Friday, October 30, 2009
Why Do Liberals Hate the Poor in Cuba?
by Jacob G. Hornberger
President’s Obama’s much-ballyhooed campaign promise of “change” has received yet another setback. This time it’s respect to the U.S. embargo against Cuba, which has been in existence for some 50 years. Obama, who wowed and wooed the crowds during his presidential campaign with promises of “change,” has decided to continue the embargo.
Never mind that the UN General Assembly, in a 187-3 vote with 3 abstentions, condemned the embargo. (Israel and Palau joined up with the United States). Alas, even that was not enough to cause Obama, the great believer in democracy, to change half-a-century of a cruel and brutal U.S. policy toward the Cuban people.
What this means is that President Obama will continue threatening, prosecuting, and punishing Americans who have the audacity to believe that where they travel and how they spend their own money is none of the U.S. government’s business.
Do you want to know the most hypocritical part of Obama’s latest no-change policy? It’s that favorite mantra that liberals employ whenever someone objects to one of their socialistic programs: “You hate the poor!”
Well, it would be difficult to find a better example of the poor than the Cuban people. I have been to Cuba. Just about everyone is poor, the exception being those at the top of the political echelon.
Liberals know this. Nonetheless, their model change-agent, Barack Obama, decrees that the U.S. government will continue to do its part to keep the Cuban people impoverished with the continuation of the embargo.
Will liberals hurl their favorite accusation in Obama’s direction: “You hate the poor!”?
Not likely. Liberals might have done that when George W. Bush was continuing the Cuban embargo. But this is now their man in office. So, most of them will shut their mouths, seal their lips, put aside their pens, and praise Obama for being their “leader for change.”
Oh, and it actually gets better. President Obama’s ambassador to the UN, Susan E. Rice, blamed the misery of the Cuban people on “the Cuban government’s airtight restrictions on internationally recognized social, political and economic freedoms.”
What she’s referring to on the economics part is Castro’s socialist system. She just doesn’t feel comfortable using the S word. But imagine: even while doing his best to saddle America with one of the biggest socialist programs in U.S. history — government-provided health care — Obama audaciously blames much of Cuba’s poverty on Castro’s socialist economic system.
Gosh, I wonder why Rice failed to mention that free health care in Cuba is the pride and joy of Fidel Castro? Or that the socialist Castro is also a firm advocate of Social Security, welfare, and equalization and redistribution of wealth.
Obama says that as soon as Cuba conforms to U.S. standards of behavior, he’ll take another look at the embargo.
Yeah, as if that kind of political pressure has been successful. After all, I did mention that the embargo has gone on for 50 years, right?
I wonder how Obama, who has continued the Bush administration’s war on terrorism policies, would respond if Cuba (or China, Russia, or Venezuela) imposed an embargo on the U.S. to force the U.S. government to give up invasions, wars of aggression, occupations, embargoes, torture, kidnapping, rendition, and overseas prisons.
Given that Obama promised change and has steadfastly delivered no change, Americans would be justified for asking their lawyers whether it’s possible to sue Obama for fraud. It will be amusing to watch Obama running for reelection in 2012 as he wows and woos the crowds with, “Reelect me for change, and this time I really mean it.”
So what if the poor in Cuba have to continue suffering for a few more years.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
One of the Best Libertarian Events Ever!
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Yesterday, I participated in one of the most exciting and enjoyable libertarian events in the 30 years since I discovered libertarianism. The event was the first-ever live broadcast of Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Internet program “Freedom Watch,” which was broadcast from Drexel University.
How did the event get established? A group of libertarians at Drexel came up with the idea of inviting Judge Napolitano to have a special edition of “Freedom Watch” at their school. They contacted him, and he quickly agreed. That entrepreneurship ended up bringing about one of the best events in the history of the libertarian movement.
I’ve previously blogged about Judge Napolitano’s show. It is nothing less than a libertarian phenomenon. Here is the legal commentator for Fox News, the most conservative network on television, advancing hard-core, pure libertarianism on an Internet program that is hosted by Fox News itself.
When was the last time that you saw a host on Fox News attacking not only liberal statists but conservative statists too … criticizing the drug war and passionately arguing that it violates the principles of individual freedom … condemning the undeclared wars on Iraq and Afghanistan … criticizing the severe infringements on civil liberties that have accompanied the “war on terrorism” … and castigating torture and calling for prosecutions of all those involved, even if they go all the way to the top?
You’ll see all that … and more when you watch the video of yesterday’s program.
This ain’t your parents’ Fox News! This is Judge Andrew Napolitano’s “Freedom Watch” on Fox News!
I cannot begin to describe how great this program was. You owe it to yourself to take the time to watch this program. They don’t have it online yet but I’m sure they will very soon. Here’s the link to where you will find it: https://freedomwatchonfox.com.
But I haven’t even given you the highlight of the program yet — the part that will absolutely fire up your libertarian engines like never before.
The students.
You will absolutely be bowled over when you listen to the students who were on the panel answering Judge Napolitano’s questions. Every time they answered one of the judge’s questions, I felt like I was in libertarian heaven. The answers were not only hard-core, they were eloquent. And they reflected a depth of knowledge that could only come from countless hours of ardent study of libertarianism and Austrian economics. Above all, what exuded through every one of these students was a deep, passionate love of liberty.
Are you feeling despondent about the situation in the United States? Are you thinking that we just don’t have a chance to restore liberty to our land?
Watch this video. It might well be the best tonic and picker-upper you’ll ever have.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Drug-War Assassinations
by Jacob G. Hornberger
The U.S. government has now extended its assassination program to the drug war. According to the New York Times, the Pentagon now has an assassination list for suspected drug dealers in Afghanistan.
No arrests. No hearings. No attorneys. No judges. No trials. Just kill them.
Great! So now the occupation of Afghanistan has expanded not only to CIA drone assassinations but also now to Pentagon’s drug-war assassinations.
U.S. officials are justifying the drug-war assassinations as part of their counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan. They say that they’re only going to be assassinating those drug dealers whose drug trafficking is benefiting the terrorists.
I wonder how they make that determination, especially without judicial hearings and trials.
Keep in mind that U.S. officials justify their occupation of Afghanistan as part of their overall “war on terrorism.” Keep in mind also that according to them, in the war on terrorism the entire world is a battlefield, including the United States.
As part of their war on terrorism, U.S. officials claim the power to treat Americans as “enemy combatants,” which entails the power to ignore the rights and guarantees in the Bill of Rights for people suspected of committing the federal criminal offense of terrorism. That includes the power to arrest suspected terrorists, incarcerate them for life, torture them, and deny them due process of law.
It also includes the power to assassinate suspected terrorists, a power that U.S. officials have exercised on “the battlefield” in such places as Yemen, where they assassinated an American citizen who happened to be traveling with a suspected terrorist, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. So far, they have not exercised the assassination power on that part of the battlefield that encompasses the United States, but they certainly now wield the post-9/11 power to do so.
And now they have extended their assassination power to the drug war. And without even bothering to ask Congress to enact a law giving them such power. Hey, this is the era of the war on terrorism. They don’t need no stinking assassination law. All they need is a presidential order to the CIA and the military to begin assassinating people.
Will they apply their assassination power to suspected drug dealers elsewhere in the world? After all, doesn’t the sale of heroin everywhere likely put money into the pockets of drug producers in Afghanistan, given that that’s where 90 percent of the world’s heroin originates?
We know that they are employing the power to assassinate suspected terrorists in different parts of the world. Time will tell whether they do the same with suspected drug dealers, including, of course, that part of the battlefield that encompasses the United States.
Meanwhile, families are mourning the deaths of three American DEA agents and 11 U.S. soldiers who died this past week in two helicopter crashes in Afghanistan.
Fourteen more senseless deaths. Where does this lunacy end?
End the assassinations. End the occupations. End the war on terrorism. End the war on drugs. There is no other solution for restoring freedom, morality, peace, prosperity, and security to our nation.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Only One Genuine Way to Support the Troops
by Jacob G. Hornberger
A few days ago, New York Times columnists Bob Herbert and David Brooks engaged in an online conversation in which they lamented that the American people are not doing enough to support the troops who are occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. They said that Americans just aren’t taking these “wars” seriously and should be engaging in much more shared sacrifice for the sake of the troops.
It would be difficult to find greater imperialistic nonsense than that.
First of all, there is absolutely nothing to prevent Herbert and Brooks from joining the military and volunteering to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sure, Herbert is 60 or so and Brooks is 48 or so. So what? Old people can serve useful functions in combat, especially in a support role. For example, Herbert could drive a transport vehicle. Brooks could cook. Old age is an invalid excuse for avoiding military service, especially when one honestly believes that national security is at stake.
Moreover, even if the military refused Herbert’s and Brooks’ offer of service, that would not prevent them from traveling to Iraq and Afghanistan and joining up with a private contractor that serves the troops, such as Blackwater. Or they could join some private aid group that assists the many Iraqi and Afghani victims of the war, such as those who have lost family members in wedding parties that the troops have bombed.
