Consulting by RPM || Free Advice Blog

It’s Official: Your President Can Kill You At Will

Think I’m exaggerating? Think I’ve been duped by a paranoid blogger? From the newspaper of record:

The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday.

Mr. Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and spent years in the United States as an imam, is in hiding in Yemen. He has been the focus of intense scrutiny since he was linked to Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., in November, and then to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man charged with trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25.

American counterterrorism officials say Mr. Awlaki is an operative of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the affiliate of the terror network in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. They say they believe that he has become a recruiter for the terrorist network, feeding prospects into plots aimed at the United States and at Americans abroad, the officials said.

It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing, officials said. A former senior legal official in the administration of George W. Bush said he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president.

I was originally going to leave it at that, thinking it would be self-evident why this is insane and the epitome of tyranny. But let’s not leave it to chance; let’s quote Glenn Greenwald:

No due process is accorded.  No charges or trials are necessary.  No evidence is offered, nor any opportunity for him to deny these accusations (which he has done vehemently through his family).  None of that.

Instead, in Barack Obama’s America, the way guilt is determined for American citizens — and a death penalty imposed — is that the President, like the King he thinks he is, secretly decrees someone’s guilt as a Terrorist.  He then dispatches his aides to run to America’s newspapers — cowardly hiding behind the shield of anonymity which they’re granted — to proclaim that the Guilty One shall be killed on sight because the Leader has decreed him to be a Terrorist.  It is simply asserted that Awlaki has converted from a cleric who expresses anti-American views and advocates attacks on American military targets (advocacy which happens to be Constitutionally protected) to Actual Terrorist “involved in plots.”  These newspapers then print this Executive Verdict with no questioning, no opposition, no investigation, no refutation as to its truth.  And the punishment is thus decreed:  this American citizen will now be murdered by the CIA because Barack Obama has ordered that it be done.  What kind of person could possibly justify this or think that this is a legitimate government power?

Admiral Ackbar on Martin Wolf

“It’s a trap!”

Martin Wolf is the guy who asked an apparently innocent question about whether the Austrians had the best business cycle theory. It was Wolf’s post that led to the Krugman and DeLong critiques of ABCT. Hey that’s cool, Mr. Wolf is just giving the Austrians a fair shake, right…?

Bob Roddis sends me this from Wikipedia:

Martin Wolf (born 1946) is a British journalist. He is associate editor and chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2000….He has been a forum fellow at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos since 1999. … He is a regular participant in the annual Bilderberg meetings of politicians and bankers.

Oops. Arnold Kling and I just stepped in it.

It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? The international elites realize that the one threat to their schemes is economic education. Therefore they must suppress Austrian economics, especially knowledge of the Austrian theory of the business cycle.

So Wolf runs it up the flagpole, knowing the predictable criticisms of Krugman et al. In fact, Krugman is in on it; that’s why he was uncharacteristically polite.

The point is not to foster a debate. The point is to draw out everyone who really understands Austrian business cycle theory, to throw in the database.

There is another interesting twist to this, showing that my worldview as of three hours ago was totally inadequate. Up is down, left is right, apparent  neo-Keynesians are in fact triple agents. Given Wolf’s nefarious feint, the optimal response is clear.

Progressive Pile-Up On the Austrians!!

Good thing we have truth on our side; otherwise I might be nervous. Here’s Yglesias (HT2 Bob Roddis):

The great failure of the Obama administration, on domestic policy, has been an inability to communicate at either a mass or an elite level what its diagnosis of the situation is. Are there things that should be done but that Congress or the FOMC won’t agree to? Have they turned Austrian and think we need to suffer 3-4 years of post-trough elevated unemployment as punishment for our sins? [Bold added.]

I cut him some slack, because sometimes people on “our side” are a little sloppy in how we discuss this; I’ve done it myself. For example, I’ve probably said, “The Austrians agree with the Friedmanites that the Fed caused the Great Depression…” and I think Arnold Kling, in his “Recalculation” story, has said things like, “We are in recession because it takes a long time to shift resources to their new lines” (not exact quote).

