How Many Economists Still Get Subjective Value Wrong

How Many Economists Still Get Subjective Value Wrong

03/14/2019Per Bylund














Originally published on Twitter @PerBylund

Image source:

Inflation Celebration

10/14/2021Robert Aro

As reported by Reuters on Wednesday:










Despite noting that:








Does the Fed Need More Progressives?

10/11/2021Robert Aro



















Wisdom from Piketty

10/11/2021David Gordon



Canada’s 2021 Election: Trudeau’s Miscalculation

10/11/2021Lee Friday














The Magic of the Keynesian Multiplier

10/10/2021Frank Shostak






Is the multiplier a real thing?










Social Income = Consumption + Investment


Consumption will always be .80 (Income).


.20 (Income) = Investment;

 or Income = 5 (Investment).




Social income = Y

Income of the Reader = R

Income of everyone else = V


Then, Y = .99999 Y + R

.00001 Y = R

Y = 100,000 R


Does the introduction of money make the multiplier possible?





Summary and Conclusion



Change for a Trillion

10/07/2021Robert Aro

Could a $1 trillion platinum coin be the answer to our problems? Or is this just another bad idea on the never-ending list of bad economic takes?

If history is any indication of the past, then everyone knows how the debt ceiling debate ends. As the deadline approaches, government officials will come together, extend the ceiling, more money will be printed, and, as we’ve been told, calamity will be averted.

A trillion-dollar coin sounds absurd from the outset. But consider its implications first. Pass judgement after. ABC News explains:

Legislation enacted in 2001 allows the treasury to mint platinum coins of any value without congressional approval. Under that law, the coin's value could be anything, but it would have to be platinum, not gold or silver, nickel, bronze or copper, which are under Congress' control.

Per the Constitution, only Congress has the power to “coin money.” But should this money be backed by a platinum coin, it allows the president to bypass Congress. As for the Federal Reserve, they are not mentioned in the Constitution … 

Giving money creation powers to a president can be dangerous; however, the law can be amended to include congressional approval. And there’s a more important aspect here:

President Joe Biden could order Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to have a coin with the value of $1 trillion be minted and deposited into the Treasury.

Money creation with an ironic twist may bode well for the free market. But think about the central bankers: Where does this leave the Federal Reserve? Have they not been cut out as the intermediary?

Understand, the Federal Reserve does not physically print money. That is the job of the US Treasury. Unintentionally, the very essence of the trillion-dollar coin calls into question the role of the Federal Reserve and should make people wonder why their bills are marked Federal Reserve Notes. Through bypassing the Fed and existing without debt creation, the trillion-dollar coin has the propensity to make the Fed obsolete.

Choose one of the two (simplified) scenarios, where $1 trillion is being physically printed:

The Treasury mints a platinum coin granting them the authority to print $1 trillion and deposit it in the USA’s bank account; this is money creation without a debt burden and without the Fed.

Or we maintain the status quo. The Treasury prints $1 trillion and gives it to the Federal Reserve. The Fed literally does nothing except send the money back to the Treasury, which then deposits it in the USA’s bank account; same money creation as the previous scenario, except now the money is owned by the Fed.

The difference is clear, as the Fed provides no value-added activity in the money creation process. Under free enterprise, there is no market for the Federal Reserve. It only exists due to a government-granted monopoly on the US dollar.

It leads us to consider whether money should even carry an unpayable debt. Gold, or bitcoin for example, carry no debt. But when the Fed is involved, our money is debt based and the benefit to society can scarcely be defended.

Watch carefully to see what inflationists and the debt-doesn’t-matter crowd have to say. Janet Yellen exposes many errors:

The platinum coin is equivalent to asking the Federal Reserve to print money to cover deficits that Congress is unwilling to cover by issuing debt, it compromises the independence of the Fed conflating monetary and fiscal policy, and instead of showing that Congress and the administration can be trusted to pay, to pay the country’s bills, it really does the opposite.

