From The Fields

Liberalism used to be a philosophy that espoused the protection of individual liberties AND economic freedoms. The early twentieth century progressive movement and then Franklin Delano Roosevelt redefined liberal to exclude the economic freedom part. The word liberal was stolen from actual liberals and used to describe the views of progressives, socialists and outright Marxists. Actual liberals had to coin a new term to describe their beliefs and philosophy. Thus the term libertarian came into use to describe the beliefs of those of us who value both individual liberties and economic liberty.

The palace coup that crowned Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party nominee for President has appropriated the word freedom and in doing so has changed its meaning. The germ of the idea started with FDR's 1941 State of the Union address where he posited that there were four freedoms; freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

There are two kinds of freedom, negative freedom and positive freedom. Negative freedom refers to what government cannot take away from you; your life, your right to express yourself, your right to associate with people of your own choosing, your right to defend yourself against forceful aggression, your right to keep honestly earned property, your right to worship as you please, essentially those rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights plus private property rights and personal control over reproductive rights. Positive freedom refers to what the government can give you; FDR's freedom from want and fear. Government produces nothing. People produce things. Government therefore has nothing to give those in want or fear. Therefore all it can actually do is tax, that is steal, from the group of people deemed not to be needy or fearful to give to the group of people deemed to be needy or fearful.

The Democrats under Kamala's banner have completely reversed the meaning of freedom. They claim freedom of speech and expression for themselves exclusively. Under the Biden administration, which obviously includes Kamala as Vice President, they have effectively denied free speech to anyone who disagrees with their preferred narrative. The censorship by coercion of social media on different narratives on COVID, the Hunter Biden laptop, climate change, the war in Ukraine and other issues is a 180 degree turn from FDR's freedom of speech and expression. Their attempts to force "woke" lifestyle choices in all public institutions at the expense of traditional religious values negates freedom of worship.

They are doubling down on FDR;s positive freedoms; want and fear. Crackpot ideas like price controls on food companies (which have profit margins of 1-2%) and giving $25,000 to first time homebuyers are examples of positive freedoms. Expressed in non-political language, they want to be the fences that transfer stolen goods from the "rich" who don't vote for them anyway to the poor who do. The mantra of freedom from fear of being shot is just a clever way of trying to make the fundamental right to self-defense a freedom instead of a gross violation of freedom.

We are witnessing the prophecy of George Orwell in "1984" where "Freedom is slavery". Kamala is also all in on continuing to support Ukraine in their futile war against Russia. I guess "War is peace." And if the voters elect either Kamala or Trump, we will have learned that "Ignorance is strength." That's this week's Report From the Fields. See you again next week.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was recently killed while he slept in a compound controlled by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It is widely believed that the responsible party for carrying out the assassination was Israel. The Israeli government has neither confirmed nor denied those reports.

Haniyeh, a peace negotiator for Hamas, was in Iran to attend the inauguration of Iran's new President, Masoud Pezeshkian. Pezeshkian was elected on a platform of seeking peace for Iran. He defeated the candidate supported by the Revolutionary Guard. The Guard epitomises the hardcore "Death to Israel" faction in Iranian internal politics.

Since the attack, Pezeshkian has advocated a measured response by Iran. Attacking Israeli forces in places like Azerbaijan and Iraqi Kurdistan. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard is advocating direct hits on Tel Aviv and other targets within Israel.

Of course, the final decision will be made by Supreme :Leader Ali Khameni. After all, Iran is still an autocracy.

The primary interest of the United States in this conflict should be limited to diplomacy aimed at limiting the possibility of escalation of hostilities in Israel's conflicts with Iran and Iran's proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen. Israel is a nuclear power. Iran may be. We really don't know for sure. A nuclear conflagration in the Middle East could easily escalate world wide.

It's tempting for politicians to pick sides in conflicts like this and form alliances. Culturally and politically, we have more in common with Israel. And we should certainly put no constraints on the ability of our arms manufacturers to do business with Israel. But we should not also be buying weapons for Israel. The Israelis have demonstrated over the years that they are quite capable of defending themselves against all threats. They don't need our further economic assistance.

By electing the relatively moderate, Pezeshkian, over the more hawkish Revolutionary Guard backed candidate for President, the voters of Iran have indicated they are more interested in peace and prosperity than they are in death to Israel. That's a sentiment that needs to be nurtured and encouraged, not manipulated for short-term tactical geopolitical gain.

That's this week's Report From the Fields. I'm Richard Fields. See you again next week.

