Nations as such don’t gain or lose from trade; only individual traders do. If the trades into which these people voluntarily enter entice them by the prospect of mutual gain, it simply cannot be the case that the sum total of their transactions amounts to a bad deal.
Category: Against Leviathan
The Difference between You and Them
From one point of view, the government is almost indescribably complex. Its functionaries and contractors are occupied in a gigantic set of diverse activities. The objectives it claims to be carrying out are nearly as numerous as the stars in the heavens. Yet, at day’s end, all of this complexity can be reduced to a very simple relationship between you and those who compose the state: you have money, and they intend to take as much of it as possible and dispose of it as they see fit.
Adherence to the Constitution, or Not?
U.S. conservatives generally make a fetish of, among other things, strict federal immigration policy and strong support of the Constitution. It never seems to occur to them that these two positions are inconsistent, given that the Constitution gives no power whatsoever to Congress in regard to immigration controls. So, federal immigration policy of any kind is unconstitutional.
On Coming to Grips with the Nature of the State
That so many intellectuals talk about the state as if it were a sort of garden-party amusement, rather than the cold, merciless killing and plundering machine that it really is, now puzzles me. I don’t think the disconnect between the ivory-tower conceptions and the reality of the state springs so much from the philosophers and political scientists having prostituted themselves to the state as it springs from these thinkers’ not getting out more—or, barring actual first-hand involvement in the relevant realms, from their failure to learn more realistic history.
FinCEN Form 114—I’m Not the Criminal Here
You don’t need a Ph.D. in political science to realize what’s going on here. The Treasury is trying to track money related to drug trafficking, tax evasion, and other U.S. “crimes.” But its way of doing so is to impose a requirement on everyone with a foreign account willy-nilly—and that includes yours truly—and to threaten punishment of anyone who fails to cough up the required information.
Entirely Meaningless and Wholly Unproblematic
Many social and economic problems have no solution. At best, we can only make continuing trade-offs and thereby move to an improved, yet still troublesome, situation. But one problem — at least, many pundits and politicians affect to regard it as a problem — has a complete and easy solution that can be seized at any time. I speak, of course, of the problem of the so-called trade deficit in international commerce.
The Criminal Injustice System
An interesting fact about the U.S. criminal justice system is that the people charged with enforcing the laws are people with virtually no desire to act justly.
U.S. War Making: What’s in It for You?
You pay for all of this endless death and destruction, average American, but you get less than nothing out of it. In short, you are a sap for evil and designing intriguers. If you are reflexively “supporting the troops,” you might want to reconsider playing the fool and having your intelligence insulted daily in the process.
Think Twice about Bringing Back U.S. Manufacturing Jobs
We hear a lot of lamentations about the loss of American jobs in manufacturing (notwithstanding that U.S. manufacturing output has never been greater). People purport to want to bring back jobs in factories. I’m not sure a lot of thought goes into these views.
Statism’s First Casualty Is the Truthful Use of Language
States engage not only in conquest, plunder, and oppression, but also—in order to create conditions in which the populace is rendered less likely to resist a state’s abuses or rebel against it—in pervasive bamboozlement. Those who support the state ideologically tend to engage in chronic misrepresentation of what the state does and how it does it. So, not only war—the characteristic state action—but statism in general makes truth the first casualty of its claims, proposals, programs, and projects.