On September 5th, Reason Magazine published a very strange assessment of the war in Ukraine, written by Paul Schwennesen, titled “The War in Ukraine Is Already Over—Russia Just Doesn’t Know it Yet.” In short, Schwennesen argues that, based on his experience recently traveling to the front in Kursk Oblast, Ukrainian will and high morale mean that the war is as good as over and that Ukrainian triumph is “inevitable.”Schwennesen’s analysis that Russia has as good as lost the war and that its conclusion might very well lead to a collapse of the Russian Federation rests on the premise that the material factors of war do not matter, and that, “A war’s end, after all, is a matter of will, of spirit” and, “Wars are won in the heart of a people, not through the rational

There is little doubt that John Mearsheimer is one of the most prominent, and controversial, thinkers in the field of international relations alive today. His most important work, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2014, New York: Norton), continues to be the de facto handbook to the theory of offensive realism and this theoretical lens has played a very prominent role in the debate over the underlying causes of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. Coauthor Sebastian Rosato, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, is, like Mearsheimer, a thinker from the broadly realist school of international relations.However, How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy is not rooted in realism. Rather, Mearsheimer and

Between the ongoing war in Gaza and Houthi attacks on Western shipping in the Red Sea, the media has had plenty of gruesome foreign policy fodder for the content mill. However, this coverage has come at the expense of the ongoing grinding conflict in Ukraine, which has quickly gone from a euphoric cause célèbre to a now embarrassing catastrophe that is best shoved in the closet and forgotten like all the rest of America’s decades of costly foreign policy disasters.In recent weeks and months, the tone of coverage around the ongoing war in Ukraine has changed. At one point, any Russian advance was treated as a fluke and any Ukrainian success was seen as the precursor to an inevitable victory. The tone has now decidedly shifted, however, toward a more

At the end of September, I reported how a recent article in the Army War College academic journal examined lessons learned from the war in Ukraine and that one of the most concerning was the claim that the military might need to reinstate the draft in order to wage a high-intensity war. I argued at length that this was an example of the military laying the groundwork to resume the draft and laid out the reasons why it might be necessary from the regime’s perspective.
This report garnered a good deal of attention online for understandable reasons; being press-ganged into the military to fight and potentially die in a war is one of the most extreme infringements on one’s liberty that can be imagined, especially since the US has a track record of fighting, and

The most recent edition of the US Army War College’s academic journal includes a highly disturbing essay on what lessons the US military should take away from the continuing war in Ukraine. By far the most concerning and most relevant section for the average American citizen is a subsection entitled “Casualties, Replacements, and Reconstitutions” which, to cut right to the chase, directly states, “Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.”
An Industrial War of Attrition Would Require Vast Numbers of Troops
The context for this supposed need to reinstate conscription is the estimate that were the US to enter into a large-scale conflict, every

The fight between Russia and NATO is not about "democracy versus authoritarianism." Rather both the US and Russian states are doubling down because they are doing what states do: seeking power.

Original Article: "The Ukraine War Isn’t about Democracy. It’s about States Seeking More Power."

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Writing for The Volokh Conspiracy, hosted by Reason magazine, George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin argues that the war in Ukraine amounts to a clash between liberal democracy and authoritarian nationalism and that these stakes must be taken into account when continuing to support Ukraine.
Somin argues that the ideology of the winning side in a war receives a boost, pointing to the rise and then fall of fascism and communism. These examples are lacking, to say the least, and hardly prove that a wartime victory necessarily leads to the triumph of the winner’s ideology.
To begin with, Somin’s own examples of the rise of communism and fascism seem to refute his own point. The more or less liberal democratic Entente powers won the First World War, but

In the early morning of July 6th, an explosion damaged a monument in Georgia known as the Georgia Guidestones. Because of the damage, the rest of the monument was demolished for safety reasons. The stones were erected by anonymous donors in 1980 and list ten principles for humanity. At the time of writing, it seems that the explosion was the result of purposeful sabotage.
Writing at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok compares the willful destruction of the monument to the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2001. These massive statues carved into the mountainside were over a millennium old and were a reminder of the once flourishing Buddhist culture in Central Asia and the fascinating cultural fusion that was born when Buddhist and

From the darkened cinema to the football field to the airport screening line, the US government inflated the actual threat of terrorism and the necessity of an aggressive military response.

