Is Gold an Inflation Hedge?: Judge Napolitano...Intel Pressured House to Renew FISA; Human Action on Its 75th Anniversary Helps Us Understand How Statism Has Decimated Argentina

Wanjiru Njoya

@WanjiruNjoya

“The West is held captive by ‘reasonableness’. Most people think: ‘I want to be reasonable. No matter what my communist enemies who are trying to destroy me propose, I should meet them halfway. It shows willingness to compromise, which is the hallmark of reasonableness.’"

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Jeff Deist:

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Judge Napolitano to Newsmax: Intel Pressured House to Renew FISA

"‘By American spies,’ Napolitano said. "We're not talking about Chinese spies or Russian spies, we're talking about American intelligence community spying on the court, spying on Congress, and I think members of Congress keep enhancing the spying authority and enhancing the budgets for the spying authority because they're afraid of what might be exposed about them.

‘I am sorry that we have reached this point in our history. The government James Madison gave us needed our permission, the people's permission, to do nearly everything. Today we need the government's permission to do nearly anything. That's an aversion.’

Napolitano said he was disappointed an amendment to the FISA reauthorization by Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., was defeated. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., cast the deciding vote against the amendment, which reportedly would have required law enforcement to obtain warrants to search the communications of U.S. citizens and permanent residents collected while surveilling foreigners.”

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Human Action on Its 75th Anniversary Helps Us Understand How Statism Has Decimated Argentina

Octavio Bermudez

“The seventy-fifth anniversary of Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action invites us to ponder on Mises’s scholarly achievements and how the economic mainstream has not yet caught up to his advances in economics. Like Jesus Huerta de Soto points out in his preliminary study to the Spanish version of the thirteenth edition of Human Action: few are the treatises on the side of the mainstream that even try to match what Mises does in Human Action.”

“The state tends to encourage collectivism because it divides society and creates a friend-enemy distinction between parts of society. It divides and conquers through myth creation. Ludwig von Mises fought his entire life against the statist mythos. He didn’t yield to evil—as his favorite quote said—but proceeded boldly against it. Mises and the Austrian School are debunkers of the system of myths that the state manufactures.

Interesting is the situation of one particular country: Argentina—a country that used to be the richest in terms of gross domestic product per capita toward the end of the nineteenth century but now ranks sixty-third. What I used to think was the ‘mystery of Argentina’ is no such mystery; there is nothing surprising in the downward spiral in terms of prosperity that this country has suffered. It was the massive attack by the state through its collective public programs that has ejected this country from the top ranks of economic well-being.”

“In the name of the ‘national interest, what should be managed by private enterprise is instead controlled by the state bureaucrats. These industries include—among many—the public media, the train system, an airline, and a petrol company. All of them are inefficient, but still the progressive story portrays them as heroic and nation saviors from the clutches of multinational corporations. It is mercantilism in our age.”

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