Herbert writes: “The members of the military have behaved heroically and conducted themselves with great dignity. Their sacrifices (and those of their families) have been enormous. I haven’t even talked about the thousands who have given their lives and the tens of thousands who have suffered terrible physical injuries.”
Unfortunately, neither Herbert nor Brooks raises a critically important question: What difference does it make if the troops are conducting themselves “heroically and with great dignity” if they are engaged in an illegal and immoral war of aggression? Are the American people supposed to be enthusiastically supporting the troops when the troops are doing something that is fundamentally wrong and that violates people’s consciences?
Where is the constitutionally required declaration of war for Iraq? It doesn’t exist. Where is it for Afghanistan? It doesn’t exist. That makes the wars on these two countries — and the resulting occupations — illegal under our form of government.
Where is the morality of using the troops to kill, torture, and maim people in order to achieve a foreign policy of regime change? Who cares whether they are performing “heroically and with great dignity” when they’re serving as the instruments of violence to achieve an immoral political aim?
Moreover, we must also keep in mind that no matter how heroically the troops are behaving, their killings, assassinations, maiming, and torture of people in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now Pakistan, continue to engender massive anger and rage among foreigners, which produces the ever-growing threat of more terrorist retaliation against the United States. By continuing to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, the fact is that the troops are making Americans less safe.
Herbert and Brooks point out that many U.S. soldiers are returning home with psychological problems, which Herbert and Brook partly attribute to post-traumatic stress disorder or depression.
There’s another possibility though: that those troops are suffering from massive guilt, rooted in the unlawful and immoral killing of people who had a right to live free of an illegal and immoral invasion and occupation by the troops of a foreign empire.
When people are engaged in wrongdoing, oftentimes there is nothing they love more than for everyone else to engage in the wrongdoing too. It makes them feel better about what they are doing. We must constantly resist the temptation to support wrongdoing, either explicitly or implicitly.
We must never surrender our consciences for any reason. We must steadfastly continue to oppose the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and continue calling for an immediate evacuation from those countries. That is the only moral way to genuinely support the troops, our country, and ourselves.
POSTSCRIPT for people in the Arizona area: The Freedom Library, which is run by longtime FFF friend Howard Blitz, whose articles in the Yuma Sun we often link to in FFF Email Update, is hosting (pdf) its 14th Annual Education Forum on Saturday, October 31, at Arizona Western College in Yuma, featuring C. Edward Griffin, author of The Creature from Jekyll Island.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Monday, October 26, 2009
The Unreal World of Liberals
by Jacob G. Hornberger
One of the fascinating things about liberals is how they create their own false realities and then simply ignore or block out of their minds facts that conflict with that reality.
We have witnessed this phenomenon, big time, during the housing and banking crises. The crises were the fault of the free market, the liberals claim, because as everyone “knows,” America has a “free-enterprise” system, one that has once again failed.
And what about the fact that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were at the core of the crisis, were government-created institutions, both of which had the implicit guarantee of the federal government? What about the mortgage regulations that forced lenders to make risky loans? What about the Federal Reserve’s artificially low interest rates that blew air into the housing bubble? What about the plethora of federal agencies that regulate the banking and lending industries?
Oh, none of those things count, say the liberals. Interventionism doesn’t cause economic crises, they say. Rather, it’s that degree of economic freedom that is still permitted to exist that causes the crises. All we have to do is socialize the entire economy and — voila! — no more crises.
After all, say the liberals, just look at Cuba, where everything is socialized and where people live in prosperity and economic bliss.
Another example of this life of unreality occurred a few days ago in the New York Times in an article by a liberal named Amy Chua, who is a professor at Yale Law School. She writes that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, “markets and free elections were the answer. Free-market democracy … would transform the world into a community of productive, peace-loving nations” but “instead “the ensuring years saw repeated economic crises outside the West, genocide in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, intensifying fundamentalism, virulent anti-Americanism and finally the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.”
In other words, all those bad things were caused by all that “neoliberalism,” which Chua equates to free-market principles that she is convinced guided the United States and the rest of the Western World during the decade prior to 9/11.
What about the entire socialistic welfare state and regulated economy that came into existence here in United States during the 20th century? What about the income tax, the IRS, the Federal Reserve, the New Deal, the Great Society, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, farm subsidies, trade restrictions, immigration controls, regulation, the SEC, the DEA, the FTC, the departments of labor, agriculture, energy, commerce, education, and so many more?
Oh, in Chua’s mind all this no doubt represents the height of “free enterprise.” After all, that’s what she and most everyone else are taught in junior high school and high school and then also in college. No doubt it’s what Chua herself is now teaching students in her law classes at Yale. America has a “free enterprise system” that was saved and improved upon by Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society.
What about libertarianism, which defines a genuinely free-market society as one in which there is an absence of all those socialistic and interventionist programs? Well, since libertarianism doesn’t fit within Chua’s personal reality, it’s not surprising that she limits her critique to neo-conservatives and simply acts as if libertarianism didn’t exist.
In her article, Chua issues a broadside against neo-conservatives, who embarked upon an “aggressive, interventionist use of American military force” after 9/11, with the Iraq quagmire sending neo-conservatism into a tailspin.
Fair enough. But what about the aggressive, interventionist use of American military force in the decade prior to 9/11? What does Chua say about that?
Oh, she doesn’t mention it. No mention of the Persian Gulf intervention, or the Pentagon’s intentional destruction of Iraq’s water-and-sewage treatment plants, or the more than 10 years of brutal and deadly sanctions against the Iraqi people, or U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright’s infamous declaration that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions were “worth it,” or the deadly and illegal no-fly zones over Iraq, or the stationing of U.S. troops near Islamic holy lands. No mention of the anger and rage those things produced within people in the Middle East, ultimately culminating in the 9/11 attacks.
You see, that discomforting set of facts would conflict with Chua’s thesis — her reality — that it was the purported embrace of “neoliberalism” in the decade prior to 9/11 that, somehow or another, ended up causing all those problems.
Chua reviews a collection of recent foreign policy books and essays but she fails to mention the many essays and the trilogy of books written by Chalmers Johnson — Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis. Again, this is not surprising given Johnson’s thesis — that it was U.S. foreign policy that produced the anger and rage that ultimately brought about the 9/11 attacks. Thus, better to behave as if Johnson’s books had never been published.
The noted author and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck pointed out that mental health requires an ongoing commitment to reality at all costs. It is a principle that liberals should take to heart.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Friday, October 23, 2009
The Nobel Audacity Prize Goes to Cheney
by Jacob G. Hornberger
If there were a Nobel Audacity Prize, former Vice-President Dick Cheney would deserve to win it, hands-down. This guy is unbelievable. He’s taking President Obama to task for “dithering” by not immediately sending 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
So, here’s a guy who, along with President Bush, had 7 years to straighten things out in Afghanistan. For all practical purposes, nothing tied their hands — not the Constitution (e.g., the declaration of war requirement), not the Congress, not the courts, and not the UN. Here was omnipotent government in action.
Yet, despite having the power to do whatever they wanted in their invasion, occupation, and rebuilding of Afghanistan, seven years later, as Bush and Cheney were exiting Washington, U.S. troops were still occupying the country, and, even worse, things were going from bad to worse, as reflected by the call to send in thousands of more troops to fortify the occupation.
And notice how cavalier Cheney still is regarding the lives of other people.
Over the last seven years, we’ve of course seen the calculus engaged in by pro-interventionists when it comes to the Afghani and Iraqi people. No number of dead Afghanis and dead Iraqis has ever been considered too high in terms of the benefits the U.S. Empire is bringing the survivors in these two countries.
Tens of thousands of dead? Hundreds of thousands of dead? No matter. The empire doesn’t even keep count. It just doesn’t matter. In the mind of the empire people, it’s all worth it.
We’re now witnessing this cavalier attitude in Pakistan with the CIA drone attacks. Some computer operator at CIA headquarters in Virginia fires a missile into a home in Pakistan in which a suspected terrorist is residing. The missile kills the suspect plus his wife and children and neighbors and relatives who happen to be visiting.
In the mind of the U.S. imperialist, all those deaths are “worth it” because they got the suspected terrorist.
But Cheney’s cavalier attitude toward life and death obviously isn’t limited to foreigners. It also extends to American soldiers. Everyone knows that they are being killed on an increasing basis in Afghanistan. Hey, they don’t call it the graveyard of empires for nothing! Sending in 40,000 more troops is only going to increase the death rate for U.S. soldiers.
And for what? Forget the old bromides — that the troops are in Afghanistan to protect our freedoms. That they’re doing it to establish democracy (with crooked elections). That they’re doing it to rebuild the country.
They’re doing it because they’ve been ordered to do it. And they’ve been ordered to do because the Empire considers it important to solidify its control over Afghanistan. That’s what empires do — they expand their control and enforce that control with brutal force.
Is that worth sacrificing even one U.S. soldier for? Would you be willing to die for such an ignominious aim?
Moreover, not only are these soldiers dying for nothing, they’re actually making the situation less secure for those of us here at home. By continuing to kill and maim people in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now Pakistan, they are succeeding in inflaming anger and rage that swells the ranks of terrorists.
