This video explains a Supreme Court decision that wipes out the use of gun permits to restrict access to firearms. If the gun control freaks are calling it a “libertarian victory,” you know it’s got to be good:
Scheerpost blog discusses the Doomsday Debt problem from the point of view of what to do about job losses brought about by the AI explosion:
…A Universal Basic Income (UBI) has long been proposed as a way to cushion the blow of jobs lost to automation. Under that model, everyone receives a modest monthly payment – enough to cover basic needs and prevent extreme poverty.
But Elon Musk has gone further. On April 16, he posted on X:
Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.
AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money
supply, so there will not be inflation.
Rather than a subsistence stipend, Universal High Income (UHI) would be a level of income allowing ordinary people to live well in a world where machines do most of the work. Musk has also said that AI and robotics are the only things that can solve the massive U.S. debt crisis.
That sounds promising, but where will the government get the money to pay the UHI? Critics say any government that tried it would go bankrupt. There are also other concerns, which will be addressed in Part 2 of this article. Here we will look at the financial underpinnings: why UHI is even thinkable, why AI forces a reexamination of how money enters the economy, why the current system cannot scale to meet what is coming, and the implicit transition needed to meet that challenge.
Why the Current Money System Cannot Scale
The national debt of the U.S. government just topped $39 trillion. China’s is $18.7 trillion. Japan’s is $8.6 trillion. Those of the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain are each in the multi-trillion-dollar range. Collective global debt now stands at $353 trillion, 305% of the world’s annual economic output. So even if, hypothetically, everything produced in the world in a year were applied toward liquidating the debt, it still would not be enough to pay it all off.
In fact the debt can never be repaid, because of the way money currently enters the system. Nearly all of the money supply today is created by banks when they make loans. Banks do not lend their existing capital. The loan itself creates the money. The bank adds the loan amount to the asset side of its balance sheet and balances that sum with the same amount on the liability side. When the borrower withdraws or transfers the funds, either the bank takes them from its reserves in “vault cash” or the Federal Reserve debits the bank’s digital reserve account at the central bank. But the lending bank typically has funds coming into its reserve account at about the same rate as they are going out, so its reserves are continually replenished. Thus a very small reserve account can support a much larger money creation engine. For decades before the Fed discontinued the reserve requirement in 2020, it hovered at around 10%.
The chief problem with this debt-based system is the interest, which the bank does not create in its original loan. For a typical long-term loan, interest can double the total tab or more. Where is the money to come from to pay this added liability? Across the system as a whole, it must either come from more borrowing or from existing funds. In the case of governments, that means issuing interest-bearing bonds or tapping taxes and other revenues. The interest on the debt compounds, meaning the government is paying interest on interest. This makes the debt increase exponentially, until it is mathematically unsustainable. Then bankruptcies occur, of banks or even whole governments. Booms turn into busts, and the cycle begins again.
Today, interest on the federal debt is the second largest budget line item after Social Security, exceeding $1 trillion. Meanwhile, workers are losing jobs to AI/robotics, shrinking the income tax base. The system is clearly unsustainable… Read More
Join us for QL’s Mother’s Day weekend meeting as the Libertarian Party of Queens County (LPQC) on May 9 at noon. It will be held will be held at our Astoria location, Stamatis Greek and Mediterranean Restaurant at 29-09 23rd Avenue (in the back area, menu details at stamatisrestaurant.net). This official LP county committee function will serve as a full general meeting, in anticipation of the upcoming LP National Convention.
We hope to have an update by Larry Sharpe or a representative about the progress of his campaign for Governor, and the LPNY candidate situation. New candidates for office are given an opportunity to announce their interest in running and meet and greet those attending. We also expect to give a tribute to longtime Queens activist John Clifton, who will also discuss solutions to current party issues and circumstances.
Attendees are asked to pay/renew dues of $20 to LPQC by or during the proceedings in order to vote. In this session members will again be offered to serve as LPQC officers, and as key persons or “team members” for the following positions: media contact, membership/fundraising, candidate/activist outreach, youth/campus outreach, community/business outreach. Please attend, and volunteer to help in one of these areas! Hope to see you there!
Reason’s Damon Root (who used to interview LPNY candidates at Columbia University back in the day) on the Supreme Court case that evaluates the privacy violations implicated by the use of “geo-fencing” (police getting mass digital location info of cell phone users):
…At issue in Chatrie v. United States is a law enforcement tool known as a “geofence warrant.” In this case, the police told Google to search the location histories of every one of its users in order to determine which users were present in the vicinity of a bank robbery.
