fellow, complied.

“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

Have no other presidents ever changed their minds about anything? Bill Clinton declared that the era of Big Government was over, and then supported the minimum wage law, along with numerous other regulations. Did the mainstream media condemn him for fickleness or capriciousness? Not so that anyone would notice.

Originally posted here.

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more