The irony of Cheney’s cavalier attitude toward the lives of American soldiers is his personal history. When the U.S. government was sending American men to their deaths in Southeast Asia, for another worthless cause, where was Dick Cheney? Despite being the right age for going to Vietnam and fighting for freedom, justice, democracy, and the American way, Cheney did everything he could to escape military service.
Oh, I’m sure he was eager to sacrifice the lives of men in his generation during that time, just as he is eager to sacrifice the lives of young Americans today in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. He just wasn’t eager to risk his own life for the things for which he was eager to sacrifice other people’s lives, just like he is today.
Americans would be wise to do today what they should have done at the end of the Cold War and even before — reject the counsel of hypocrites who have led our nation down the road of moral debauchery and destruction — the road of empire, assassinations, invasions, occupations, sanctions, embargoes, torture, out-of-control federal spending, soaring taxation, debt, and inflation, and financial and economic bankruptcy.
Americans would be wise to restore our nation onto the road that the Founding Fathers intended for America — the road to moral principles, free markets, non-interventionism, peace, and a limited-government republic in which our nation once again serves as a model of freedom for the world.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Drone Assassinations Are Only Making Things Worse
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Jane Mayer, author of the great book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, was interviewed yesterday on NPR on the CIA’s drone attacks in Pakistan. She discussed the morality and legality of those attacks as well as their adverse consequences.
Last summer CIA Director Leon Pinetta announced cancellation of an assassination program that the CIA was going to implement.
Yet, how are these drone attacks in Pakistan any different from an assassination? Suppose, for example, a CIA assassin sneaks into Pakistan, spots a suspected terrorist sunbathing on the top of a house, and blows up the home, killing the suspect and everyone in his family.
That’s the type of assassination that Pinetta presumably put a stop to.
Assume, however, that a CIA official in Northern Virginia uses his computer to direct a drone over the house, spots the suspected terrorist, and drops a bomb on the house, killing the suspect and everyone else in the house.
Apparently, that’s considered okay.
What’s the difference?
The CIA justifies these attacks on the old Bush rationale that terrorism is an act of war, not a criminal offense, and that the war on terrorism is a real war, just like World War II or Vietnam.
Yet, that’s just plain false, which is repeatedly confirmed by criminal prosecutions for the federal crime of terrorism that are regularly carried out in federal district court. Examples include the federal prosecutions of Jose Padilla, Zacharias Moussaoui, and Ali al-Marri. Would federal judges be presiding over such trials if terrorism wasn’t a federal criminal offense as defined by the U.S. Code? Of course not. They would have been dismissing the criminal indictments at the inception of the proceedings.
Thus, the notion that terrorism is an act of war is bogus, as is the notion that a “war on terrorism” is a real war.
Let’s not forget also that there is no constitutionally required congressional declaration of war against Pakistan and, yet, amazingly and virtually without objection, the U.S. government is now killing people in that country with impunity.
Even worse, the drone attacks are killing family members, friends, and relatives of the suspects who are targeted for death. As New York Times columnist David Rohde, who was held captive in Afghanistan and Pakistan by the Taliban has been pointing out in a series on articles about his captivity, the drone attacks are producing enormously high levels of anger and rage against the United States.
Another justification for the drone attacks in Pakistan is that that country is serving as a sanctuary for insurgents in Afghanistan, who are opposing the 8-year occupation of that country by the U.S. government (which invaded without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war).
U.S. officials says they have to continue occupying Afghanistan for the next several years, maybe decades, in order to prevent the Taliban from regaining power. The notion is that the Taliban would provide a sanctuary for al-Qaeda.
But that’s a ludicrous rationale because it’s obvious that the occupation and, now, the expansion of killing into Pakistan are producing the very thing that the U.S. government fears most — terrorists.
Moreover, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, terrorists don’t need a Taliban sanctuary in Afghanistan to plan attacks against the United States. All they need is a hotel room or a house somewhere. So, the principal rationale for continuing to occupy Afghanistan is ridiculous, especially given that the occupation is churning out new terrorists at an ever-increasing rate.
Thus, why wouldn’t the U.S. be better off simply exiting Afghanistan and bringing the troops home? After all, they’ve had a free hand to kill terrorists to their heart’s content for more than 8 years, and the situation is worse than ever. If they exited the country and came home, at least they would no longer be serving as a permanent terrorist-producing machine.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress is preparing to once again raise the debt ceiling, which will permit the U.S. government to stack more debt onto the existing mountain of U.S. debt. Coincidentally, the New York Times business section carried an article yesterday showing the enormous damage that ever-increasing debt owed by the Japanese government is doing to Japan. Wouldn’t the same principles apply here?
Too bad President Obama is failing so dismally with his much-vaunted campaign promise of change. A good place to have begun would have been to bring the troops home from both Afghanistan and Iraq. Not only would that have made America safer but also more economically secure.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
The Drug War Leads to Gun Control
by Jacob G. Hornberger
A fundamental principle of interventionism holds that one government intervention inevitably leads to more interventions, in order to “fix” the problems of the previous interventions. At the end of this road lies omnipotent government and the loss of freedom.
A good example of this phenomenon is being provided by a group called the Binational Task Force , whose co-chairman , Robert Bonner, is former head of the DEA. The group, which also includes two former U.S. ambassadors to Mexico, wants to reinstate the assault-weapon ban that was enacted during the Clinton era.
Guess what the group cites as its justification for such gun control: the drug war. Yes, that war that everyone admits has failed to achieve its objectives despite 45 years of vicious warfare. The task force is saying that reenacting the assault-weapons ban will reduce the drug-war violence that now pervades Mexico.
If I were a believer in extra-terrestrial life, my question would be: What planet are these people from? Do they honestly believe that gun-control intervention is going to alleviate the horrific consequences of their drug-war intervention? Can anyone really be that stupid?
Not likely. My hunch is that these people are simply looking for new excuses for gun control and are latching onto the war on drugs to advance that agenda.
Let’s restate some important principles that are involved here.
The drug-war itself is the root cause of the drug-war violence in Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere. If there were no drug laws — that is, if drugs were legalized — there would be no drug gangs, drug cartels, and drug-war murders, assassinations, robberies, bribery, and the like. All the violence associated with the drug war would disappear for the obvious reason — there no longer would be a drug war.
The black market inevitably attracts an unsavory producer, one who has no reservations about employing violence and political corruption to expand his market share.
Making drugs illegal doesn’t cause consumers to stop desiring drugs. Making them illegal simply makes it more difficult and more expensive for the consumer to acquire them. Thus, oftentimes poor drug users resort to robberies, muggings, and thefts to acquire the money to pay the exorbitant black-market prices for the drugs they seek.
Rarely does this happen in a free and open market. Competitors compete against each other on the basis of such things as quality and price. Generally, prices are within reach of most everyone.
After all, when was the last time you saw Al Capone type of gangs distributing beer? When was the last time you saw a wino mugging someone to get the money to pay for a bottle of wine?
Prohibition-related violence disappeared with the repeal of Prohibition. That’s precisely what would happen if drug prohibition were repealed.
The statist notion — the notion being advanced by the Binational Task Force — is that by reenacting the assault-weapons ban, drug gangs in Mexico would no longer be able to acquire the weaponry to initiate drug-war violence.
That’s ludicrous. For one thing, the drug gangs can acquire weaponry from all over the world. For another, the assault-weapons ban didn’t really ban assault weapons — it simply required modifications of them, such as shorter clips or no bayonet. People could still acquire AR15s, AK47s, SKSs and other assault rifles.
What the statists fail to recognize — or perhaps not — is that a fierce war on guns — that is, one waged like the war on drugs — would do nothing more than produce the same type of violence, if not more, than that produced by the war on drugs.
The solution to the failure of interventionism is not more interventionism. The solution is the repeal of interventionism. Americans would be wise to reject the statist recommendations of the Binational Task Force. Contrary to what these people say, it’s not possible to fix their failed war on drugs with a war on guns or with anything else. The only way to end the drug-war violence is by ending the drug war.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Support the Troops by Legalizing Drugs
by Jacob G. Hornberger
For decades libertarians have been arguing that the only way to put drug gangs out of business is by legalizing drugs. There is no way that drug gangs could compete against legitimate drug producers in a free market. Drug gangs thrive only in an environment of illegality, where such traits as murder, robbery, kidnapping, and corruption play an important role.
An article in the October 7 issue of the Washington Post provided strong circumstantial evidence of this argument. The article, entitled “Cartels Face an Economic Battle,” pointed out that drug cartels are have a difficult time competing against thousands of marijuana farmers in the United States who have been popping up in response to liberalization of laws allowing the production of medical marijuana.
The article pointed out that because American marijuana producers are cutting into the profits of the drug cartels, “to stay competitive, Mexican traffickers are changing their business model to improve their product and streamline delivery.”
So, why are there still drug gangs and drug cartels? Because medical marijuana has liberalized only one segment of the drug market. Except for medicinal purposes, the production, distribution, and possession of marijuana are still illegal, as is the case for cocaine, heroin, and other drugs. That illegality continues to fuel the gangs and cartels. Legalization would put them out of business immediately, just as the repeal of Prohibition put the booze gangs out of business immediately.
