Tag: slavery

Milton Friedman’s All-Volunteer Military

Milton Friedman was one of the most influential leaders of the libertarian and classical liberal movement in the second half of the 20th century. A staunch advocate for applying free-market principles to government policy, he served as Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago from 1946 until his retirement in 1980.

In 1976, Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics—during the time your columnist was an undergraduate at the university. Many of his students became known as the “Chicago Boys,” who helped introduce free-market reforms across Chile and much of Latin America. Today, President Javier Milei of Argentina stands as one of their prominent intellectual heirs.

A prolific writer, Friedman often collaborated with his wife, Rose, whom he met as a graduate student in economics at Chicago in the 1930s. Together they produced two of his most influential books:

1. Capitalism and Freedom (1962); and
2. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (1980), which was later adapted into a popular PBS television series.

Both works championed the idea that voluntary exchange and market mechanisms could deliver public services more effectively than government mandates—including areas such as education (charter schools) and national defense.

Proposing an All-Volunteer Army

Friedman’s most impactful public policy achievement was his long campaign for an all-volunteer military. He argued that instead of conscripting young men, the government should hire willing volunteers at market wages. While the Navy, Marines, and Air Force had always relied on volunteers, the threat of being drafted into the Army often drove young men to enlist in those other branches.

Friedman maintained there was no moral or practical justification for the draft. He viewed it as inequitable, arbitrary, and deeply intrusive—interfering with young men’s freedom to shape their own lives. Economically, he believed it was ultimately more expensive than a volunteer force that paid competitive wages.

In 1971, Congress held hearings on the transition to an all-volunteer force. Friedman testified in favor. Opposing him was General William Westmoreland, former commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam (1964–1968), who had a distinguished record including combat heroism in World War II, graduation from the Army War College, and an MBA from Harvard. During a break, Westmoreland approached Friedman and asked, “How would you like to be defended by mercenaries?”

Friedman’s swift reply: “Better than being defended by slaves!”

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EV Pollution: Converting the World to EVs Would Be an Environmental Disaster

In 2024, President Biden said he wanted 56% of all new cars sold in the United States to be electric vehicles by 2032. California Governor Gavin Newsom similarly mandated that 35% of new 2026 model cars sold in the state be zero-emissions vehicles, rising to 68% in 2030 and 100% in 2035.

The European Union announced in 2023 that, from 2035 onward, all new cars coming onto the market could not emit any CO2. The United Kingdom similarly announced a 2030 ban on the sale of new diesel and petrol cars.

The reaction from the U.S. auto industry was blunt. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation said it “will take a miracle” for all states following California’s rules to reach 100% new zero-emission vehicle sales by 2035.

They are correct. The environmental impact would be devastating. The people claiming to save the world with electric cars could end up destroying it.

Replacing every vehicle on Earth with an EV, all 1.5 to 1.6 billion of them, would be effectively impossible. There are not enough minerals to manufacture all of the batteries required. In addition, there is not enough global processing capacity, and such a transition would require incredible amounts of labor. Many of these minerals are already being mined by children and by workers laboring under hazardous and toxic conditions that amount to modern slavery.

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It’s Time For Reparations For Taxpayers Forced To Pay Reparations

Reparations have become quite popular among the “white guilt” liberal set who insist the rest of us pay for crimes 21st century Americans did not commit. The redistribution of wealth schemes driven by identity politics are popping up in leftist-led cities across the country. They seem to be making critical race theory charlatans and professional race-baiters a lot of money while sowing more division and discrimination.

How about reparations for taxpayers forced to pay unjust reparations?    

Take Evanston, Illinois, for example. The Chicago suburb teeming with self-loathing, wealthy white liberals and misplaced Big 10 football and basketball teams in 2019 became the first U.S. city to launch a reparations program. The city of some 75,000 souls has committed $20 million to the cause of assuaging its guilt for past transgressions of segregating and redlining black residents. 

The money is supposed to compensate today’s black residents for past racial injustice. The recipients were not enslaved nor are they necessarily victims of discrimination. But they get a hefty check, regardless. 

‘Incredible’

In its latest round of redistribution with one-sided representation, Evanston announced in February that it will be issuing $25,000 individual payments to 44 people, according to the city’s Reparations Committee. The money, Fox News reported, comes from $276,588 in Evanston’s real estate transfer tax, a collection from the sale of property in the college town. The city also levies a tax on cannabis sales, although that revenue stream reportedly hasn’t been sufficient to meet the reparations wish list.

City leaders would also like to strap a tax on Delta-8 THC products —  weed lite, if you will — to keep the reparations train rolling. 

Last June, the Reparations Committee announced it had doled out a total of $6.36 million “to ancestors and direct descendants of the Black Evanston community,” the Evanston Roundtable reported. 