Adam Unikowsky, the lawyer for Okello Chatrie, whose conviction stemmed from that geofence warrant, told the justices that the government’s tactics should be viewed as an illegal “general warrant,” the sort of all-compassing search that the Fourth Amendment was originally written to prevent. “There was not probable cause to search the virtual private papers of every single person within the geofence merely because of their proximity to the crime,” he argued.
By contrast, Deputy Solicitor General Eric Feigin told the justices that Chatrie’s position, if adopted, would result in an “unprecedented transformation of the Fourth Amendment into an impregnable fortress around records of his public movements that he affirmatively consented to allow Google to create, maintain, and use.” Read More
The Iran situation, and the sad reversal of Trump on the subject of getting mired in foreign conflicts is noted by our party’s national Chair. The comments (from a donation message) are quoted in full, as this “one week war” is clearly spiraling into a crisis that will damage our entire economy this year. It’s not just an idle intellectual issue anymore, as it seems the chickens of fiscal and militarist insanity are coming home to roost:
Donald Trump returned to office promising strength, restraint, and relief. He promised to put America first. He promised to avoid new wars. He promised to lower costs, tame inflation, and focus Washington back on the American people. He delivered another Middle East war, another foreign policy disaster sold on fantasy, and another crisis whose costs will be paid by ordinary Americans.
The irony is obvious. The man who ran as a repudiation of Bush-era interventionism revived its logic and marched us back into the same swamp under a different banner.
Years ago, Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack revealed that George W. Bush cited the threat to Israel as part of the rationale for invading Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he warned, could strike Israel and trigger a wider international conflict. That logic survived Iraq. It survived the lies, the dead, and the wreckage. It returned, rebranded and repackaged in the language of urgency and necessity.
Trump sought regime change in Iran. He said so. In the video announcing the attack, he spoke like a man opening a political overthrow, telling the Iranian people that when we are finished, they should take over their government, that it would be theirs to take, and that this might be their only chance for generations. It was regime change language. It was the language of decapitation followed by hoped-for collapse.
The opening blow matched it. Israeli reporting described a surprise daylight strike on the Supreme Leader’s compound in Tehran, reportedly killing him along with senior political and security officials. The Iranian regime is authoritarian, corrupt, and hostile. That was never the question. The question was whether decapitating it would produce the outcome Trump and Netanyahu imagined.
By all available reporting, it would not. The administration had reason to know that. A week before the attack, the National Intelligence Council reportedly concluded that even a major American operation would not topple the regime. Reuters reported that the CIA assessed that if the Supreme Leader were assassinated, he would likely be replaced quickly by harder-line Revolutionary Guard elements. That appears to be exactly what happened.
It was a failure of judgment. The intelligence was there. The warnings were there. The administration chose fantasy anyway.
Then came the scramble. Cabinet officials began sanding down the language. Suddenly the war had narrower aims. Suddenly the objective was only nuclear rollback, only deterrence, only strategic degradation. Trump briefly shifted to safer ground, talking about preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Days later, he returned to demanding unconditional surrender and the selection of a “great and acceptable leader.” Pete Hegseth later suggested regime change had already occurred. Marco Rubio tried to square the circle, denying regime change as an objective while welcoming it as an outcome.
The story lurched because reality had begun tearing at the sales pitch.
Rubio also revealed something more damning at the outset. He admitted the administration knew Israel intended to strike Iran and understood that such an attack would likely bring retaliation against the United States. America joined a war because Washington knew another government was about to light the fuse and decided it had better jump in.
It is entanglement. It is subordination of American policy to another government’s timetable. It is a direct betrayal of what voters were promised.
And those assumptions were sold hard. Israeli officials later indicated the operation had been planned months in advance. Reuters reported that regime change was one of Netanyahu’s arguments in the final call before Trump gave the order. Other reporting described Netanyahu briefing Trump’s team directly in the White House Situation Room, promising that Iran’s missile program could be broken quickly, that the regime would be too weak to close the Strait of Hormuz, that retaliation against American interests would be minimal, and that internal unrest inside Iran could help finish the job.
It was the same old pitch. Easy war. Fast collapse. Limited blowback. A brittle regime ready to shatter after one decisive strike.
We have seen this before. Iraq. Libya. Syria. The map is always simple in the briefing room. Reality is always more expensive.
