The Democrats are at full froth daily, so they missed this crucial part regarding why Trump’s tariff agenda is a bit surprising: the man is precisely enacting what he promised. Throughout the 2024 election, the president said that he would return American wealth and end the great exodus of dollars that has gutted America’s working class. The elites and the rich have lost mountains of cash as markets are resetting—so much for Trump pushing policies that benefit the wealthy. Trump is doing, frankly, what Senator Bernie Sanders wanted to do back in 2019. So, what’s the problem?
It's time to stand fast. The market sell-off is being induced for two reasons: one, this was going to happen, tariffs or not, as the unnecessary spending under Biden is over. Second, the elites and the globalist cabal stand to lose the gravy train if Trump succeeds. They’re betting against the American worker, an insane wager, and hope to scare the nation into placing pressure on Congress to push back on the tariffs. Trump has no prospect of election on the horizon, so it’s balls to the wall on everything.
“Shark Tank’s” Kevin O’Leary had a great lecture about business and noted that successful people can distinguish signal from noise. The signal is the mandate, and noise is everything else. O’Leary spoke about developing educational software for Steve Jobs, notably “The Oregon Trail,” where a new version was in development for the next quarter. It would cost millions, but someone suggested doing a market research study of 110,000 schools, gauging teacher feedback on some features. Jobs blew a gasket, as he often did when he disagreed with his employees, which was frequently, to which he told O’Leary’s team they—the teachers (or customers)—don’t know what they want until I tell them. When O’Leary pushed back, Jobs asked if we were dominating, making money, and increasing market share? The answer was “yes” to all three, so why are we wasting time with a market research poll—they’re developing a new version; that’s the sign.
“Shut up and let’s just stay focused,” Jobs said to O’Leary.
The “Shark Tank” co-host said this was 85 percent signal; doesn’t care about your opinion, and is laser-focused on the objective and creating results. He added that Elon Musk is a 100 percent signal: the Tesla CEO will walk away from any meeting or conversation if he feels the discussion isn’t progressing toward his goals.
Is that Trump with tariffs? We’ll see. He’s committed to returning high-skill American manufacturing jobs to America. More than two-thirds of the country wants it, which puts the Wall Street artificial shock syndrome into perspective. The elites don’t like this; instead, they are hooked on mainlining unfettered free trade that’s become so unhinged that voters from the Democratic and Republican parties now hold more protectionist views on trade. That was exposed during the 2016 election, where Hillary Clinton had to do some serious retconning to that effect.
The de-industrialization and the “world is flat” globalist cadre allowed our working class to be cannibalized. Millions of jobs went overseas, while the ones that remained stateside were gobbled up, thanks to illegal immigration. Business conservatives love their slave labor, so there are enemies everywhere in this fight.
Stay focused. Stand fast. Let’s make American manufacturing great again.
There are a lot of things President Donald Trump wants to accomplish with his tariffs, but part of it seems to be to restore manufacturing jobs to America.
Immediately after World War II, we were the manufacturing juggernaut of the entire world. We had a developed economy, and we weren't bombed back into the 19th Century in the largest war anyone had ever seen on this planet. We could produce goods, and no one else really could.
Trump is trying to bring that back.
Now, though, a lot of people are asking, "Do Americans want to work in factories?"
I'm pretty sure that most of them don't. Children don't grow up dreaming about working on an assembly line making widgets that they don't care anything about. Most people have dreams to do literally anything else.
It just doesn't matter, and we need to stop pretending that it does.
Look, dreams are fine. Dreams are good, even. They make us aspire to different things. Elon Musk's dreams are poised to take us to Mars years after NASA gave up even trying.
Dreams are great.
But dreams are also out of reach in far too many cases.
Back in my day, kids dreamed of being professional athletes, rock stars, or actors all the time. Literally none of my senior class achieved anything of the sort. We all landed in far more mundane occupations. Some of those were, in fact, the realization of other dreams, but many of those were people just settling for something that would pay well since Plan "A" didn't pan out.
Today, the dreams are different — a lot of kids want to be "influencers" on top of the other stuff, which I get because that looks really easy — but the odds of achieving it are still slim to none for most people.
By all means, work toward those dreams, but at some point, you've got to pay the bills.
That means getting a job, but not everyone can go to college. Not all of those who do complete it. That means we end up with a lot of people without college degrees who need jobs that will help them live out the rest of the American dream.
Manufacturing jobs can provide just that. I've worked manual labor in my life. I've worked in office settings and from home as a writer. I've been in factories and warehouses to earn a paycheck. What I'm doing now is a dream come true for me — the acting thing never worked out for me, unfortunately — but I had to pay the bills for years before it ever could.
I didn't want to do any of that. None of it was work I wanted.
It was, however, work that provided a living, supported my wife and children, and put food on the table.
What people want to do isn't the metric anyone should be using when looking at the possibility of manufacturing coming back to the United States. No, the metric we should consider is whether it would improve the lives of tens of thousands of Americans who are currently making less than they could if they were on an assembly line somewhere.
Dreams are great, but reality doesn't care about your hopes and aspirations. At some point, people have to pull up their Big Girl/Big Boy pants — and there are no third options here, for the They/Them crowd, so get bent — and take care of business. Want to still work on your dream on the side? Fan-freaking-tastic. Go for it and I hope you find success.