At the time, Tashiek Kerr, assistant to the city manager, (not to be confused with the assistant to the regional manager), said Evanston officials had met with “116 out of 126 residents in the direct descendants group,” the newspaper reported. “These residents are related to Black Evanston residents who lived in Evanston from 1919 through 1969.” 

A total of nearly $3 million was disbursed to those residents, with another 135 recipients sharing $3.5 million, all black applicants who claim to have faced discriminatory housing practices. The payments are supposed to be used for housing assistance — mortgage payments, down payments, home repairs and the like. 

The committee’s chairwoman, Robin Rue Simmons, described the funding totals as “incredible.” The audience burst into applause, the Roundtable reported. 

Here’s the phrase that pays: 

“However, recipients in the next round are wondering when it will be their turn. Rue Simmons said it is undetermined due to funding,” according to the newspaper. 

And so it goes with the history of reparation proposals and plans. Like all leftist money grabs, it’s never enough. (*See the expansion of welfare, affirmative action, the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977”, etc.) 

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How the Slaveholding Founders Really Felt About Slavery

The Declaration of Independence accused the king and Parliament of Great Britain of “exciting domestic insurrections” among the half-million people enslaved in the American colonies. This was a reference to the November 1775 proclamation by Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, that he would free “all indentured servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to rebels)” who were “able and willing to bear arms” against the American revolutionaries.

Today’s readers often consider it hypocritical that the Founders denounced Britain for offering black Americans the same freedom for which they were themselves fighting. Some of the revolutionary era’s readers thought the same thing. In 1776, the London writer John Lind published a pamphlet responding line by line to the Declaration, and in it he ridiculed the patriots: “Is it for them to complain of the offer of freedom held out to these wretched beings? of the offer of reinstating them in that equality which, in this very paper, is declared to be the gift of God to all?“

What Lind overlooked was that Americans did not deny that it was self-contradictory for them to hold slaves while proclaiming liberty to be every person’s birthright. On the contrary, their embarrassment over that inconsistency had been particularly glaring when Virginians drafted their Declaration of Rights in June 1776. Thomas Jefferson went even further, admitting that slaves were justified in violently rebelling against their oppressors. The thought that God’s “justice cannot sleep forever” made him “tremble,” he said.

But the real story of the “domestic insurrections” passage is more complicated than modern readers typically realize. The best point to begin understanding it is October 1769, when a poor man named Samuel Howell approached Jefferson, then a 26-year-old lawyer practicing in Williamsburg, to ask for help in defending his freedom against the claim that he was a slave.

Howell’s great-grandfather was a black man who’d had a baby girl with a white woman. Under Virginia laws of that time, the daughter was bound to servitude until the age of 31, and during those years, she gave birth to Howell’s mother. She, too, was enslaved until the age of 31, and during that time, she gave birth to Howell himself. The owner of Howell’s mother and grandmother, thinking that Virginia law also rendered Howell a slave until the age of 31, then sold him.

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Revealed: Greens hopeful who is calling for the UK to pay slavery reparations is a descendant of slave traders

A Green Party candidate pushing Britain to pay trillions of pounds in slavery reparations is descended from a Nigerian royal family that traded slaves.

Antoinette Fernandez is the ‘reparations officer’ for the party’s Global Majority Greens group which campaigns for ‘racial and environmental justice’.

However, she is also the daughter of a billionaire oil baron who was one of Africa’s richest men.

The local election candidate has campaigned for British taxpayers to pay reparations for the transatlantic slave trade and said that politicians who oppose it ‘show an appalling arrogance’.

Ms Fernandez – who is standing for Zack Polanski’s party in London – is the daughter of the Queen Mother of Lagos and is given the title ‘princess’ in the Nigerian press.

Her mother is Abiola Dosunmu and her father is Antonio Deinde Fernandez, a late business magnate and UN ambassador who is said to have made his fortune in oil, gas and mining and had a reported net worth of $8.7billion (£6.5billion) when he died in 2015.

Through her mother, the Green politician is a descendant of the Obas (kings) of Lagos, some of whom historians describe as ‘major’ slave traders that made ‘lucrative commissions from slave deals’.

One of Ms Fernandez’s ancient relatives personally owned 1,400 slaves and another even brought back slaves that had been sent to Brazil to build houses in Lagos, according to one historian.

The campaigner’s family accrued wealth through the slave trade which they used to purchase ‘velvet clothes, royal umbrellas, hats and stylish robes’, the account adds.

On Monday the Conservatives and Reform UK rounded on Ms Fernandez, branding her the ‘ultimate hypocrite’ for demanding hard-up Britons shell out for reparations.

