Issue 1

The Abolitionist

9/13/2015
Editor: Will Porter

The Young Americans for Liberty Campus Newsletter

All attempts to

The Empire Comes Home

coerce the living

By Will Porter

will of human
beings into the
service of something
they do not want
must fail.
Ludwig von Mises

In mid-April, famed national security state journalist Glenn Greenwald gave a talk
at the Stop the Wars on Drugs and Terrorism conference, held jointly at the
University of Texas at Austin by the Future of Freedom Foundation and Young
Americans for Liberty. In his speech, Greenwald made a point which, in light of
recent events in Baltimore, cannot be emphasized enough. The war on terror, he said,
must eventually come home. That is to say, perpetual warfare waged abroad will
always creep back to the Homeland, manifesting on the domestic front in a number of
alarming ways.

Perhaps the most blatant example of this phenomenon is the now-infamous 1033
program, wherein civilian police departments procure heavy-duty military weapons
and hardware from the Pentagon. This program was created by the National Defense
Authorization Act of 1997 (an act whose more recent versions Americans are now
familiar with) for the purpose of transferring excess military equipment to domestic
police forces. In 1997 alone the Pentagon gave 1.2 million
pieces of military hardware to local police departments. And
According to some while the idea of the 1033 is to provide law enforcement used
equipment from past military conflagrations, the hardware
estimates, police
received in that program, as well as in a separate DHS grant
officers in America program, is often brand-new.

take a life every

From mine-resistant armored personnel carriers, to fullyautomatic MP5 submachine guns, to terrifying acoustic
eight hours . . .
cannons straight out of an Orwellian nightmare, the
American cop is now armed to the teeth, ready to wage a
veritable war on innocents and criminals alike. (Note the
illustrative marketing slogan given to H&Ks MP5: From the Gulf War to the Drug
War battle proven.) Here, with the rapid militarization of police, the imperial
warfare waged abroad blends seamlessly into domestic American society, finding a
significant outlet in the War on Drugs. Indeed, it was the Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA), beginning in 1992, that beat the NSA to the punch with their
own massive, bulk-collection surveillance program, targeting virtually all American
telephone communications, as well as up to 116 foreign nations.
The Drug War, among many other things, offers police departments a limitless
number of suspects and perps, many of whom are apprehended in the course of a noknock raid. Once reserved for special circumstances and crimes-in-progress, hyperweaponized SWAT teams now execute tens of thousands of no-knock drug raids each
year. As a consequence of the Reagan Administrations sharp escalation of the Drug
War in the 1980s, the number of SWAT raids conducted each year in America
continues to rise substantially. The early 80s saw about 3,000 SWAT raids annually,
with around 30,000 in 1996, and up to 40,000 by 2001.

The Abolitionist | Young Americans for Liberty

2
About YAL :

Young Americans for Liberty

(YAL) is a chapter-based
organization dedicated to
spreading the ideas of
human liberty, free trade,
and peaceful foreign policy.
With over 600 chapters and
204,000 activists nationwide,
YAL is one of the fastestgrowing pro-liberty
organizations in the country.
This weekly newsletter will
provide relevant news and
commentary on the issues
most important to YAL,
libertarians, and anyone
generally interested in
politics, philosophy, and
world affairs.

