If your son dies in a war are you beyond reproach? Thomas Woods answers

And no, you are not morally beyond reproach because your son died in war." ~Thomas Woods

Taken from his August 16, 2016 email. Here's the link.

Here's the full context:

Tonight I was taking a glance at my Facebook feed, and I saw Thaddeus Russell had posted something I'd missed.

Remember Khizr Khan, the Muslim man who spoke at the Democratic Convention and whose son died in the Iraq war?

At the time, I remember finding him utterly odious. For the life of me I could not understand people who defended this man.

He exploits the memory of his fallen son on behalf of the Democratic Party, and on behalf of a woman who helped send his son into that ludicrous war?

He urges his son to fight an idiotic -- not to mention grotesquely unjust -- war against a Muslim population, and all the pro-Muslim people flock to him?

Insanity.

If I were ever to exploit the memory of one of my own children on behalf of the Democratic Party, I sure hope everyone reading this would punch me in the face.

If I'd had a chance to speak before the Democratic Party, I would have strayed from my prepared script and appealed to the Bernie supporters in the room by denouncing Hillary and her war.

At any rate, Thaddeus posted a news item I'd missed: Khan's hero is -- wait for it -- John McCain.

I knew my instincts were right about this guy.

"Senator McCain -- he's my hero," Khan told CNN in an interview. "The last book my son read that I sent him was Senator McCain's book about courage: Why Courage Matters. So for me to hear Donald Trump malign my hero -- my son's hero -- it is just mind-boggling."

Senator McCain, who never saw a war he didn't like, and whose foreign policy has spread radical Islam all over the place and caused untold human suffering, is Khan's hero.

Not a good guy.

And no, you are not morally beyond reproach because your son died in war. If anything, Khan is all the more to be condemned for cheering on such a morally depraved course of action.

On this, I can't and won't budge.

Now that that's off my chest: tomorrow on the show I'm discussing the myth of the success of Nordic socialism.

Put the economic crisis in perspective

Put the economic crisis in perspective:

The government has been using stimulus to thwart a recession since I was 13.

I'm 27 now. They've been pushing off a recession for over half of my lifetime.

They've been using stimulus since 2001 and what do have they to show for it?

If stimulus worked so well, then why are there 2 million breadwinner jobs -- $50k a year -- less than 2000? Why are wages still declining?

By pushing off the recession with stimulus, they make the inevitable correction even worse.

What if we had one bad recession in 2001 and then that was it? What if we all had to toughen it out for one bad year when the economy was much stronger?

What happens now that the crisis is still forthcoming and people don't have the incomes and savings to brace for it?

Imagine if all of the people who went to college from 2001 to 2015 -- including myself -- had to make decisions to go to school based upon real price sensitivity, based upon what they could actually afford, versus enrolling in federal student loan programs? How financial freer would those people be?

The solution is to drastically cut spending, preferably Ron Paul 2012 presidential platform style by $1 trillion, end local, state, and federal bureaucracies, drastically lower taxes (no regressive flat tax, conservatives), and end the American Empire overseas and at home. Oh, and of course, End the Fed.

There's also other things that could be done but that's for another blog post. But for starters, we could legalize capitalism.

Vladimir Putin learns the wrong lesson from the Soviet Union's collapse

As I was watching the opening ceremony for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, a commentator said that Vladimir Putin thought the collapse and break-up of the Soviet Union was devastating, or something to that effect, and that Russia lost a lot of "good Russians." 

Bizarreness of that statement put aside, it deflects from real analysis of the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991.

What we should make of the Soviet Union's collapse was that we saw the complete and utter collapse of a nation based on an idea: Socialism. 

The "former glory of the Soviet Union" was no glory at all because socialism -- no matter how many years and decades it will take -- always plants the seeds for economic destruction. So going back to it would be like a "dog going back to its vomit" (Proverbs 26:11), and fool repeating his folly.

One other point here.

We are not unlike the Soviet Union.

