Early in the “coronavirus-19” — subsequently called “Covid-19” — pandemic, Denmark and Sweden were often being compared with one-another because both are Scandinavian countries, but on 13 March 2020, Denmark had started a lockdown and imposed strict recommendations for businesses and personal behavior, whereas Sweden did nothing of the sort, and so the two countries were considered to be especially suitable to serve as being an almost controlled experiment in what the results would be of socialism versus libertarianism in social policy (regulations) regarding a communicable disease.

On 26 March 2020, EuroNews headlined “Neighbours Denmark and Sweden miles apart on coronavirus confinement”. Whereas both countries had socialized healthcare, and were also otherwise generally considered to be similar, Sweden was pursuing Europe’s most libertarian policies on coronavirus or Covid-19, and yet Denmark had a 15% higher percentage of its population who had come down with that disease. On 29 June 2020, I headlined “‘Herd Immunity’ Is a Failed Response to Coronavirus: Comparing Denmark versus Sweden on Coronavirus,” and reported that in early April Sweden’s population-percentage who had the disease had switched (increased so fast as) to become 14% higher there than Denmark’s population-percentage who had Covid-19, and that Sweden’s percentage was also increasing much more quickly than Denmark’s. And, so, at that time, as of 28 June 2020, Sweden had 2.5 times as high a percentage of its population who had contracted the disease, as compared with Denmark’s percentage. There were 131 reader-comments to that news-report, at Reddit, and they were overwhelmingly in denial, and pro-libertarian, anti-socialist, though each comment had a different excuse for their reality-denial.

CNN headlined on 28 May 2020 “Sweden says its coronavirus approach has worked. The numbers suggest a different story” and made clear that, at least up till that moment in time, Sweden’s approach was a failure, not only in competition as compared to Denmark’s, but globally.

Then, on 12 May 2020, Foreign Affairs, the prestigious journal of America’s Council on Foreign Relations, bannered “Sweden’s Coronavirus Strategy Will Soon Be the World’s: Herd Immunity Is the Only Realistic Option—the Question Is How to Get There Safely”, and presented the standard libertarian argument: “There are good reasons for countries to begin easing their restrictions. It will take several years to tally the total number of deaths, bankruptcies, layoffs, suicides, mental health problems, losses to GDP and investments, and other costs attributable not just to the virus but to the measures used to fight it. It should already be obvious, however, that the economic and social costs of lockdowns are enormous.” In other words: the best “regulation” is to let nature rule, not to impose any human-imposed regulations, but just “the free market” should reign.

On 7 January 2021, the Scandinavian Journal of Public health headlined “A comparison of COVID-19 epidemiological indicators in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland” and reported that:

Compared with its Nordic peers, Sweden had a higher incidence rate across all ages, a higher COVID-19-related death rate only partially explained by population demographics, a higher death rate in seniors’ care, and higher all-cause mortality. Sweden had approximately half as much mobility change as its Nordic neighbours until April and followed similar rates as its neighbours from April to July. Denmark led its Nordic peers in testing rates, while Sweden had the highest cumulative test-positivity rate continuously from mid-March. …

Looser government restrictions at the beginning of the outbreak are likely to have played a role in the impact of COVID-19 in Sweden. In an effort to improve epidemic control, Sweden has increased testing rates, implemented more restrictive prevention measures, and increased their intensive care unit bed capacity.

Here are the figures as-of 30 April 2021:

Denmark cases per million = 43,282

Sweden cases per million = 95,909

Denmark deaths per million = 428

Sweden deaths per million = 1,384

Denmark March unemployment rate = 4.5%

Sweden unemployment rate = 10.0%

But Denmark versus Sweden aren’t, by any means, the only indicators that libertarianism was failing on Covid-19.

On 1 August 2020, I headlined “India and Brazil Are Now the Global Worst Coronavirus Nations”, and that statement was forward-looking, predictive, and not referring only to the numbers at that time but to where the various nations were heading, and it was referring only to medium-sized and large nations (for example, not to the worst performer of all, Andorra, which currently has 171,029 cases per million and a population of only 77,367 people). (Andorra has had a total of 13,232 cases, which is 17.1% of its entire population. The only country that has a population of over 10 million and which is among the 9 worst — and America scores as being absolutely the world’s 10th-worst — is Czechia, the Czech Republic, which has 152,046 cases per million. At the end of this article, Czechia will be discussed.)

As-of 30 April 2021, the following are the world’s only nations that have had more than 6,000,000,000 Covid-19 cases:

USA = 33,044,872

India = 18,881,587

Brazil = 14,592,886.

Those are now the Covid-19 giants (the worst-performing major countries), which, back on August 1st, is what I was expecting them to be, by the present time. Ultimately, I expect Brazil and India to be scoring even worse than the United States. All three countries have been exceedingly lax in their anti-Covid-19 policies, extraordinarily libertarian regarding this.

On 20 September 2020, I headlined “All 8 of America’s Worst-Hit Coronavirus States Are Now in the South.” That reported “the worst 11 states … are: Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Iowa, Arkansas, and Texas” — and all 11 of them had voted for Donald Trump, the more-libertarian (and losing) candidate, in 2020. The United States therefore provides overwhelming evidence of the failure of libertarianism regarding coronavirus-policies.

