What Real Austerity Is

By Mark Thornton

Austerity has been hotly debated as either an elixir or a poison for tough economic times. But what is austerity? Real austerity means that the government and its employees have less money at their disposal. For the economists at the International Monetary Fund, “austerity” may mean spending cuts, but it also means increasing taxes on the beleaguered public in order to, at all costs, repay the government’s corrupt 

creditors. Keynesian economists reject all forms of austerity. They promote the “borrow and spend” approach that is supposedly scientific and is gentle on the people: paycheck insurance for the unemployed, bailouts for failing businesses, and stimulus packages for everyone else.


Austrian School economists reject both the Keynesian stimulus approach and the IMF-style high-tax, pro-bankster “Austerian” approach. Although “Austrians” are often lumped in with “Austerians,” Austrian School economists support real austerity. This involves cutting government budgets, salaries, employee benefits, retirement benefits, and taxes. It also involves selling government assets and even repudiating government debt.


Despite all the hoopla in countries like Greece, there is no real austerity except in the countries of eastern Europe. For example, Latvia is Europe’s most austere country and also has its fastest growing economy. Estonia implemented an austerity policy that depended largely on cuts in government salaries. There simply is no austerity in most of western Europe or the U.S. As Professor Philipp Bagus explains, “the problem of Europe (and the United States) is not too much but too little austerity—or its complete absence.”


Most of Europe and the U.S. continue to have massive budget deficits and growing national debts relative
to GDP. The Keynesians’ magical multipliers have once again failed to materialize. Given that most of these
economies have not achieved growth from stimulus, they should give the idea of true austerity a fresh look.


Austerity for individuals, means living a highly restricted lifestyle. The best example is the monk who
lives on a subsistence diet, wears simple clothing, possesses a few basic pieces of furniture, and uses only necessary utensils. His days consist of long hours of work and prayer with no leisure activities and he may not even enjoy indoor heating and plumbing.


Austerity applied to whole countries, is not necessarily so harsh or ascetic. It simply means that the government has to live within its means.

Read the rest of the article from the Mises Institute's monthy publication call The Free Market

Ron Paul's Farewell Speech

Ron Paul's Response to the State of the Union Address

Spielberg's Sovietization of U.S. History

By Thomas J. DiLorenzo

When Steve Spielberg’s movie "Lincoln" came out Time magazine featured interviews with him and his historical advisor on the film, Doris Kearns-Goodwin. Spielberg said the movie is based on part of Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals, because he was so impressed with her scholarship and the great detail and abundance of historical facts in the book. Goodwin herself wrote in Time that she spent ten years researching and writing the book to assure audiences that the movie was in fact very, very well researched. (This project was commenced shortly after she was kicked off the Pulitzer Prize committee and PBS for confessing to plagiarism related to an earlier book of hers).

Time’s cover story included another article by another historian, in order to further persuade Americans that the movie portrays The True Story about the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution that ended slavery. Another major theme of the movie, one which is accurate but not developed nearly enough, is how much of a political conniver, liar and manipulator Lincoln was, and how he ignored the law and the Constitution in myriad ways. This was brought out in the movie so that the punditry could then editorialize about how President Obama should be "more like Lincoln" and ignore any and all constitutional constraints on presidential powers. The punditry did indeed behave in exactly that way before and after the November election.

A couple of years before the movie came out Goodwin was a pervasive presence on various news programs proclaiming how brilliant and magnanimous Lincoln was to have appointed several former political rivals to his cabinet and praising Obama for doing the same (keeping Bush’s Defense Secretary, for instance). In an LRC article entitled "Team of Liars" I pointed out that numerous presidents had done exactly the same thing for generations prior to the Lincoln presidency; the main theme of Goodwin’s Team of Rivals is therefore trivial and false. Nevertheless, these instances are examples of how dishonest "historians" like Doris Kearns-Goodwin attempt to twist and manipulate history in service of the state.

