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From The Fields

Libertarians, Trump, and the Case for Edward Snowden

FromTheFields Monday February 3, 2025

Hi, this is Richard Fields with this week's Report From the Fields. Angela McCardle, the Chair of the Libertarian National Committee is doing victory laps. She claims that Donald J Trump has fulfilled the promises he made to Libertarians at their national convention last spring by appointing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services and by pardoning Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road website.

Not so fast. RFK Jr. demonstrated that he can talk the libertarian talk when he spoke to last spring's LP convention. But, walk the walk? Not so much. He spent most of his adult life as an activist lawyer pursuing ultra-green environmental goals which are sometimes antithetical to property rights and other libertarian priorities. And it's one thing to call out as unwarranted a government mandate on an experimental vaccine. It's another, and potentially dangerous to your health, thing to call out all vaccines as bad things. I, for one, am glad to have taken my childhood polio shots.

And, while most libertarians would agree that a pardon of the Dread Pirate Roberts should occur, his worthiness to be pardoned pales in comparison to, say Edward Snowden. Ulbricht's website facilitated the sale of illegal narcotics and services. Drugs and services between willing buyers and sellers should not be illegal. Changing the laws that make them illegal seems to me to have better optics than thumbing your nose at those bad laws. It kind of reinforces the cynical criticism of libertarians as just conservatives who like to get high.

Edward Snowden, on the other hand, single handedly, and at great personal risk, exposed massive lawbreaking on the part of our national intelligence apparatus and their subcontractors. It is because of Snowden's whistle-blowing that we know of the massive data vacuum of personal information, that our nation's intelligence agencies have the ability to focus on any one of us. When Snowden saw the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, lie under oath to Congress he decided to release what he knew, to trustworthy journalists. He escaped to Russia of all places and ultimately was given asylum and eventually citizenship there. He's the guy that the Libertarian Party should have suggested Trump pardon.

It's not too late. Trump has hinted that he is open to brokering an end of hostilities between Ukraine and Russia. It's not inconceivable that a pardon for Snowden could be part of that negotiation. Ulbricht was a website operator who facilitated dealing in narcotics. Like all drug dealers and other criminals who have no unwilling victims, he should be pardoned. Snowden laid bare that our own government has been, and continues, to illegally spy on American citizens without warrant or cause. He's a national hero. He should not only be pardoned but also awarded the Medal of Freedom.I'm Richard Fields and that's this week's Report From the Fields. See you again next week.

Republican Spending Spree: Inflation Threatens Your Wallet

FromTheFields Monday February 3, 2025

Hi, I'm Richard Fields with this week's Report From the Fields. Nothing says that Republicans learned nothing from their November wins like GOP Speaker Mike Johnson pushing through a massive budget reconciliation bill at the end of the year that keeps the government open until March.

The bill suspends the debt limit, a Trump demand. It authorizes $110 billion in farm and disaster aid and more submarines for the Navy. Money the government doesn't have. Which means the cost will be passed on to the public in the form of inflation instead of taxes. Amounting to an average of over $320 per person. At 118 pages, it's a marginal improvement over the original Mike Johnson negotiated reconciliation bill which had more than 1500 pages of pork including huge pay raises for Congresscritters.

Johnson, the Republican Speaker had to rely on near unanimous Democratic support and the votes of 34 RINOs. And that demonstrates that in spite of the voter message that elected a Republican House, switched the Senate to GOP control and elected a GOP President, Republicans still are not responding to the desire of the voters for less government spending. Not the same old pushing the ever-increasing debt can down the road.

It's a stark contrast to Argentina where voters elected a President, Javier Milei, who promised to reduce spending and inflation and then actually did so.

In a just world the costs of disasters would be borne by private insurance paid for by those suffering the losses, not by the taxpayers. Likewise, lobbying groups like big Ad and the military/industrial complex would not be bailed out whenever they say please gimmee.

Unfortunately passage of the Reconciliation Bill which increases spending and cuts nothing, when we're already running record red ink under a Republican majority, bodes poorly for any significant change in government overspending. DOGE has its work cut out for it. It doesn't look very optimistic. That's this week's Report From the Fields. I'm Richard Fields. See you again next week.