On 14 March 2021, I headlined “Republican States Have Higher Covid Rates than Democratic States” and — ranking all from the best (#1) to the worst (#51) — reported that the average state which had voted for Trump scored 33.3 or two-thirds of the way down the list of the 51 states + DC, and that the average state which had voted for Biden scored 19.5 out of the 51.

The more corrupt a country is, the more libertarian it is, and on 5 May 2020, I headlined “America’s Design Causes It to Fail the COVID-19 Challenge” and reported that because America is an extraordinarily corrupt country (very libertarian, as compared to other nations), “America is designed so as to fail the coronavirus-19 challenge. The power of big-money (concentrated wealth) is destroying this country. It controls both Parties and their respective media, so the public don’t know (and certainly cannot understand) the types of realities that are being reported (and linked-to) here.”

India and Brazil are nipping at America’s heels on this, but, still, the record up till the present moment shows America as still retaining its title as being the worst of all major nations on coronavirus-performance.

Finally, here, will be considered what might be the strongest exception to the general principle that libertarian policies are inferior to socialistic policies in order to control and limit a pandemic: Czechia. Wikipedia’s article “COVID-19 pandemic in the Czech Republic” says:

The Czech Republic was the first^[11] European country to make the wearing of face masks mandatory from 19 March onwards.^[12] COVID-19 testing was made widely available with drive-through locations from 14 March,^[13] and from 27 March anyone with a fever, dry cough or shortness of breath was eligible for a free test.^[14] From 13 April onwards, COVID-19 testing capacity significantly surpassed demand.^[15] Contact tracing in the country also included voluntary disclosure of mobile phone position and debit card payments data for previous days and the quarantining of identified contacts.^[16] By 1 May 2020, altogether 257 COVID-19-related deaths were identified in the Czech Republic compared to 2,719 in similarly populous Sweden, which did not impose a full lockdown. However, Belgium, also with a similar population, had suffered 7,866 deaths at that time, despite having implemented an early and strict lockdown. …

By April 2021, the Czech Republic has recorded the highest confirmed death rate in the world after Hungary. There are some root causes speculated.

None of those proposed explanations of this is any sort of scientific explanation for it. A great deal remains that is important to know but that is currently unknown about Covid-19. Obviously, Czechia is the most challenging case, not because it is the worst, but because it has been a leader in adherence to international guidelines but has nonetheless disastrously failed on this virus. If that’s not a warning for the world to do lots more research on the Covid-19 problem, then nothing is.

Lying at the heart of the increasingly discredited ideology of Trumpism is the bankrupt politics of libertarianism. Like the old joke about the dog chasing the car and finally catching up with it, the seething crew of armed and deranged Donald Trump supporters who managed to temporarily seize control of the upper and lower chambers of the U.S. Congress on January 6 were unsure of what to do with their briefly captured prize. Some decided to rifle through Senate desks in search of some holy grail of secret documents. Others were content with snatching laptop computers from offices. A few felt encumbered to aim canisters of destructive caustic bear spray at priceless oil paintings of Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams.

Libertarians have as some of their heroes some of the most deranged economists, philosophers, and politicians in recent history. At the top of that list of deplorables is sociopathic writer and godmother of modern libertarianism Ayn Rand. A critic of programs she deemed “socialist,” including President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Social Security system and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Medicare, she did not hesitate to avail herself of both “socialistic” federal programs in the 1970s. During the 1973 Israeli-Arab War, Rand said that the war involved “civilized men,” Israelis, fighting “savages,” the Arab nations. Rand also justified European colonialists seizing the land of the indigenous native peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Even though Rand was a supreme hypocrite and racist, her vile beliefs seeped into the Republican Party’s “libertarian” wing, partially represented by Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan, and which later developed into the Tea Party movement and Trumpism.

The Libertarian Party of the United States represents nothing more than parlor room discourse by major political party rejects. Libertarians have only achieved political power by nesting themselves inside established political parties having a record of electoral success and governance. This has been the case with Trump, disgraced House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, and Paul’s father, Ron Paul, the latter having quixotically run for President on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1988, before becoming a Republican and being elected to the U.S. House from Texas. Paul became one of the ideological leaders of the anti-government Tea Party movement. Paul and other Republican leaders embraced the laissez-faire economic doctrines of such anti-government and pro-corporate economists as Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, Charles Murray, and economist, Milton Friedman. This resulted in increasingly rightward-leaning anti-labor policies by the administrations of George W. Bush and Trump. While Paul and his son, Senator Paul, have nothing but hostility for the social democratic-inspired government services provided in the Nordic nations, Germany, and Canada, they have no problems with governments like those of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and Britain’s Boris Johnson that embrace the corporate fascist policies of Friedman and the Austrian School economists Hayek and von Mises.

Libertarian opposition to labor rights, public health, and environmental controls has resulted in poverty-level wages, the spread of disease – including the present Covid virus – and poisonous air and water.

Libertarians and the U.S. “militias” who support them through threats to public safety and armed insurrection constantly wail against government. They are also the first to demand government services after they lose their jobs or see their homes and communities devastated by hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes. Libertarian politicians hate government but have offered nothing even halfway feasible to replace it. Representative government has been humankind’s best endeavor for the common health, welfare, and security of the people since the days of democratic Athens, the Roman Republic, and the Althing of the Icelandic Commonwealth.

