The Costs Post 9/11/2001

9/11/2001 around 3,000 people lost their lives in the World Trade Center buildings and the flights used as guided missiles. In the aftermath of the buildings collapsing, the total deaths were recorded at 2,996 people, including the 19 hijackers and 2,977 victims. More would succumb to illness caused by the dust and debris in the months and years afterwards, and we can only speculate on those citizens who died as a result of shock at the unfolding of the atrocities of the day. But these are not the only casualties we can add to this. we can also add in the deaths of service members and civilians from America and those of other nations.

According to the website Journalist's Resource "The Brown University project estimated that together, all countries involved have lost a total of 31,000 uniformed servicemembers and military contractors. In addition, the researchers estimated in 2011 that between 152,280 and 192,550 civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan have died as a “result of the fighting at the hands of all parties.” In March 2013, the Brown researchers revised the civilian total estimate to 200,000; and they estimated that 330,000 people had been killed overall as a result of the conflicts, accounting for all soldiers, militants, police, contractors, journalists, humanitarian workers and civilians involved."

These numbers should do enough to discourage any more operations in the areas, but sadly it does not deter those war hawkish members of the political atmosphere nor a number of citizens from the demolition and destruction of these countries, these people and these futures. 

Lives cost a lot, no one is denying that, but let's take a second to look at the economical impact the past 13 years have taken. According to the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) Total spent and obligated through FY 2014 is around 4,374.5 billion US dollars. (2014 dollars) with the Additional Cumulative Interest on Past Pentagon and State/USAID War Appropriations FY 2001‐2013 by 2054 reaching over 7,900 billion. If you are having trouble with converting that, it is 4 Trillion 374 Billion, 500 Million dollars since 2001 and an estimated 7 Trillion 900 Billion dollars. 

All of this is taken directly from increased borrowing from the US Central Bank with loans being paid back with interest by the US taxpayer. That money is being created with the future payments being ladled with interest and being sworn to your children and grand-children and so on. 

Another aspect of what has been lost since 2001.

The rights and privacy lost since 2001 have been explained by many, from Judge Andrew Napolitano to Former House Of Representative and 2008 and 2012 Presidential candidate Ron Paul, from the leaked document of the CIA, NSA, DOJ, DOD and a host of other alphabet soup agencies by the work of Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, who took personal sacrifice for the American citizens to a new level. 

All the new security you see and experience when traveling, paid for by increased taxation. All the new background checks you go through, paid for by increased taxation. The departments themselves, who have been the subject to their own leaks of inter-office behavior, are entirely funded by the same ones they are spying on. Let there be no mistake about it, the notion that you can be 100% ok with the amount of agencies and securities that have increased since 2001 and also hold a belief in the reduction of taxation is entirely erroneous. Let it also be noted that in any attempt to curb this behavior or increasing security state bubble is met with resistance by those who value their sense of safety over their sense of morality or sensibility. Hell they even used the word Patriot to pass an act of protecting themselves while spying on you; ie. Patriot Act. 

Over the years Patriots have risen, but did you even notice?

We have already gone over Snowden, Manning and Assange, all who have given their freedom for your knowledge of the facts of the government you live under. There are more examples of those who have made a stand for a belief in what is moral and right.

The Burger King Corporation recently set itself into a media firestorm. With the acquisition of a foreign (Canada) company, the BK Corp saw to move its Headquarters to Canada to escape higher corporate taxation. Now the media and those unknowingly ignorant of economic sense call this move unpatriotic. But how so? Wasn't the Boston Tea Party a patriotic act, in the same sense to avoid undue taxation, the hypocrisy is almost deafening. 

Cliven Bundy did his patriotic duty in his defiance of federal officials to turn over parts of his land to federal department control in the name of bogus claims of conservation of a certain species. He, along with other resistors in name and spirit spent days holding off Federal Department of Land Management officers as they took to try and take what they wanted of property that had no right to.

So on this Patriots day let's remember those that gave their lives, their freedoms and their blood, sweat and tears for what is morally right, what can be more patriotic than a man who fights a tyrannous, overbearing, overreaching, overburdening Government? 

Hayek’s “Rejuvenating Event” by B.K. Marcus

Swedish socialist Gunnar Myrdal was not happy about sharing his Nobel Prize with that Austrian "reactionary," F.A. Hayek. The so-called Nobel for economics, established by the central bank of the world's leading welfare state, was only five years old in 1974. It had already become meaningless — according to Myrdal — if they were going to bestow it on this apologist for capitalism.

Forty years ago today, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the "Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel" would be awarded to both Myrdal and Hayek. It would be hard to find a less compatible pair of economic thinkers.

Myrdal was Keynesian before Lord Keynes himself. His biographer would later write, "If his contribution had been available to readers of English before 1936, it is interesting to speculate whether the ‘revolution’ in macroeconomic theory … would be referred to as ‘Myrdalian’ as much as ‘Keynesian.’" By contrast, Hayek was the foremost opponent of the Keynesian revolution.

Myrdal had helped found the Econometric Society, whose original motto was "science is prediction." Hayek and his fellows in the Austrian School insisted that economics wasn't a quantitative science, that prediction was impossible, and that econometrics was at best a form of history. Where Myrdal wanted the State to use economic science to plan for a more humane tomorrow, the Austrians claimed the future was constantly being renegotiated by entrepreneurs in a dynamic dance with consumers. Not only did the Austrians oppose central planning; they claimed it was impossible!