Meanwhile, in a story entitled “Many Sources Feed the Taliban’s War Chest” that was published on October 18, the New York Times reported that one of the principal sources of revenue for the Taliban is the illegal drug trade, which enables them to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to finance their insurgency operations in Afghanistan.
Legalization, of course, would have the same effect on the Taliban that it has on the drug gangs and drug cartels — it would eliminate drug profits as a source of Taliban revenue.
So, given that legalization is a sure-fire way to put drug gangs and cartels out of business and end hundreds of millions of dollars of drug-war profits for the Taliban, why wouldn’t U.S. officials wholeheartedly be embracing drug legalization?
After all, it’s not as if they really think that more crackdowns are going to put the drug gangs out of business. If 40 years of drug warfare have taught us anything, it is that the more the government cracks down, the higher the prices and profits go, which then attracts more gangs and cartels into the business.
In fact, to see the futility of using the drug war to put these people out of business, all one has to do is go back for the last 40 years and read the regular announcements of U.S. officials proudly announcing the busts of drug gangs and cartels. Each well-publicized drug bust is quickly forgotten amidst the acclaim for the next one.
So, given that the drug war fuels the drug gangs and the group that is killing U.S. troops in Afghanistan, given the 40 years of drug-war failure, and given that legalization would put those groups out of the drug business, why aren’t U.S. officials embracing drug legalization?
Money and jobs. There are lots of people making money off the drug war, not just the drug cartels and the Taliban. There are also plenty of government officials, including law-enforcement officers, who are making money off of bribes. And there are also lots of people, including judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, court personnel, bail bondsmen, and the like whose jobs depend on their being plenty of drug cases. Legalization would bring the bribes to an end along with all those lucrative drug-war-related jobs.
Given the choice between protecting the lives of drug-war victims here at home and overseas as well as the lives of American soldiers in Afghanistan versus the drug-war income of lawyers, judges, court personnel, and the like, U.S. officials have chosen to protect the latter by continuing the drug war and opposing legalization. What a shame.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Managing the Economy is Ridiculous
by Jacob G. Hornberger
The race for governor here in Virginia is reaching new heights of boredom with a new battle between the candidates. This time the raging battle is over which candidate can better “manage the economy.”
How ridiculous is that?
Think about it: how in the world does a governor — or any other government official — “manage an economy”? More important, what business does any government official have trying to “manage the economy”?
First of all, I wonder where our gubernatorial candidates received their training for managing an economy. After all, that seems like an awfully important job — economy manager, one that obviously requires years of education and training.
Second, what precisely does an economy manager do? After all, the only tools at his disposal are laws, rules, orders, and edicts, all enforced by the state or local police. How does a governor use those things to “manage the economy”?
An economy is actually an intricate process by which human beings are engaged in an endless series of voluntary economic transactions, mostly with others. As producers, people engage in pursuits by which they offer goods and services to others, hoping that other people, in their role as consumers, will purchase them.
With the money the producers make, they turn around and become consumers, purchasing goods and services that other people are offering.
Some people also save their money, which adds to the overall stock of capital, which producers use to purchase equipment and tools, which make workers more productive.
The entire process is based on a sophisticated information-transmitting tool known as prices. When prices are high, producers tend to produce more and consumers tend to produce less. When prices are low, the opposite tends to happen.
So, what do the economy managers bring to this natural process? They bring tax and regulatory schemes that do nothing but cause economic damage to people. With their tax schemes to manage the economy, they suck capital out of the system or create perverse incentives. With their regulatory schemes to manage the economy, they frustrate the plans of people in the marketplace.
In fact, what the economy planners fail to realize is that it their tax-and-regulatory schemes that are a root cause of economic crises. Then, in an attempt to fix the crises, they perversely make things worse with their various plans to manage the economy.
The Nobel Prize-winning Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek wrote a book entitled The Fatal Conceit. The conceit to which Hayek was referring was of those government people who honestly believe that they possess the requisite knowledge to plan something as intricate as a market.
No economy-managing scheme can ever serve as an adequate substitute for the myriad plans of people seeking their own self-interest in the marketplace. It is impossible to measure the harm that this fatal conceit does to people.
Oh well, I suppose we should count our blessings. At least the governor of Virginia lacks the power to print money as part of his plan to “manage the economy.”
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Statism and the Drug War
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Anthony Placido, head of intelligence for the DEA, wants the 35-year-old drug war to continue because drugs are “mind-altering substances that destroy human life and create violence.”
Ponder carefully the first part of Placido’s statement — the part about drugs being bad for people. What he is saying is that as a government official, he should have the power to punish people for ingesting substances that are harmful only to themselves.
We have lived for so long with the drug war that we hardly give a thought to the audaciousness of such a claim.
Let’s assume that a person is sitting quietly in his own home somewhere in the mountains of Colorado. Every day, he ingests a quantity of cocaine … or marijuana … or heroin … or booze … or tobacco.
All of a sudden, Anthony Placido shows up with a SWAT team of drug agents, busts into the house, and declares, “We are here to help you see the error of your ways by arresting you, prosecuting you, incarcerating, and fining you, all for your own good because drugs are bad for you.”
Why doesn’t a person have the right to decide for himself what to ingest? Even if it is conclusively determined that an item is harmful to health, why shouldn’t a person nonetheless be free to ingest it, if that’s what he wishes to do? Why shouldn’t that be his business? Why should it be the business of Anthony Placido and his fellow statists to determine what people ingest and don’t ingest?
The statist sees everyone as part of a collective — like drones in a bee hive — and thinks that they must be made to serve the best interests of society. The notion that a person should be free to live his life on his own terms, no matter how harmful to himself, is anathema to a statist.
We libertarians see life differently. We believe that human beings are born with fundamental, natural, inherent, God-given rights, ones that are not subject to the whims of the collective. Among these rights is liberty, which entails the right of a person to live his life any way he wants, so long as his conduct is peaceful.
In a genuinely free society, people have every right in the world to ingest whatever they want, no matter how harmful or self-destructive and no matter how much others in that society disapprove of it. In a free society, the state no more has the authority to determine what a person ingests than it has to determine what a person reads. Fundamental rights are not subject to majority vote.
Placido also suggests that drugs “cause violence,” notwithstanding the obvious fact that most people who ingest drugs don’t commit acts of violence.
Libertarians have a different idea. How about punishing people who commit acts of violence, whether they ingest drugs or not, and leave everyone else alone?
It is amazing that statists like Placido fail to recognize a phenomenon that has characterized the war on drugs since its inception some 35 years ago. It is the drug-war itself, including the exorbitant black-market profits it generates, that has spawned massive violence across society in the form of gang wars, assassinations, murders, muggings, robberies, thefts, and burglaries.
The time has come to discharge Placido and his statist ilk into the private sector, where they can devote their lives to educating people about the dangers of drugs. It’s time to remove the legal authority of these people to punish individuals for making peaceful decisions that others disapprove of. It’s time to end the untold violence that the drug war has spawned. There’s only one way to do that: Legalize drugs.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
The Virginia Race for Governor Is Boring
by Jacob G. Hornberger
People from around the country should be happy that they are being spared having to undergo the sheer boredom of Virginia’s race for governor. Wow, what a yawner.
Oh, that’s not to say that Democrats and Republicans and the mainstream media agree with that assessment. In their minds, this is a terribly exciting race. After all, they would say, look at the 3 big issues in the race: (1) transportation; (2) a 20-year-old graduate thesis; and (3) tax increases.
Yes, those are exciting issues for statists. But what a yawner for everyone else!
Why only 2 candidates and why such boring issues?
The answer lies in Virginia’s onerous ballot-restriction law. The law places such enormous obstacles to people running for statewide office that Virginians customarily end up with only two statewide candidates, a Republican and a Democrat.
To run for statewide office, a prospective candidate must secure 10,000 signatures of registered voters. To be safe, that means that a person must normally secure about 17,000 signatures since many signatures will inevitably be disallowed.
As part of that total the prospective candidate must ensure that at least 400 valid signatures come from each congressional district around the state, which normally means getting about 800 total signatures. That means that a prospective candidate or his petition gatherers must travel around the state, expending money on travel and hotel rooms and, even more difficult, finding a place that will allow them to approach people and ask for signatures.
The entire process is difficult and expensive, which it is designed to be. Every so often the Libertarian Party or an Independent is able to pull it off, but all too often the people of Virginia are treated to two yawner candidates, both of whom share the same statist philosophy.
One of the biggest myths in American politics is that there are fundamental philosophical differences between the Democrats and Republicans. In actuality, there is one political party — call it the Statist Party — that is divided into two wings — the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, much like the NFL is one league that is divided into two conferences.
Statists, whether Democrats or Republicans, share a common commitment to the role that government plays in a society — from welfare, to transportation, to drug laws, to public schooling, to income taxation, to undeclared foreign wars of aggression, to regulation, to protectionism, to border controls, to the war on terrorism, to gun restrictions, to infringements on civil liberties. The debates and arguments are always over inane plans to reform the system.