Governments that represent the people who install them into power are also subject to demands for change. In 1970, Cabinets around the world included traditional portfolios of foreign affairs, defense, justice, finance, labor, agriculture, commerce, education, home affairs or interior, posts and telecommunications, health, and housing. Positions such as ministries of housing and health were relatively new in many countries. In the United States, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was established in 1953 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican. It was first proposed in 1923 by President Warren G. Harding, another Republican. Neither Eisenhower nor Harding would recognize the Republican Party of today, with is infiltrated at the highest levels by anti-government libertarians or every stripe, from “flat Earth” conspiracy types to Ayn Rand followers.

When one examines Cabinet-level ministries of today it is clear that governments around the world responded to general and more specific needs of the people. There are ministries for the environment, infrastructure and web connectivity, mental health, addictions, and well-being, cyber safety, indigenous peoples, early child learning, innovation and better regulation, suburban rail services, veterans’ services, disability services, family violence and women, child protection, seniors and aging, multi-cultural affairs, medical services, national unity, climate change, sustainable development, disaster management, workplace safety, the arts, and homelessness. Libertarians argue all of this represents “big government.” They are dead wrong. Expansion of government services to meet modern challenges and serve the people is responsible government, not big government. Those who argue otherwise display their selfishness and cruelty in ignoring the needs and pleas of those who require assistance to equally enjoy the fruits of responsive government and society.

Trump insurrectionists may have temporarily damaged and destroyed the chambers of the U.S. Capitol but that stands in stark contrast to the possible permanent damage Trump officials wrought against federal government departments and agencies over four years of libertarian-driven policies.

Trump’s last-minute full pardon granted to his one-time chief strategist and campaign manager Steve Bannon sends a signal to all of Bannon’s fellow fascists around the world that Bannon and his embryonic “Fascist International” are back in business. Bannon’s poisonous focus of “killing off the administrative state” has not only found a home in the U.S. Republican Party but also the Libertarian, Direct, Democratic (LDD) of Flemish Senator Jean-Marie Dedecker and the Wallonian People’s Party of Mischaël Modrikamen, the latter being a co-founder of Bannon’s Brussels-based global fascist organization called “The Movement.” Other Bannon-inspired right-wing libertarian parties include the People’s Party of Canada, which split from the Conservative Party as a far-right and anti-government alternative party; the Go Tax Evaders! Party of Italy; the Capitalist Party of South Africa; and the anti-taxation 5.10 party in Ukraine. The foolhardiness of the libertarian agenda contributed to the collapse of libertarian parties in Argentina, the Canadian Province of Manitoba, France, New Zealand, and Poland. Far from being a clever strategist, Bannon is a pursuer of lost causes, as libertarianism has, time after time, been shown to be a fraud.

Libertarianism for many of its backers is a means to an end. Promoters of this lost political cause are more interested in pushing dubious gold and silver investments, Ponzi scheme operations and similar pyramid schemes, fraudulent medical cures and devices, and bogus ventures for real estate and “pump and dump” stocks.

It has been under governments committed to serving the needs of the people that the world has seen the advancement of public health, social security, reliable transportation services, and civil rights protections for minorities. Libertarianism offers the world nothing more than greed and selfishness.

That table starts in 1989, so doesn’t show the prior figures, but other studies place the start of the post-WWII increase in America’s wealth-concentration at around the year 1981. Prior to that, it had been pretty unchanged, for decades. Maybe Ronald Reagan was largely responsible for the change, but none of the subsequent U.S. Presidents did anything to reverse his “Greed is good!” policies.

Here is from Reagan’s interview, in the libertarian Reason magazine, on 1 July 1975, headlining “Inside Ronald Reagan”:

REASON: Are there any particular books or authors or economists that have been influential in terms of your intellectual development?

REAGAN: Oh, it would be hard for me to pinpoint anything in that category. I’m an inveterate reader. Bastiat and von Mises, and Hayek and Hazlitt – I’m one for the classical economists.

They had been the formulators of the “Greed is good!” philosophy, now called libertarianism (which in continental Europe is instead called “neoliberalism”). Prior to President Reagan, no U.S. President had been a libertarian. But the losing Presidential candidate in 1964, Republican Barry Goldwater, had been a libertarian. So, the “Greed is good!” philosophy had been respectable in the Republican Party for at least 16 years before a libertarian became elected President in 1980. Then, after Reagan, America has been in the Reagan Era, ever since. The Democratic Party merely adds hypocrisy to it, by condemning libertarianism. That stance (libertarianism while condemning libertarianism) is nowadays called “liberalism.” Such ideological hypocrisy has become a secular religion, which is believed especially by many religious people in America — “Let God do it!” (Otherwise called: adherence to natural law.) Among some, it is called “Prosperity Theology”. Since it effectively inducts the super-rich into a new type of sainthood, America’s billionaires — especially Republican ones — would never object to it. After all: it’s just another form of libertarianism, which already deifies the rich and despises the poor.