In his speech to the Libertarian National Convention, Donald Trump promised to do libertarian things if libertarians gave him their vote this November. On July 31, Trump posted on Truth Social, in all caps of course, "SENIORS SHOULD NOT PAY TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY!" Is this a way for Trump to appeal to libertarians? Well, let's do some arithmetic. Right now, seniors making less than $44,000 (for a couple) pay taxes on only one half of their social security income. Inferentially, that is the portion of Social Security that was paid for by their employers, from which no tax was withheld. So, no taxes on Social Security means no taxes on that income ever. Right now the minority of seniors making more than $44,000 can be taxed on up to 85% of their Social Security benefits. So that extra 35% amounts to double taxation on the same income.

Libertarians are all for lowering and, if possible, eliminating taxes. So, does that make Trump's proposal a libertarian proposal? Well, not really. You see, Trump and, for that matter, Harris both ignore the elephant (or donkey) in the room. You see, so-called mandatory spending, mostly social spending like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid along with interest on the national debt account for 70% of all Federal spending. All taxes combined only cover 76% of Federal spending. That means the 24% deficit has to be covered by even more borrowing. Interest is already more than 10.5% of Federal spending, more than Medicaid. Meanwhile the biggest lenders to the U.S. government are reducing the amount they are willing to lend us. China has reduced its lending to the U.S. by 40% in the last 10 years. If you want to know why, see Trump tariffs and Biden's outright theft of U.S. Treasury debt held by Russia. Other countries are figuring out that the Treasuries they hold may be stolen from them if they dare have a different foreign policy than the one prescribed to them by Washington.

In short, the willing lenders to the U.S. are going away. That leaves the Federal Reserve. They can always just create new money and lend that. We've seen, in the last few years, that the eventual result of that is rip-roaring inflation. Inflation is just a tax going by another name. The only way tax cuts can be beneficial is if they are accompanied by a corresponding (or larger) spending cut. Neither Trump nor Harris is going to be proposing anything like that anytime soon.

I've thrown a lot of numbers at you so let me recap. Interest on the debt and mandatory social spending make up 70% of what the Federal government spends. Taxes only account for 76% of what the Feds spend. That means that all of defense spending and most spending for federal courts and regulators and everything else is financed by borrowing.

The only way a tax cut, any tax cut, can be considered libertarian is if the budget is already balanced and the cut is matched by an equal spending reduction. Only one Presidential candidate is proposing anything close to that. That would be Libertarian Presidential candidate Chase Oliver who proposes reducing Federal spending to pre-covid 2019 levels. That's this week's Report From the Fields. I'm Richard Fields. See you again next week

Last week I examined why Kamala Harris is manifestly unsuited to be the President of the United States. This week let's delve into what Seymour Hersh calls a bloodless coup which led to Kamala's coronation as the Democratic candidate.

For those of you who are unaware of the reputation of Si Hersh, let me bring you up to date. He exposed the My Lai massacre and coverup during the Vietnam War and was awarded the Pulitzer prize for that reporting. He covered Watergate for the New York Times, the secret bombing of Cambodia, domestic spying by the CIA and the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.His most recent scoop was the revelation that the U.S. and Norway had collaborated to blow up the Nord Stream pipeline which piped Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany. The goal was to make sure Germany did not stray from the coalition opposing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He has won a record five George Polk awards and two National Magazine awards in addition to his Pulitzer. And at age 89, he has no reason to pull any punches.Hersh often uses confidential sources and has been criticized for that. Mostly by people who don't like what his reporting reveals. His honest reporting means he no longer has a home at the NYT or anywhere else on the government propaganda peddling legacy media. He now writes at Substack.

In his latest Substack reporting, he says, based on information provided by a confidential source, a Washington insider, that Biden stepped down from the campaign only after a phone call from former President Barack Obama. Obama is alleged to have said, "Here's the deal. We have Kamala's approval to invoke the 25th Amendment." The 25th Amendment can be invoked when "a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide." Once invoked, the Vice President becomes the acting President. In short, Biden was offered the choice between being forced out in disgrace or resigning and accepting public accolades from his fellow Democrats and the legacy media. All of this came to a head because of Biden's disastrous debate performance last June. The media could no longer hide or explain away Biden's obvious mental decline. More to the point, the big money donors had zipped shut their wallets until a replacement for Biden was found. Biden's decline in polling along with Kamala holding steady in polling cemented the party's determination to dump Biden.