Consider, for example, Virginia’s transportation mess. Every four years, just like clockwork, each candidate comes up with his plan to reform the mess. Regardless of who is elected, the mess goes on, followed by a new election in which the candidates come up with new plans to reform the mess.
No statist is ever going to state the obvious: socialist ownership of the means of production will always be a mess and no one, no matter how brilliant, will ever be able to come up with a plan to fix it. No one ever suggests privatization as the solution. That notion falls outside the paradigm represented by the Statist Party.
The same goes for public schooling. No statist candidate is ever going to call for a separation of school and state. Or drug laws — no statist will call for repeal and legalization. And so on.
The statists suggest that too many gubernatorial candidates would be chaotic and that Virginia voters are just too dumb to choose the best candidate from a field of too many candidates.
Yet, consider the special election for governor that was held in California in 2003, the one where Arnold Schwarzenegger was initially elected. It had 135 candidates, many of whom were running active campaigns. See the Official Ballot here.
It’s true that some people might claim that the fact that Californians elected Schwarzenegger confirms that voters are too dumb to ferret out which candidate to vote for, but others would say that it was an exciting race, one where voters were offered a range of diverse ideas and perspectives and that voters had no problems determining who to cast their vote for.
Anyone who wants to run for governor of Virginia should be free to do so, including poor, inner-city residents who lack the time, money, and ability to comply with Virginia’s inane ballot-restriction law. Why not rid the state of its monopolistic statewide elections and restore democracy to Virginia? At least it would relieve the boredom.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Oswald, the CIA, and Kennedy
by Jacob G. Hornberger
In my recent blog post on Lee Harvey Oswald and the CIA, I raised the possibility that Oswald was working deep undercover for the CIA when he defected to the Soviet Union and then returned to the United States as a communist sympathizer. There are a few other things about Oswald that have long mystified me.
When Oswald was living in New Orleans in the period prior to the assassination, he got into an altercation with an anti-Castro Cuban named Carlos Bringuier while Oswald was distributing pamphlets promoting The Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Cuba organization that the CIA considered to be subversive.
As a result of that altercation, Oswald was arrested for disorderly conduct and taken to the local jail in New Orleans. While he was incarcerated, he asked to talk to a FBI agent. Lo and behold, a FBI agent named John Quigley came to the jail and visited with Oswald for an hour and a half.
Now, I ask you: How many communist sympathizers have that much influence? Indeed, how many ordinary people do you know who, after being arrested for disorderly conduct by the local police, would be able to summon a FBI agent who would come and visit them in jail?
That seems rather unusual to me. After all, the offense of disorderly conduct, especially at the local level, is as far from being a federal crime as one can get. Nonetheless, here is a FBI agent responding positively to a request by a supposed communist sympathizer jailed for the local crime of disorderly conduct and visiting with him for an hour and a half.
Another oddity is the Fair Play for Cuba pamphlets that Oswald was distributing. Some of the pamphlets had a return street address stamped on them — 544 Camp St. Yet, that was not the address of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee or even Oswald’s address. It was actually an address that housed the same building in which a 20-year veteran of the FBI was running his private detective agency — a man named Guy Banister.
Perhaps just a coincidence, but a strange one at that. But the obvious question arises: What would happen if people responded favorably to the pamphlet by sending letters to that address? How would such letters ever get to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee or to Oswald? I wonder if Oswald thought about that when he was distributing the pamphlets. Wouldn’t you think that that would matter to him?
There is another interesting aspect of the altercation that resulted in Oswald’s arrest. Carlos Bringuier, the man with whom Oswald had the altercation, was associated with a fiercely anti-Castro Cuban group named the DRE. During the House Select Committee hearings on the JFK assassination in the 1970s, the CIA called a man out of retirement named George Joannides to serve as a liaison between the CIA and the House Committee. In the 1990s, after Joannides had died, documents revealed that he had served as a CIA conduit that was funneling money into the DRE during the time of Oswald’s altercation with Bringuier. Yet, that fact had never been revealed to the House Committee or anyone else, including the Warren Commission, and no one was ever able to question Joannides about it.
Since then, the CIA has steadfastly refused to open up and disclose its Joannides files to the public. Several years ago, a former Washington Post journalist named Jefferson Morley sued the CIA seeking disclosure of the Joannides files, a suit that is still pending and which the CIA continues to fiercely oppose even today, on national-security grounds. See my article, “Appoint a Special Prosecutor in the JFK-Joannides Matter.”
Another weird aspect of this case involved a note that Oswald delivered a couple of weeks prior to the assassination to a FBI agent in Dallas named James Hosty. Immediately after Oswald was assassinated, Hosty destroyed the note. Hosty later claimed that in the note Oswald threatened Hosty for harassing Oswald’s wife.
Of course, that’s possible. And it’s also possible that the reason Hosty destroyed the note was to protect the FBI from embarrassment over having received such a note two weeks before Kennedy was assassinated and not having reported it to the Secret Service.
But how often does one see a FBI agent scrambling to destroy evidence in one of the most important murder cases in history? After all, two days after the assassination there was no way that Hosty could have been certain that Oswald wasn’t part of a conspiracy to kill the president, one that would later be prosecuted in court. Thus, Hosty had to know that despite Oswald’s death, Hosty was potentially engaging in obstruction of justice by destroying evidence that could later be pertinent in a conspiracy-to-murder case.
Finally, I think that one of the most fascinating aspects to Oswald’s post-arrest statements was his statement “I’m a patsy.” Ordinarily, when a person is denying guilt, his reaction is simply one that is limited to denying guilt, such as: “I didn’t do it. I’m innocent. They have the wrong guy.”
Oswald did more than that. He not only protested his innocence, he went a step further and suggested that someone or some people had set him up and were framing him. What would cause him to go off in that direction rather than simply claim that he was innocent of the crime?
In his book Brothers, David Talbot writes, “Robert Kennedy had one other phone conversation on November 22 that sheds light on his thinking that afternoon. He spoke to Enrique ‘Harry’ Ruiz-Williams, a Bay of Pigs veteran who was his closest associate in the Cuban exile community. Kennedy stunned his friend by telling him point-blank, ‘One of your guys did it.’”
Some 45 years after the JFK assassination, one cannot help but wonder whether Robert Kennedy was right.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Did The CIA Have More Motive than Oswald?
by Jacob G. Hornberger
For the life of me, I still don’t understand what Lee Harvey Oswald’s motive was for killing President John F. Kennedy. The lone-assassin theorists say that he was a lonely and disgruntled communist sympathizer who sought glory and fame for killing someone as powerful as the president of the United States.
But if that’s the case, why would Oswald deny that he killed the president? Why would he claim that he was “a patsy,” i.e., someone who had been set up to take the fall? Why wouldn’t he proudly admit that he had killed the president of the United States? If he were seeking glory and fame, how would that be achieved through a successful denial of having committed the act?
Moreover, if Oswald intended to deny commission of the offense, I’ve never understood why he would leave such an easy trail behind him, such as the purchase receipt for the Carcano rifle found in the Texas School Book Depository. If he was going to deny killing the president, wouldn’t he have been better off simply going to a gun shop and purchasing a rifle with cash? There were no background checks back then.
I’m no expert on the Kennedy assassination but it seems to me that many of the things that people point to in support of Oswald’s guilt are also consistent with his having served in a deep undercover role for the CIA or other U.S. intelligence, as many people have alleged.
In fact, early on there were assertions that Oswald was a federal undercover agent. According to a biographical sketch of Waggoner Carr, the Texas Attorney General who led the investigation in Texas into the assassination and worked with the Warren Commission, “Carr testified that Lee Harvey Oswald was working as an undercover agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was receiving $200 a month from September 1962 until his death in November, 1963. However, the Warren Commission preferred to believe J. Edgar Hoover, who denied Carr’s affirmations.”
Yet, the problem is that Hoover could be expected to lie about such an association and thus, his denial is meaningless.
Much has been made about Oswald’s communist sympathies, including his defection to the Soviet Union and his affiliation with a group called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
Yet, those actions are entirely consistent with being a CIA undercover agent. For one thing, Oswald was a Marine. Most people who join the Marines are patriotic individuals who have the utmost loyalty to their government. How likely is it that a person who hates America is going to join the U.S. Marine Corps? Not very likely at all. In fact, wouldn’t the Marines be a likely place that the CIA would do recruiting?
Many people point to Oswald’s dysfunctional behavior, including his propensity for violence, citing the fact that he beat his wife. But the problem is that the CIA has a history of attracting dysfunctional people to work there, including alcoholics and people who have a propensity for violence. Indeed, what better types of people to assassinate and torture than dysfunctional people with a propensity for violence?
The thing that I have long found mystifying is the U.S. government’s reaction to Oswald when he returned from the Soviet Union. Did they arrest and indict the guy? Did they even subpoena him to appear before a federal grand jury? Did they harass him?
No, none of the above.
Don’t forget that Oswald was a former Marine who had security clearance and had worked at a military base in Japan where the super-secret U-2 spy plane was based. He was also a man who purportedly defected to the Soviet Union, supposedly tried to give up his U.S. citizenship, and presumably was willing to divulge all the secret information that he had acquired as a Marine to the Soviet communists, who were a much bigger threat to the United States during the Cold War than the terrorists are today.