One might imagine that such aggressive tactics are reserved for only the most violent
of suspects, yet an ever-greater proportion of no-knock SWAT raids are used to serve
simple search warrants. All too many such raids end in the death of an innocent
person, such as the case of seven year-old Aiyana Jones, who was fatally shot by a
police officer in a botched SWAT raid on a Detroit residence in 2010.
Yet the now commonplace no-knock raid is only the beginning; in countless other
ways the War on Terror is imported from the desert sands of the Middle East to the
heart of American cities and suburbs. Local and federal police fly warrantless drones
above American towns to survey, and spy on, citizens. The FBI baits Americans
(many Arab or Muslim, some mentally handicapped) and entraps them in phony
terrorist plots.
Cops train as if they were waging an ongoing war with urban guerrillas, exemplified
in the case of the LAPD officers receiving counterinsurgency training from the
military (dont worry, they returned the favor). Police continue to engage in civil
asset forfeiture practices, which involve the outright theft of property considered
suspicious. And outside of the SWAT raid, Americans are killed and brutalized on
an almost daily basis during routine traffic stops and run-of-the-mill encounters with
police.
According to some estimates, police officers in America take a life every eight hours,
with over 100 police killings just in March of 2015. Despite such alarming figures, as
well as high-profile cases such as that of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Eric Garner in
New York, or the Ferguson saga, accountability is almost nowhere to be found. There
was much talk in Washington DC of a desire to cut back the rapid militarization of
police after the murder of Michael Brown, yet little happened.
Soon after the killing of Freddie Gray, police unions in Maryland joined hands to
fight tooth-and-nail against a wave of police accountability reform bills. They
prevailed. In fact, police departments not only politely resist greater accountability,
many pout like children at the very prospect! Take the case of the NYPD threat to
cease or at least slow down carrying out their tax-funded job in order to teach
some perverse lesson to the people they claim to protect (and who pay their salaries).
While this was ironically a great relief for many New Yorkers, its increasingly
obvious that anything short of absolute sovereign impunity is unacceptable to
Americas new Warrior Cop.
The domestic effects of the American war state dont end with the police, either. On
the economic front the wars take their toll as well. Economic historian Robert Higgs
traces what he calls the Ratchet Effect in his book Crisis and Leviathan, which can
be described simply as governments tendency to usurp greater regulatory power
during times of war. The increased power often wanes after the conflict, Higgs
concedes, yet it never returns to prewar levels. Whether it is routine police abuse and
unaccountability, ramped up domestic surveillance programs, greater governmental
control of the private economy, or the general social degradation that accompanies all
of the above, the American Empire has undoubtedly come home.
When Americans perform such ethical acrobatics as the attempt to justify torture, it
is no wonder why this continues to happen. War is the health of the state, and it is
the disease of the body politic. It erodes the public morality, and in countless ways
undermines the value of human life. For every anguished scream tortured out of a
Middle Easterner in the name of American security, another American citizen will

The Abolitionist | Young Americans for Liberty

YAL Group Schedule:

9/9/2015 General meeting.

4:00pm-6:00pm in LA 161.
9/12/2015 Free Speech
Wall build.
9/15/2015 Welcome Day
and FIRE free speech
workshop.
9/16/2015 General
meeting. 4:00pm-6:00pm in
LA 161.
9/17/2015 Constitution
Day and Tabling Session in
Student Center.
9/23/2015 General
meeting. 4:00pm-6:00pm in
LA 161.
[Note: This schedule is subject to
change.]

face similar treatment from the soldiers counterpart in the Homeland. For every evil,
for every depredation left in the wake of American military might abroad, the
standards of human decency are diminished equally so at home. The welfare,
warfare, and police states are inextricable, and so long as Americans fail to
internalize that lesson, prospects for significant, far-reaching government
accountability remain somewhat dim.

[This article originally appeared on Antiwar.com May 07, 2015.

To access the footnotes that accompanied the original essay, visit:
http://original.antiwar.com/will_porter/2015/05/06/the-empire-comes-home/]

Iraqs Battle to Retake Ramadi is Failing

By Jason Ditz

After ISIS captured Ramadi in mid-May, officials were desperate to downplay the
importance. When calling a provincial capital of 500,000 people unimportant didnt
work, they insisted there was a plan in place to quickly retake the city. Months later,
theyve made no real progress to that end.
Surrounding Ramadi was supposed to be the first step, isolating it and cutting it off
from ISIS supply lines. Over the course of an entire summer, Iraqs military hasnt
even managed that much, and has suffered some major casualties by trying to
position their military too close to the city.
With things not going according to plan, everyones looking for a scapegoat. The Iraqi
military says there arent enough US airstrikes being conducted to take Ramadi, and
that the US always insists their warplanes are busy elsewhere.
The Pentagon, by contrast, says that the real reason the fight to take Ramadi isnt
going so well is because a recent heatwave has made troop maneuvers more difficult
in the area, following that up with their typical insistence that progress is being
made, just slowly and in ways that, to the rest of us, look an awful lot like losing.
The US put 450 ground troops near Ramadi when this plan was first put into place,
and has coaxed a number of Sunni tribal fighters into the offensive. The tribals are
now on the brink of collapse, however, and the US advisers dont seem to be
yielding any progress at all.