So let me clarify: In my view, as a card-carrying Austrian, the Fed caused the late 1920s boom, which made a crash inevitable. But if the federal government had sat back and done NOTHING at all, just as the dreaded Mellon had recommended, and if the Fed had jacked up its lending rates, just as old-school central banking wisdom dictated, then the US would have had a really bad depression for about a year.

Note that when Tom Woods and I cite our favorite counterexample to the monetarists and Keynesians, it is the 1920-1921 depression. Not the 1920-1924 depression.

Same thing today. If instead of Secretary Paulson we had had Secretary Paul, then the feds would have sat back and let a few big investment banks collapse in September 2008. It would have been absolutely awful…for about 6 months. But by then I think we’d have hit rock bottom, and the genuine, sustainable recovery would have begun (with stock prices, housing prices, and many types of wages all a lot lower than in September 2008).

The reason the Great Depression lasted a decade (or more, depending on how you count it), and the reason we are still mired in (what I predict will become known as) the Second Great Depression, is that central banks and governments are not allowing the reconfiguration of the economy. They are doing everything in their power to freeze workers and other resources into the old, bubble-economy configuration. That won’t work, because that configuration was nonsense and didn’t accord with consumer preferences and the supplies of various capital goods.

Obama Administration Putting Capital Controls Into Place

This is old news on the blogosphere, but I have been really busy with the online class and other things. For those of you who missed it, it looks like the clever cats running our government are looking a few moves ahead. They know that when they really drop the hammer, people are going to try to move their wealth offshore. Hence, they are now putting into place severe capital controls, as “Tyler Durden” explains:

It couldn’t have happened to a nicer country. On March 18, with very little pomp and circumstance, president Obama passed the most recent stimulus act, the $17.5 billion Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act (H.R. 2487), brilliantly goalseeked by the administration’s millionaire cronies to abbreviate as HIRE. As it was merely the latest in an endless stream of acts destined to expand the government payroll to infinity, nobody cared about it, or actually read it. Because if anyone had read it, the act would have been known as the Capital Controls Act, as one of the lesser, but infinitely more important provisions on page 27, known as Offset Provisions – Subtitle A—Foreign Account Tax Compliance, institutes just that. In brief, the Provision requires that foreign banks not only withhold 30% of all outgoing capital flows (likely remitting the collection promptly back to the US Treasury) but also disclose the full details of non-exempt account-holders to the US and the IRS. And should this provision be deemed illegal by a given foreign nation’s domestic laws (think Switzerland), well the foreign financial institution is required to close the account. It’s the law. If you thought you could move your capital to the non-sequestration safety of non-US financial institutions, sorry you lose – the law now says so. Capital Controls are now here and are now fully enforced by the law.

So I think what that is saying is this: If you put your money into any foreign bank–even money that has already been taxed when you earned it–and then you try to pull some of it out, the foreign bank’s default obligation is to send 30% of the withdrawal to the US Treasury. Then it’s up to you to prove you should get that money back.

So if your plan has been something like: “Geez, things are really getting ugly. Well, I’ll start socking money away in a few offshore accounts, and if the excrement really hits the rotating blade, I’ll just move to South America and live off my savings,” then you may need to think again. Geithner & Friends have realized you are going to do that, and they just forked you.*

* A chess reference, nothing dirty.

Krugman vs. Austrians

Paul Krugman is a clever fellow. Sensing that I am swamped with other work commitments, he launches an attack on Austrian business cycle theory today on his blog:

My view is that the fatal flaw in Austrian economics is that it can’t explain unemployment — or, worse, that it thinks that it can explain unemployment, but is deluding itself. The Austrian view is that unemployment in a slump results from the difficulty of “adaptation of the structure of production” — workers are unemployed as resources are painfully transferred out of an overblown investment-goods sector back into production of consumption goods.