The game is not yet over, of course. Among her many negative attributes, Kamala is reputed to be a bad boss to her staff. And she appears to be lazy. According to Hersh, Kamala apparently doesn't feel the need to read the President's Daily Brief, the highly classified summary of intelligence prepared overnight by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It's delivered by hand to the President and the Vice President and is supposed to be read in the presence of the delivering intelligence officer. Harris expressed disinterest in reading the document and at one point asked that it no longer be delivered to her. That's a bit of a snub to the deep state agents who are responsible for stage managing her apparently successful coup. The deep state, i.e. our 17 or 18 intelligence agencies, do not like being ignored. If elected, Kamala will be well advised to at least pretend to read her President's Daily Brief. I'm Richard Fields and that's this week's Report From the Fields. See you again next week.

Hi, this is Richard Fields with this week's Report From the Fields. "Joe Biden's" Weekend at Biden's Presidential campaign has mercifully come to an end. More troubling, the remaining six months of his Presidency continue. But that's another story. Biden (or one of his aides) quit his campaign with a post on X from Biden's beach house in Delaware on Sunday morning, July 21. Perhaps as an afterthought, he made a second X post endorsing VP Kamala Harris to run in as the Democratic nominee in his stead. Within hours, the entirety of legacy media was on board with glowing stories about the first woman of color running for President. Within days, Kamala had rounded up enough delegate votes for the nomination. When Kamala ran for President in 2020, she dropped out due to poor polling numbers in December of 2019, before any primary ballots were cast. As such she is the only Presidential candidate to receive a major party nomination without receiving a single primary vote since Gerald Ford secured the Republican nomination in 1976. So much for the Democrats saving "our democracy".

Early polling shows that Republican Donald Trump has a slight lead over Kamala. But it's within the margin of error. So, barring a miraculous third party win, Kamala could be our next President. We already know what an awful President Trump was. He set record deficits. He started a tariff war with China which means higher consumer prices for Chinese goods. He signed onto the COVID propaganda and instigated the lockdowns and questionable vaccines we were all "strongly encouraged" to take. All of that contributed to inflation as high as 9% and which continues to this day. He scapegoated immigrants for all of the economic problems he caused. And he continues to do that to this day. His judicial appointments paved the way for states to outlaw abortion. In some states, that is now happening. Despite his pandering to the Libertarian National Convention, he is no libertarian. If, for no ot, her reason, than promulgating huge Federal deficits. At $35 trillion and growing another trillion every two or three months, the deficit is the existential issue for America. No libertarian can, in good conscience, support Trump.

So, let's try to devine where Kamala comes down on the issues. First, she is almost certainly complicit in the Biden administration's media censorship efforts. She buys into the global warming scam. She is on record as being even more extremely anti-fossil fuel than Biden was. She would ban fracking. For the record, fracking is the most efficient way to get more natural gas, the cleanest burning fossil fuel on the planet. Fracking causes no problems with well water. The fear-mongers have not figured out that It takes place thousands of feet below the water table. Kamala wants to ban fracking. Her undergraduate degree is in economics from Howard University. As far as I know, there are no economics courses that look at the Austrian School or even the Monetarist School of economic thought. The Howard University's economics department mostly just regurgitates Keynesian and neo-Keynesian economic dogma. That's what got us into this mess. It's not going to get us out. And Kamala's father was a Professor of Economics who taught Marxist economics. With Kamala in a decision making position regarding the economy, what could possibly go wrong? Modern Monetary Theory as government policy, anyone?

I've previously put forward the theory that the very people who are attracted to political power are those who want to force others to live the way those in power prefer. Control freaks. Precisely the kind of people who should never get political power. Those kinds of power seekers are also the kinds of people who will use any means necessary to attain power. Like, at age 29, becoming the girlfriend of the then 60 year old, married Speaker of the Assembly in California, Willie Brown. I'm sure that it was true love or at least true lust and not lust for power and the gift of a BMW or the well-paid, little-work patronage appointments to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board or the Medical Assistance Commission. As DA she obtained more than 1,900 marijuana convictions and in an interview laughingly admitted her own use of pot. She introduced a program threatening parents of school truants with a $2500 fine and a year in jail. As Attorney General she opposed California's ban on affirmative action. She argued in court against the early release of state prisoners, saying they were necessary for fire-fighting duties. At well below minimum wage, I suspect. And I'm merely scratching the surface of Kamala's demonstrated lust for and abuse of power.

So, once again, Libertarians have a choice of voting for an evil Republican or an evil Democrat. Both will increase the pace of America's descent into bankruptcy probably through hyperinflation. Both will infringe on the economic and personal freedoms of Americans. Neither will disentangle us from our foreign military adventurism. Libertarian Presidential candidate Chase Oliver may not win. But, at least he is not evil. That's this week's Report From the Fields. See you again next week.