But the Green Party said that reporting Ms Fernandez’s lineage is ‘racist’ and a ‘bad-faith attempt to undermine the case for reparative justice’.

Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and then spent millions of pounds – billions in today’s money – and thousands of sailors’ lives putting an end to the practice worldwide.

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The monetary system is designed to enslave you and your government

The dollar, pound, euro, peso, yen or whichever fiat, unbacked currency is in your wallet or bank account is the very means by which we are all enslaved.

It is a brilliant, hidden system of cunning, evil genius – to make the commodity most sought after the world over (because it is the most exchangeable for the things you want and need; the very thing that keeps the state getting more powerful, the corporations squeezing ever more small and independent businesses out of the market, the courts maintaining the unjust status quo and the media propagandising everyone using every trick in the book – all to keep the system in place and the rulers in power.

The best way to keep a population enslaved is to never let them see the bars of the cage and give them the illusion of freedom.

So you get a choice between red and blue political teams, different brands of the same poisonous crap, and different branded stores where the poisonous crap is sold, but that is not freedom; it’s a system developed over centuries so that its slaves become comfortable in their open air prison and even fight to maintain it, believing it’s the best system possible, or it wouldn’t exist and another would surely have taken its place by now.

Aren’t we just the most advanced civilisation there has ever been? I mean, look at our amazing buildings (and modern works of art)!

It Starts With Indoctrination At School

Do you never wonder why we are not taught about the most basic mechanisms of our economic life in school, if school is supposed to prepare us for the world ahead as an adult?

You might have been taught what a bank account was and how to open and use one and then they just implant the necessity of money in our minds and there it stays as we keep chasing the carrot and avoiding the stick for most of our working lives, without ever understanding where currency comes from and why it is so hard to accumulate enough to buy the things we need in life like a home, land, transport, etc.

Here is the shocking truth they will never tell you: the money we borrow when we go for a loan or a mortgage is not from someone else’s deposits, again, as most are taught, even at university level.

Fractional reserve banking would be bad enough, but what the actual mechanism is, as confirmed by the Bank of England’s ‘Money Creation in the Modern Economy’ report from 2014 and many other researchers before and since, is far worse than even starting with real labour-produced savings: the money is created when you sign for the loan.

If you didn’t know that before, it should indeed be shocking, but it’s not “conspiracy theory” or conjecture – The Bank of England says so.

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America: Land of the (Not Really) Free

Last week, President Donald Trump commemorated income tax payments being due by having DoorDash deliver food from McDonald’s to the White House. The delivery was intended to highlight the first year of tax-free tips. Removing tax on tips was part of the 2025 Big Beautiful Bill (BBB).

As the sponsor of the first No Tax on Tips legislation introduced in Congress, I was obviously pleased to see this change in tax laws included in the BBB. The bill also included other good tax changes such as removing tax on overtime and extending the 2017 tax cuts. Unfortunately, the bill also increased federal spending and debt.

Supporters of the income tax implicitly endorse the idea that our rights are gifts from government and, thus, can be revoked by government at the will of our rulers. Adoption of the income tax signified the abandonment of the belief that individuals have inalienable rights granted them by the Creator.

Therefore, those who believe in natural rights must reject income taxation. It is also a violation of the people’s rights when the central bank reduces the value of the dollar, and thus the people’s purchasing power, via the hidden inflation tax.

The income tax system’s rejection of natural rights is exemplified by withholding that gives government first claim on an individual’s earnings. The government then may return, via what it calls a refund, some of what was taken. However, a normal refund is when a business returns a customer’s payment because the customer is dissatisfied with the good or service he received, not when a thief returns some of what the thief stole.

Withholding was implemented during World War Two as a “temporary” wartime measure. Yet, it is still with us decades later.

Milton Friedman, as a young economist, played a role in the US government’s development of withholding. Of course, Friedman went on to become a leading advocate for free markets. He also redeemed himself for his work on withholding by becoming a prominent advocate for ending the military draft.

The draft is the worst example of how the government has rejected the principles of the Declaration of Independence. The draft gives government power to force young men (and possibly young women) to join the military and kill or be killed in a war. Contrary to the beliefs of some progressives, support for the draft is not justified by allowing individuals to choose between serving in the military or performing some other form of mandated “service.”

While the US does not have a military draft, the infrastructure for the draft remains in place via Selective Service registration. A provision in this year ‘s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) allows Selective Service to automatically register all men between the ages of 18 and 25. This makes it easier than ever for government to reinstate a draft.

Income taxes, along with the military draft and other types of mandated “service,” are incompatible with a free society and should be opposed by all who value liberty and peace. As Ronald Reagan said in a statement that could be modified to apply to income taxes, the draft “rests on the assumption that your kids belong to the state…. That assumption isn’t a new one. The Nazis thought it was a great idea.”