But this immediately raises the question, why isn’t there similar unemployment during the boom, as workers are transferred into investment goods production?

I’ve asked this question repeatedly over the years, and all I get is one of two things: gobbledygook, or “but during the phase of rising investment, the economy is booming!”, which is of course circular. In practice, Austrians seem to be Keynesians during booms without knowing it; they realize that high demand produces a boom, but don’t realize that this contradicts their own theory of slumps.

And the key to all this, I believe, is that the Austrian abhorrence of explicit models, even for the purposes of clarifying thought, leaves them unaware of the holes in their account.

Fortunately, I have already answered this in depth. Since I didn’t just say, “But the economy is booming during the investment phase!” I deduce that my earlier article was “gobbledygook.”

Video Shows US Apache Crews Killing Civilians

The post title sounds provocative, but that’s exactly what this is. I just have two comments; I’ll leave the rest to the video.

(1) In the beginning it’s not clear (at least to me as the viewer) whether the Americans in the helicopters justifiably thought they were under attack. But it is pretty clear to me that they didn’t even go through the motions of justifying the attack on the van (which ended up wounding and maybe killing two children–I’m not sure if they both died seriously wounding two children). Up till then, they are always talking about rules, like “Reach for a weapon, buddy” (not exact quote). But when it comes to them asking for permission to fire on the van, they don’t even come up with a reason (let alone a good reason).

(2) I would urge antiwar people not to go overboard in describing this. This is not “just like the Nazis,” etc. If you go over the top like that, then it will make people defensive. I think the best way to convince other Americans of why they should oppose US occupations abroad, is just to send this video with no comment.

==> Because of the graphic content, YouTube wants me to sign up. But I don’t want to do that, not least of which because my son sometimes goes through YouTube clips when I’m in the shower (first it was Monster Trucks, lately it’s been predators hunting animals). So watch the 17-minute YouTube (which comes after the MSNBC video) here at Glenn Greenwald’s site.

Daily Beast Guy Makes Great Anarchy Point to Daily Show Guy

While Tom Woods has his head buried in the Compleat Works of Thomas Jefferson, I am on the lookout for libertarian nuggets of wisdom on fake news programs on Comedy Central. In the below clip, at about the 1:54 mark, Reza Aslan (contributing editor for the Daily Beast, no apparent relation) is discussing the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and says:

You know, this is the funny thing. There is this perception, that it’s the absence of a strong, centralized government, that is pushing people to the Taliban. If you ask the people on the ground, they’ll say, “No actually the opposite is true. It’s in those places in which there is a strong government presence that people are moving towards the Taliban–because the government is so corrupt.”

Incidentally, for those of you who are completely out of the loop–such that you get your news from me, as opposed to Jon Stewart–you should be aware that Our Man in Afghanistan is openly threatening to side with the Taliban.

Quick, someone call David Frum for advice! Argh, if only those fools at AEI hadn’t turned him loose! For all we know, he’s giving sage widsdom to the Taliban at this very moment! Curses!

Three Murphy Items

* In this op ed I discuss the history of the federal income tax, and make the very modest proposal that we abolish it.

* At EconLib this month I do the grunt work and make a quick case that Big Government destroys at least $8,500 in real income per year, for every man, woman, and child in the United States.

* This guy has the right attitude:

How awesome is this!

The Mises Institute has decided to open up an online academy to teach Austrian economics.  The first series of online classes will be taught by Robert Murphy (a personal hero of mine) on understanding the business cycle.

Taking a class from Bob Murphy is like being personally taught by Einstein.  Only Einstein is dumber that Murphy, so really its like being taught by Hannes Alfvén.  The time will come when Keynesian theory is relegated to the dust bin of history and men like Murphy will reign supreme over economic theory.  Now is your chance to learn from a future Nobel Laureate and someone who isn’t a statist tyrant scumbag.

I have high hopes for my future, but I think I will win the Nobel Peace Prize before I win the Nobel (Memorial) Prize in Economics.