And according to multiple reports, people around Trump knew better. J.D. Vance, who once spoke clearly about the folly of stupid wars and the burden they place on young Americans, reportedly had serious reservations. General Dan Caine reportedly warned that the Israelis were overselling the ease and speed of the operation. Intelligence professionals reportedly rejected the regime change scenario as unrealistic. Even Rubio, by some accounts, understood that the pitch was nonsense.
Trump went anyway.
Despite intelligence to the contrary, Trump plunged headlong into another Middle East war. This was a war of choice. It was entered despite warnings. It was sold on fantasy. It is now being justified after the fact with contradiction, drift, and rhetorical smoke.
There was no quick collapse. There was no neat uprising. There was no clean political transition. Iran responded as weaker states do. It fought asymmetrically. It struck where it could cause the most damage. Missiles and drones targeted bases and cities. Shipping lanes were harassed. Proxies activated. The broader regional escalation that had been minimized or dismissed materialized anyway.
Trump reportedly believed Iran would cave before it closed the Strait of Hormuz. The world got an energy shock of historic proportions instead. By some assessments, the disruption now unfolding could exceed the shocks of 1973, 1979, and 2022 combined.
That is where this war stops being a foreign policy abstraction and starts landing squarely at home.
Trump won in no small part by promising relief from inflation and economic disorder. He promised lower costs, more stability, and a government focused on Americans rather than foreign adventurism. By choosing this war, he helped trigger the opposite. Fuel prices were only the first tremor. The bigger shock is still moving through the system. The last tankers that cleared Hormuz before closure are still arriving.
After that, reserves tighten, supply chains strain, and the effects spread through shipping, consumer prices, industrial inputs, utilities, airfare, and food.
Reopening the Strait tomorrow would not fix it. Major infrastructure in the Gulf has been damaged. LNG capacity has been disrupted. Production elsewhere has been curtailed. Storage and export systems do not snap back on command. Wells cannot be turned back on like a light switch. Restoration takes months. In some cases, years.
That means the pain does not end with a headline. It moves through the bloodstream of the economy. Fuel. Freight. Fertilizer. Food. Utilities. Credit. Everything touched by energy, which is to say everything.
This is the deeper betrayal.
Trump railed against high interest rates, against the Federal Reserve, against the rising cost of living. He wanted lower rates, stronger growth, and economic relief. By launching this war, he helped reinforce the exact conditions that make relief harder to deliver. War inflation. Supply shocks. Strategic uncertainty. Rising energy costs. A population already worn down by years of inflation is now being asked to absorb another blow because the administration chose to chase a regime change fantasy its own intelligence did not support.
Promises made. Promises broken.
He promised no more stupid wars. Now we are in one.
He promised America First. American power has been yoked to another state’s strategic gamble.
He promised competence. He ignored warnings from intelligence and senior officials who understood the operation was being oversold.
He promised prosperity. He helped unleash a crisis that will make daily life more expensive for the very people who put him back in office.
He promised realism. He embraced delusion.
Nor has he achieved what he appears to have set out to do. On regime change, he failed. On missiles, reporting suggests Iran retains significant launch capability, much of it hardened and buried precisely for this kind of conflict. On the broader regional front, the threat network remains. Hezbollah, despite years of damage and repeated boasts of its demise, appears far from gone. Washington and Tel Aviv once again believed they could bomb away the region’s political and military realities. The region answered back.
Even in Israel, confidence in the outcome has reportedly been weak. That should tell us something. This war was sold as decisive. It pushed the region further toward permanent confrontation, territorial seizure, and long-war management, another forever war in the long roll call of American interventionism.
And who pays for that?
Not the men who sell it on late-night television.
Not the think tank war priests.
Not the consultants, contractors, or foreign policy careerists who move between cable news, government posts, and defense boards.
The American people pay for it.
The family paying more at the pump.
The worker whose wages never quite catch up.
The borrower trapped by higher rates.
The small business hit by higher freight and input costs.
The young man who may yet be asked to carry the burden of someone else’s grand strategy.
Libertarians should have no trouble saying this plainly. One does not need to admire the Iranian regime to oppose this war. One does not need to pretend the mullahs are good in order to see that Washington was reckless, gullible, captured, or some combination of all three. The first duty of an American administration is to the liberty, life, and prosperity of the American people. That duty was discarded here in favor of regime change fantasy, foreign pressure, and interventionist delusion.
That is the real indictment.