While Myrdal worked to modernize Western left-liberalism and to strengthen the hand of an enlightened State in the pursuit of progress and social justice, Hayek denied that the idea of social justice had any meaning. He adhered to a more individualist understanding of liberalism, according to which the market needs no external regulation.

As Myrdal saw it, if such a backward thinker as Friedrich August von Hayek could be awarded the highest honor in economics, then the whole institution needed to be abolished.

He was not the only one to object to the prize. Peter Nobel, a great-grandnephew of Alfred, insists that no member of his family ever wanted an economics prize in the first place.

Technically, what is commonly called the Nobel Prize for Economics isn't a Nobel Prize at all. The will of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish armament manufacturer and the inventor of dynamite, established the official Nobel Prizes in 1895. The categories were physics, chemistry, medicine, peace, and literature. There was no prize for economics — until 1968, when Sweden's central bank created and endowed a new prize "in memory of Alfred Nobel."

Hayek himself, while grateful for the recognition, said he would "have decidedly advised against it," had anyone consulted him on whether or not such a prestigious award should be given. "The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess," Hayek explained in his speech at the Nobel banquet.

This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally.

Hayek was clearly onto something, as we can see when an interventionist like Paul Krugman wins the prize. But as Samuel Brittan of the Financial Times wrote in 2003, the soi-disant Nobel "has not … in the least increased the willingness of policy makers to accept international free trade or reject the 'lump of labour' fallacy — matters on which most academic theorists are agreed."

When a free-market economist wins a Nobel Prize, the public does not suddenly embrace laissez-faire capitalism, but the Swedish socialist may have been prescient if he worried that honoring the Austrian would somehow hurt economic science as he conceived it. Hayek’s work, then as now, is used as the antidote to Myrdal’s conception of economics — that is, economics as interventionism.

One biographer describes Hayek's Nobel as "the great rejuvenating event in his life." It rescued him from obscurity — and apparently brought him out of a long emotional depression.

After his bestselling 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, Hayek had been unable to repeat the success. No other book of his would attract a popular readership, and scholars, even those who generally shared his political philosophy, saw Hayek's economic work as obsolete. He had, indeed, left economic theory largely behind to pursue a broader understanding of history, social theory, philosophy, and law.

But after sharing the self-styled Nobel with Myrdal, Hayek's star began to rise again, not just in the West — where he would later receive honors from the British and American governments, and meet with Pope John Paul II to discuss the pressing concerns of political economy — but, much more importantly, in the Eastern Bloc countries.

Milton Friedman (another "reactionary" Nobel laureate, according to Myrdal), wrote:

There is no figure who had more of an influence on the intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain than Friedrich Hayek. His books were translated and published by the underground and black market … read widely, and undoubtedly influenced the climate of opinion that ultimately brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Hayek became infamous with the socialists of all parties, and he is considered an extremist even by many moderates. But he was no purist. He made so many concessions to the welfare state that some are uncomfortable with his prominence within the freedom movement. In a letter to Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand offered Hayek as "an example of our most pernicious enemy." She also described him as “the kind who do more good to the communist cause than ours.”

In that second assessment, at least, she was obviously wrong. The history of ideas — and the impact of those ideas on actual freedoms in the real world — is complex, nonlinear, and thoroughly unpredictable. And the Austrians are clearly right about the nature of prediction: Who could have foreseen that the central bank of the world's leading welfare state would pilfer the name of an arms dealer and end up resurrecting the career of the leading opponent of socialism and central banking?

Today Hayek is remembered more for his lifelong opposition to all top-down attempts to manage the economy than for his compromises in 20th-century politics. He is remembered for concepts such as local knowledge and spontaneous order — ideas that are more readily evident to a generation that has grown accustomed to the disruptive innovation of distributed networks, digital currency, and the sharing economy.

But we don't need the developments of the last 40 years to vindicate Hayek’s life’s work. Myrdal's outrage in 1974 should have been evidence enough of the Austrian’s importance to the cause of liberty.

ABOUT

B.K. MARCUS

B.K. Marcus is managing editor of The Freeman.

Wage Slavery is a false term.

I think "Wage Slavery" is a false term.
Wages are what employees gain from their service and labor to their employer. It is an act of voluntary exchange on the part of both parties. If wages were not gained by this service then slavery would exist, in the presence of wages though it is merely employment by mutual terms.


Slavery, historically, is the position of a person who through compulsion is held against their will and forced (by threat of violence)to work for the gain of the "slaveholder or slave master".


Using the word wages in conjunction with the word slavery does two things. One it lowers the definition of wages to the negative connotation of being forced to work for the benefit of another without ANY reimbursement. Secondly it tends to negate the real horrors of real slavery that has happened and is still happening around the world.


The term "wage slavery" defined deals with those wages that are so low that a person who is employed relies on them just for basic survival. Of course wages should be used in the pursuit of survival and any wants left to be pursued, if that is the want of the wage earner. One cannot force a person to use their own property in any other way that they do not wish.


Hereto we must interject on the reverse side of this issue. Mandatory wage and Minimum wage laws handed down from government bureaus and departments. These laws force businesses and businesses owners to provide wages beyond that of market value or personal labor value. These laws almost always lead to higher prices in market goods as the mandatory minimum wages are offset in the businessman's pursuit to maintain certain levels of profit.


Wage Slavery is a false point being made by those that wish to direct the affairs of businesses that do not affect them in the personal way.