Until then, earn your pay and pay your bills, and if a manufacturing job will make it easier to do both, do you really care if that's what you wanted to do when you were a kid?
I know. You’re tired of pundits opining on the unconstitutionality of various courts declaring that Trump can’t fire people or that he must send USAID money, keep sex deniers in the military, and so on. In those cases, the judges often get outside their lanes, accepting cases that Congress assigned to other courts or not to the courts at all.
For example, Congress explicitly ordered that immigration cases have to go through immigration courts. The appeal from those courts is through the Circuit Court of Appeals, bypassing petty tyrants such as James Boasberg, who, if you’ve been listening, isn’t on an Immigration court. He’s a judge in a District Court, the level that Congress said should never see an immigration case. There’s also good authority that, when it comes to alien enemies, the courts are out of the picture entirely. But the Supreme Court sits on its thumbs.
It’s time to change gears. Once again, we’re in the Southern District of New York, based in Manhattan (like Judge Boasberg). But this time, the Judge is Edgardo Ramos, and the case is Calce v. City of N.Y. This should have been a really simple one. Calce (and several others) work in New York City. Co-plaintiff Kennedy lives in Connecticut. All of them would like to buy stun guns to carry for self-defense. The Supreme Court has made it clear that the mere threat of losing a constitutional right is enough to get them into court. They don’t have to get arrested first. Thank heaven for small favors.
But that’s all Calce gets. She’s in the communist court for New York, which has no regard for the law. I know you think I’m overstating the case, but hear me out. New York Penal Law § 265.01 bans possession of stun guns. Simply having one is enough to get you thrown in jail. The law is explicit. You don’t have to have any kind of criminal intent. But this 1985 law is blatantly unconstitutional. Don’t take my word for it. We’ll get there in a bit.
The problem isn’t that the law is unconstitutional. It’s that the judge doesn’t care that it’s unconstitutional. And he gives the same degree of concern to his standing as a judge of an “inferior court.” No, that doesn’t mean that the District Court isn’t as good as others. It means that, as Hebrew National hot dog ads said, he “answers to a higher power.” Or at least he’s supposed to.
Article III of the Constitution opens with “The Judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” That means that the District Court is at the bottom of the food chain. Between it and the Supreme Court lies the Court of Appeals for its Circuit. The Circuit Court is the court designed to correct “reversible error.” If the District Judge screws up, it’s the Circuit’s job to fix it. Above the Circuit is the Supreme Court, which is designed to solve the tough cases and, in the words of John Marshall, “affirmatively declare what the law is.” In doing that, it establishes precedents for the lower courts to apply.
Once a precedent is established, the inferior courts, both Circuit and District, are obligated to follow it. As District Judge Hendrix said in U.S. v. Rahimi, he would rather rule differently, but he is “constrained by the Fifth Circuit’s decision in McGinnis. This Court cannot depart from that precedent unless and until the Fifth Circuit or the Supreme Court directs otherwise.”
Unfortunately, those lower courts in blue states love to ignore the plain language of Supreme Court decisions. On gun cases, as Mark W. Smith notes in theHarvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, “some lower courts have seized upon a single sentence inBruenthat states that ‘[w]hile the historical analogies here and inHeller are relatively simple to draw, other cases implicatingunprecedented societal concernsordramatic technological changesmay require amore nuancedapproach.’”
In other words, we can forget the clear statement by the Supreme Court that says that weapons in common use for peaceful purposes are fully protected. That ruling means you can’t outlaw ARs, AKs, and their standard 30-round magazines. Instead, these courts allege that the development of semiautomatic firearms and their accessories constitutes an “unprecedented societal concern or dramatic technological change.”
Basic facts don’t concern blue courts. They simply want to figure out a way to dress up their politics as law. But the Calce case takes the cake. When Hellerbecame the law of the land in 2008, it wasn’t clear if the Second Amendment applied to state-level actions. However, the McDonald decision in 2009 made it clear that all the rights in the Bill of Rights applied to citizens in every state. Then, on point for our discussion, the 2016 Caetano decision should have completely settled the stun gun question.
The Massachusetts Supreme Court had held that stun guns were not protected. They offered several reasons, all of which were rejected by the US Supreme Court. In short, stun guns are in common use for lawful purposes, per Heller, and are therefore protected in every state by the Second Amendment. We should note that Calce is even in the same Circuit as Caetano. An honest judge would say something similar to what Judge Hendrix said. Instead, in an act of blatant judicial disobedience, the court upheld New York’s ban on stun guns.
This same sort of confabulation is found in the 9th Circus Court of Appeals ruling in Duncan v. Bonta. We can skip the shenanigans that this liberal Court pulled in getting past the Supreme Court’s explicit directions in Heller and Bruen. California bans “high capacity” magazines that hold more than ten rounds. Somehow, like the stun gun in Calce, if you are in a specific communist state, your right to keep and bear arms doesn’t exist.
The fact that literally billions of these magazines are used by citizens for lawful purposes doesn’t matter to them. Somehow, they aren’t “arms” to be protected by the Second Amendment. But remember that the Amendment doesn’t protect “firearms.” It protects “arms,” which is a much broader term. And while you’re at it, watch Judge Lawrence VanDyke’s brilliant video dissent.
