Hornberger's Blog

Bernanke’s Gold-Standard Nonsense at GWU

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 29, 2012

In his recent lecture (pdf) condemning the gold standard to students at George Washington University, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke suggested that speculators had “attacked” central banks in the 1930s, forcing them to abandon the gold standard. Bernanke told the students: Indeed, the Bank of England was famous for keeping, as Keynes called it, a thin film of ...

Rejecting the CIA’s Communist Methods

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 28, 2012

In a series of interviews in 1977, television journalist David Frost asked Richard Nixon about the legality of his actions as president. Nixon responded, “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” That mindset has also long been a guiding principle for the CIA, and unfortunately the American people have gone along with it, in the ...

Egypt and the Perversion of American Values

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 27, 2012

The current controversy over U.S. foreign aid to Egypt highlights perfectly the moral bankruptcy of U.S. foreign policy and what such a policy has done to our nation. For the past three decades, the U.S. government has been funneling billions of dollars to the military dictatorship in Egypt. Notice the operative word in that sentence: dictatorship. Why is that word important? Because dictatorship ...

Mali: Another Imperialist “Success” Story

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 26, 2012

Sometimes the adverse effects of the U.S. government’s pro-empire, pro-interventionist foreign policy take years to manifest, long after the original intervention that engendered them. By that time, many Americans will have forgotten about the original intervention, and statists can get them to believe that history begins with the adverse effects of the intervention rather than with the intervention itself. A ...

Gold versus Paper

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 23, 2012

In a recent lecture to an undergraduate class at George Washington University, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Benanke, not surprisingly, blasted the gold standard and praised paper money and the nation’s central bank, the Federal Reserve. He said that it would be impractical to return to the gold standard and that the Federal Reserve is necessary to address economic crises. Unfortunately, ...

Why Not Permanently Terminate Foreign Aid to Egypt?

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 22, 2012

A March 17 Washington Post editorial entitled “A Bad Decision on Egypt” criticizes a decision by U.S. officials to consider renewing foreign aid to Egypt, given that the Egyptian government is still prosecuting certain non-governmental political organizations for operating in violation of Egypt’s registration requirements. After U.S. officials had threatened a cut off of the aid unless Egypt ...

Our Permanent War Economy

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 21, 2012

In an era of unrestrained federal spending and debt, one of the most ludicrous arguments made by statists is that reducing the military budget would be harmful to the economy. Their suggestion is that military spending is beneficial to the economy — that it creates jobs. Reducing military spending, they say, would result in laying off troops and downsizing ...

Conservative Responsibility for Iraq and Afghanistan

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 20, 2012

Among the favorite mantras of conservatives is With freedom comes responsibility. They love to hurl it at liberals whenever they point to the disastrous failure of the welfare state. When liberals cry, Please, judge us by our good intentions, not by the actual results of our policies, conservatives respond, No, good intentions mean nothing. What matters is the damage ...

Speaking at a Leftist Conference

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 19, 2012

For two years in a row — 2010 and 2011, The Future of Freedom Foundation participated in the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. Ordinarily, we would never do something like that, given how ardently conservatives support such things as foreign interventionism, militarism, empire, undeclared wars, wars of aggression, torture, the war on terrorism, and the denigration of ...

Where’s the Declaration of War on Iran?

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 15, 2012

Given all the talk about the possibility of President Obama initiating another war of aggression, this one against Iran, now would be a good time to review the illegality of such an operation, a point that will likely be forgotten once the standard war fever and warped sense of patriotism hits the media and the mainstream public. Under our ...

Confronting Guatemala’s Military Massacres

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 14, 2012

Ironically, while the U.S. military is grappling with the cold-blooded killing of 16 Afghans, including women and children, the Guatemalan people are dealing with a military massacre of their own. A Guatemalan court has just sentenced a former member of Guatemala’s special forces, Pedro Pimental Rios, to a jail term of 6,060 years. Pimental was convicted of participating in a ...

The Time for Soul-Searching Has Arrived

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 13, 2012

How ironic. Countless American Christians supported the U.S. government’s war of aggression on Iraq, and now consider this headline from last Sunday’sNew York Times: “Exodus from North Signals Iraqi Christians’ Slow Decline.” And now we learn that an American soldier went on a killing rampage in Afghanistan, walking into people’s homes in a brutal shoot-up that ended up killing 16 people, ...