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Jacob G. Hornberger

The Danger that NATO Poses to Americans

Saturday July 10, 2021

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Imagine a massive nuclear exchange between the United States and China. That obviously would not be a pretty sight for the people of either nation. As the mushroom clouds arose over both nations, imagine thinking to yourself: “All this because of a socialist road.”
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Libertarians and the Drug War

Wednesday June 23, 2021

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With June 2021 being the 50th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s “war on drugs,” an ever-increasing number of editorials and op-eds are calling for an end to the drug war. This is an extremely positive sign, not only because it brings America closer to ending this evil, immoral, and destructive government program, but also because it shows the power of ideas on liberty.

The intellectual climate was entirely different back in 1989, when I started The Future of Freedom Foundation. Back then, it was mostly only libertarians who were calling for an end to the drug war — and not all libertarians at that. The idea of drug legalization was considered weird, bizarre, and beyond the pale of legitimate discourse. People were simply not ready to hear such a radical message. 

After all, the argument went, anyone who favored drug legalization obviously favored drug use and drug abuse. People simply could not understand that advocating an end to the drug war did not necessarily connote support of drugs themselves.

Back then, I was appearing on lots of talk-radio programs. I knew that I could always light up the phone lines by calling for drug legalization. People were outraged that anyone could possibly favor such a position. 

I was once invited to deliver a talk on libertarianism to a libertarian club at a public high school in Houston. Parents of a student in the club learned that I favored drug legalization. They called a member of the school board, who called the principal, who called the club’s sponsor, who called me. You would have thought that World War III had broken out. 

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End the Draft Permanently

Friday June 18, 2021

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Recently the US Supreme Court declined to consider a challenge to the all-male draft. The plaintiffs in the case argued that excluding women from the draft was unconstitutional. Apparently the Court is simply letting Congress decide the issue. 

I’ve got an idea — an idea grounded in freedom. How about abolishing the draft — and, of course, draft registration? In fact, better yet, how about enacting a constitutional amendment prohibiting the draft from ever being enacted again?

Young people might think the matter is irrelevant, given that there hasn’t been conscription since the Vietnam War. That is naive, wishful, and dangerous thinking. Every 18-year-old male is required, on pain of a felony conviction, to register for the draft. The reason? Because in the event of some major foreign war, make no mistake about it: The Pentagon will not hesitate to restore the draft because it will need soldiers to fight, kill, and die. Young men — and also most likely young women — will begin receiving draft notices ordering them to report to military facilities for training and “service” to “their country.”

The fact that the national-security establishment continues doing everything it can to gin up such a war — like with Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea — makes the possibility of a draft even more likely. And once it happens, there is little anyone will be able to do to stop it. In fact, in the event of another major foreign war, I wouldn’t be surprised if they started jailing people for just challenging the draft, as US officials did in World War I.
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Old and New Official Enemies

Wednesday June 16, 2021

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Doing his best to justify President Biden’s $750 billion military budget, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that China’s military has been building its military capabilities at “a very serious and sustained rate.”

Well, of course it has been. How else would the US national-security establishment justify its ever-increasing budgets? I’m just surprised that Milley didn’t mention Russia in the same breath, as well as North Korea, Cuba, the Taliban, Venezuela, Iran, and all the other minor official enemies, maybe even communist Vietnam too.

China and Russia were the two official enemies — or “rivals,” “opponents,” “enemies” — during the Cold War that kept the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA in high cotton. That was when both countries were supposedly part of an international communist conspiracy that was supposedly based in Moscow. If increasing amounts of US taxpayer money were not shifted into the coffers of the US national-security establishment, it was argued, America would end up falling to this international communist conspiracy.
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How We Got Omnipotent Government

Saturday May 22, 2021

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We have all been born and raised under a government that wields the power of assassination. State-sponsored assassinations at the hands of the US government — and specifically the Pentagon and the CIA — have become a rather ho-hum affair. They have become fully accepted as part and parcel of American life.
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Ban Paternalistic Government

Tuesday May 18, 2021

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What is it about paternalists that prevents them from minding their own business? They are obsessed with minding everyone else’s business and, even worse, using the power of government to force people to live their lives the way paternalists want them to live them.

