Gary North
Lew Rockwell
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Past articles by Gary:
The Man Who Gave Us King Kong
From 2005. In 1992, a pair of German immigrant brothers were visiting me in Texas. They were in their twenties. One of them asked me, “Have you ever heard of Edgar Wallace?” It was an odd question, I thought. What interest did he have in Edgar Wallace? “Yes,” I replied. “He was the author of crime novels in the 1920’s.” They were amazed. “You are the first American we have ever asked who knew… → Read More
Assisted Dying
Rationing is inevitable in a world of scarcity. You can ration by price: high monetary bid wins. You can ration by standing in line: first come, first served. You can ration by bureaucratic procedure: fill out forms. You can ration by favors: hello, baby. But there is always rationing. The free market rations by price. The federal government rations by standing in line and filling in forms. When… → Read More
A Left-Wing Infiltration of the Conservative Movement
The enemies of your enemies may also be your enemies. Just because someone joins you in opposing some government policy or political movement is no guarantee that this person shares anything more than your opposition. He may in fact be a lot more dangerous to you than the opposition. Anarchists prior to the Russian Revolution were allies with the Bolsheviks in their attempt to overthrow the… → Read More
All Hail the Government Shutdown
If President Trump holds firm on the shutdown until January 20, 2021, he will have struck the greatest blow for liberty and against bureaucracy in American political history. To achieve this, all that he to do is nothing. In doing this, he will have overturned a classic slogan of American politics: “You can’t beat something with nothing.” DON’T DO SOMETHING. SIT THERE These days, Congress does… → Read More
Crazed Boondoggles
The spending never stops. It never will until the Great Default. Here is another example. The House has passed H.R. 2887, a bill to reauthorize expiring aviation and surface transportation programs for a few months. Embedded in the bill are Transportation Enhancements (TE). What is this? It is a program run by the Department of Transportation. It forces states to build bicycle paths, extend… → Read More
Seeing Is Not Believing
How do steel and concrete turn into dust before our very eyes? Why don’t our brains acknowledge what we are seeing? Because of this: “This is not possible, by definition.” Seeing is not believing. Wild theories abound. None gets traction. Here is a wild theory. It is supported by impossible videos. The videos are real, however. Aye, there’s the rub! Crashes to crashes, dust to dust. But crashes… → Read More
The Case for Optimism
Recently, I wrote an article on lost causes on the Left. I began it with this quotation from a civil rights activist in the mid-1960’s: Mel Leventhal. > Everything meaningful that’s ever happened in the world, any change, any improvement comes about because of optimism. The pessimists don’t get anything done. They’re naysayers. You have to see the potential for change. And you’ve got to see… → Read More
Let Me Tell You About the 1950s
The great thing about being a historian is that you can write about almost anything and get away with it. Everything that happened in the past that left chronological records is fair game. If you’re really good, you can even fake the chronology. Of course, most historians don’t write, once they get their Ph.D. degrees. They write term papers in college. They write longer term papers in graduate… → Read More
Lost Causes on the Left
> “Everything meaningful that’s ever happened in the world, any change, any improvement comes about because of optimism. The pessimists don’t get anything done. They’re naysayers. You have to see the potential for change. And you’ve got to see it not in terms of the moment but in terms of the long view, the long haul.” — Mel Leventhal Mel Leventhal was involved in the civil rights movement in… → Read More
Lost Causes on the Right
I came to political awareness in the height of the anti-Communist movement in 1956. I was brought into the conservative movement at a lecture by the Australian anti-Communist physician Fred Schwarz. I have told my story in a collection of reminiscences by 82 libertarians, I Chose Liberty. You can read it here (pages 239ff.). Historians usually date the rise of the conservative political movement… → Read More
Ho Ho Ho - LewRockwell L
Here is a list of 14 warnings from Mr. Trump on how the U.S. government must get out of Afghanistan. On Monday, August 21, President Trump announced that he has reversed his previous plan to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. His speech is here. Politicians know they can promise anything before they are elected, yet they can easily reverse course and suffer almost no lasting political damage.… → Read More
Why Is There No Free Online Catholic Education?
I created the Ron Paul Curriculum. It is up and running, K-12. It has enrolled a lot of families. What I am saying is not hypothetical. Somewhere in the United States, there is a Roman Catholic bishop who is a conservative. He probably doesn’t say it publicly, but he would prefer that the Latin mass were still in use. That world is gone. He sees around him parishioners who share his beliefs.… → Read More
Statist Monetary Cranks
I have been writing refutations of monetary cranks for over half a century. I wrote my first essay on a monetary crank, Gertrude Coogan, in 1965. Her book was Money Creators. It came out in the 1930’s in the Great Depression. That was the golden era of anti-gold standard fiat monetary cranks. I wrote the essay because R. J. Rushdoony had been taken in by the cranks in the late 1950’s.… → Read More
Dealing With the Fascist State
Milton Friedman always wanted to make the welfare state slightly less perverse. He wanted to make education slightly less statist. He proposed vouchers. Supposedly, this was going to lead to greater parental choice. The scheme was nuts from the beginning. No school district ever adopted it. It was fantasy economics, politically speaking. It was designed to make the fascist system slightly more… → Read More
Nobel Prize-Winning Fools
John Mauldin wrote a report that deserves wide circulation. > Benchmarks like the Consumer Price Index try to reflect the experience of an “average” family, but few families are actually average. We all have our own preferences and priorities.And I want to clear up a common misconception. Deflation is actually good for your household budget in that it means that you have to spend less to get… → Read More
Why Christian Anti-Capitalists Are Always Wrong
Professors of liberal arts courses other than economics at obscure little Christian colleges — virtually all Christian colleges are obscure and little — are generally opposed to the free market. They got their Ph.D. degrees way back when, and all they really remember about economics is what they learned in a sociology course. That course satisfied the social science requirement for the B.A. They… → Read More
Eat Meat - LewRockwell L
I am on a vegan diet to deal with my cancer. I eat no animal protein. I probably never will again. That’s because I have cancer, and I have read Dr. John Kelly’s book, Stop Feeding Your Cancer. I have been researching diets for five decades. I was restored to health by Francis Pottenger in 1949-50. His diet had a lot of red meat. It had no refined sugar, no processed white flour, and lots of… → Read More
What You Must Find Out in a Job Interview
The first thing you need before the interview is a copy of the company’s mission statement. Get it before you walk into the interview. First, you want to know if you agree with it. Second, you want to if it is plausible. When asking questions about the company, refer back to this document. Let it guide your line of questioning. You are just trying to find out how things really work. This frame… → Read More
The FDA Is Cancer
The gay lobby was able to overcome the Food and Drug Administration on anti-AIDS “cocktails.” This was one of the few major triumphs of politics over bureaucracy in my lifetime. > Hasini Jayatilaka was a sophomore at the Johns Hopkins University working in a lab studying cancer cells when she noticed that when the cells become too densely packed, some would break off and start spreading.She… → Read More
The Bureaucrats Will Scuttle Trump
Pres. Trump has proposed a $1 trillion boondoggle. He wants to spend this money on infrastructure. This is going to put Obama’s shovel-ready, anti-recession boondoggle to shame. Only it isn’t going to happen. It didn’t happen for Obama, either. Here is what happened — or didn’t happen. > Back in 2009, former President Barack Obama made some lofty promises about the infrastructure overhaul… → Read More