Someone should inform Yellen that the government's deficits are already covered by money printing. While Fed independence is a red herring, monetary/fiscal policy was compromised long ago.

More analysis is required. But with absolute certainty, $1 trillion will be printed by the Treasury in the not-too-distant future. This process does not require the Federal Reserve. The question for now is whether or not we want the Fed to get their cut. Or should we strive to live in a country not shackled down by central banking?


Debunking the Tulip Bubble

What asset price bubbles are is fairly uncontroversial, even if a fast and hard definition is elusive. At their most basic, bubbles are said to exist when a sharp upward departure in the price of an asset, from its historic or otherwise reasonably expected value, occurs over a relatively brief period of time, however defined. These dramatic, often parabolic, rises can be driven by rushes into new sectors, like dotcoms, new tech, or cryptocurrencies—while some economists consider their occurrence completely random.

Whatever the case, it almost invariably happens that when talking of bubbles in this or that asset class someone brings up the Dutch tulip bubble. Despite its predictable regularity, a closer look at what occurred in Holland around the mid-1630s casts serious doubt on the comparison, for, as will be outlined, the sudden brief spike in the prices of certain tulips wasn’t due to any change in the underlying assets, emergence of new assets, or the preferences of buyers, but rather innovations in how tulips were briefly bought and sold.

By the seventeenth century Holland was the most advanced economy in Europe, with a recognizable and relatively sophisticated stock market. In 1602, for example, the Dutch East India Company was founded as a joint stock company, generally recognized as the first of its kind. As for tulips, they had begun to make their way to Europe via trade with the Ottoman Empire a century prior. As it happened, women’s fashion by the early seventeenth century had come to incorporate flowers, tulips specifically. Even more specifically, certain tulips, called “broken bulbs,” were highly sought after and came to command hundreds, even thousands of guilders each from European elites.1

The tulip market in 1630s Holland, then, was multitiered, with select broken bulbs being traded for many hundreds, even thousands, of times the value of ordinary tulip bulbs—until, that is, the two months spanning late 1636 and early 1637, which saw twenty- to thirtyfold increases in the price of standard tulips, which had traded weeks before at the equivalent of tenths of a cent per handful.

Let’s take a closer look at the mechanics that caused this to happen, and see why there is little to nothing to be gained by comparing what happened during “tulipmania” to asset price bubbles in the modern context.

As already stated, the Dutch stock market was the most sophisticated in Europe in the mid-seventeenth century, and already had a brisk futures trade. Similar to today’s futures trading, most Dutch traders at the time weren’t actually interested in owning the underlying asset. Rather, it was a simple bet on the future price of the asset. If the price went down, the seller got paid the difference, and vice versa for the buyer of the future if the prices went up.

Importantly, because of moral strictures much of this futures trading was done informally—contracting to sell something you didn’t yet own seeming an activity close to, if not indistinguishable from, gambling. And it was in late 1636 that informal futures markets for standard tulips began sprouting up. Because it was outside the existing market framework, these informal markets had their own rules but no real means of enforcing them; and it is here, in the structure and rules governing these emerging tulip futures markets, that we find the origins of the actual bubble of tulipmania.

First, everyone involved had to bid on every lot of tulips; second, new buyers were prohibited from immediately selling; third, all buying was fractional, with only one-fortieth of the price of the contract due down; fourth, there was a maximum cap of three guilders down, no matter how large the contract; and finally, while social exclusion would follow for anyone who reneged on what they owed, the contracts were technically unenforceable in Holland’s courts.

Reading over these conditions, it isn’t difficult to imagine how a bunch of bored Dutch traders with little else to do in the middle of a northern European winter, blew up and then popped an enormous bubble in the lower-tiered tulip market in just a few weeks: contracts were cheap; you might make some money; and if things somehow got out of hand, the contracts weren’t enforceable, anyway. Of course, no one wanted to have their name come under opprobrium, which is why virtually no one apparently reneged—at least at first. It also helps to explain why the bubble burst so quickly after forming. A lot of standard tulip bulbs worth only a guilder or two per bucketful quickly rose to hundreds of guilders in value. This was a huge sum, and no one wanted to risk being on the end of it.