Original Article: “US Military Propaganda in Film, Sports, and TV: It’s Everywhere”

I was a young lad of thirteen when the first Transformers film directed by Michael Bay premiered in theaters. I do not recall much about it other than Megan Fox working on Shia Labeouf’s car, but apparently, this sultry façade was hiding a darker secret: the film was actually government-supported propaganda produced with extensive involvement from the military. This is just one of the many surprising and sometimes shocking things I learned from Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall’s new

From the darkened cinema to the football field to the airport screening line, the US government inflated the actual threat of terrorism and the necessity of an aggressive military response.

Original Article: “US Military Propaganda in Film, Sports, and TV: It’s Everywhere”

I was a young lad of thirteen when the first Transformers film directed by Michael Bay premiered in theaters. I do not recall much about it other than Megan Fox working on Shia Labeouf’s car, but apparently, this sultry façade was hiding a darker secret: the film was actually government-supported propaganda produced with extensive involvement from the military. This is just one of the many surprising and sometimes shocking things I learned from Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall’s new

Sohrab Ahmari’s new book The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in An Age of Chaos is so disappointing I don’t know where to begin. This may seem to be a harsh invective, but in reality, it is a confession. My previous attempts to review this book have resulted in little more than hours and hours of frustration and discarded drafts. Such frustration stems in part from the sympathy I have for Ahmari’s general goal and a desire to do his work justice despite my previous criticism of his views. At its most basic level, Ahmari’s book seeks to ask twelve serious life questions and answer them by drawing upon the examples of twelve figures from history to demonstrate the “unbroken thread” that connects us to the past. As a staunch defender of tradition

The Washington Post reports that a group of thirty-three current and former students at Christian colleges are suing the Department of Education in a class action lawsuit in an attempt to abolish any religious exemptions for schools that do not abide by the current sexual and gender zeitgeist sweeping the land. The plaintiffs argue that by holding to orthodox Christian teachings on sexuality these universities are engaged in unconstitutional discrimination due to the federal funding they receive. The lawsuit, filed by the Religious Exemption Accountability Project, is timed to coincide with the passage of the Equality Act (which I recently discussed here) in the House of Representatives and to give narrative momentum to the push to force the progressive conception

Private property is an institution central to civilization and beneficial human interaction. When central banks distort this institution with easy money, the social effects can be disastrous.

Original Article: “The Property-Based Social Order Is Being Destroyed by Central Banks​”
Readers of the Mises Wire are no doubt familiar with the negative consequences of central banking and the inflationary capacity of fiat currency and how such a system drives malinvestment and leads to boom-bust cycles. Not only does the business cycle lead to the misallocation of resources from their natural ends of the structure of production, but it also drives resources into financialization, rather than the “real” economy. This financialization, which has been taking place since at

On February 4, 2021, Democrats in the House and Senate introduced the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. Like many names in Washington, this one is an Orwellian misnomer that does the exact opposite of what it claims to be doing. If passed, the bill, which is basically a union wish list, would radically transform the nature of the labor market in the US with numerous sweeping and heavy-handed changes. Andy Levin (MI-09), a sponsor of the bill, doesn’t bother to hide its envy-driven prounion goals; in his press release, he whined about income inequality and stated that “The PRO Act would reverse years of attacks on unions and restore fairness to the economy by strengthening the federal laws that protect workers’ right to join a union and bargain for higher

On January 19 it was announced that Joe Biden planned to nominate Rachel Levine, the Pennsylvania (PA) secretary of health, for the position of assistant secretary of health in the Department of Health and Human Services. This is potentially good news for Pennsylvanians, who will finally be rid of her after having had to endure her disastrous covid lockdowns and restrictions for nearly a year, but is likely bad news for the rest of the country.
News coverage of Levine’s nomination is focused almost entirely on the fact that if she is confirmed she will be the first transgender official to be confirmed by the Senate and barely mentions or completely glosses over her handling of the pandemic in PA. NPR doesn’t mention her track record at all other than noting that

“There are no libertarians in an epidemic” crowed Atlantic reporter Peter Nicholas back on March 10, as he listed the numerous economic interventions the Trump administration was undertaking in the wake of the mounting COVID-19 crisis. This intervention, Nicholas declared, just goes to show you that whatever antigovernment talk one might talk, government intervention in the economy is “nothing new and, as may well prove the case this time around, it’s often necessary.” Setting aside the fact that it is simply absurd to refer to Donald Trump as being a libertarian, numerous commentators have pointed out that far from there being no libertarians during a crisis, all levels of government have been on a mad dash to slash meaningless regulations and rules that are