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Judge Orders Colorado to Stop Throwing Prisoners in Solitary for Refusing to Work

In 2019, while incarcerated at the Centennial Correctional Facility in Colorado and assigned to shifts in the kitchen, Nadia Reed refused to work for two days in one month. All incarcerated people in Colorado are required to labor, and are typically paid mere cents an hour. Her punishment for that decision was being confined to her cell alone for 23 hours a day for 30 days, unable to interact with any other incarcerated people, not even during the hour she was allowed out for exercise and to shower. She was also denied the ability to talk to her loved ones. In court testimony, she described the isolation as “very depressing,” leading her to self-harm. 

The following year, after Reed completed her assigned shift in the kitchen, she was ordered to stay longer to do additional work. She refused, for which she was handcuffed, shackled, strip searched, put in solitary confinement and once again confined to her cell for 23 hours a day, according to her testimony. As a result of the incident, Reed was reclassified from medium security to a higher level, and she says she was sexually assaulted when she was moved into that part of the prison.

Experiences like Reed’s are common in Colorado, with Bolts reporting in 2023 that incarcerated people there are routinely subjected to solitary confinement and other punishments for refusing to work. But that could soon be a thing of the past. In a groundbreaking ruling last month in a lawsuit filed against the state by Harold Mortis and Richard Lilgerose, men who were punished for refusing to work in crowded prison kitchens during the COVID-19 pandemic, a state district court judge found that Colorado is violating incarcerated people’s rights by the way it punishes them for refusing to work. 

The judge ruled that Colorado has failed to abide by a change voters made to their state constitution in 2018 that erased language allowing “slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime.”

While the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery at the end of the Civil War, it included a carveout that sanctions it as punishment for people convicted of crimes. Many state constitutions include the same loophole, which has allowed prisons to force incarcerated people to work under threat of discipline, often for little pay; seven states don’t pay anything for most prison jobs. 

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Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson Calls for Reparations and Claims Restaurants Are Tied to Slavery in Bizarre Rant 

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is currently embroiled in some sort of feud with the city council over a raise for tipped workers and it’s not going the way he wants so he is lashing out.

This week, while he was remarking on the situation, he suddenly veered into the topic of reparations and then claimed that the restaurant industry has ties to slavery.

How was this man elected mayor of a major city? It really seems like there’s something wrong with him.

FOX News reports:

Chicago mayor links restaurant industry to ‘slavery’ as tipped wage fight intensifies

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson linked the restaurant industry to “slavery” Wednesday as he defended his push to eliminate the tipped wage, doubling down after surviving a City Council effort to block the policy.

Johnson’s remarks came after the Chicago City Council failed to override his veto of a measure that would have halted the city’s phaseout of the subminimum wage for tipped workers — a policy set to raise base pay to the full minimum wage by 2028 that is opposed by restaurant owners who warn it could drive up prices and cut jobs.

He called on Chicagoans to “challenge city council not to do stuff like take wages away from Black and Brown people,” saying that most workers in the service industry who rely on tips are minorities.

“You just watched the entire city council, in transparency, try to take wages away from the very people who are part of an industry that has its ties to slavery is hiding from that,” Johnson said. “I am boldly declaring that we need reparations in this city, and that’s why I’m funding it.”

What is he even talking about?

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Louisiana advances bill to funnel homeless people into forced treatment and unpaid labor

Yesterday, the Louisiana House of Representatives took the dangerous step of voting in favor of a truly disgusting anti-homeless bill. This bill is an extreme take on the already extreme copy-paste legislation peddled by the Palantir-funded, billionaire-backed Cicero Institute. In addition to making it a crime to sleep outside, this bill forces homeless people charged with a crime to make the false choice between jail or at least one year of forced treatment. 

But it gets worse.  

This bill requires homeless people to pay for the very treatment they are forced into. And if the person cannot pay the cost of treatment, this bill requires them to perform unpaid labor for the government or a community organization to pay off their debt. Louisiana has a long history – and present – of chain gangs, prison labor, and entrenched white supremacy. This bill clearly evokes debtor’s prisons, convict leasing, and the ugliest day of Jim Crow.   

We can all agree that the creation of a two-tiered justice system, where people are punished differently for the same crime depending simply on whether or not they are homeless, is just too extreme.  

Louisiana Governor Landry cites Donald Trump’s anti-homeless policies to justify his support of this heinous bill.  But this is not just about Louisiana – it reveals just how far many states might be willing to go to align themselves with Trump’s extreme, anti-homeless agenda. Politicians from Donald Trump on down would rather blame homeless people than use their power to address the sky-high rents that are the leading cause of homelessness.  

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