Recognizing the mess they’d gotten themselves in, virtually everyone involved agreed to rip up the contracts and walk away. No damage was done to the Dutch economy, the price of ordinary tulips almost immediately returned to what it had been, and the value of high-tier broken bulbs, like the Semper Augusta continued to steadily appreciate.2

In short, the Dutch tulip bubble, or tulipmania, had virtually nothing in common with modern bubbles, though it is an interesting episode of economic history to be sure.

  • 1. Unlike ordinary tulips, which are a single color—typically red, yellow, or pink—broken bulbs produce a range of multicolored, distinctly patterned petals. Smaller, slower-growing, and rare, botanists now know the flowers were actually infected with a mosaic virus, which stunted their growth and caused the erratic coloring.
  • 2. And this is a key part of the story, for while the tulip bubble is generally said to have occurred between 1633 and 1637, this claim is contradicted by both Peter Gerber and Connel Fullenkamp, economists who have gone back and searched for tulip sales made in the years preceding and following that period. Their research and writings reveal that broken bulbs had been seeing a steady, almost 10 percent rise in value for at least a decade prior. To take just one example, as early as 1626 a single broken bulb had sold for just over two thousand guilders (the equivalent of around a half million dollars priced in today’s dollars). And while 10 percent is certainly brisk growth, it’s nowhere near today’s bubble level—except perhaps in housing, though this bubble is of the Fed’s creation. Lastly, as Kindleberger points out in his Manias, Panics, and Crashes this steady appreciation in high-tier tulip bulbs was happening within the context of broader asset price inflation following the economic hard times during and after the War of Spanish Succession.

The Evolution of Bank Runs

They can start with as little as a rumor; whether fact or fiction, some new information emerges that spooks depositors or investors, or otherwise convinces them that the institution to which they have entrusted their money isn’t going to be able to cover its debts or obligations. Predictably, those who had deposited or invested their money at the institution in question lose confidence, and this loss of confidence sparks a run on the bank.

The image that comes immediately to mind probably looks something like this: long lines of anxious depositors queued down the block, more frantically hustling from their jobs to join; inside, tellers issue bills at a plodding pace, counting out notes to those lucky depositors who got to the bank at the first news of trouble, while in back the bank manager paces and frets as the bank’s reserves run lower and lower. 

This scene, familiar to anyone who has seen the 1946 Frank Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life or is otherwise familiar with the black-and-white photos in economic history textbooks, has virtually no bearing whatsoever on modern bank runs—Northern Rock standing as a notable exception. 

For one thing, in the case of most depositors the entirety of their bank balance is ensured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC); that is, whether the bank goes bust or not, they stand to get all the money they lost paid back to them by the government. Second, most money has been digitized; by the time Tom, Dick, and Harry get the news and start running for their cars to get downtown, it’s all over. Third, and most important for understanding systemic risk in modern finance and banking, is the short-term funding mechanisms institutions use to fund their balance sheets.

To highlight and examine the mechanics behind a modern bank run, the climax of the global financial crisis in the autumn of 2008 provides a textbook example, because it was precisely this third facet of modern bank runs that caused Lehman Brothers to collapse so abruptly. 

Banks borrow short to lend long; this is the basic premise of all modern banking, whether commercial, investment, or so-called shadow lending. In the classic case, and even, to an extent, under the early fractional reserve banking of the Federal Reserve System, banks’ biggest stock of capital came from their depositors. These depositors placed their money in the bank, thereby enabling it to make loans, open new locations, or branch out into other product services. The spread, the difference between the lower rate paid to depositors and the higher rate it charged borrowers, formed the basis of the bank’s profits.