As-of 2014, the top 0.1% of Americans owned almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% did. The top 0.1% owned more than the entire bottom 80% did. Furthermore, America’s billionaires now have an absolute veto-power against any candidate in both Parties’ Presidential primaries, such as Bernie Sanders, whom no billionaire wants to become President. Only candidates who are backed by at least a few billionaires has any realistic chance at all. A candidate whom no billionaire backs is not possible to win the nomination of either of the major Parties. Unfortunately, enough Americans are manipulable enough to be deceived by the ceaseless propaganda that’s funded by the super-rich. Any candidate who opposes the super-rich has virtually no chance to win any election to the federal Government. Many federal officials — and almost every Republican one — even overtly champion the super-rich and at least implicitly denigrate labor and deify capital “the entrepreneur”), but such a situation would be impossible in any nation which has an informed and sane electorate, because it entails the vast majority of voters voting against themselves. People don’t do that unless they are deceived (such as to think “I am an entrepreneur” because they own, maybe, a hamburger stand, or receive some rental income). (Anybody who isn’t backed by at least venture capitalists is no “entrepreneur” that federal politicians are likely to care about.)

This is the reason why, today, 36% of America’s private wealth is owned by top-one-percenters, whereas in 1990 only 5% was. “Greed is good!” makes that okay.

A bigger and bigger percentage of U.S. private wealth is going into the stock markets, because more and more of it is sheer excess that’s beyond the ability of its owners to spend for their own consumption. Furthermore, because the Covid-19 crisis hits workers the hardest, and the stock markets have been booming in 2020, the percentage of America’s private wealth that’s owned by the richest 1% is getting a special boost this year. David Sirota’s investigative news blog The Daily Poster headlined on December 30th “10 Stats That Will Blow Your Mind” and the top four were:

1. The total cost of $2,000 checks ($465 billion) is less than half the amount that American billionaires have made during the pandemic ($1 trillion). The total cost of the checks is less than the amount that just 16 American billionaires increased their net worth by during the pandemic ($471 billion).
2. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk gained more wealth during the pandemic ($158 billion) than Congress just authorized for additional unemployment benefits for millions of Americans ($120 billion).
3. Jeff Bezos’s personal wealth increased more every second of 2020 ($2,800) than Congress is considering giving Americans who are facing eviction, starvation and bankruptcy ($2,000).
4. Congressional lawmakers are being paid $3,300 of government money every week to come up with ways to block $2,000 checks to millions of Americans.

During this period of more and more of the country being owned by the richest 1%, more and more of the Government is also being controlled by the richest 1%, because money brings power (such as the ability to hire and fire employees and other agents), and especially it brings the power to hire lobbyists, and to do favors for the members of Congress, and to hire everyone who retires from government-service, including not only former elected officials, but also former career civil servants. The revolving door between service to the Government, and service to the people who fund election-campaigns (the richest 1%), spins ever-faster, as the richest 1% own more and more of the country. If they will own 100% of the private wealth, they will also control the Government 100%, and therefore effectively own 100% of the government wealth, too. What would the U.S. Constitution say about that? It would be an absolute dictatorship by the richest 1%. But what would the U.S. Constitution say about that?

The turning-point was actually in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous Buckley v. Valeo decision (but with Justice Byron White dissenting in part), which said that there can be no limits placed on an individual’s total political donations, because that money is “speech” and the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment prohibits any laws against “speech” — such as against lying, or against any other form of expression, no matter how harmful (and what could possibly be more harmful that allowing the government itself to be bought?) — the Court ruled that if more money means more control over the Government, then that’s okay, but Justice Byron White, in his lone and grandstanding objection said that “Congress and this Court’s cases have recognized this as a mortal danger against which effective preventive and curative steps must be taken.” (He basically wanted to punt the entire issue back to the legislators, who were now legally hamstrung against dealing with it, because of the unanimous decision, which ‘Justice’ White himself was joining in to sign onto.) That unanimous equation of “money” with “speech” was the beginning of the end of America’s till-then-limited democracy, and it marked the beginning of today’s American aristocracy — America’s aristocracy of wealth. But were America’s Founders in favor of creating an aristocracy? Wasn’t their overriding objective to prevent any such thing from taking over here? Who hired these ‘Justices’? Were they actually traitors?

If it started on any date, that’s the date: 30 January 1976.

Jo JORGENSEN

The 2016 Republican presidential primary debates revealed a sea change. From 2008 to 2012, then-congressman Ron Paul was routinely booed for his criticism of America’s foreign policy. It was even common to hear Republican office holders, commentators, and activists say they “agreed with Ron Paul on everything but foreign policy.” Yet in 2016, candidate Donald Trump was cheered for calling the Iraq war the biggest blunder in American history.

One would have thought Trump’s victory would have resulted in a major reduction of America’s military presence in the Middle East and Afghanistan. However, three years and 10 months after President Trump was sworn into office, at least 3,000 troops will remain in Iraq at the end of the year if Trump’s troop reductions go into effect. How many troops will remain in Afghanistan depends on how successful the military-industrial complex, and their allies on Capitol Hill and in the media, are at undermining Trump.

How did a candidate who was elected in part on a promise of no more useless, endless wars wind up keeping the warfare machine humming along?

Trump also called for dramatically increasing the military budget, repeating the lie that Obama had decimated the military. But U.S. military spending has continually gone up, not down.

Trump has been more successful at stirring up hostilities with Iran than at withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq. The biggest reason his actions have not matched his campaign rhetoric is that the entire foreign policy infrastructure in D.C. is controlled by pro-war factions. Even a truly non-interventionist Republican or Democrat would likely fail to roll back America’s military presence overseas.

The House versions of the fiscal year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) contained provisions designed to block Trump from fulfilling his promise to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.