Los Angeles Fires: Blame Game and Recovery Insights

FromTheFields Monday February 3, 2025

Hi, this is Richard Fields with this week's Report From the Fields. As I write this tragic tale on Tuesday morning, the Pacific Palisades fire has already incinerated 5,300 structures and it's only 17 percent contained. The Eaton fire has consumed over 5,000 structures and is 35 percent contained. Dry conditions and hurricane speed Santa Ana winds have contributed to the destruction by fire of over 40,000 acres of urban land. At least 24 people have died. For comparison, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 killed 300 people, destroyed only 2,112 acres but, at 17,500, more buildings. But the LA fires are still burning, the winds are still blowing and there is no rain in the forecast.

Naturally, a lot of blaming is going on. Let me begin by pointing out where blame does not belong. Contrary to climate-change scamsters and fearmongers, the cause is not climate change. The climate in the Los Angeles basin has been dry and the Santa Ana winds have been blowing for centuries. Dashiell Hammet wrote "Red Wind", a pot boiler detective story which featured the Santa Ana winds. It was published in 1929, nearly a hundred years ago. There is nothing new about hot dry winds in LA. In fact there is nothing new about fire in the LA basin. Before Angelinos paved and landscaped the city, it was dry grasslands and chaparral. Grass and chaparral fires were a regular occurance.

But, on December 4 of last year, LA Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley wrote a memo foreseeing dire consequences from a $17.6 million fire department budget cut. Among the areas cut was pilot training for water dropping helicopters and deferred maintenance that took fire fighting equipment out of service. One area that was not cut was firefighter salaries. The fact that the nearby 117 million gallon Santa Ynez reservoir had been empty for a year for maintenance probably contributed to fire hydrants going dry.

Meanwhile, billionaires like Rick Caruso are hiring private fire fighting crews at thousands of dollars a day. Successfully, it seems. Caruso's Palisades Village shopping center is still standing. Multi-million dollar mansions across the street have burned to the ground. Nowhere is it written in stone that fire-fighting should be a public service rather than a private service paid for by property owners and their insurers. Municipal fire departments are notoriously subject to crony politics and overspending in less than optimal ways. Private fire-fighting companies whose motive is to make a profit by providing a service that actually prevents and quickly puts out fires, don't have that problem.

Something for Angelinos to ponder as they sift through the ashes and try to figure out how to rebuild. In the long run it would be more effective than begging the Federal government to please, please help us. That's this week's Report From the Fields. See you again next week.

2024, a year where decades happened

FromTheFields Tuesday January 21, 2025

Allegedly, Vladimir Lenin, of all people, said “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”. 2024 was like that, albeit a whole year where decades happened.

2024 was the year that people began to lose faith in the elite dictated established order. All at once. That lack of faith is epitomized by the election to public office of candidates decidedly not a part of the elite establishment. The most compelling example of that is the election of Javier Milei as President of Argentina in late 2023. Milei campaigned as a radical anarcho-capitalist libertarian economist promising to take a chainsaw to government spending. He won. And he's been wielding the chainsaw with a vengeance, cutting Argentine government spending dramatically. As a result, the Argentine Federal budget is in balance for the first time in decades. Inflation has been slashed. Foreign investment into Argentina has boomed along with the Argentine stock market. And the economy has emerged from a long painful recession into growth mode. Doug Barbieri, a Libertarian Counterpoint panelist who actually moved to Argentina has been there while all this took place and will shortly be giving us a boots on the ground description of how it all played out.

Sweden has scrapped their commitment to the 2030 global climate directives.

Voters lost faith in the FBI and other law enforcement organizations when it became clear that crime's of corruption by Hunter Biden while his Dad was Vice President were being ignored and covered up.

Voters lost faith in elite controlled healthcare bureaucracies like the CDC when it became abundantly clear that they were propagating bald faced lies about COVID, from its alleged severity, to its origin, to the efficacy of masks and vaccines, to the effectiveness and fairness of the lockdowns and more. Some heard that COVID fatalities in Africa with its 20 percent vaccination rate were no worse than in the West with vaccination rates nearing 100 percent in some countries.

Voters lost faith in the Climate scare complex when the predictions of polar ice cap disappearance, polar bear extinction and flooding coastal cities failed to materialize even decades after when they were predicted by the likes of Al Gore and John Kerry.