The Supreme Court clearly stated in Heller that the government must prove that an “arm” is not protected. As Stephen Halbrook notes, “it is not the plaintiff’s burden to establish “common use” but the government’s burden to show an “arm” is not in common use.” Calce and Duncan have courts turning that standard on its head. Leftist judges aren’t doing these gymnastics in just gun cases. Judge Boasberg is turning backflips in immigration cases where he doesn’t even have the authority to rule. Welcome to NewSpeak, where up is down.
I can’t yet support plans to impeach judges or eliminate billets, but I hope that the Supreme Court will promptly take appeals to the rulings by these subversive judges. SCOTUS has relisted Ocean State Tactical v. Rhode Islandmultiple times without granting cert. It’s a clone of Duncan. Multiple other similar cases are in the pipeline. The great mystery is why SCOTUS is dawdling. It’s time for a major league smackdown on insubordination by inferior courts.
Much of this could be fixed by Chief Justice Roberts, who is the ultimate supervisor of the lower courts. A few phone calls would clarify that he’s p/o-ed at lower courts dissing the Supreme. Many of those cases will be dead on arrival at SCOTUS, so don’t waste our time with your petty rebellion. America deserves better.
Unfortunately, I don’t see Roberts having the spine to do his job.
On Tuesday, the United States Senate voted to confirm Elbridge Colby to serve as the Department of Defense's UnderSecretary for Policy, the #3 role in the Pentagon, affirming another of President Trump's nominations. Colby came under some questioning in the confirmation process over his views on the relative importance of the United States' roles in the Middle East and Europe as opposed to the Pacific.
The Senate voted Tuesday to confirm Elbridge Colby, President Trump’s “lightning rod” pick to serve as the Pentagon’s under secretary for policy, despite the private concerns of several Republican senators about Colby’s past statements and views.
The chamber voted 54-45 to confirm the nominee, who will hold the No. 3-ranking job at the Pentagon and be in charge of briefing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on all defense policy matters.
That's a comfortable margin, although a couple of Republicans voted no, at least one expressing concern over Colby's prioritization of the Pacific theater.
Notably, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), an outspoken advocate for projecting American military strength throughout the world and supporting NATO allies, voted against Colby.
McConnell voiced concern about what he called Colby’s desire to prioritize U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific over those in Europe, Ukraine and the Middle East.
“Abandoning Ukraine and Europe and downplaying the Middle East to prioritize the Indo-Pacific is not a clever geopolitical chess move. It is geostrategic self-harm that emboldens our adversaries and drives wedges between America and our allies for them to exploit,” he said in a statement explaining his vote.
It's important to note that, despite the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East and the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, China remains the United States' primary geopolitical adversary. They are casting some increasingly ambitious eyes at Taiwan, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has already made steps that appear to support such a realignment.
Taiwan, of course, is a friendly nation and, unlike mainland (Communist) China, has a freely elected representative government. Taiwan and Taiwanese companies are also major suppliers of semiconductors. We have a quasi-treaty obligation to support Taiwan militarily if China attacks, but that support would likely be logistical and not necessarily direct military support.
In military matters as in economic matters, China is the elephant in the room, and they will likely one day seek to supplant the United States as the primary power in the Pacific. But Colby is aware not only of Taiwan's importance but that of Europe:
He assured (Senator Tom) Cotton (R-AR), a leading defense hawk, that he thinks Taiwan is “very important” to the United States.
He also told Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) that he views NATO as an important alliance, even though he believes it has to “adapt.”
It's a complicated world, politically and militarily, and it's only going to become more so.
There's another elephant in the room, albeit a smaller one: Iran. During his confirmation hearings, Colby pledged that he would provide President Trump with "credible and realistic" plans and options to deprive the Islamic Republic of its nuclear weapons program. And, in the end, we should remember that Colby is an advisor, even as his boss, SecDef Hegseth, advises the president. In the end, any military decision is President Trump's to make.
The banking elites who had long wanted to control money and credit succeeded when they created the Fed in 1913. They claimed it would benefit the little guy — but it was a scam. ...
Thomas DiLorenzo for thenewamerican.com
Most Americans have little or no idea what “the Fed” is or does, despite the fact that, ever since its creation in 1913, it has had monopolistic control over the money supply in the country and regulated virtually every type of financial transaction. When Tucker Carlson interviewed former Congressman Ron Paul on his podcast, he recalled how, when Paul was running for the Republican Party nomination and was giving a speech at Michigan State University, hundreds of students began spontaneously chanting “End the Fed!” Carlson said he was taken aback by this since he, as a professional journalist, was paid to know at least something about the Fed but did not. The Michigan State University students obviously did — they had been reading and listening to Paul’s speeches.
The pervasive lack of awareness of the Fed’s activities, as with so much else the government does, is what economists call “rational ignorance.” When it comes to educating ourselves, we spend most of our time and effort on our own education, jobs, family matters, paying the bills — our private lives. We spend very little time and effort learning about what the hundreds of government agencies of all types are doing. This is why the late Rush Limbaugh referred to most Americans as “low-information voters.”