The Senate’s version of the NDAA warned against a “precipitous” withdrawal from Afghanistan. It also expressed concerns about closing any U.S. base located in Europe without offering an alternative, thus putting a monkey wrench in President Trump’s attempt to draw down the number of American troops in Germany.

Even worse, the Senate rejected an amendment by Senator Rand Paul to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. Paul’s measure failed by a vote of 60-33.

For all the often-justified handwringing over how the Republican Party has become a “cult of Trump,” the sad truth is, for most Republican representatives and senators, devotion to Trump stops at the water’s edge.

One reason for the GOP’s fidelity to the warfare state is the military-industrial complex’s outsized influence on Capitol Hill. For starters, the defense industry donated $27 million to political campaigns in 2016.

But the main reason military contractors wield clout with many federal lawmakers is their business model. Instead of manufacturing a complete product at one plant, they make components at various plants spread across the country. This means that many representatives and senators have a vested interest in supporting a large military budget—and thus an interventionist foreign policy—because those weapons produce high-paying jobs in their districts and states.

Too many conservative Republicans, who usually denounce stimulus spending bills, claim that throwing money at failed weapons projects like the F-35 creates jobs and helps grow the economy. The truth is that money heaped on the Pentagon creates less than half the number of jobs that the same amount would create if spent by the taxpayers who had earned it.

The defense industry also maintains its influence through generous donations to D.C.-based think thanks. Recipients of these funds produce research papers, op-eds, congressional testimony, and presentations given to congressional staffers that promote an interventionist foreign policy beneficial to their donors’ bottom lines.

Defense contractors’ support for think tanks is not limited to conservatives. Center-left think tanks and foreign policy scholars also receive funding.

This enables the defense industry to control both sides of the foreign policy debate, no matter the election results. The military-industrial complex wins while U.S. troops fight and die in unnecessary, unconstitutional wars. Taxpayers who fund these wars are saddled with debt and high taxes.

And defense contractors are not the only ones funding pro-defense D.C. think tanks. Foreign governments also provide money in exchange for justification of U.S. interventions on behalf of their countries.

The funding given to pro-war think tanks breeds pro-war political operatives who fill presidentially appointed civil service positions and congressional staffs. This is why President Trump has staffed his administration with neocons like John Bolton, who spend their careers promoting the disastrous foreign policy that Trump had promised to reverse.

The Democratic Party is just as welded to the warfare state as are the Republicans, as was shown by the bipartisan effort in Congress to stop President Trump from withdrawing most of the troops from Afghanistan. Further evidence is provided by the presidency of Democrat Barack Obama. His opposition to the Iraq war was a major reason he bested uber-hawks Hillary Clinton and John McCain in 2008. Yet Obama expanded America’s military presence around the world and infamously made a “kill list” of individuals—including American citizens—subject to summary execution without due process.

The modern Democrats’ love for the war party was also shown by their attacks on Representative Tulsi Gabbard for meeting with Syrian President Bashar-al-Assad. By the logic of Gabbard’s critics, John F. Kennedy should never have negotiated a peaceful end to the Cuban missile crisis. They were willing to attack her, even though she’s a down-the-line progressive and a mixed-race military veteran who would seem an ideal presidential candidate for the Democrats.

The Democratic Party is now fielding presidential and vice-presidential candidates who are all in with the war party. Joe Biden was an instigator of the Iraqi war. Senator Kamala Harris recruited her for­eign pol­i­cy advi­sors for her presidential bid from the Center for a New American Security, which has long pushed Democrats to embrace war.

While I am grateful for pro-liberty, antiwar Republicans such as Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, and, of course, former congressman and 1988 LP presidential candidate Dr. Ron Paul, the fact is that the war party is too embedded in the infrastructure of the two major parties and the D.C. establishment. Neither Republicans nor Democrats will change our disastrous foreign policy.

If we are to adopt a policy of peace, antiwar activists must work outside the two-party system. We should be guided by independent think tanks that are free of the corrosive influence of the military-industrial complex, citizen groups that pressure elected officials to stand up to the warfare state, and alternative parties that are not beholden to the military-industrial complex.

As the Libertarian nominee for president, I am proud to build on the work of former Libertarian presidential candidates Ron Paul and the late Harry Browne to bring the message of peace, prosperity, and liberty to the American people. As I campaign from coast to coast, the reception I have gotten convinces me that the majority of Americans want peace.

If I am elected, I will begin to bring troops home from the Middle East on day one of my presidency. As a member of a party that is not beholden to any part of the military establishment, I will not budge under pressure from the military-industrial-think-tank-media complex. Instead of seeking a “benevolent global hegemony,” I will make America like a giant Switzerland: armed and neutral. Furthermore, I will remove barriers to free trade with all nations, which will reinforce peaceful relations.

Republicans and Democrats cannot deliver peace because they are loyal to special interests that benefit from continual war.

Libertarians, who have been fiercely committed to a non-interventionist policy throughout their party’s 49-year existence, stand ready and eager to deliver the peace and neutrality that Americans want and need.

theamericanconservative.com

The earliest popular ideological debate regarding coronavirus-policy was between advocates of Denmark’s socialistic approach, versus neighboring Sweden’s laissez-fair approach. EuroNews headlined on March 26th “Neighbours Denmark and Sweden miles apart on coronavirus confinement”, and reported that “when it comes to handling the coronavirus crisis, they are on very different trajectories,” which were Denmark’s socialism, versus Sweden’s libertarianism.

