Featured Articles

Ron Paul’s 2001 Alternative: What Could Have Been

Ron Paul’s 2001 Alternative: What Could Have Been

by | Nov 2, 2026 |

“Should we just have done nothing?!” The former question is a common incensed objection whenever someone dares to question the wisdom, appropriateness, or success of the War on Terror. Part of this is because many hold to an unrealistic and idealized “War on Terror”—which was just and, despite mistakes, imperfectly accomplished most or all its stated objectives—instead of the historical War on Terror. Even recognizing significant missteps and disasters of the War on Terror, many defenders...

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Republicans Deserve to Lose, but Democrats Do Not Deserve to Win.

Republicans Deserve to Lose, but Democrats Do Not Deserve to Win.

by | Nov 2, 2026 |

Anyone wondering why the Republicans are facing historic losses in this week’s midterm elections should consider these two numbers: 3.7 percent and 0.6 precent. The first is the latest one year increase in prices from the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The second is how much wages and salaries for private industry workers are reported to have fallen in the last year when adjusted to account for the rise in prices. Even Americans with increasing incomes are struggling with inflation. In the 2024...

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Please Mr. President: Be A Peace President Like Eisenhower

Please Mr. President: Be A Peace President Like Eisenhower

by | Oct 31, 2026 |

n October of 2002, the night before the U.S. House voted to go to war in Iraq, my sister Beverly called to tell me a Knoxville television station had conducted a poll and found that 74 percent in its viewing area were in favor of the war, 9 percent were opposed, and 17 percent were undecided. The next day, when I voted against going to war, I wondered if I was also voting to end my political career. This was clearly the most unpopular thing I had ever done. About a year later, I was scheduled...

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Trump Can Start It But He Can’t Finish It. Now He Wants to Island-Hop

Trump Can Start It But He Can’t Finish It. Now He Wants to Island-Hop

by | Oct 31, 2026 |

Washington has a plan for Iran. According to a source close to the White House, the plan is to seize one or more of Iran’s islands in the Persian Gulf. Senator Chris Murphy, who says he has been briefed on what the administration intends to do after Tuesday’s midterms, summed it up this week in four words: “their plan is insane.” For once, a United States senator has understated something. My friend Karl Miller has just finished a report on the limits of American and Israeli war power, and its...

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Gun-Free School Zones and Students’ Safety

Gun-Free School Zones and Students’ Safety

by | Oct 30, 2026 |

Earlier this month, a mass shooting at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon appears to have been cut short by Kaylub Giamanco, a father of two students at the school. Giamanco, using a handgun in contravention of gun-free school zone law, killed the murderer. Brady Leonard provided in a Wednesday Independent Institute article some details regarding Giamanco’s heroic intervention. That intervention, wrote Leonard, depended on Giamanco breaching legal restriction on the exercise of his...

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Trump Speaks His Mind On the Campaign Trail

Trump Speaks His Mind On the Campaign Trail

by | Oct 30, 2026 |

President Donald J Trump has been rampaging around the United States delivering campaign speeches that are all about himself as America’s “greatest president” when he is not smearing someone else employing his own unique brand of maniacal hatemongering. Recent sorties to the hinterland have including Trump in Michigan admiring the prominent asses of incumbent Senator candidate Jon Husted and celebrity rapper Nicki Minaj, to include expressing to the MAGA audience with a leering grin how much...

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America’s Deadly Addiction to War

America’s Deadly Addiction to War

by | Oct 29, 2026 |

America has a deadly addiction to war. Since 1950, presidents of both political parties have sent American troops into conflicts across the globe, killed countless people, sacrificed the lives and limbs of American servicemen and women, and wasted trillions of dollars. Yet these wars have consistently failed to achieve the objectives proclaimed when the killing began. Enemies are replaced by new enemies, dictators give way to new dictators, and supposedly decisive victories become endless...

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Lies, Damn Lies, and Ukraine News

Lies, Damn Lies, and Ukraine News

by | Oct 29, 2026 |

It's been said that truth is the first casualty of war. What about the Ukraine war? I've followed the news closely, and have found ample evidence in headlines and storylines that the old adage holds true today. Too often the Ukraine news stories we see are misleading instead of informative. For instance, in March 2014 CNN reported that Ukraine's Maidan Revolution was "standing up on behalf of democracy." A month earlier, The Week cited many pundits and policymakers also characterizing events...