Politicians have always understood this, which is why so many of them are habitual liars and deceivers. Indeed, when Alexander Hamilton made his case for creating a national bank run by politicians in his 1790 Report on a National Bank, his political nemesis, Thomas Jefferson, responded by saying that it was intentionally confusing, a subterfuge designed to fool the public into acquiescing to a vast, unconstitutional expansion of governmental powers. Jefferson was right on the money, as usual.
Forerunner: The First Bank of the United States, set up at the urging of Alexander Hamilton, was America’s first central bank — although, unlike the modern Federal Reserve, it did not have the power to print money or the authority to purchase government bonds. But it did set the precedent that the federal government should have its finger on the scale of finance by being involved in the banking business. (Public Domain)
Jefferson pointed out that the Constitutional Convention had discussed — and rejected — Hamilton’s proposal for a national bank, and that no such thing was included in the delegated powers (assigned by the states to the federal government) in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. In what may be the very first significant snub of the constitutional limits on government, George Washington signed legislation creating the first central bank, the Bank of the United States (BUS), in 1791. The BUS was 80-percent privately owned, with the government owning the other 20 percent. It was the first great monopolistic collusion scheme between business and government in America. The BUS promptly did what Jefferson and the Jeffersonians feared: It inflated the currency, causing 72-percent price inflation from 1791 to 1796, and continued to do so for the next 15 years. Consequently, its 20-year charter was not renewed by Congress.
The War of 1812 was used as an excuse to revive the BUS in 1816 as a means of helping to pay for the war debt, and the BUS quickly became known for its “mismanagement, speculation, and fraud,” wrote James J. Kilpatrick in The Sovereign States. Its monetary expansion created bubbles in the economy, and when they burst — as economic bubbles inevitably do — the result was the first great depression in America, known as the “Panic of 1819.” The revived BUS also extended cheap credit to politically favored borrowers, causing great corruption — so much so that President Andrew Jackson claimed that it “impaired the morals of our people, corrupted our statesmen, and threatened our liberty. It bought up members of Congress by the Dozen ... subverted the electoral process, and sought to destroy republican institutions.” This last claim by Jackson referred to how the BUS had subsidized the campaigns of its favored political candidates.
President Jackson famously vetoed the renewal charter of the Second BUS in 1832, and it eventually went out of business and into the dustbin of history. In his veto message to Congress, Jackson said that the BUS was an example of how “the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” Such institutions “make the rich richer and the potent more powerful.... The humble members of society ... who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government.”
It would take another eight decades or so before the banking industry’s cabal of corruption could get the government to create another central bank that would benefit the cabal at the expense of the rest of the population. That was the Federal Reserve System, or simply “the Fed.”
Inherent Corruption
To understand the essential nature of the Fed and central banking in America, it will be helpful to examine it in light of the government/business relationship, often referred to as “crony capitalism.” As the name suggests, crony capitalism is not real, free-market capitalism, but a system whereby government coercion is employed to benefit not the public in general, but politically connected businesses — usually against the public’s interests — by creating some type of monopoly and, subsequently, higher prices.
From the beginning of the Republic to the Civil War, the great economic debates in American politics were mostly about whether or not the United States should adopt elements of the British “mercantilist” system that the American Revolution was fought to secede from. This British system was given the name “The American System” by Alexander Hamilton. It was later championed by Henry Clay, and then by Abraham Lincoln, who considered Clay to be his political role model or, as he once put it, his “beau ideal of a statesman.”
The system involved what we today call tax-funded corporate welfare for politically connected businesses, tariffs to protect mostly Northern state manufacturers from foreign competition (and to “protect” consumers from lower prices), and a national bank — controlled by politicians even if it was partly privately owned. This was really the Hamiltonian/British system, not an American system, that was championed by Hamilton and his political descendants and opposed by Jefferson and the Jeffersonians for roughly the first 75 years of the American Republic. By the eve of the Civil War, almost none of it had been adopted, as the Jeffersonians had more or less prevailed. Things, however, were about to change.
With the Republican Party holding monopolistic control of the federal government during the war and for decades thereafter, all of the Hamiltonian system was put into place. The average tariff rate went from 15 percent to more than 50 percent, and remained there until the federal income tax was adopted in 1913. The floodgates of corporate welfare were opened with massive subsidies to railroad corporations to build transcontinental railroads. There was no central bank, but the Legal Tender Act of 1862 created the “greenback” dollar and taxed competing currencies out of existence. The National Currency Acts of 1863 and 1864 created a regime, if not an actual central bank, that had regulatory powers over banking. These regulatory powers were steppingstones to a central bank, albeit not the real thing.
They could not, of course, tell the public the truth — that their real objective was to disguise corporate welfare to their political benefactors. They needed to bamboozle the people with talk of how government regulation would supposedly be enforced to serve “the public interest.” This was pure Hamiltonianism, for Hamilton himself used “public interest,” “national interest,” and other such rhetoric to describe his quintessentially special-interest politics, such as corporate welfare and protectionist tariffs. Such policies would drive up the prices of certain products while enriching politically connected corporations at the expense of their hapless customers forced to pay higher prices for the same or shoddier products.
The very first federal regulatory agency was the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), created in 1887 — 26 years before the founding of the Fed. There was a railroad-building boom after the Civil War, and competition among railroad corporations was fierce, causing passenger rates to plummet year after year. The corporations complained bitterly of “cutthroat competition” and attempted to create price-fixing cartels, but they invariably failed because of cheating with secret rebates by members of the cartels, proving once again the old adage that there’s no honor among thieves.
