Recent headlines tell us Ukraine managed to sneak trucks inside Russia close to five Russian air bases—one as distant as Siberia—then launched first-person-view drones to attack military assets, including Russian bombers. According to Politico,
“During the operation, modern UAV control technology was used, which combines autonomous artificial intelligence algorithms and manual operator intervention,” said the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, the country’s main counterintelligence agency.
“During the flight, some drones lost signal and switched to performing a mission using artificial intelligence along a preplanned route. After approaching and contacting a specifically designated target, the warhead was automatically activated,” the SBU added.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the attacks were justified because Moscow had refused to agree to “Ukraine’s unconditional ceasefire proposal.”
Military blogger Roman Alekhin described the attacks as “Russia’s Pearl Harbor,” even though “Ukraine has launched drones at Russia, including the capital Moscow, for months, as well as staging other covert operations on Russian soil.” The “Pearl Harbor” attack exceeded the others in scope and came two days before “the two sides sat down face-to-face in Turkey for a second round of direct talks.” As of June 4, Russia has been silent on how it would respond.
Let’s remind ourselves that the original Pearl Harbor attack—a creation of the Roosevelt Administration—led to four years of war and ended when the US dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities.
According to author and former Congressman David Stockman,
…the Sunday drone attack according to Zelensky himself was nearly 20 months in the making. So it was surely hatched, kitted, trained and pre-positioned with heavy duty support from US covert operations and then actually triggered, launched and guided by US intelligence assets.
The implications for which, Stockman concludes,
…amounted to an order of magnitude escalation toward nuclear confrontation designed to prolong and intensify Washington’s proxy war on Russia and throw immense new roadblocks in the path of a negotiated peace agreement.
Automotive columnist Eric Peters, in step with Stockman, writes:
Imagine the Russians egging on the Cubans to launch a mass drone attack on American strategic assets such as B-52 bombers. Imagine even one of ours got bombed to smithereens on our soil by a Cuban drone probably supplied by the Russians and almost certainly guided to its target with the help of the Russians.
But of course, he adds, the Russians wouldn’t do this because, unlike the US deep state, “they are not insane.” The ones wanting a US showdown with Russia apparently believe they have “no skin in the game.” If the Russians ever do respond, “it will be something a sane mind has difficulty imagining.”
A Russian-American nuclear war in 2025 is not a thrilling new computer game, or a bigger, better Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It means the end of humanity.
Let’s also remind ourselves that almost no one, whatever their level of education or degree of experience, would deny that we need government. It’s not even regarded as a serious question—of course we need government. But attempts to define government as it exists as some kind of league of like souls fails the reality test. It funds itself by stealing from us, through taxes and Fed monetary inflation. Refuse to pay your taxes and you go to jail. Resist and you get shot. It gets away with it because it has the police power behind it. It’s a criminal gang writ large, in Rothbard’s famous aphorism.
Robert Higgs began Crisis and Leviathan (1987) with these words: “We must have government. Only government can perform certain tasks successfully.” His book explained how government expanded in spurts to real or imagined crises, rather than continuously, a process he called the ratchet effect. After the crisis, some of its expansion recedes, but never entirely. What began as a republic ends as a monster state, usually without changing names.
Does it have to be this way? Only if you start with the fundamentals of state rule—a monopoly of force. Higgs later became what he called a “libertarian anarchist.”
“Laissez-faire” Gets Corrupted
An attempt to keep government out of their lives began with the French Physiocrats of the 18th century, who labeled their movement laissez-faire —literally, “allow to do”—meaning they opposed state intervention in the economy. Adam Smith expressed the idea with his notion of an invisible hand working to increase society’s wealth as the individual works at making a living: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
Yet, as Rothbard details, Smith’s invisible hand was hardly pristine. He called for government intervention in education, government coinage, and regulation of bank paper, including “the outlawing of small denomination notes—after allowing fractional-reserve banking.” Along with these he advocated a “soak-the-rich policy of progressive income taxation,” rigid usury laws, and a pre-Marxist labor theory of value. Smith even had reservations about the division of labor because he thought it led to a decay of the “martial spirit.”
It’s easy to see why Smith is regarded as the founder of modern economics and today’s warfare state. With popular economics textbooks, such as N. Gregory Mankiw’s Principles of Economics, supporting interventionist policies as an answer to alleged market failures, it is no mystery that government continues to grow at our expense.
Very importantly, Mankiw loves the Federal Reserve, though not because of any monetary service it performs. Its 20,000 employees “do their jobs with solemnity and tenacity and without a whiff of scandal. And, most important, they do their jobs well.”
And by one standard they’ve always done their jobs well. As Alex J. Pollock put it, the central bank “prints power for the state.” Nearly all governments have one. “The Fed was essential to financing America’s entanglement in the First World War, which led to immense growth in the size and reach of the Wilsonian US government.” Commenting on itself, the Fed “recognized its duty to cooperate unreservedly with the Government to provide funds needed for the war and to suspend the application of well-recognized principles of economics and finance.”
And the Fed did its part in financing America’s role in World War II, including the top-secret Manhattan Project, out of which came a uranium-based design called “Little Boy” and a plutonium-based weapon called “Fat Man.” The Fed in its unique manner facilitated borrowing to keep interest rates low. Apparently, “Fed independence” is suspended when government needs money. When does it not?
Given what history tells us about government as it exists, we need to remove it from our lives completely, not just in economics. The threat of civilization-ending conflicts should clue us to a different approach. The free market is the answer. People just need to discover it.