Yet, U.S. officials didn’t lay a hand on him when he returned to the United States. Compare that treatment to how they treated, for example, John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban. How come they didn’t subject Oswald, whose case was much more egregious than Lindh’s, to the same treatment?
Moreover, I’ve never understood how Oswald was able to learn the Russian language so well. It’s not easy to teach one’s self a foreign language, especially one as difficult as Russian. It’s even more difficult when one has a full-time job, which Oswald had in the Marines. He certainly couldn’t have afforded a private tutor. Since he obviously learned Russian while he was in the military, how was that accomplished? Did the government provide the language training and, if so, why?
What would have been the CIA’s motive in developing Oswald as a deep undercover operative posing as a communist sympathizer? Well, don’t forget it was during the Kennedy administration that the CIA was in partnership with the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro. Since the CIA was developing such weird assassination schemes as poison pens and infected scuba suits to kill Castro, it doesn’t seem beyond the pale that they would also consider sneaking a trained assassin with communist credentials into the country to get rid of the communist leader.
Of course, the fact that Oswald might have been operating deep undercover doesn’t negate the possibility that he did in fact assassinate Kennedy or participate in a conspiracy to kill the president. If such were the case, the motive for denying commission of the offense would be stronger, along with the CIA’s denial of Oswald’s employment with the agency.
Of course, there are those who claim that it is inconceivable that the CIA, being the patriotic agency it is, would ever have participated in such a dastardly scheme.
Last Sunday, October 11, the New York Times published a book review detailing the history of Ramparts magazine, a leftist publication that was revealing in the 1960s some of the bad things that the CIA was engaged in. What I found fascinating was the CIA’s response:
“Outraged, the C.I.A. retaliated with a secret investigation of Ramparts’ staff and investors in hopes of uncovering foreign influence, but it found nothing…. The agency fought back with even more snooping — clearly illegal — as it ‘investigated’ 127 writers and researchers and 200 other Americans connected to the magazine.”
So, the CIA was clearly not above retaliating against Americans who went after the CIA and was clearly not above breaking the law to do it.
Now, consider the threat issued by President John F. Kennedy to “tear the CIA into a million pieces.” That threat was issued after Kennedy had fired CIA Director Allen Dulles, which occurred after Kennedy had supposedly betrayed the CIA by refusing to provide air support for the CIA-directed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, whose aim was to kill Castro or oust him from power.
Let’s not forget, also, that the CIA was not above using ruthless means against foreign presidents, including assassination. Guatemala (coup), Iran (coup), Cuba (invasion and assassination attempts), and Vietnam (coup and assassination) come to mind, to mention a few.
“But they would never have done bad things to an American?” Oh? What about Project MK-ULTRA, the nasty and infamous mind-control project in which CIA officials conspired to employ LSD experiments against unsuspecting Americans?
“But they never would have employed their assassination talents or their partnership with Mafia assassins against an American president.”
Maybe, maybe not.
But let’s not forget that the CIA sees itself as the ultimate, permanent guardian of U.S. national security. What if it concluded that a young, inexperienced president himself was jeopardizing the national security of our country by establishing secret contacts with communist leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, by plans to surrender Vietnam to the communists by withdrawing U.S. troops, just as he had surrendered Cuba to the communists, by philandering with a Mafia girlfriend, a Hollywood starlet, and even a wife of a CIA agent, and by threatening to destroy the CIA, America’s loyal and permanent guardian of security and liberty?
Would the CIA simply stand by and refuse to protect America from such a threat, even while it was doing everything it could to protect U.S. national security abroad with assassinations and coups? For an excellent discussion of that question, see JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass.
Most likely though, we’ll never know have a definitive answer to that question because if the CIA did participate in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, there is virtually no possibility that such a crime would have ever been uncovered without a hard-driving, honest, independent federal prosecutor with grand-jury subpoena powers charged with the specific task of targeting CIA officials for investigation and possible prosecution for murder. And we all know that the CIA and its supporters would never have permitted that to happen.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Update on Economic Liberty Lecture Series
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Here’s an update on our Economic Liberty Lecture Series, which is turning out to be a very exciting program.
In September our first speaker, Lew Rockwell, president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and head of Lew Rockwell.com, attracted an overflow, standing-room-only crowd of about 125 people. He delivered a captivating talk on the history of economic thought, specifically focusing on intellectual battles that Mises engaged in before he emigrated from Europe to the United States at the outset of World War II.
The title of Lew’s talk was “Economics and Moral Courage.” Here is the link to Lew’s video.
Around 85 people came to hear our October speaker, Robert Higgs, who delivered one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard. Speaking for about 1 1/2 hours, Bob kept the audience transfixed as he compared the Great Depression and the current economic recession. Here is the link to the Higgs talk.
We are doing the series in conjunction with the GMU Econ Society, a student-run group whose members have big fire-in-the-belly for libertarianism and Austrian economics. Thus, most of the audience is composed of students from George Mason University, where the lectures are being held.
But we also have several FFF supporters from the area attending the lectures, which makes for an interesting dynamic during the reception period, where we serve free pizza and soft drinks. In fact, for Bob’s talk we had supporters from Pennsylvania attend, along with a supporter who came up from Texas.
We then post the videos here for the world to access.
We had initially designed the series to include a free movie afterward but since attendance to the movies last spring was low, we decided to change the formula to having a social hour at a place named Brion’s Grill across the street from the GMU campus. That change has turned out to be a big winner, as it has turned into a fun event that enables people to adjourn for a snack and a beer (or soft drink) to discuss the lecture and everything else about libertarianism and Austrian economics.
In fact, it doesn’t get much better than what happened after Bob’s talk. I drove Bob over to the social hour and when we walked over to the section where the students were, seated at a big round table waiting for Higgs to arrive were none other than GMU econ professors Walter Williams and Pete Boettke, along with Steve Horwitz, an Austrian economics professor from St. Lawrence University, who is our December speaker and who happened to be visiting in the area.
Seated around the rest of the table were a bunch of star-struck economics students who looked like they had died and gone to Heaven. Once Higgs sat down at the table, one of the students posted a note on Facebook that said, “I’m here sitting at the same table as Walter Williams, Peter Boettke, Steven Horwitz, and Robert Higgs. Life is good.”
If you’re in the area for one of our Economic Liberty Lectures, I hope you’ll join us for a really intellectually stimulating and fun evening. Our Monday, November 2, speaker will be Larry Reed, president of The Foundation for Economic Education, whose speech will be entitled, “Lessons from the Great Depression.” Our Monday, December 2, speaker will be Steve Horwitz, whose talk will be “Do We Really Need a Central Bank?”
Or consider attending a special event we’re having on Sunday evening, November 8, in the cellar of the Auld Shebeen pub in downtown Fairfax featuring Andy Worthington, author of the noted book The Guantanamo Files and who serves as a policy advisor to FFF. Andy will be showing and discussing his new hour-long documentary on the war on terrorism at our event. It promises to be another enlightening and enjoyable evening.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Army Partially Surrenders in Watada Case
by Jacob G. Hornberger
The U.S. Army has partially surrendered in the case of Lt. Ehren Watada by allowing Watada to resign from the army and avoid further court-martial proceedings. The Army had been prosecuting Watada for refusing orders to deploy to Iraq. The surrender was partial because Watada was given a discharge “under other-than-honorable conditions.”
Watada had refused to deploy to Iraq on the ground that the war was illegal and immoral.
It was illegal in the sense that it was being waged without a congressional declaration of war, which is required by the U.S. Constitution, which U.S. soldiers take an oath to support and defend.
It was illegal and immoral in the sense that it constituted a war of aggression, one in which the U.S. government attacked, invaded, and occupied a country whose government had never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so.
The Army’s prosecution of Watada confirmed that the U.S. government expects its soldiers, especially its officers, to blindly obey orders, no matter how illegal or immoral such orders might be. Ironically, the U.S. government sometimes still points with pride to its prosecution of German military officials at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal for faithfully obeying orders to wage a war of aggression during World War II.
The only reason that the Army surrendered in the Watada case is because its prosecutors screwed up after Watada’s trial had begun. They sought and secured a mistrial without the consent of the defendant. As I suggested in an article I wrote on November 17, 2007, that action would probably preclude a retrial of Watada based on double-jeopardy grounds, a position that was later upheld by a federal judge. But for that screw-up, there is little doubt that the Army would be continuing to send a message to every Army officer and enlisted man by continuing to prosecute Watada: Obey orders, no matter how illegal, immoral, or unconstitutional they might be.
During the past several years, I have written several articles about the Watada case: https://tinyurl.com/ylx392c
As I stated in those articles, in my opinion Watada is a genuine hero for having had the courage to stand up for his convictions, for refusing to obey illegal and immoral orders of his superiors, and for risking harsh punishment and the loss of his military career. He is what a military officer should be all about. He deserved nothing less than an honorable discharge from the Army.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Pity the Imperialists
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Pity the imperialists. What do they do? They must realize that the longer they continue occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, the more they weaken the Empire. Hey, they don’t call Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires” for nothing.