This period of so-called 3–6–3 lending, borrow at 3 percent, lend at 6 percent, and be on the golf course by 3 o’clock, was primarily driven to extinction by the onset of high and persistent inflation caused by government overspending. Beginning in the late 1960s, and worsening in the following decade, the hitherto safe and stable banking system operating under the monetary auspices of the Bretton Woods system broke down. The high inflation rates ate away the bankers’ spread, making their former business of taking deposits and lending for thirty-year mortgages a money-losing venture.

So began thirty years of rapid financial innovation. One of these innovations, the repo (repurchase) market, is at the heart of modern bank runs.

Simply put, the repo market is a short-term funding mechanism allowing borrowers to access liquidity from willing lenders. This is done by way of repurchase agreements: contracts that allow a borrower to exchange a securitized asset for cash in exchange for a small premium, or implicit interest rate, to be repaid upon repurchase. These contracts can range as long as a month or three months but typically span just a single day. In the context of modern bank runs, then, it is best to think of these as short-term deposits: losing confidence in the institution into which they are “depositing” money daily, repo lenders pull back, refusing to renew the repo: the following day, shut out of short-term credit markets, the borrowing institution faces an immediate liquidity crisis.

Take the example of Bear Stearns, on the eve of the financial crisis one of the most profitable investment banks on Wall Street. It was regularly financing $70 billion each day through the repo market. This was far from ordinary. Bear Stearns just happened to be the first major Wall Street firm to get shut out of the repo market because of word that it was in trouble due to its exposure to subprime collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and mortgage-backed securities (MBS). The same thing would happen to Lehman Brothers a week later.

Like deposit-based fractional reserve banks, these financial institutions don’t keep enough assets on hand to cover their obligations. When access to cheap credit dries up, or the value of the assets backing the commercial paper they issue drops suddenly, their hitherto profitable loan book becomes unserviceable. An attempt to sell assets by an institution facing such a sudden liquidity crisis can drastically drop the prices of a wide range of assets, thereby endangering the short-term financed balance sheets of similar institutions. This is why the Fed, following Lehman’s collapse, took the approach that any single failure could mean systemic failure.

Though the profits to be made by leveraging investments using short-term credit instruments were and are enormous, it is almost certain banks would think twice about engaging in such risky behavior were it not for the moral hazard built into the modern US financial system. Beginning in the late 1980s major institutions came to expect that if they got themselves into trouble the Fed or Treasury would bail them out—either directly or by forcing a deal on another bank to absorb their own failing enterprise.

It is a straight line from the savings and loan (S&L) bailout to Long-Term Capital Management to Bear Stearns.

But moral hazard in modern banking is another topic entirely. 


The Link between Knowledge and Economic Growth

10/06/2021Ryan McMaken

In a thoughtful and thorough article at the Australian publication Quadrant, economist Wolfgang Kasper writes on the Austrian contribution to the role knowledge plays in global economic growth.

Specifically, Kasper provides some helpful observations on the decentralized and specialized nature of knowledge. Unfortunately, though, Kasper veers off course in assigning an excessively exalted role for knowledge in creating economic growth.

It is not knowledge that is the X factor in paving the way for economic growth. Rather, capital accumulation, low time preference, and entrepreneurship are the crucial factors.

Let’s look at the details.

Kasper begins with an informative description of what knowledge is and the Austrian school’s role in understanding this:

I was fortunate in that I came into personal contact with the great economist-philosopher Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992), as well as his friends Fritz Machlup (1902–83), Gottfried Haberler (1900–95) and Karl Popper (1902–94). These Viennese scholars clarified for me what the abstract and many-sided concept of “knowledge” is and what a crucial role it plays in cultural and economic development.

“Knowledge”, I learnt, consists of tested, useful ideas—useful for realising the diverse, changing and complex aspirations of millions of different people. Bits of new information are gradually integrated by rational thought and practical testing into systems of related ideas which constitute knowledge. The information must be based on observed facts. Knowledge may need to be adjusted when circumstances change. An important point is that most knowledge is held in the brains of numerous individuals. Some is made accessible to others when recorded in textbooks, research reports, technical manuals, statistics, legislative and practical publications, or YouTube tutorials. Much valuable knowledge is also incorporated in capital goods.