Yours truly recognized the Spielberg movie as fraudulent from the beginning. In another LRC article entitled "Spielberg’s Upside-Down History" I pointed out that Harvard’s Pulitzer prize-winning historian David Donald, the preeminent mainstream Lincoln historian of our time, wrote in his biography of Lincoln (page 545) that Abe in fact had almost nothing whatsoever to do with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, contrary to the main story line of Spielberg’s movie. In fact, as Donald wrote, when asked by genuine abolitionists in Congress if he would assist them in getting the Amendment passed, Lincoln refused. (He did struggle mightily, however, to try to get a first Thirteenth Amendment, known as the Corwin Amendment, passed in 1861 that would have enshrined slavery explicitly in the U.S Constitution).

To my surprise, a member of Congress recently noticed a glaring falsehood in Spielberg’s "Lincoln" and called him out on it. Congressman Joe Courtney of Connecticut was sitting in the movie theater when he was informed by the film that Connecticut congressmen voted against the Thirteenth Amendment. He smelled a rat, and contacted the Congressional Research Service, which informed him that the "facts" portrayed in the movie are false; the entire Connecticut delegation voted FOR the Thirteenth Amendment.


Congressman Courtney wrote to Spielberg asking him to correct the inaccuracy in the DVD version of the movie but was ignored. Spielberg was painted into a corner: If he did what the congressman requested he would be admitting that his film contained a heavy dose of propaganda, contrary to the great effort that had been made to assure audiences of the movie’s historical accuracy. If he ignored the Congressman he risked having him make a big deal of the issue with further press releases. So Spielberg’s screenwriter, Tony Kushner, eventually came out with a feeble defense of the falsehood by writing in USA Today that the purpose of the now-admitted falsehood was "to clarify to the audience the historical reality" of how the Thirteenth Amendment was passed. There you have it in the words of a famous left-wing Hollywood screenwriter (is there any other kind?) –clarifying historical "reality" for the public requires lying about historical reality.

This is the kind of bait-and-switch game that is played by Hollywood leftists with their statist propaganda films. They trot out "distinguished presidential historians" like the disgraced, confessed plagiarist Doris Kearns-Goodwin to assure audiences of the movie’s historical accuracy, but then when they are caught red handed in a pack of lies they plead "poetic license" and argue that "it’s only a movie, after all, and not a portrayal of reality." No wonder some people believe that the word "cinema" is a combination of "sin" and "enema."

I do not own this article. This article belongs to Tom DiLorenzo and lewrockwell.com

Some Good Points on why Price Controls are evil

In a blog post at lewrockwell.com, John Keller states the following reasons why price controls are immoral:

The government interferes directly with the right of contract between two consenting parties
The government claims some ownership over the goods in question by dictating its price
They are a government reaction to prices, which show government's mismanagment of the currency
They are an attempt to shift the blame for said mismanagement from the government to the productive class
They inculcate a sense of entitlement and jealousy among the less educated, who complain about price gouging
They are always accompanied by edicts to report said price gougers, turning the entire nation into potential informers
They lead inevitably to shortages of the most basic items which are always the target of controls - gas, food, and other staples (no one puts price controls on Bentleys and Rolexes) 

What is the deal with Chuck Hagel?

Ever since President Obama has chosen former Senator Chuck Hagel as his nominee for the Secretary of Defense, many in the political establishment of Washington D.C. have been complaining. Most criticism of Chuck Hagel come from establishment Republicans and neoconservatives who are very supportive of the American Empire, the War on Terror, the adjacent covert wars, and a war against Iran on the side of Israel. Bill Kristol of the The Weekly Standard stated that Hagel is "out on the fringes." GOP Senator Lindsay Graham stated of Chuck Hagel: "Chuck Hagel is out of the mainstream of thinking ... on most issues regarding foreign policy," Why are many in the Washington establishment opposed to Chuck Hagel?

Most opposition to Chuck Hagel is due to some of his views on foreign policy. Chuck Hagel is seen as anti-empire and anti-war, much to the disgust of the War Party. Hagel has promoted the idea of the United States talking to Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, supported the Iraq War but soon opposed it, and has claimed that "A military strike against Iran ... is not a viable, feasible, responsible option."