Giving up on attempts at collusion to fix prices, the railroad corporations endorsed government regulation of their own businesses, obviously confident that they, not the vaunted public, would benefit most from the regulation. They were certainly right about that. The first commissioner of the ICC was one Thomas Cooley, a lawyer/lobbyist who, like Lincoln himself, had represented railroad corporations for many years. He lobbied Congress to give the ICC even more regulatory powers. One of the first things he did with those powers was to address the “problem” of long-haul rates being lower than short-haul rates, a sort of quantity discount offered by some railroads. Cooley’s “solution” to this non-problem was to outlaw the lower rates! That was always the policy of the ICC with regard to railroads: Always keep rates higher, never lower. Price fixing did not work when it depended on voluntary agreements among price-fixing conspirators, but it did work when the coercive powers of government could be employed to make it work.
When trucks began competing with railroads, trucking-industry lobbyists came to dominate the ICC and created a government-enforced price-fixing scheme for themselves as well. The ICC restricted the number of truckers who could be licensed, reducing the supply and thereby increasing the price of trucking; granted monopoly routes to certain trucking companies; and forced long-haul truckers to return from a trip empty, reducing the supply of trucking services even further and making trucking even more expensive.
The airline industry followed suit in the 1930s with the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), which severely restricted competition, directed routes, prohibited price cutting, and essentially made air travel too expensive for working-class Americans until the airline industry was deregulated and the CAB abolished in the late 1970s/early 1980s.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was vigorous competition in all the public-utility industries, including electric lights, telephone, water supply, natural gas, and others. As with the railroads, there were many attempts at private price fixing, but they all failed. Also as with the railroads, the public-utility industries then turned to government to enforce their monopolistic pricing practices. The technique was to have state or local governments decree that one company should be the monopoly supplier of utility services, and then share the monopolistic loot with state or local governments. One of the very first instances of this was in Maryland, where, in 1890, the Baltimore Gas Light Company contracted to pay the city of Baltimore $10,000 annually and three percent of all dividends declared in return for a government grant of monopoly, as described in The Gas Light Company of Baltimore by George T. Brown. City after city followed suit, all the while blaming the monopolies that theycreated on free-market competition by labeling them “natural monopolies.” Many other industries, including banking, jumped on the “natural monopoly” bandwagon and lobbied for government-mandated monopolies for themselves.
Hence, the political atmosphere of “progressivism” in which the Fed was founded in 1913 was one of myriad crooked conspiracies whereby businesses and governments colluded and conspired to create government-mandated monopolistic privileges for various businesses and industries. The industries then shared the monopolistic loot with the governments that had granted them their monopoly status and, of course, financially supported the politicians responsible for the whole scam in the first place.
Today there is much talk of the “capture theory of regulation,” made famous decades ago by University of Chicago economists and highlighted in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s book The Real Anthony Fauci, which discusses how the pharmaceutical corporations have “captured” the public health bureaucracies in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, especially the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Historically speaking, however, these bureaucracies were seldom “captured.” Their very creation was often lobbied for in the first place by big businesses in various industries, so that there was nothing to “capture.” Hiding behind the rhetoric of the “public interest,” the regulatory bureaucracies were always intended to serve special interests, not the undefinable “public interest.” This is true of the Federal Reserve System as much as or more than any industry.
Not-so-immaculate Conception
In a free market, banks make money by charging a higher interest rate for the money they lend than the rate they pay on bank deposits. However, banks have always been tempted to lend far more money than they hold in deposits, or reserves — hence the term “fractional reserve banking.”
In the first half of the 19th century, when there were still competing currencies issued by various banks, banks with higher levels of reserves (often in the form of gold and silver) were seen as more trustworthy, and therefore their currencies were more widely used. Banks that lent, say, a hundred times the amount of their reserves experienced the opposite, and often went bankrupt. This is easy to understand: If for some reason such a bank’s customers started demanding their deposits back, that bank would quickly run out of money and go out of business. Competition “regulated” the banking system in the same way that it does all industries.
It was Lincoln who ended competition in banking by creating the “greenback” dollar as the monopoly currency while taxing the other currencies out of the market.
Dixie dough: The ten-dollar note, or “dix” (French for “ten”), issued by the Citizens’ Bank of Louisiana was considered very sound, and its popularity across the South was the origin of the word “Dixie.” (Photo: Public Domain)
For example, in the first part of the 19th century, farmers and merchants from “up river” on the Mississippi would sell their wares and agricultural products in New Orleans and be paid in a currency issued by the Citizens’ Bank of Louisiana that was called the “dix,” which is French for “ten.” They would return home boasting of having a “pocket full of Dixies,” and that is how the South became known as “The Land of Dixie.” The dix was issued by a bank with a very high percentage of reserves, and was therefore so reliable that it was routinely used in Minnesota and all over the Midwest. It could be exchanged for gold or silver all over the country.
As with the railroads, the public utilities, and other industries during the latter part of the 19th century, corporate executives in the banking industry began to oppose competition. According to them, it was too risky to essentially engage in legalized counterfeiting by lending out hundreds of times the amount of money they had in reserve, risking bank runs and bankruptcy. They and their lobbyists complained bitterly for decades that the money supply was too “inelastic” — meaning that competition among banks restricted their ability to profit from a legalized counterfeiting operation.