Two additional key factors in understanding knowledge are the decentralized nature of knowledge and the importance of exchange. Kasper continues:

One of the key points that the Austrians made is that dispersed, specialised knowledge can normally be exploited best by the voluntary co-operation of individuals. This depends on trust and trust-enhancing rules (institutions), such as the rule of law and free markets in which individual property rights can be exchanged. I learnt from my inspiring “Austrian” teachers that knowledge is a production factor, just like physical capital, natural resources and labour.

Moreover, knowledge—in the form of so-called human capital—can be deployed with factors of production, such as capital and land, to improve production:

In combination with other production factors, knowledge (or "human capital") can overcome situations of scarcity. Indeed, the long history of the human race can be seen as a sequence of more and more knowledge creating better physical capital, tapping into more natural resources, empowering labour and overcoming or at least alleviating the deleterious side effects of economic growth.

Kasper starts to run into trouble, however, when concluding:

Thus, knowledge has been the main driving force behind the unprecedented growth of the global economy since 1945. Land has been opened and crops have been made more productive by new knowledge (think of the Green Revolution); new inventions have tapped new natural resources and improved the effectiveness of energy resources and capital goods; labour has become more skilful …

But was knowledge really the key factor in these cases?

Many Austrians would argue it is not.

In Man, Economy, and State, Rothbard writes:

It has often been assumed that production is limited by the “state of the arts”—by technological knowledge—and therefore that any improvement in technology will immediately show itself in production. Technology does, of course, set a limit on production; no production process could be used at all without the technological knowledge of how to put it into operation. But while knowledge is a limit, capital is a narrower limit. It is logically obvious that while capital cannot engage in production beyond the limits of existing available knowledge, knowledge can and does exist without the capital necessary to put it to use. Technology and its improvement, therefore, play no direct role in the investment and production process; technology, while important, must always work through an investment of capital. As was stated above, even the most dramatic capital-saving invention, such as oil-drilling, can be put to use only by saving and investing capital.

Specifically, we might note that many societies have valued “knowledge” in various forms. But, as Rothbard explains:


That is, saving and investment are the key factors, not knowledge. As Rothbard notes, time preference is more essential here:

A businessman's new investment in a longer and more physically productive process will therefore be made from a sheaf of processes previously known but unusable because of the time-preference limitation. A lowering of time preferences and of the pure interest rate will signify an expansion of saved capital at the disposal of investors and therefore an expansion of the longer processes, the time limitation on investment having been weakened.

It's also important here to note that “time” is a crucial factor—and one that Kasper doesn’t mention. It takes time to build up savings and capital, and it takes time to develop the technological tools that are the fruits of innovation and knowledge.

An additional important variable in this equation is entrepreneurship. Kasper does hint at this in a few places, noting:

The stock of knowledge, which a community owns, grows when people are driven by curiosity or self-interest to risk exploring new ideas and concepts, individually or in co-operation with others. A social climate that favours individualism, enterprise, risk-taking, trust, independence and rivalry (competition) has always been conducive to the growth of knowledge.

But it is not the stock of knowledge in this case which produces the growth. It is the mechanism by which economic growth actually occurs. Randall Holcombe explains:

Research and development, and the production of human capital, can be systematic ways of producing additional opportunities, and of finding those that already exist. That specific knowledge of time and place that Hayek emphasized can play a role in revealing entrepreneurial opportunities. However, if one focuses exclusively on investment in human capital and technological advance, the mechanism by which innovation occurs is left out of the picture entirely. Such investments can produce a more fertile environment within which to search for entrepreneurial opportunities, but it is the entrepreneurial act of seizing those opportunities that produces the engine for economic growth, and that lays the foundation for more entrepreneurial discoveries.

Put another way, it’s not simply “knowledge” that is the critical input here, but a combination of capital—made possible by savings and low time preference—and entrepreneurship which deploys resources in a productive way. Merely pursuing “knowledge” gains us little. Rather, it is a specific type of market-based knowledge that matters.