America’s imperialists are discovering what imperialists throughout history have discovered: empires are costly. This one is no exception. Military spending on Afghanistan and Iraq and the rest of the Empire all over the world continues to soar out of control.
Combined warfare-state and welfare-state spending is producing a budget deficit of 1.4 trillion dollars. That’s the difference between what the federal government brings in with taxes and how much it’s spending.
And that’s just for one year!
The debt owed by the federal government now totals $11 trillion. That’s almost $39,000 per citizen. What would you do if you had to pay off your $39,000 share of the debt this year?
Social Security is busted — there never was a fund and never will be one. Same for Medicare and Medicaid. No fund there either. Hey, don’t worry — we can just keep borrowing to make all these increasing welfare payments, thereby adding even more debt to the national debt.
Maybe — if we’re lucky — by the time it all has to be paid off we’ll be dead and it’ll be the young people’s problem.
Or better yet, why not just double or triple the income taxes on young people right now to keep the welfare largess flowing? The young people can easily handle it.
Hey, have you heard about the FDIC? That’s the agency charged with bailing out depositors of failed banks. It’s broke too. So it is forcing banks to bail out the bailer by requiring them to come up with an advance payment of “insurance premiums.”
The FDIC considered going to the Treasury to get bailed out but finally decided not to impose that bailout cost directly on the taxpayers. Do you ever wonder what would happen if there is an industry-wide banking collapse? I suppose they’ll go out and tax everyone to pay everyone off.
Oh, and let’s not forget that great big expensive socialist health-care plan that President Obama wants to enact. Hey, the Empire is rich. It can afford anything.
Meanwhile, not surprisingly, the value of the dollar is crumbling and the price of gold is soaring. There are rumbles about foreign countries’ abandoning the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. U.S. Empire officials remain scared to death that the communist regime in China, the Empire’s biggest foreign creditor, might start dumping its supply of U.S. debt instruments, potentially sending the dollar into a death spiral.
While the Empire is cracking from within, the imperialists steadfastly maintain that the 8-year and 7-year occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq must continue. Hey, we’ve got to keep killing the terrorists who still haven’t been killed after all those years of occupation, including those new terrorists that the occupations incessantly produce.
As every imperialist tells us, if the Empire were to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, the Empire would be perceived as weak. We can’t have that, even if staying there continues to weaken the empire! Perceptions are important.
Anyway, what about all those contractors in the military-industrial complex who have become dependent on their military largess? Aren’t they as entitled to their welfare as domestic welfare recipients are?
Pity the imperialists. They’re damned if they do, and they’re damned if they don’t. Pity the American people even more — they’re the ones who will ultimately pay the price of all this imperial folly.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
The Sanctuary Fallacy
by Jacob G. Hornberger
The principal argument for continuing the 8-year occupation of Afghanistan is that if the Taliban regain power, they will provide a “sanctuary” for al-Qaeda. It is a fallacious rationale for the continued killing of Afghanis and the continued sacrifice of U.S. troops.
For one thing, if the U.S. Empire were to exit Afghanistan and Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, the al-Qaeda threat would become largely irrelevant.
Why?
Because the principal reason that al-Qaeda is attacking the United States is because the U.S. Empire has troops over in that part of the world and is killing, abusing, torturing, and humiliating people there. Once the U.S. Empire exits that part of the world, the principal justification for al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks against the United States dissipates.
Sure, U.S. foreign aid to Israel, both financial and military, will continue to antagonize people in the Middle East. The ideal, of course, would be for the U.S. government to terminate foreign aid, which is nothing more than government-to-government welfare, to every country, including Israel.
But barring that, the likelihood that members of al-Qaeda or other Muslims will devote their lives trying to kill Americans simply because of foreign aid being provided to the Israeli government is small, especially when there are no U.S. troops available for targeting in that part of the world.
Contrary to what U.S. interventionists claim, the 9/11 terrorist attack didn’t come first. The U.S. Empire’s interventionist actions in the Middle East came first and the terrorist attacks on the United States came second. The 9/11 attacks, just like the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, were motivated by the anger and rage engendered in Middle Easterners by what the U.S. government had been doing in the Middle East prior to those attacks.
Consider (1) the many years of support provided to Saddam Hussein, including the furnishing to him of those infamous WMDs; (2) the Persian Gulf intervention, which killed countless Iraqis; (3) the Pentagon’s intentional destruction of Iraq’s water-and-sewage treatment plans with the intent of spreading infectious illnesses and diseases; (4) the brutal sanctions enforced against the Iraqi people for more than 10 years; (5) the callous and indifferent attitude that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children from the sanctions were “worth it” ; (6) the deadly and illegal “no-fly zones” over Iraq; (7) the stationing of U.S. troops near Islamic holy lands; and (8) the unconditional financial and military aid to the Israeli government.
The invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, together with the massive death and destruction they have wrought, have been nothing more than continuations of the types of deadly and destructive interventions that produced the terrorist attacks both in 1993 and on 9/11.
By ending the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and preferably foreign aid to Israel (and everywhere else), the fact that a Taliban regime might be willing to provide a “sanctuary” to al Qaeda becomes largely irrelevant give that the principal motive for committing terrorist acts against the United States will have been removed.
Conversely, by continuing the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the death and destruction that come with them, the threat of terrorist attacks against the United States becomes ongoing, regardless of whether potential terrorists are provided a formal “sanctuary” in Afghanistan or anywhere else.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Libertarian Phenomenon
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Fox News legal commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Internet program Freedom Watch is one of the most fascinating phenomena in the history of the libertarian movement. There’s never been anything like it and if it were to break out to the Fox News television channel, it would constitute nothing less than a revolutionary development in American politics.
Take a look at the guests that Napolitano has been having on his show: Lew Rockwell, Bob Higgs, James Bovard, Paul Armentano, Ron Paul, Roger Pilon, Tom Woods, Pete Eyre, Nick Gillespie, David Boaz, Peter Schiff, Walter Block, and many more. Every one of them is a major figure in the libertarian movement. I myself have been on Napolitano’s show twice.
How many times have you seen any of these guests on the mainstream television talk shows or even on the cable television talk shows? My hunch is that your answer is “Rarely, if ever.”
For years, conservatives and liberals have played their little games of pretending to have debates over policy, acting as if there were fundamental philosophical differences between the two. In actuality, the debates have always been over which form of statism is preferable — conservative statism or liberal statism.
You’ll rarely find either a conservative or a liberal challenging, at a fundamental level, the role the federal government plays in American life — (1) the role of a paternalistic nanny who takes care of people’s retirement, health care, education, food, housing, and money; (2) the role of protector from drug dealers, illegal immigrants, terrorists, communists, corporations, the rich, greedy people, and other scary creatures; (3) the role of an overseas imperial power, engaging in foreign wars of aggression and occupations, coups, embargoes, sanctions, torture, and assassination; and (4) the role it plays as infringer of people’s liberties here at home, through the denial of such fundamental procedural rights as due process, trial by jury, habeas corpus, and others.
The last thing that conservatives and liberals have wanted on their television shows on a regular basis has been libertarians, for two reasons:
One, they don’t want people interfering with their little game, one in which they argue over how best to make their welfare-warfare paradigm work and which statists, Republican or Democrat, should be running it.
Two, they do not know how to handle, in an intellectual sense, libertarian arguments that call for the dismantling, not the reform, of their welfare-warfare programs.
Along comes Napolitano and with his Internet program Freedom Watch has broken the dam by flooding his show with libertarian commentators. All of sudden, people are having the opportunity to watch and listen to hard-core, pure libertarian analysis and commentary on current events from leading libertarian thinkers, which blasts the statism of both conservatives and liberals to kingdom-come. And I know I’m biased, but Napolitano’s show is one heckuva lot more interesting and exciting than the shows run by the conservatives and liberals.
I can’t help but wonder how Napolitano’s show is being received by Fox News executives. The top executives at Fox have to be paying attention to what he is doing on the Internet, since he’s doing it under the Fox banner. Moreover, it’s clear to me that Napolitano would love to have his Internet show elevated to a Fox News television show.
We all know that Fox News is conservative-oriented, big time. But by the same token, they’ve just brought libertarian John Stossel on board, and it’s clear that Napolitano is highly respected and held in high esteem by his conservative colleagues at Fox.
My hunch is that in their staff meetings, there is one segment of Fox News executives exclaiming, “We’ve got to can Napolitano for featuring libertarians and libertarianism on the Internet” while another segment is exclaiming, “We’ve got to give Napolitano his own show so he can feature libertarians and libertarianism on television.”
If Fox News were to decide to put Napolitano on the air, his show would undoubtedly shake up the nice, little comfortable world of the statists. Both conservatives and liberals would undoubtedly be stunned, shell-shocked, and dumbfounded over how to deal with a television show filled with purist, hard-hitting libertarians challenging the fundamental premises of the welfare-warfare state that is so beloved to conservatives and liberals.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Lecturing the New York Times on Libertarianism
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Given the surge in interest in libertarianism during the past few years, it is amazing to me that one must still lecture the New York Times on the subject but, alas, such is the case. In an article on the Roman Polanski child-rape case entitled “The Polanski Case: A Gallic Shrug” by the paper’s columnist Michael Kimmelman, the paper pointed out that initially the reaction to the case was that “the arrest painted the usual picture of moralistic America versus libertarian France.”