Some comments that Chuck Hagel has made in regards to Israel has earned himself the smear of "anti-Semite" from the neoconservatives. Hagel told author Aaron David Miller that "Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up there". He has since conceded that he misspoke in using the phrase "Jewish lobby". But there is indeed a "Pro-Israel lobby" whose goal is the shape and mold U.S. foreign policy to the benefit of the State of Israel while not necessarily benefiting the United States. Hagel would go further to say that "I am a United States senator, not an Israeli senator," he told Miller. "I support Israel. But my first interest is I take an oath ... to the Constitution of the United States. Not to a president. Not to a party. Not to Israel. If I go run for Senate in Israel, I'll do that." 

Chuck Hagel has earned the smear of "anti-Semite" because he supposedly places the interest of the United States before the interests of the State of Israel. To your typical neoconservatives, if one does not equate the interest of the United States with the interests of the State of Israel, they are smeared as anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-Semite deserving the greatest condemnation. 

The neoconservatives and the Washington establishment also fear his views on talking to Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran. They fear that such talks will make America "weak" and that talking to our supposed enemies will only encourage them. As Patrick Buchanan has stated, "Harry Truman talked to Josef Stalin and read Vyacheslav Molotov the riot act in the Oval Office. Ike invited Nikita Khrushchev to tour the United States three years after he sent tanks into Budapest. Richard Nixon went to China and toasted Mao Zedong, 20 years after the Chinese were killing U.S. solders in Korea and brainwashing our POWs, and at the same time they were conducting their maniacal cultural revolution and shipping weapons to Hanoi.

Israel negotiated with Hezbollah to retrieve the remains of airman Ron Arad and traded 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in a deal with Hamas for the return of Pvt. Gilad Shalit. And we can't talk to them?" 

Many believe that the nomination of Chuck Hagel will bring change to U.S. foreign policy. Even many anti-war conservatives and quasi-libertarians are jumping on the Chuck Hagel bandwagon. But as Congressmen Ron Paul has stated, such belief is "really just a mistaken over-emphasis on personnel over policy. We should not forget that cabinet secretaries serve the president, and not the other way around." He further states that " But let us not forget that he did vote for the war against Iraq, he has expressed support for multi-lateral sanctions on Iran, and last year he wrote in the Washington Post that, on Iran, he supports 'keeping all options on the table, including the use of military force....the real problem is in placing too much emphasis on the person the president hires to carry out his foreign and defense policy, as it ignores that policy itself. If the president has decided to continue or even expand US military action overseas through more covert warfare and use of special operations forces, which seems to be the case, it will matter little who he chooses to carry out those policies. If the president decides to continue to provide support to rebels in Syria who have dubious ties to Islamic extremists, to continue to meddle in the internal affairs of countless countries overseas, to continue to refuse to even talk with Iran without preconditions, and so on, we will not see a return to foreign policy sanity no matter who occupies what position in the president’s cabinet." 

As Laurence Vance, a Christian author and a libertarian, has put it: "Hagel as secretary of defense will change nothing when it comes to U.S. foreign or military policy. Will the U.S. Navy no longer be a global force for evil (not good as the commercials say)? Of course not. Does Hagel want to bring all U.S. troops home from overseas? Of course not. Has he ever said that U.S. troops should no longer be in Germany, Japan, and Italy--since WWII ended in 1945? Of course not. Does Hagel want to close all foreign military bases? Of course not. Does he want to close any? I mean out of principle, not because they are no longer an efficient use of resources. Does Hagel think very highly of the U.S. military and its role in the world? Of course he does. Will Hagel be loyal to the president and his foreign and military policy objectives? Of course he will. Does Hagel think that the U.S. military should withdraw from the Middle East and stop intervening? Of course not. Would Hagel be "better" than Rumsfeld? Only in the sense that getting hit 9 times is better than 10 or getting $9 stolen is better than $10." 

I am not very optimistic that the nomination of Chuck Hagel will change the fundamental foreign policy of war, empire and interventionism to a foreign policy of "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations- entangling alliances with none" of our Founding Fathers.

Ron Paul: War, Politics and the Future of Peace