[This article originally appeared on Antiwar.com September 04, 2015]

The Economics of Bernie Sanders

By William L. Anderson

As the political campaign of Hillary Clinton continues to run aground, Democrats are
flocking to the campaign of Bernie Sanders, the self-described socialist US senator
from Vermont, who has been a fixture in that state for more than three decades. Not
unlike the presidential campaign of Ron Paul, Sanders is drawing large, enthusiastic
crowds who are very receptive to his message of increased state control of the US
economy.
Obviously, when a person running a campaign based upon socialist principles is
drawing attention and big crowds, we might ask just what does Sanders mean by

The Abolitionist | Young Americans for Liberty

4
Contact Information :

Please feel free to contact us

with questions, comments,
concerns, or anything else
youd like us to know.
We accept article
submissions; contact the
editor for details.
Will Porter YAL Chapter
President for WCC and
Abolitionist editor:
Cell 248-464-0564 (Call or text)
Email WKP.AnCap@Gmail.com
Twitter @WKPAnCap

socialist, and what would he do if he were elected president of the United States?
To better answer that question, I am taking a closer look at what we would call the
economics of Bernie Sanders.
What Do We Mean by Socialism?

Before looking at Sanderss platform, however, I believe it is important to note that

when socialists speak of victories in the economy, they are not talking about actual
results, but rather political achievements in the forms of laws being passed that
mandate certain policies. Whether or not these policies actually achieve what
socialists claim will be accomplished is another story altogether, but results are
irrelevant to socialists.
This should surprise no one because, after all, socialism is based upon political
control of the economy. True (or at least original) socialists believe that state agents
via the magic of their authority should allocate all resources to where there is the
greatest need for them. Political representatives, not surprisingly, determine what
constitutes the greatest need. The state would take ownership of all factors of
production and then wisely determine the needs and how production of goods would
fulfill them.
Ludwig von Mises in 1920 in his short work, Socialism (three years later expanded
into a book), exploded the socialist myth by pointing out that in a world of scarce
resources, economies needed private ownership, prices, profits and losses to
determine where resources should be directed. The early years of the experiment of
the Soviet Union proved Mises correct, and socialists then sought to redefine what
socialism actually meant.
In the USSR, and later in China and North Korea, the state took ownership of factors
of production, but tried to create a parallel economy by using shadow prices and
production functions via the mechanisms championed by Polish communist Oskar
Lange, who admitted that Mises had pointed out serious flaws in the original plans of
socialists. We also know how that experiment turned out, which is why there no
longer is a USSR, China has abandoned much of the economics of Mao, and North
Korea is a failed state where most people live in grinding poverty.
But people like Bernie Sanders, while maybe not rejecting the old socialism
spiritually, nonetheless have embraced a socialism in which government takes
ownership of large portions of what has been produced by private enterprise and
transfers wealth from one group of people to another. A look at the Sanders website
spells out his brand of socialism that he says is based upon what Nordic countries
like Sweden, Denmark, and Norway have done, levying high taxes with governments
using that funding for social programs like medical care and other public welfare
initiatives.

The Abolitionist | Young Americans for Liberty

Secondary Socialism

A number of people have pointed out that the Sanders program is not socialism per
se, but rather is something based upon socializing the results of private enterprise, or
what one might call secondary socialism. The Bernie Sanders regime would take
control of some of the produce of private enterprise, as opposed to taking outright
control of factors of production, which would remain in private hands. If this reminds
one of the fascism of the 1930s, that is because Sanders is promoting a version of the
governing models of Germany under Adolph Hitler and Italy under Benito Mussolini.
Of the two, Sanders certainly is closer to Mussolini. Like Sanders, Mussolini called
himself a socialist and was a leader in the Italian Socialist Party. Like Sanders,
Mussolini decried profiteers and the wealthy, and spoke out against political
corruption. Like Sanders, Mussolini spoke of a larger national purpose and sought
to harness nationalism as a political force. Like Sanders, Mussolini sought to impose
more and more controls on Italian businesses in order to direct production in a way to
satisfy political purposes. Like Sanders, Mussolini built political power by appealing
to Italian voters by saying that other Italians were well-off because they had gained
their wealth on the backs of the poor.
Having similar economic proposals to Hitler and Mussolini does not make Sanders
either of those two men and it is important to emphasize that while Sanders
regularly employs the powerful political tool of appealing to voter resentment of
others, he is not advocating the kind of genocide that ultimately helped to
characterize the fascism of Central Europe in the 1930s and 40s. Bernie Sanders is
an economic nationalist, and economic nationalism was at the heart of European
fascism, but we do not want to make unwarranted accusations against Sanders,
either.
At the same time, I do not want to let Sanders off the hook. He promotes economic
nationalism and has built his campaign upon resentment, the kind of which Henry
Hazlitt wrote in 1966 in his famous, Marxism in One Minute. Hazlitt wrote:

The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man
who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success
may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the
whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the
more or less open robbery of others. (Emphasis mine)
As one moves through the website for the Sanders campaign, there is plenty of
resentment for others. First, there is the ubiquitous One-Percent that is the main
focus of the typical Sanders stump speech:

This campaign is sending a message to the billionaire class: you cant have it all.
You cant get huge tax breaks while children in this country go hungry. You cant
continue sending our jobs to China while millions are looking for work. You cant hide
your profits in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens, while there are massive
unmet needs on every corner of this nation. Your greed has got to end. You cannot
take advantage of all the benefits of America, if you refuse to accept your
responsibilities as Americans.

The Abolitionist | Young Americans for Liberty

6
While I would agree wholeheartedly that the US economy is in serious trouble, it is
not because of the greed of billionaires. It is because the US government, through
the Federal Reserve System, has created what David Stockman has called the casino
economy that has substituted trading of sovereign debt and monetary manipulation
for a real economy with interest rates that reflect actual economic fundamentals.
Like the Bush and Clinton administrations before it, the Obama administration has
promoted political entrepreneurship and demonized market entrepreneurship.
Sanderss List of Recycled Twentieth-Century Solutions

Americans are not jobless because some people are not paying their fair share of
taxes; they are jobless because the US government insists on directing resources from
higher-valued uses to lower-valued uses, as determined by consumer choice. They are
jobless because Washington insists on remaking the economy in its own image, and
there is nothing in the entire Sanders campaign that would change any of the things
that vex the US economy the most.
So, what does Sanders propose to revitalize the US economy? Here are some things
listed on his website:
Raise taxes on US corporations (ironically, corporate tax rates in the Nordic
countries are substantially lower than current corporate taxes in the USA, something
that has escaped Sanderss notice);
Raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour;
Expand the reach of labor unions and vastly expand their membership;
Make it illegal for US corporations to manufacture goods abroad, and then sell
those goods in the USA;
Impose new taxes on financial transactions;
Spend at least a trillion dollars on building and repairing roads, bridges, and
utilities;
Create a youth jobs program in which unemployed young people are given
government-sponsored jobs (Sanders sees no connection between high minimum
wages and youth unemployment);
Enact equity pay that will guarantee that women are paid the same as men for
comparable work;
Break up banks and financial institutions;
Enact a Canada-style single-payer healthcare system;
Provide free tuition for all public colleges and universities;
Expand Social Security benefits;
Require businesses to provide 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, at least 10
days of paid vacation a year, and seven days per year of paid guaranteed sick leave.
Notice that there is nothing in the Sanders platform that calls for nationalization of
the means of production, nor does he propose to do away with the price system. In
other words, Sanderss vision of socialism is not what Mao or Trotsky or Lenin
proposed, yet there is not one thing in the entire platform that would reverse the
dangerous economic trends of the past decade.

The Abolitionist | Young Americans for Liberty

Instead, Sanders proposes to direct huge amounts of resources in the direction of

constructing something akin to a European welfare state. To put it another way,
Sanders wishes to turn back the clock to create or promote social and economic
structures that already have been undermined by the modern sharing economy.
If one reads Sanderss platform from another perspective, it would be the New Deal.
Indeed, there is nothing Sanders has written or said from the stump that would not
be reminiscent of a New Deal rally (with the possible exception in appealing to black
Americans, which was not part of the Democratic Party agenda in the 1930s, as well
as Sanderss appeal to furthering the Sexual Revolution). Bernie Sanders pushes an
economic agenda that is frozen in time.
The problem, economically speaking, is that Bernie Sanders proposes nothing that
actually would enable entrepreneurs to help bring about a true economic recovery. In
Sanderss world, entrepreneurs are parasites and employers are oppressors who seek
to harm their employees, and wealth is defined by how much governments have in
their treasuries.
If I could put the economics of Bernie Sanders into a nutshell, it would be this:
Burden private enterprise with one directive after another, and then demonize it
when it ultimately falls down under the awful weight of taxes, higher costs, and
mandates. While many people believe that instituting the Sanders economic agenda
would help turn the USA into another Sweden or Denmark, the more likely outcome
would be turning this country into another Venezuela.

[This article originally appeared on Mises.org September 1, 2015.]

The Abolitionist | Young Americans for Liberty