They employed a small army of academics and intellectuals to make the case for a banking system that would use the coercive powers of government to allow them to expand their loans far beyond what their reserves would allow for in a competitive system. They wanted what they called a “lender of last resort,” a euphemism for government-funded bailouts of their counterfeiting scheme. In other words, they wanted a government-enforced cartel for the banking industry just like the ones in the railroads, public utilities, and other industries. Having failed to cartelize the banking industry privately, they wanted to do what these other industries had done and use the government to be their cartel enforcer. The Mafia-style enforcer (minus all the broken kneecaps) would be the Federal Reserve System.
Economist Murray Rothbard explained the purpose of the Fed in his History of Money and Banking in the United States as follows: “The financial elites of this country … were responsible for putting through the Federal Reserve System, as a governmentally created and sanctioned cartel device to enable the nation’s banks to inflate the money supply in a coordinated fashion, without suffering quick retribution from depositors or noteholders demanding cash.”
In addition, the banking industry recruited myriad academics, especially economists, to dream up theories about why monopoly is better than competition in the banking business. “To achieve the Leviathan state,” Rothbard wrote, “interests seeking special privilege, and intellectuals offering scholarship and ideology, must work hand in hand.” This is as true today as it was in 1913. Economist Larry White of George Mason University published an article in a peer-reviewed economics journal (Economic Journal Watch, August 2005) in which he reported that 74 percent of all academic journal articles published in the field of monetary economics were authored or co-authored by Fed employees or published in Fed journals. Pro-Fed bias is so pervasive that the late Milton Friedman once remarked that if one wanted an academic career as a monetary economist (like Friedman), then it would be a good idea to not criticize the major employer in the field.
Legalized Counterfeiting
The Fed started out by serving as a “lender of last resort” and essentially bailing out unsuccessful bankers. Then, in 1933, a law was passed allowing it to engage in the monetization of government debt by purchasing government bonds. Consequently, the Fed literally counterfeits currency, which it then uses to purchase government bonds. This is the major way it injects billions of dollars into the banking system, creating price inflation and seemingly never-ending boom-and-bust cycles. The big New York investment banks have always been the primary dealers in these government-bond purchases, and have become extraordinarily wealthy and politically influential by doing so. That is why the U.S. treasury secretary is almost always a former CEO of Goldman Sachs or one of the other big New York investment banks. (They were given that name decades ago because they dealt mostly with lending to corporations to create or expand their businesses.)
Rather than encouraging banks to hold on to reserves sufficient to avoid bankruptcy through “bank runs” of depositors demanding their deposits, the Fed allows virtually unlimited lending. It does this through its “reserve ratio,” which is the percentage of a bank’s reserves that it must hold and not lend out. While this “requirement” has been as high as 10 percent, as of January 2025, the Fed’s required reserve requirement was 0.0 percent! The Fed website and sites such as Investopedia explain that the purpose of the reserve ratio is to assure the public that their banks have sufficient reserves so that they don’t have to worry about not being able to get their cash on demand. That, of course, is just more pro-Fed propaganda in light of the current reserve “requirement.”
The dollar has depreciated tremendously since the Fed’s founding in 1913, despite the fact that the Fed is supposed to be an inflation fighter. A typical market basket of consumer goods that cost $108 in 1913 would cost $2,422 today, thanks to decades of Fed-generated price inflation. The highest rates of price inflation in America’s history have occurred under the Fed’s watch.
The Fed claims that one of its jobs is to “stabilize” the business cycle to avoid dramatic inflationary “booms” and unemployment-increasing “busts.” But the academic research of University of California at Berkeley’s Professor Christina Romer — President Barack Obama’s chief economist — showed that the business cycle was less stable after the Fed was created than it was before.
Another key tool of the Fed in its ostensible quest to stabilize the U.S. economy is the manipulation of interest rates. There are essentially two ways to reduce interest rates: If people save more, the supply of loanable funds in the banking system will increase. According to the laws of supply and demand, this will cause a reduction in interest rates, inducing businesses to invest more because lower rates make investment projects or business expansions look more profitable. Or, the Fed can inject money into the banking system by simply counterfeiting it and purchasing government bonds from investment banks, or lowering the reserve ratio from 10 percent to 0.0 percent. In the former case, consumers increase their future purchasing power because they have saved more. In the latter case, they have not. This is what causes the bust — and all the unemployment, bankruptcies, and suffering that come with it. Businesses that have expanded or created new ventures eventually realize that the market for their goods or services is not as big as they thought, and many of them are unable to complete their investment projects.
The creation of boom-and-bust cycles is one thing the Fed has excelled at — along with massively depreciating the dollar — since its inception. The Fed was created in 1913. Its policies led to the Depression of 1920, in which the unemployment rate was higher than in the first year of the next decade’s Great Depression, caused by the Fed’s monetary inflation in the late 1920s. The Fed’s reckless monetary expansions have caused seemingly endless economic crises, including those in 1953, 1957, 1960, 1969, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1990, 2001, 2008, and 2020.