At that time, there was no clear indication, yet, as to which approach would win out. For example, on April 19th, Denmark had 1,275 Covid-19 cases per million, whereas Sweden had 1,424. So: per million inhabitants, they were about the same.

Even as late as 12 May 2020, three libertarian co-authors at the prestigious U.S. neoliberal and neoconservative Council on Foreign Relations’s journal Foreign Affairs headlined, confidently, that libertarianism would win out: “Sweden’s Coronavirus Strategy Will Soon Be the World’s: Herd Immunity Is the Only Realistic Option—the Question Is How to Get There Safely”.

But, by the time of June 29th, the data had become clear to the exact contrary, and so I headlined “‘Herd Immunity’ Is a Failed Response to Coronavirus”, and reported the subsequent increases in each of these two countries’ numbers.

On April 22nd:

DENMARK = 1,329 (up 4%)

SWEDEN = 1,517 (up 7%)

On May 10th:

DENMARK = 1,782 (up 34%)

SWEDEN = 2,567 (up 69%)

On June 17th:

DENMARK = 2,123 (up another 19%)

SWEDEN = 5,404 ( up another 111%)

And here it is as of June 28th:

DENMARK = 2,188 (up another 3%)

SWEDEN = 5,450 (up another 1%)

And, finally, on 22 August:

DENMARK = 2,783 (up another 27%)

SWEDEN = 8,515 (up another 56%)

Furthermore, one of the leading libertarian arguments against taking action has been that supposedly the economy will perform better if there are no coronavirus-restrictions placed by the Government. However, Sweden’s unemployment-rate has been hit at least as hard by coronavirus as Denmark’s has:

Denmark’s unemployment-rate was 4.1% in March, 5.4% in April, 5.6% in May, and 5.5% in June.

Sweden’s unemployment-rate was 7.1% in March, 8.2% in April, 9% in May, and 9.8% in June.

So, on that day, August 22nd, I sent to an influential libertarian website (not as influential as Foreign Affairs, but more populist — not funded by billionaires like the CFR is), which has come to specialize on coronavirus, the following article for them to consider, since it discredits their many libertarian articles about coronavirus:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251615-is-swedens-coronavirus-strategy-a-cautionary-tale-or-a-success-story/

and the response from them three hours later was:

I appreciate you’re willingness to engage on this topic, but your choice of source is poor. The logic is bad, and whole areas of policy are ignored.

Firstly, comparing Sweden only to Denmark and Norway is absurd. Sweden imposed no lockdown, yet fared far better than many countries which did so (Belgium, Netherlands, UK, Spain and Italy). This alone is a perfectly strong argument that lockdowns are totally ineffective for their stated aims.

Secondly, it at no point talks about deaths caused by lockdowns, which is a huge factor (accounting for nearly half the excess deaths in the UK).

Thirdly, it mentions GDP but doesn’t discuss that the economy is MORE than that. A suffering economy is not about money or finance, it is about well-being for the working class. Good wages, affordable rent and the freedom to run your own small business. All of which have been destroyed by the lockdown policy, which Sweden shows was (at best) pointless.

I promptly replied:

The Belgian policy-response was unclear, unfocused, and such a mess that nothing has even been generally reported regarding their contact-tracing (which is such a crucial aspect of effective policy-response to the virus).

None of the countries with good results have achieved them via an expectation of ‘herd immunity’. No country is anywhere near the 70%-infection-rate that produces herd-immunity. It’s a myth; it’s just a lie.

For example, though the imperialistic libertarian country United States warns travelers that the coronavirus risk is exceptionally high in Uganda (warning “Level 3,” which is their highest), Uganda is actually one of the world’s lowest coronavirus-risk countries, and they achieved it by stringent policies, which is exactly what you reject. Whereas U.S. now has 17,587 cases per million, Uganda has 47. The country that has a 374 times higher percentage of its population coronavirus-infected, warns its suckers to stay away from the country that has 1/374th of the risk.

Why is [your site] feeding into this deception of its readers, instead of exposing it to them? Have you switched to being pro-imperialistic (pro-neoconservative, which is a variety of neoliberal or “libertarian”)? All of a sudden, the neoliberal countries, such as U.S., Brazil, and India, which are or have been the world’s worst on coronavirus-performance, are the ones to emulate? Why? Or else: which countries ARE the ones to emulate on this? Say it. Prove it. The statistical data by now are certainly sufficient to do this. Why don’t you do it, instead of continue to deceive readers? Why do you deceive readers so that they would support, instead of condemn, the imperialistic U.S. Government’s alleging that Uganda is more coronavirus-dangerous than the U.S. itself is? It’s a lie, but how would your readers be able to know this?

I don’t get it. You seem stuck in your existing false beliefs. Please explain so that I will become able to understand. Right now, I don’t.

I received a reply that said I should “apologise” because “We have never expressed any support for the US or its Imperial policies in any way, shape or form,” and “the statistics speak for themselves — the virus is harmless to the vast majority of people, and in no way justifies any of the draconian or authoritarian laws being imposed opportunistically in many countries around the world (including the United States).” In other words: the U.S. under Trump isn’t being sufficiently laissez-faire about this matter. The evidence that I had cited was ignored, not discussed, by him.