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The Doomsday Government: Preparing for the End of the World, Not the End of Power

The Doomsday Government: Preparing for the End of the World, Not the End of Power

by | Oct 28, 2026 |

This time of year, there is no shortage of monsters to frighten us. Hollywood has given us vampires, zombies, mad scientists, masked killers and creatures that emerge from the darkness to prey upon the unsuspecting. But perhaps the most frightening monster of all is the government that has become so accustomed to wielding extraordinary power that it cannot imagine a future in which that power is diminished. Enter the Doomsday Plan. In what sounds like a plot lifted straight out of Stanley...

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The Iran War and the ‘Terrible Power of the Purse’

The Iran War and the ‘Terrible Power of the Purse’

by | Oct 27, 2026 |

The “Grand Design” to “maintain [western civilisation’s] place at the head of the world” (as U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it) requires the tools for ensuring compliance are two-fold: The creating of destructive revolutionary fervour from below (now termed “regime change”); and secondly, the use of what Theodore Herzl in a now famous phrase termed “the terrible power of the purse to exert irresistible pressure on international politics” in order to co-opt the ruling strata into a...

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Republicans Deserve to Lose, but Democrats Do Not Deserve to Win.

Who is Making Billions from the Iran War?

by | Oct 26, 2026 |

At a campaign rally over the weekend, President Trump dismissed Americans’ concerns over high oil and gas prices, claiming that it’s a small price to pay for the hundreds of billions of dollars “we” are making from these higher prices. “We’re making a fortune,” he said. “Hundreds of billions of dollars. Trillions of dollars.” People are paying a little bit more for gas, he explained, but it doesn’t matter because “we” are making so much money. The question is, “Who is ‘we’?” We know it is not...

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A Western Civ Speech Only A Neocon Could Love

A Western Civ Speech Only A Neocon Could Love

by | Oct 24, 2026 |

When one of my acquaintances expressed his enthusiasm for Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s October 7 speech from the Acropolis in Athens, Greece—seeing it as the de facto launching of a presidential campaign—I thought to watch the talk in its entirety. It was worth the viewing, if only for the craftsmanship involved. It was set in the golden hour, with the Parthenon beautifully framed behind Rubio, bathed in the soft light of the setting sun.    It was as well written as it was...

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Vote As If the Constitution Depended On It

Vote As If the Constitution Depended On It

by | Oct 24, 2026 |

There was a time when thinking for yourself was considered a virtue. These days, it can make you a political outcast. Question the Democrats, and you’re accused of being a Republican. Question the Republicans, and you’re branded a Democrat. Criticize Donald Trump, and you’re dismissed as suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Criticize his opponents, and you’re accused of enabling authoritarianism. Somewhere along the way, Americans seem to have forgotten that independent thought is not an...

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Our Failed Constitution

Our Failed Constitution

by | Oct 22, 2026 |

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.” -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) The US Constitution was ratified to create and to restrain the government. It established boundaries beyond which the government may not venture, even when it invokes national security, public order, economic necessity, emergency or the will of a popular majority. Its purpose is not to make government more powerful but to keep the government off the people's backs.  By that...

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Trump and Netanyahu Want to ‘Finish the Job’ on Iran

Trump and Netanyahu Want to ‘Finish the Job’ on Iran

by | Oct 22, 2026 |

If one were seeking to create something like a modern-day folk tale based on current realities and having the theme of “good versus evil” there are any number of real-life narratives available that could be exploited to invite speculation on actual environments that might have served as models for the fiction. I have found much of the bizarre and blood-soaked evil relationship between the United States and Israel, which serves no US interest at all, to be one such arrangement in which two...

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Some Pinocchios are Criticizing President Trump for Saying ‘Shylock’

Some Pinocchios are Criticizing President Trump for Saying ‘Shylock’

by | Oct 21, 2026 |

The name of Shylock, a character in William Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice has long been embraced in the English language as a means of referring to charging high interest for loans or engaging in business ruthlessly. That second meaning also applies to the name Scrooge from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carrol. “Scrooge” may refer as well to disliking people or their pursuit or attainment of happiness. These are two examples of names from fiction and religious texts that have...

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Peace & Prosperity Blog

Phantom Trump Checks

Phantom Trump Checks

by | Oct 5, 2026

President Donald Trump’s promise to send 5,000 dollars to each adult American citizen after the November election has one big contingency explicitly built in — that Republicans...

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Trump’s Pump and Dumps

by | Oct 5, 2026

In the Wednesday episode of his Peter Schiff Show, economics and current affairs commentator Peter Schiff focused in on two situations in which he argued United States President...

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Thank You for Your Coup

Thank You for Your Coup

by | Sep 25, 2026

For argument’s sake, let’s assume that Donald Trump is the worst United States president in history. Still, is he so bad that you would like to see him overthrown via a military...

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