This also provides additional insights into the fact that economic growth has historically not been dependent on the existence of a technologically sophisticated workforce. Although Kasper warns that "poorly educated" immigrants lessen the quality of the workforce, Lipton Matthews has recently noted that  empirical studies suggest there is not a clear connection between a schooled workforce and economic growth

And then there is the issue of the "knowledge" gap often touted during the old Cold War, and increasingly during the new "cold war" between the US and China. Kasper correctly notes that the "West still has a scientific and technological lead over China," but appears to stick with the premise that with enough devotion to a knowledge-based economy, China will take over the West in economic growth and dynamism. This conclusion is only possible if we ignore the realities of time, low time preference, and saving in economic growth. 

As noted by China researcher Michael Beckley, China is nowhere near overtaking the United States in this regard—which suggests the West overall has an edge as well. Even if China is currently saving more than Americans, or has a society-wide time preference lower than that of Americans, the American economy sits on an enormous store of wealth built up over many decades. Beckley shows time is a key factor here, and even at higher growth rates, it will take the Chinese many decades to build up capital that even rivals that of the US. Moreover, the state-dominated Chinese economy has nothing rivaling the entrepreneurial activity experienced in the US. Unfortunately for the Chinese regime, knowledge is never a substitute for time, savings, or entrepreneurship. 

None of this means a knowledgeable population is of no importance. Moreover, a society that is knowledgeable about the importance of saving, investment, and private property is more likely to ultimately produce more capital. But without actual saving and low time preference, knowledge of their advantages is of little use.  


Backdraft: Evacuate the Military, Stat

10/06/2021Jason Morgan

For as long as I can remember, my family and I have greeted men and women in military uniform with a “Thank you for your service.” Like many other average Americans, when we see people in fatigues at a local restaurant we sometimes pick up their tab when we pay our own.

My father, grandfather, and great-grandfather served in the United States Navy (my grandfather was in the thick of some of the worst Pacific battles of World War II). Another Morgan, John, was in a Virginia militia during the Revolution. So part of the respect we have shown to soldiers, sailors, and Marines has been in recognition of others engaged in the old family business.

But there is another element to our having thanked so many service members over the years. This element is deeper and much more mysterious, even atavistic. In some way I have long been in awe of people in the military because I believed they were, somehow, sacrificial offerings.

When we laud men and women in uniform with the words, “They keep us safe,” most of us surely mean that by standing on the “front lines of freedom,” by being the “tip of the spear,” the people in the ranks guard us, hold the perimeter beyond which bay the madmen who would kill us in our sleep. This much is on the level. It is common sense to thank the watchman for the service of security in life and property he provides.

But on a much darker level I believe I have long seen the military as a kind of stand-in for myself. Like a strange double in a Conrad novel, the man or woman in the camouflage or the dress blues has, now that I think about it, embodied the wild, primitive non-category of sacrifice, of the blood-price, the one who dies so the rest might live. Thanking military members has been, for me at least, not just an expression of gratitude, but also an acknowledgement of some ineffable connection across the buried cables of the psyche, a recognition that the logic of the world in some way demands that one go down while another remains among the living.

This quasi-religious superstition was shattered in 2021. This past year I have dug up those buried cables of the psyche and cut them in half. I no longer see the military as a guardian or a half-holy avatar. I see people in fatigues now as a threat, the single greatest threat to American liberty.

The first blow to my respect for the military was the deployment of the National Guard to the nation’s capital to protect the political class from the peons who get screwed so that the swamp can prosper. You all remember the scene. People with flags and attitudes busted into the “sacred ground of democracy,” the Capitol in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021. The “sacred ground of democracy” is reserved for grifting by the “elected” elite, but somehow the peons didn’t get the message. On that January day the political class called in the troops to protect what the politicos rightly called a bigger threat to “American democracy” than 9/11, because nothing will undo the current corrupt order like a populace which takes seriously the last president’s campaign slogan of “No More Bullshit.” Never mind that the only casualty was Ashli Babbitt, murdered by the Deep State. Somehow the National Guard was necessary to protect “sacred democracy” from the demos.