As Thomas Woods explained in his 2009 book "Meltdown": "[the U.S. Federal Reserve System] is dedicated to central economic planning, the great discredited idea of the twentieth century. Except instead of planning the production of steel and concrete, as in the Old Soviet Union, it plans money and interest rates, with consequences that necessarily reverberate throughout the economy."

We are in the midst of a grand experiment that will end in nothing less than devastation for a lot of people. As I explained in previous statuses**, the time for a "soft landing" was over a decade ago. We should end our foolishness now to avoid an even harder landing later.

**Originally written as a Facebook status

Thomas Woods on Fiat Money (Part 2)

Creating money out of thin air, on the other hand, allows the money creator to enter the market and seize goods or services he wants without having supplied anything himself.

Thomas Woods, Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before The Coming Fiscal Collapse

Thomas Woods on Fiat Money

Fiat money artificially and unjustly increases the wealth and economic power of the banking system, well beyond what would occur in the free market.

Thomas Woods, Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before The Coming Fiscal Collapse

Video: Tom Woods Interviews Walter Williams on Peter Schiff Radio

One of the guys who helped me get into economics got interviewed by the guy who is keeping me in it. (Really, my own desire to understand what is going on around me is keeping me interested. But hey, it sounded nice!)

Update 2/18/12:

In the first paragraph below, I accidentally wrote Thomas Sowell instead of Walter Williams. The error has been corrected. I think I wrote Sowell instead of Williams because I was listening to this interview before I updated the page on 2/8/12.

Update 2/8/12:

In the above interview, Walter Williams mentions a report or paper that one of his colleagues wrote about Jim Crow laws in New Orleans. If I remember correctly, he said that private industry was actually pushing back against those laws which were being forced upon them by the government.

After doing some digging, I found out today that Thomas Sowell wrote about Rosa Parks a few days after her death in 2005. The column "Rosa Parks and History" is worth the read and piggybacks on the report mentioned above. Secondly, it shows that free-market's solutions to racism aren't just academic theories, they reflect something that happened in the real world.

As Walter Williams wrote, "When white solidarity is confronted by the specter of higher profits by serving blacks, it's likely that profits will win."

Upon some further digging, it didn't hit me until now--because I read the column when it first appeared in 2010--that one of my other favorite economists, Walter Williams, wrote about this exact topic then, and it may indeed reference the paper that Thomas Sowell was talking about (although he doesn't mention New Orleans so there is a chance it isn't).

For more reading into this topic, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism (which is one of the first books on capitalism I read a few years ago) by Mises scholar Robert P. Murphy has a section dedicated to the free market and racism.

George Reisman, who studied under Ludwig Von Mises himself, has a paper taking a slightly different angle called "Capitalism: The Cure for Racism" and it is pretty short.

Video: Schiff and Woods on Government Nonsense

Dr. Brown asks about Gingrich; I answer "Paul"

Ask Dr. Brown asks (via Facebook):

Would you vote for Newt Gingrich as president? On the one hand, he has tremendous wisdom, is a real statesman, and argues for the importance of God and faith in the nation. On the other hand, he's had two affairs and is on his third marriage. Your thoughts?

Some random person:

Newt Gingrich is the only chance for defeating Obama in either debate or personal charisma.

My response:

No Gingrich is not the "only chance for defeating Obama in...debate." Congressman Ron Paul has Obama beat in a debate on economics alone and will call him out for his lawlessness and defiance of the constitution from health care to foreign policy. He also has him beat for consistency and honesty.

Dr. Brown I ask that you invite Dr. Thomas Woods onto your show to discuss the Christian Case for Ron Paul. (tomwoods.com to contact him)

A Christian Case for Ron Paul:
http://www.tomwoods.com/blog/woods-on-iowa-radio-the-christian-case-for-ron-paul/

Letter to the Catholic Community on Behalf of Ron Paul:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods83.html

Letter to the Protestant Community on Behalf of Ron Paul:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance127.html

Tom Woods Explains The Student Loan Racket

I knew this and wrote about it December 2010. I write:

What bothers me so much about this statistic is that colleges can keep the price of tuition higher than what it would have possibly been if the student loans weren't there in the first place.