Subsequently, I checked a few of the other nations that are among the best on coronavirus-performance. For example, there’s China. It has 59 coronavirus-19 cases per million population, and the U.S. has 298 times as many cases per million, but the U.S. Government rates China also in the highest-risk category, “Level 3,” for Americans to visit, on account of its supposedly higher-than-U.S. danger of becoming infected with that virus.

Then, there’s Vietnam, which the U.S. Government had tried to conquer but couldn’t. Vietnam has only 10 coronavirus cases per million inhabitants. America has 17,587 per million; so, obviously, that’s 1,759 times as many. Vietnam also is rated “Level 3” — the worst, most coronavirus-dangerous, category. The Government of Americans is warning Americans to avoid visiting Vietnam because it’s just too dangerous a coronavirus-risk for an American, whose country has 17,587 cases per million. Obviously, no intelligent person trusts a government such as this. (No more than such a person would trust the Government that had promised it was certain that WMD existed in Iraq in 2002, or that Syria had gassed people on 7 April 2018, or that the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President in 2014 was a ‘democratic revolution’ instead of a U.S. coup — or on, and on, such as about “Russiagate”.)

Then, there’s Myanmar, which has only 8 cases per million inhabitants — 1 divided by 2,198 times as many cases-per-million as the U.S. does — and the U.S. Government refuses even to call that nation “Myanmar,” but instead calls it by what the British did when they had it as a colony, which is “Burma,” and the U.S. regime’s travel-advisory rating of “Burma,” for ‘Burma’s would-be now U.S. imperial masters, is likewise exactly the same as they rate Uganda: “Warning — Level 3”. The U.S. regime is telling its citizens that a country which is 2,198 times safer on the coronavirus danger than the U.S. itself is, is instead too unsafe on coronavirus for Americans to travel to. They care so much about the safety of their own citizens, as to warn them against visiting a country that’s thousands of times safer. How sincere is that? But some people still respect the lie, and the liars (serial-liars), as if they weren’t.

Perhaps people who are in denial about coronavirus are simply in denial about reality — the broader, global, reality.

On coronavirus-19 — this pandemic — the best data regarding the international reality is this, which is the constantly up-to-date listings of all countries and their respective numbers. To see the rankings there of all countries on the crucial outcome-variable of “Tot Cases/1M pop” just click onto that column’s heading and countries will be ranked that way. Same for the other crucial outcome-variable “Deaths/1M pop,” and for the far less-crucial process-variables (such as “Tests/1M pop”). Two successive clicks onto the given column-heading will reverse the ordering of the countries regarding that variable. You’ll be seeing there the existing rankings, as of that given moment. To see the trends within any given country, just click onto the name of that country, and then scroll down to the charts “Daily New Cases” and “Daily New Deaths” (tracking both of the crucial outcome-variables)

However, people who are in denial about coronavirus-reality avoid those numbers like the plague. Perhaps they do that because, to their libertarian ideology, these numbers are “the plague.”

The bottom line is clear, societies that have had open borders to previous major centers of infection and transmission, like Iran and Italy which kept open strong flows of people to and from China in the early stages of pandemic, suffered exceptionally badly. Countries obsessed with maintaining liberal values and open borders like France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the U.S. also suffered disproportionately.

Countries that have allowed their domestic industry to decay have found they cannot now produce the crucial equipment they need, from respirators to gas masks. Countries with strong manufacturing bases like China, or with a prudent nationalist sense of preparing ahead for emergencies like Russia, have done far better. The shortage of respirators in Britain has become more than a national scandal: It is a national shame. That is another inexorable consequence of the pernicious doctrine of Free Trade.

I documented this history in some detail in my 2012 book “That Should Still Be Us“.

There, I showed how even the French Revolution of 1789 was in fact triggered by the catastrophic Free Trade Treaty that hapless King Louis XVI approved with England only three years before. It led immediately to the worst economic depression in French history which triggered revolution. In three years, liberal Free Trade succeeded in destroying a society that had flourished for a thousand years and the most powerful state Europe had known since the fall of the Roman Empire.

In his classic television series and accompanying book “How the Universe Changed”, the great British broadcaster and historian James Burke showed how the discipline of statistics was responsible for discovering the way the cholera bacteria spread through contaminated water in 19th Century London, then the largest urban area ever experienced.

Today, we see a similar pattern in the spread of the coronavirus: While half the counties in the United States remain so far virtually free of the virus, infections have soared in most major metropolitan areas, especially in so-called Sanctuary cities. Invariably these centers are ruled by liberal Democrats where illegal immigrants congregate. They are the places where the values and consequences of Free Trade and Open Borders most clearly flourish. And they ar ealso the places where the terrifying costs of those policies are most evident as well. The chickens have come home to roost.

Countries like Russia and China itself, which have reacted most quickly and decisively to shut down international and domestic travel, have been able to keep their numbers of infections and rates of spread down.

In Europe, by contrast, the impact of the virus has been appalling, The European Union has been as useless as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio,. Pro-EU liberal national leaders like President Emmanuel Macron in France and the venerable Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany (Berlin’s version of Nancy Pelosi) just sat back in bemused silence till it was too late. In Italy and Spain, the political splintering of societies has woefully added to the chaos.

This is in fact a very old lesson indeed: The ruling elites of the world should not have had to relearn it.