Look at the war on drugs. For our entire lives, paternalists have used the force of government, at the both the federal and state level, to punish people for putting substances in their mouths that haven’t been approved by our federal and state masters. 

But what business is it of some politician or bureaucrat what I put into my mouth? Why should they have the authority to punish me for putting something in my mouth that I wish to ingest?

The paternalist says: “Jacob, that substance that you’re putting into your mouth is potentially harmful to you. We have no choice but to threaten you with jail if you persist in doing so.”

How does a person acquire a mind like that? My best hunch is public (I.e., government) schooling.
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A Woke CIA … or a Free, Peaceful, and Prosperous Society?

Wednesday May 12, 2021

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There is a battle currently going on over whether the CIA should be woke or not. The battle was  apparently incited by a recent segment of a social media series issued by the CIA entitled “Humans of CIA.” According to an article in yesterday’s Washington Post, Susan Gordon, deputy director of national intelligence from 2017-2019, says that the aim of the series is to “connect to America, and if they’re lucky, attract new talent.”
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Will Biden Have Blood on His Hands in Afghanistan?

Friday May 7, 2021

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President Biden has announced that America’s forever war in Afghanistan is finally coming to an end. He says that US forces will exit the country by next September 11. 

That’s a good thing. And it is long overdue. 

But there is one big problem with Biden’s timetable: It violates an agreement that the US government entered into with the Taliban to exit the country by May 1 of this year.

Under that agreement, the Taliban agreed not to attack US troops prior to their scheduled departure on May 1. With Biden’s decision to deliberately violate the agreement by unilaterally extending the withdrawal to September 11, he is knowingly placing the lives of the 3,500 American servicemen still in Afghanistan at risk.

In fact, the Taliban has implied as much. According to the Washington Post, a Taliban spokesman declared back in April, “If the agreement is breached and foreign forces fail to exit the country on the specified date, problems will certainly be compounded and those whom failed to comply with the agreement will be held liable.”
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The Terrorist Haven Fallacy on Afghanistan

Wednesday April 21, 2021

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Interventionists are saying that US forces need to stay in Afghanistan because otherwise that country will, once again, become a “haven” for anti-American terrorists.

They still just don’t get it. It never ceases to amaze me how blind and obtuse interventionists can be.

Anti-American terrorism is not like the flu or like Covid-19. It doesn’t just spread around the world like an infection or a virus.

Moreover, the 9/11 attacks didn’t occur because the terrorists hated America for its “freedom and values.” They weren’t motivated by anger and rage over Elvis Presley or any other rock and roller. They weren’t motivated by hatred for Billy Graham or any other Christian evangelist.

The 9/11 attacks and all the other anti-American terrorist attacks were rooted in anger and hatred over US interventionism abroad, specifically in the Middle East. Interventionism is the cause of anti-American terrorism. That’s what interventionists still just don’t get.
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The Banality of Evil on Sanctions

Thursday March 25, 2021

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The banality of evil within the mainstream press when it comes to actions carried out by the US national-security establishment never ceases to amaze me. The latest example appears in the New York Times in an investigative piece that absolutely stunned me. The piece consists of a video that details an extensive investigation into a ship that was suspected of violating the system of economic sanctions that the US government and the UN have imposed on North Korea.

The video was put together by what the Times calls its “Visual Investigative Team.” The video, according to the Times, “examines the maze of connections behind secret oil deliveries to North Korea, in defiance of international sanctions.” There are five staff members who were assigned this task. They say that they “spent months reviewing ship-tracking data, corporate records and satellite imagery to uncover one way North Korea evades strict international sanctions.” They didn’t say how much their investigation cost but my hunch is at least a few million dollars.

To which I ask: Who cares? Or to put it another way: Why shouldn’t North Korea evade those “strict international sanctions”? What’s wrong with doing so? Why should their attempts to evade the sanctions be investigated and reported on by the US mainstream press?

I can’t help but think that those types of questions never enter the minds of the people serving on that investigative team. Their assumption is undoubtedly that since the US and UN imposed the sanctions, they must be legitimate and, therefore, that it is illegitimate for North Korea to be violating them.
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