University planners, knowing that financial aid is guaranteed, plan expansion based on somewhat false signals in the markets (federal grants, student loans). It does not matter how big or small the false signal.

I remember my state of mind when writing "somewhat false signals." I was too nice. They are false signals.

Excerpted from Rollback:

Of course, it is the subsidies themselves that push tuition costs ever higher. Here’s the obvious point everyone pretends not to realize: colleges know the students have access to low-interest loans courtesy of government. Aware that prospective students enjoy artificially increased purchasing power, college administrations raise tuition (and cut back their own aid programs) accordingly. When tuition thus continues to rise, as any fool could predict, we hear huzzahs for the government – for however could students pay this high tuition without government assistance? It is the classic case, as Harry Browne said, of the government breaking your leg, handing you a crutch, and saying, “See Without me you couldn’t walk.”

Thomas Woods, The Student Loan Racket: Ron Paul Right Again

Forgotten Facts of American Labor History by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Just about everything that people think they know about labor unions and wage rates is wrong.

The standard tale that practically every student hears over the course of his education is that before the emergence of labor unions, American workers were terribly exploited and their wages were consistently falling. The improvement in labor's condition was due entirely or at least in large part to labor unionism and favorable federal legislation. In the absence of these, it is widely assumed, people would still be working 80-hour weeks and children would still be working in mines.

This oft-heard tale is, however, almost entirely false, and those parts of it that are true (the low standard of living that people enjoyed in the nineteenth century, for example) are true for reasons other than those alleged by pro-union historians, who see in them only confirmation of their prejudices against the market economy.

Forgotten Facts of American Labor History by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Video: War Is Better Than Ron Paul, Say (Many) Progressives

My Anti-Capitalist Twitter Critic by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Interesting fact:

As I’ve shown in Rollback, the poverty rate in the United States fell from 95 percent in 1900 to around 12-14 percent in the late 1960s – a period in which government antipoverty measures were fairly trivial. By the late 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty programs began receiving substantial funding, the poverty rate stagnated. By 1994 it was about the same as it had been in the late 1960s, even though the federal government was by that time spending four times as much per capita as it had under LBJ.

My Anti-Capitalist Twitter Critic by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Video: Thought Controllers Call Ron Paul "Extreme"

Video: Tom Woods on Freedom Watch 04/25/11

Video: The Phony Case for Presidential War Powers

Audio: Like Saving Ten Cents on a Trip to the Moon

Listen to the audio here.

Four Books to Understand the Crisis

My latest column on the Charleston Tea Party website has just been published.


Finally!

It was written with the reader (read "Non-economist") in mind; and as I said in the column the goal of studying my book recommendations is not:

to become a bonafide economist or a constitutional scholar; the goal is to become an informed citizen.

For this reason I have narrowed down the number of books that could be read to understand the crisis to a digestable four books. If you want to read more on economics, then go right ahead. Every book except The Alpha Strategy has a book recommendation list at the end, usually broken into beginning, intermediate, and advanced lists.

To read my latest column, Four Books to Understand the Crisis, click here.

Thomas Woods on Bipartisanship

"It's not always easy these days to tell which of our two major political parties is the Stupid Party and which the Evil Party. But it remains true, as a conservative wag once said, that from time to time the parties collaborate on something that's both stupid and evil and call it bipartisanship." Thomas Woods, Why I am a Catholic Libertarian

Beware of Obamanomics

Hello fellow internet users. I found this document by accident. Honestly, I googled "Peter Schiff Community Reinvestment Act" and found this downloadable 14-page criticism of Obamanomics. The author of the document is Tom Woods, who is a brilliant historian and author of several books.

Tom Woods, a senior fellow at the Ludwig Von Mises group, also gave a few lectures that are available on the Mises Youtube Channel. A good place to start is with the lecture called "Why You've Never Heard of the Great Depression of 1920" and then "Applying Economics to American History." The rest, then, is up to you.