But for more than 225 years, the ruling elites of the West have mindlessly embraced Open Borders and Free Trade.Yet these have always been mere assertions of prejudice and mindless faith: They have never been proven to be true in any scientific manner.

Instead, when we look at the factual evidence of economic history over the past two centuries, it has always been the case that developing industrial societies which protect their manufactures behind strong tariff barriers flourish with enormous foreign trade and balance of payments surpluses. Then the livign standards of their people soar.

In contrast, free market societies too powerless, or just too plain dumb to protect their economic borders get swamped by cheap manufactures and their domestic industries get decimated. This was the case with liberal free market Britain caught between the rising Protectionist powers of the United States, Japan and Germany for the next century.

It has been true for the decline of American industry since the 1950s, the more the United States embraced global free trade, the more its own domestic manufactures and their dependent populations suffered. This never bothered the liberal intellectual elites of the East and West Coast at all. It still doesn’t. Having inflicted lasting ruin and despair on hundreds of millions of people for generations, they despise their victims as “deplorables”  for crying out in pain and seeking to end the disastrous policies.

Russia suffered the full horrors of the merciless laissez-faire, unregulated Free Market policies of the liberal West in the 1990s. Boris Yeltsin never woke up to the catastrophe that Bill Clinton and Larry Summers were inflicting on his country. Over the past two decades, Russia’s recovery from that Abyss under President Vladimir Putin has been miraculous. National social responsibility has succeeded where the crazed, simplistic theories of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Ayn Rand all palpably failed.

The coronavirus pandemic therefore should serve as a wake up call to the peoples of the West, what Thomas Jefferson memorably called “A Fire Bell in the Night.” They need to start following Russia’s examples of self reliance, prudent preparation and maintaining strong borders.

The ravages of Liberalism – its Open Borders and Free Markets – have already stripped the West of all its defenses, social, demographic, industrial and economic. The West is out of time: The Audit of Pandemic has been taken, and the reckoning is now due.

Mr. Trump ran in 2016 almost on a peace platform in terms of foreign policy. He said things such as this:

“I share the American people’s frustration… I also share their frustration over a foreign policy that has spent too much time, energy, money — and, most importantly, lives — trying to rebuild countries in our own image instead of pursuing our security interests above all other considerations.”

I supported him vis a vis Mrs. Hillary Clinton mainly because she seemed, at least in comparison, to be a pro-war belligerent. From her support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in Afghanistan and Western Sahara, she has long established herself as a foreign policy hawk. For example, as emblematic of her deeply held views, she favored a: “tough-minded, muscular foreign and defense policy…”

I along with Ralph Raico and Donald Miller started up the group called “Libertarians for Trump.” Some 5000 people signed on.  It was widely bruited about that no one but hicks, red-necks, morons in flyover country could support this ignoramus. To counter this, Paul Gottfried, Boyd Cathy and I initiated a separate support group for our present president called “Scholars for Trump.” Signatories were limited to people with advanced degrees such as the Ph.D. We attracted signatures from about 150 people.

But what about Gary Johnson? He also ran for president, on the Libertarian Party ticket. Should not I as a libertarian (lower case “l” indicates a backer of this philosophy; upper case “L” refers to a member of the Libertarian Party – I am both) have supported the former governor of New Mexico instead of Trump?

My attempt to square the circle was the following: If you lived in a red or blue state, the Donald did not need your vote. He would either win or lose big to Hillary. Therefore vote for Gary. But if you are in one of the few purple states, the pull the lever for Donald, since he more nearly favored peace.

But we are now at the end of 2019. The US military is still fighting active battles in Afghanistan (18 years and counting!) and Syria, and we have troops in over 100 other countries.

Those in the DMZ between North and South Korea are particularly vulnerable.  This is defense? It reeks of offense! Trump may have been the peace candidate, but this certainly is no description of his presidency.

What to do now? One option is to impeach Number 45; not for “abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.” That is just plain silly. Rather he deserves this rebuke for violating the Constitution which specifies that only congress can declare war, and this august body has done no such thing (I realize of course that the Donald is not the first president to deserve impeachment for this reason, but that is entirely a different matter. Impeach ‘em all, say I.) The difficulty with impeachment is that Vice President Pence will then take his place, and my reading of the tea leaves is that he will be at one fell swoop even more belligerent and also far less susceptible to a subsequent impeachment that he too will richly deserve were he to also flout the constitution in this manner. My fear is that in impeaching Trump we would be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Is there no hope? Happily, John Bolton, the war monger’s war monger no longer has the ear of the president. He never in his entire life thought of a place the US could invade without having an orgasm. Perhaps the Donald, after he beats this specious impeachment, will come to his senses, and channel the relative peacemaker he was when he first ran for office in 2015. Hey, it’s Christmas! Who knows what can happen.

A word about Mr. Kim. He saw what happened to Muammar Gadaffi of Libya. Not unreasonably, he does not want to suffer the same fate. All the more reason, then, to have no more such Libyas, lest the next dictator to come down the pike emulate this one. There is one other reason to be optimistic. Ok, ok, less pessimistic. Thank goodness say I for the recent rapprochement between North and South Korea. (Or am I just hoping for a thaw?) If the two Germanys could accomplish a reduction in hostilities, so, then, maybe, possibly, hopefully, can the two occupants of the Korean peninsula. As we peaceniks used to say in the 1960s, a nuclear war can ruin your entire day.

lewrockwell.com