It’s not just bankers, Wall Street speculators, the real estate industry, and other related entities that profit from the Fed’s inflation and boom-and-bust policies. The State and all of its bureaucratic appendages benefit from the Fed’s legalized counterfeiting operation because the people are fooled into thinking they can get something for nothing, whether that “something” is subsidizing foreign wars that have nothing to do with defending America, an ever-expanding welfare state, free hotel rooms, welfare, smartphones, air transportation for illegal aliens, or anything else the government spends money on. As Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, for example, if governments were constrained to finance their projects with taxes instead of printing money, there would be far fewer wars, and the wars that did exist would be of shorter duration. The same can be said of all other federal government programs. Without the Fed, the federal government would be far closer to focusing on its core constitutional functions instead of the anything-and-everything of today.
To save the American economy from national bankruptcy, the Fed must be abolished by repealing the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, thereby getting the nation’s money supply out of the hands of politicians, bureaucrats, and their academic propagandists and special-interest benefactors. Private property, private enterprise, and competition in currency must be restored so that all of America can become a modern-day version of the Land of Dixie, with competitive currencies backed by more than the promises of lifetime-tenured politicians (as most members of Congress are, essentially) and self-serving federal bureaucrats and their academic court historians.
About a decade ago. social psychologist Jonathan Haidt did a series of studies that showed that conservatives and moderates are quite good at anticipating the values and priorities of liberals, but liberals are quite bad at understanding how conservatives think.
Other studies show that conservatives have a more grounded understanding of the news than liberals, who have a much larger bias than conservatives when interpreting the news.
Now yet another study has shown that conservatives have much more empathy for their political opponents who are experiencing difficulties or pain than liberals do.
Liberals, who base their entire moral philosophy on claims to being empathetic and even on weaponizing empathy to get what they want (give me your money to help the homeless and building an entire industry around NOT helping the homeless), are generally unsympathetic to conservatives experiencing pain or trouble.
In today’s polarized political landscape, the ability to understand and empathize with those across the aisle has reached concerning lows. New research published in Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin reveals an asymmetry in this empathy deficit: liberals consistently show less empathy toward their conservative peers than vice versa.
President Joe Biden’s inaugural call to “stand in the other person’s shoes” highlighted empathy as crucial for healing national divisions. Yet many people find it hard to feel for political opponents. Empathy—defined as sympathy for and understanding of another’s suffering with the aim of reducing it—is widely seen as essential for improving intergroup relations, but tends to diminish when directed toward those outside one’s political or social group.
James P. Casey and colleagues conducted four preregistered studies examining how political ideology shapes intergroup empathy bias and why such differences arise. The researchers recruited 4,737 participants, roughly evenly split between liberals and conservatives, from online platforms including Prolific, CloudResearch, and MTurk.
Study 1 involved 549 U.S. participants, while Study 2 included 958 U.K. participants. Study 3 and Study 4 sampled 1,372 and 1,874 U.S. participants, respectively, with recruitment spanning both conservative and liberal administrations to account for political context.
In each study, participants read a short scenario describing a person undergoing a mild hardship (e.g., a sprained ankle). The person was identified as politically conservative, liberal, or neutral. Participants then rated their emotional responses using several scales: empathic concern (e.g., sympathy), perspective-taking, empathic intentions (e.g., willingness to help), and empathic avoidance.
Mediating variables included perceptions of the target’s morality, likability, similarity to the self, and, in later studies, the perceived harm caused by the target’s political group. Ingroup political power was also measured to assess whether the party in power influenced empathic responses.
Across all four studies, participants consistently showed lower empathy for political outgroup members than for ingroup or neutral targets. However, this bias was not symmetrical. Liberals exhibited significantly less empathy for conservatives than conservatives showed for liberals. In Study 1, this asymmetry was driven by liberals’ stronger negative judgments of conservatives’ morality and likability. Conservatives’ empathic responses remained relatively stable regardless of the target’s political affiliation.
Study 2 confirmed these findings in the U.K. sample, where British liberals also exhibited stronger empathy bias against conservatives, mediated by perceptions of morality, likability, and similarity. Study 3 demonstrated that even after the shift to a Democratic administration in the U.S., liberals continued to judge conservatives as more harmful and immoral, leading to reduced empathy. Study 4 further validated this pattern with a larger sample, strengthening the evidence for the link between perceived group harm and diminished empathy.
There are, I suppose, some conservatives out there who would be surprised by this finding, but I certainly don't know any of them.
For years, conservatives have endured insults, wishes for our death, threats of many kinds (and worse, as you know if you own a Tesla or work at a Tesla showroom), have watched liberals call Luigi Mangione a hero, and have been harassed at work, on the streets, and watched late-night comics joke about us dying en masse.
Throughout the COVID pandemic, liberals talked about taking away parental rights of COVID vaccine skeptics, putting them in concentration camps, letting them die, and literally chasing them around grocery stores and even assaulting people not wearing masks. The level of rage was off the charts, and not once did it occur to them that they were being evil.
Columns showed up in papers like the Los Angeles Times calling for the mocking of the deaths of people who did not take the vaccine, which, to be sure, was totally on-brand for liberals. They considered it a positive good--bullying people to "do the right thing" despite the fact that they had no real idea what the right thing really was is typical of the Left.
The study I referred to was not some fly-by-night effort to prove a point--it was actually quite rigorous, although in social sciences these days, it's pretty easy to poke holes in any study, admittedly.