It wasn’t just that this selfish inversion of the selflessness of soldierly sacrifice turned me off to the military-industrial complex forever. I had long believed that the buck privates and hapless petty officers in the rank and file were conceptually separable from the blood-for-money business and full-bore statism by means of which the brass and handlers of the military-industrial complex stuff their bank accounts. I always thought that Lance Corporal Potatopeeler was just along for the ride, taking orders but generally clueless about what goes on above his pay grade.

But when I saw the Guard take the field against fellow Americans I understood that Lance Corporal Potatopeeler was no friend of mine after all. He knows what’s up, and still racks the slide. He could have refused the order to deploy against his countrymen. To my knowledge, not a single Guard member took that high road. Every single one suited up and fell into line. Makes sense when you think about it, though. The military is just another government job—nobody is going to risk his or her pension for something as silly as patriotism or honor. The Guardsmen would have pulled the trigger against Trump voters on January 6. They would pull the trigger against vax skeptics today. Paychecks over patria. Blow number one to the pro aris et focis pieties of the nation-state.

Blow number two was the downfall of the American imperial satrapy in Afghanistan. The “they keep us safe” logic still hung together while the Potomac jihadis held the field in Central Asia. As the puppet government collapsed, though, and the Biden regime’s lies about the situation mounted, a domino effect toppled, in the minds of many Americans, more than just our beliefs about the war or the White House.

The hard truth is that the people fighting in Afghanistan with an American flag on their shoulder did not fight for us. I never cottoned to 9/11 Truther theories, but I am forced to admit that it doesn’t make a difference anymore what really brought the Towers down. The military-industrial complex got everything they wanted out of 9/11, regardless of what really happened that day. Afghanistan, like Iraq, was a phony war. Whether one believes the Truther line or not, the evidence for Pakistani and Saudi implication in anti-American terrorism is overwhelming. But attacking either of those places would have jeopardized the retirement plans of the Joint Chiefs. So the military-industrial complex sent young Americans to die in the Khyber Pass for twenty years in a bloody one-act political theater performance, same routine every day. Go out of FOB, get blown to smithereens, send new recruit out tomorrow on same mission. Pull plug at twenty-year mark, make solemn faces for the lapdog media for a day or two, and then uncork champagne and enjoy retirement package and outstanding dental coverage enjoyed by all Potomac jihadis. Wave a little flag on 9/11 to remember the “sacrifice” of the troops who got ground up in your phony war.

Now that it is clear that the military-industrial complex is the enemy of mankind (is there an official count of the number of war crimes which Washington has committed since it lurched onto the low road of empire in 1861?), and also clear that the military is going to be—already has been—used against Americans, it is time for a “backdraft.” If you are in the military, draft yourself out. If you love your country, do not take the king’s shilling to kill your own countrymen. De-enlist, break ranks, go AWOL, disappear. When the armed forces become domestic MPs, then there are no more patriots in uniform.

USMC Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller called out the military-industrial complex for Afghanistan and is now sitting in the brig on four counts of violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice. United States Army Lieutenant Colonel Paul Douglas Hague resigned his commission over the immoral vaccine mandate and the “Marxist takeover of the military.”  If you are in the military to protect Americans, then you are also living the military-industrial complex’s big lie. Your next assignment will be to enforce a Biden diktat in Florida or Texas, or to corral people demonstrating against utterly unconstitutional COVID lockdowns in New York. Your oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” is violated de facto by your ongoing cooperation with what has effectively become the military-industrial complex’s Praetorian Guard. You don’t work for America or for Americans. You work for Washington.

If you are still in uniform then ask yourself where your priorities lie. The government, or your country and fellow countrymen? It is time to wake up and “backdraft,” soldiers and sailors and Marines, to get the hell out of the military and join the fight for liberty raging all around you.

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