Trump was handed an opportunity to break from the old pattern. He was elected in part because millions of Americans were tired of being lied to by the war crowd, tired of subsidizing empire, tired of watching Washington serve everyone except the people who actually live here.
He revived the pattern. He embodied the swamp he claimed he would drain.
He ran against Bushism and adopted its logic.
He ran against the deep state and empowered it.
He ran on relief for Americans and handed them another bill, paid in debt, inflation, and blood.
Promises made. Promises broken.
Chase Oliver, our Libertarian presidential nominee said it best in his acceptance speech: end the genocide, ceasefire now, and support peace around the world.
The Libertarian position is clear. War does not serve the American people, especially a war as aimless, escalatory, and stupid as the one we now find ourselves in.
We will continue to stand with the American people against war. Stand with us.
Donate Today!
Sincerely,
Steven Nekhaila
Chairman, LNC
Join us for LPQC/QL’s open discussion of the upcoming petition drive and 2026 campaign matters on April 11 at noon. It will be held at our Astoria location, Stamatis Greek and Mediterranean Restaurant at 29-09 23rd Avenue (in the back area, menu details at stamatisrestaurant.net). You can travel there by taking the N subway train to the last stop at Astoria-Ditmars Blvd, or taking the nearby Q69 bus to 31st St (in both cases walk 1 block to 23rd Avenue).
Dave DeCamp, editor of Antiwar.com on the real-or-faux ceasefire “agreed to” by the US and Iran on April 7. It appears neither side was directly negotiating (sit down, in person dialogue) to be on the same page on terms, and Trump may not have even read the 10-point deal Iran proposed before announcing his approval of it. Perhaps the point was for both countries to agree to a “framework” while each spun it as a “victory.” Either way, we need a final PEACEfire, not another “pause before a new round of war” ceasefire at this point:
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Wednesday that a ceasefire deal with the US must include a halt to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, which have dramatically escalated since President Trump announced the truce on Tuesday night.
“The Iran-US Ceasefire terms are clear and explicit: the US must choose—ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both,” Araghchi wrote on X. “The world sees the massacres in Lebanon. The ball is in the U.S. court, and the world is watching whether it will act on its commitments.”
Iranian media reported that Iran has halted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israel’s continued bombing campaign in Lebanon.
“The passage of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz has been halted following Israel’s attacks on Lebanon,” Iran’s Fars news agency has reported.
Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who mediated the US-Iran ceasefire deal, said in his initial announcement of the agreement that it would also include a ceasefire in Lebanon, a point reaffirmed by Iranian officials. But it has since been denied by both the US and Israel that Lebanon was part of the deal.
“The two-week ceasefire does not include Lebanon,” the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote on X. On Wednesday morning, Israel launched a massive bombardment across Lebanon, killing and injuring hundreds of people, as part of a new escalation it dubbed “Operation Eternal Darkness.”
President Trump was asked if the ceasefire included Lebanon and called it a “separate skirmish” that was “not included” in the deal. “Yeah, they were not included in the deal,” he said. “Because of Hezbollah. They were not included in the deal. That’ll get taken care of, too. It’s alright.” Read More
Mayor Zo remains oblivious to the bad impact of his pending tax hikes on middle class access to home ownership and free markets, as this episode at the Allen AME church displays. From the New York Post:
Zohran Mamdani has a problem with the black political establishment, as well as the black middle class.
And he knows it, hence his pilgrimage to Greater Allen AME Cathedral in Queens on Palm Sunday.
It was no accident that he was seated next to Rep. Gregory Meeks, the boss of the Queens Democratic machine, and Queens Borough President Donovan Richards.
But proximity to establishment leadership does not make up for the lack of a working political relationship — or bad ideas.
Greater Allen AME, and in particular that section of Queens, is home to New York’s greatest concentration of the black middle class — professionals, civil servants, corporate workers, Democratic operatives and, most importantly, homeowners.
These are the people Mamdani addressed on Palm Sunday about the evil of . . . city tax liens sales and how those sales force black New Yorkers out of the city.
Surprisingly, the mayor didn’t attempt to quell concerns about his own two tax proposals, which directly threaten their ability to own their homes or to pass on the wealth generated by those properties to their heirs.
Feeling robbed
Mamdani didn’t dare speak about his threatened 9.5% property tax hike or his push to lower the “death” tax threshold, the state’s estate-tax exemption, from $7 million to $750,000, and tripling the top rate to 50%.
The median sale price for a home in Southeast Queens is fast approaching $750,000… See More