But the reality is that this phenomenon is precisely what every conservative I know has experienced in their day-to-day life. When I was taking a break from politics a few years back and dabbling in photography and selling cameras, my colleagues spent much of the day talking about how evil conservatives were. Which, to be honest, seemed really weird to me. It's not like photography and politics overlapped, but they were obsessed with attacking conservatives without regard to the fact that one was standing right next to them as they were doing it.
Politics was an essential part--the essential part, it seemed at times--of their identity, and they didn't have a clue about anything of which they were speaking.
Obviously, not all liberals are like this, but go on any college campus, and you see the results of this kind of thinking everywhere you look. Students, grad students, and even professors ripping down the flyers calling for Jewish infants to be returned from Hamas captivity still goes on, as does harassing students who try to avoid participating in the "protests" that shut campuses down and sometimes trap Jewish students behind locked doors.
Often the "empathy" you see from liberals is abstract--what you might call empathy for groups that can only be described with the definite article "the."
The Homeless
The immigrants.
The blacks, the Hispanics, the Asians.
And so on... This is why Thomas Sowell doesn't count as black--because he isn't part of "the" group as they define it. He is the black face of White Supremacy.
It is not an empathy directed at individual people, but at vague groups with shared characteristics, but not toward actual people defined by idiosyncratic personalities. It is "I gave at the office" empathy--paying others to take care of a problem.
We just saw this philosophy play out in North Carolina, where FEMA workers were instructed to not help victims of the hurricane who had Trump signs in their yards. FEMA workers would help people who weren't obvious supporters of Trump, but ignored the plight of Trump supporters.
And, of course, everybody remembers the Biden administration's ignoring the poisoning of East Palestine, OH. Being Vance country, they didn't deserve the government's help.
What is wrong with these people? Simple: they hate us.
So, it is hardly surprising that when confronted by a situation in which they would be expected to show empathy for a particular conservative, they balk. That person is part of an out-group--"the" conservatives. And conservatives are bad, and not fellow human beings.
I know a ton of people who think of themselves as Mother Teresa because they are "happy to pay taxes" to deal with some problem, even though the taxes never seem to make a dent in improving that problem. And when it comes to conservatives in trouble...well, they deserve it, don't they?
The border is getting under control faster than many of us (including me) would have believed possible, and all it took was a new president. Attempted border crossings have dropped to almost none, Tren de Aragua and MS 13 gangbangers are being rounded up and sent to El Salvador to enjoy the gentle and loving ministrations of that nation's Terrorism Confinement Center, and the Biden administration's "Get Out of Immigration Jail Free" app has been re-purposed into the "Go Home Now Before We Find You" app.
Now, the Department of Justice, as part of Operation Take Back America, has slammed criminal charges on over 900 people for violating American immigration law.
Since the inauguration of President Trump, the Department of Justice is playing a critical role in Operation Take back America, a nationwide initiative to repel the invasion of illegal immigration, achieve total elimination of cartels and transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), and protect our communities from perpetrators of violent crime. Operation Take Back America streamlines efforts and resources from the Department’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETFs) and Project Safe Neighborhood (PSN).
Last week, the U.S. Attorneys for Arizona, Central California, Southern California, New Mexico, Southern Texas, and Western Texas charged more than 900 defendants with criminal violations of U.S. immigration laws.
This is what we call "a good start."
Here are a few specifics:
The Southern District of Texas filed 225 cases in relation to immigration and border security. Of those cases, 70 face allegations of illegally reentering the country with the majority having felony convictions such as narcotics, violent and/or sexual crimes and prior immigration offenses, among others.
So, drug smugglers, probably cartel members or at least working for the cartels, as well as sexual predators.
The Western District of Texas filed 259 immigration and immigration-related criminal cases. Among the new cases, Mexican national Miguel Angel Torres-Seguraresided illegally in San Antonio and was arrested March 28 for conspiracy to transport illegal aliens. A criminal complaint alleges that Torres-Segura participated in a human smuggling organization (HSO) that transported illegal aliens using tractor trailers, carrying out at least 19 human smuggling events and leading to the apprehension of more than 900 aliens between May 2021 and June 2022.
A coyote, then, and a busy one at that, who brought over 900 people into the United States illegally.
And, in Arizona:
The District of Arizona brought immigration-related criminal charges against 204 defendants. Specifically, the United States filed 83 cases in which aliens illegally re-entered the United States, and the United States also charged 107 aliens for illegally entering the United States. In its ongoing effort to deter unlawful immigration, the United States also filed 13 cases against 14 individuals responsible for smuggling illegal aliens into and within the District of Arizona.
The Federalist's Senior Legal Correspondent, Margot Cleveland, has an interesting X thread on this you should check out.
She makes some interesting points, including that illegal re-entry - meaning they were kicked out once and tried to sneak back in - is now to be dealt with more severely, and that's as it should be. In any type of crime, repeat offenders eventually end up being punished more severely, except in certain Democrat-controlled urban jurisdictions, where the jails have revolving doors. When it comes to immigration law in the United States, though, boy, howdy, things have changed.
Cleveland also points out that the "leave now" message is liable to be taken a lot more seriously now that people in the country illegally know that they are liable to be charged with a crime if they stay - or if they try to come back after being repatriated once.