Voters lost confidence in government bean counters when they were told that inflation was under control even as it surged to 9 percent and when election year job gains turned into job losses after the figures were revised, conveniently after the election.

In France President Emmanuel Macron was compelled to call snap elections where the National Rally Party won more than twice as many votes as Macron's Central Alliance.

In Italy Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy won a majority of the Italian Parliament.

In Hungary, Victor Orban's Fidesz Party won a parliamentary majority.

The Law and Justice Party won a majority in Poland.

And in the United States, the candidate with the felony convictions and civil lawsuit losses, not to mention nearly unanimous disparagement by the elite controlled corporate media, Donald J. Trump, won a second nonconsecutive term as president in spite of everything the elites could throw at him.

What's interesting from a libertarian perspective is that legacy media, which is, of course, totally controlled by the entrenched elites are loudly bemoaning these electoral results as a takeover by the far right. They are not. The libertarian Milei is particularly not a man of the right. And the rest of them ran on some libertarian issues, less regulation and government discrimination in the form of DEI policies among them. They also ran on economically illiterate populist issues like the scourge of immigration. But a significant portion of that anti-immigration fear is based on the reality that the entrenched elites have long been encouraging immigration as a way of padding their own party's voter rolls.

Worldwide, the people have said loudly and clearly to the established elites and their media mouthpieces, we don't trust you, we don't like you and we will elect anyone who opposes you.

The danger is that the newly elected will wimp out on the reasons they were elected and succumb to the monetary and prestige temptations of becoming part of the establishment elite... and ultimately changing nothing. The only leader who seems willing to break that mold is Milei in Argentina. Hopefully others will follow his example. That's this week's Report From the Fields. I'm Richard Fields. See you again next week.

Department of Government efficiency or DOGE

FromTheFields Sunday December 15, 2024

Hi, this is Richard Fields with this week's Report From the Fields. As longtime viewers of this show know, I am no fan of President-elect Trump...or lame duck President Biden. Trump ran on a couple of really simple-minded and stupid planks. Rounding up millions of immigrants and sending them back to their countries of origin. And enacting tariffs so extreme that they would pretty much end U.S. participation in international trade. And to the extent they didn't do that they would effectively be a national sales tax on top of the income tax and inflation which functions as a tax.

But he is doing a couple of things right. He's not appointing members of the deep state who destroyed his first term from within. He's appointing avowed deep state destroyers like Tulsi Gabbard to Director of National Intelligence and Kash Patel as FBI Director.

But his most inspired move is to appoint quasi-libertarians Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami to the Department of Government efficiency or DOGE. And DOGE isn't even a real government agency. Their mission is to find regulations of little utility that can be rolled back or eliminated either by executive order or by congressional action and then fire all the regulators that enforce those now nonexistent regulations. The Supreme Court getting rid of Chevron deference (where the regulators were all assumed to be experts who must be deferred to) will actually put this effort in the realm of the possible. Unlike the Grace Commission under Reagan which made lots of good recommendations which were largely ignored. Both Trump and Musk have been talking to Argentina's Javier Milei who has been successfully taking a chainsaw to Argentina's bureaucratic class for a year now.

But the deep state and the administrative state are fighting back. They're trying to get as many judges confirmed as they can while the Democrats still control the Senate. They're sending every missile, tank, artillery shell and bullet they can scrounge up to Ukraine before Trump takes office. They're signing contracts right and left to put boondoggles in place under the terms of the Inflation Reduction Act so that Trump will be contractually bound to spend the money. And, by the way, the Inflation Reduction Act has little to do with inflation. It's mostly a framework for spending stupendous amounts of money on green energy projects of dubious utility. During the last few weeks of Trump's first term he issued an executive order creating Schedule F federal employees who would be exempt from civil service job protections. Biden rescinded it. Putting it back in place could take a long time.

Even some states are getting involved. California Governor Newsome has convened a special session of the state legislature to authorize a $25 million legal defense fund. Probably to prevent a loss of federal funds coming to California courtesy of Biden and the Democrats.

Will DOGE have an impact on wasteful federal spending, even save the $2 trillion a year that Musk is projecting. Or will the Empire successfully strike back? We'll be watching from the cheap seats. I'm Richard Fields and that's this week's Report From the Fields. See you again next week.