Libertarian France?
What Kimmelman obviously meant was “libertine” France. The dictionary defines “libertine” as “one who acts without moral restraint, a dissolute person,” which is the notion that Kimmelman was obviously attempting to convey in contradistinguishing the initial reactions to the case in the United States and France.
Like so many other people who have an inadequate understanding of libertarianism, Kimmelman thinks that libertarianism is a synonym for libertinism.
The reason for this common misunderstanding lies with the core principle of libertarianism — that people should be free to do whatever they want in life but only on one condition — that their conduct is peaceful and not fraudulent.
That is, as long as a person doesn’t murder, rape, steal, burglarize, defraud, or initiate other forms of violence against another person or his property, libertarians hold that he should be free to engage in any activity without risk of being punished for it by the state.
Thus, libertarians oppose laws that punish people for purely voluntary and consensual acts. And libertarians support the punishment of people who violate the rights of others through violent or fraudulent acts.
But an important point arises here, one that is often lost on people: Simply because libertarians do not wish to criminalize a peaceful act doesn’t mean that they support the commission of the act. They simply believe that people shouldn’t be punished by the state for making what some people consider is the wrong choice.
To paraphrase Voltaire, libertarians might disagree with the peaceful choices you make in life, but we will defend your right to make them.
A good example is drug laws, which libertarians have long opposed. Libertarians believe that people should be free to ingest any substance they want, no matter how harmful or risky. That includes alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, Ritalin, Prozac, or anything else.
That’s not to say, however, that libertarianism advocates the use of any of these substances. It’s simply to say that libertarianism stands for the proposition that people should be free to make that choice for themselves, without being punished for it by the state.
The problem, however, is that some people jump to the conclusion that since libertarians call for the legalization of such things as drugs, pornography, prostitution, adultery, covetousness, gambling, and other peaceful acts that many people disapprove of, that must mean that libertarians support engaging in such acts, leading them to conclude that libertarians are libertines.
No doubt that that’s how Michael Kimmelman arrived at his belief that libertarianism is synonymous with libertinism.
What’s really disappointing, however, is that Kimmelman would mix up the two words in the context of the Polanski case because libertarians have long held that one of the few legitimate functions of the state is to punish people who commit acts of violence against others, including rape, one of the crimes with which Polanski was charged.
Despite the recent surge of interest in libertarianism, Kimmelman’s misuse of the term, along with the fact that his editors at the New York Times failed to catch the error, shows that we libertarians still have our work cut out for us in the educational arena.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Faith and Freedom
by Jacob G. Hornberger
The Harrison, Arkansas, Daily Times reports that FedEx has covered the $11,000 bill for an air ambulance to take 7-year-old Jada Harper from Houston to her home in Arkansas. The girl has terminal cancer and is expected to die within a few months. Since the ailing girl could not have survived ground transportation, an air ambulance was the only viable option, but the family was too poor to afford it.
Now, let’s assume that the federal government had a program to address this particular need and that the girl had been transported home as part of that program.
What would statists say if a libertarian were to come along and propose that the program be abolished?
They would say, “You hate the poor and the needy! Without this program, this little girl would never have gotten home to die with her family.”
But this story of this little girl and Fed Ex is precisely what happens in a free society and in a free market. While freedom provides no guarantees as to how people will choose to use their own money, the fact is that most people in society are willing to help others when they perceive an urgent need.
Moreover, it would seem self-evident that the more money people have, the more willing they would be to donate money. The less money they have, the less they’re able to help others.
The big problem facing our nation is both economic and psychological in nature.
On the economic side, the federal government is taxing people to an ever-growing extent, leaving them with less money to give away to charity. The taxes are either direct, as through the IRS, or indirect, as through monetary debasement (i.e., inflation, manifested by rising prices) at the hands of the Federal Reserve. The less people are left with, the less they are able to donate to worthy causes.
The psychological problem is that the American people have quite simply lost faith in themselves, in freedom and free markets, and in God. They simply cannot bring themselves to believe that they would survive and prosper without a paternalistic Caesar coercively providing for their retirement, health care, job loss, food subsidies, and children’s education.
The two prime examples of where these economic and psychological problems coalesce are Social Security and Medicare. All that Americans want to consider is “reform, reform, reform” of these programs. Repeal is simply not part of the debate lexicon. The thought of repealing these socialist programs strikes more fear in the hearts of the American people than that which strikes a heroin addict at the thought of losing his drug.
“How would people survive without Social Security and Medicare? Old people would be dying in the streets! You must hate senior citizens! You just want them all to die!”
But the fact is that free human beings are remarkably resilient. If Social Security and Medicare (and all other socialistic welfare-state programs) were repealed today, everyone would not only be fine, they would be better off.
For one thing, the younger generations would have an immediate and significant pay raise, given that they would no longer be burdened by the heavy taxes that fund these immoral, corrupt, and wasteful programs.
Second, many old people are wealthy enough to handle their own retirement and health care needs.
Third, doctors and insurance companies would immediately come up with ingenious ways to handle people’s health-care needs at reasonable costs.
Fourth, older people would feel better about themselves knowing that they had lifted the enormous state-imposed tax-and-inflation burden on their children’s and grandchildren’s generations.
Fifth, the private sector would come up with ways to help those people who truly need help, just as it has with 7-year-old Jada Harper.
What is needed in America most of all at this juncture of our lives is a restoration not only of economic liberty and free markets but also a restoration of faith in ourselves, in freedom, and in God.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
The Evilness of Sanctions
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Following in the footsteps of his predecessors, President Barack Obama is threatening to impose even stricter sanctions on Iran, in an attempt to bend Iranian leaders to his will.
Let’s examine two major cases in which the U.S. government has imposed sanctions, examples that any reasonable person would not consider to be success stories: Iraq and Cuba.
For more than 10 continuous years after the Persian Gulf War, the U.S. government, under Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush imposed one of the most brutal systems of sanctions in history on Iraq. (See this web page for a good collection of articles describing the Iraqi sanctions.)
While the ostensible purpose of the Iraq sanctions was to require Saddam Hussein to “disarm,” the real purpose was to drive him from office and replace him with a U.S.-approved puppet, one who could be counted on to do the bidding of U.S. officials.
How would sanctions accomplish such a feat? The idea was that the sanctions would cause so much economic misery among the citizenry that they would force the Iraqi military to oust Saddam and install a U.S. puppet in order to bring the misery to an end.
And the sanctions did indeed bring misery to Iraq. The sanctions, in combination with the Pentagon’s intentional destruction of Iraq’s water-and-sewage treatment facilities during the Persian Gulf War, brought massive death to the Iraqi people from infectious illnesses and diseases, especially among the children of the country. Think New Orleans/Hurricane Katrina and multiply that a thousand times for 11 continuous years, and you’ll have a sense of what life was like in Iraq throughout the sanctions.
It is, of course, impossible to state with certainty the precise number of Iraqi children who died because of the sanctions but the best estimates range in the hundreds of thousands. When U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright was asked whether the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children had been worth it, she didn’t challenge the number but simply responded, “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”
Actually, Albright was wrong. It wasn’t a hard choice at all for U.S. officials. It didn’t matter one whit to them how many Iraqi children or Iraqi adults died by virtue of the sanctions. No price was too high to pay in terms of Iraqi life to get rid of Saddam and install a U.S. puppet in his stead.
Despite 11 years of massive death, impoverishment, and destruction, Saddam Hussein remained in power. It took an invasion and occupation to accomplish what the sanctions had failed to accomplish, an invasion and an occupation that have killed an additional 1 million Iraqis, sent millions more into foreign exile, and destroyed the country.
This mindset of callous indifference is no different with respect to Cuba. For some 50 years, the U.S. government has maintained a cruel and brutal embargo against Cuba.
The goal? Again, regime change, just like with Iraq.
Why cruel and brutal? Because the effect of the embargo has fallen not on Cuban leader Fidel Castro and his communist cronies but instead on the Cuban people. Sure, it’s true that socialism has contributed mightily to the economic desperation under which the Cuban people have long suffered but the U.S. embargo has served as the other side of a vise that has squeezed the economic lifeblood out of the Cuban people.
U.S. officials have never cared one whit about the pain and suffering to which they have subjected the Cuban people with their decades-old embargo. Their callous and indifferent attitude has always been the same as it has been with the Iraqi people: “If you don’t like the sanctions, then oust your dictator from office and replace him with someone else, someone we approve of, and then we will lift the sanctions.” As with Iraq, no price has been too high to pay in terms of Cuba death, impoverishment, and misery.
Sanctions and embargoes are the essence of evil, not just because they are ineffective but also because their cruel and brutal consequences fall on the innocent. How appalling that a people that pride themselves on Judeo-Christian values permit their government to employ them.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
