The Straight of Hormuz is closed again. Israel will not abide by any ceasefire, so Trump can only succeed by ignoring Netanyahu. Which Trump will not do. 

I’ve never been more in favor of money laundering than after reading British journalist Oliver Bollough’s new book, Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won. That might sound odd, and is certainly not what the author intended, so let me explain.

In Anatomy of the State, Murray N. Rothbard describes the state not as a benevolent servant of society but as an organization that maintains a monopoly on force and extracts revenue through coercion rather than voluntary production and exchange. It operates via the political means, predation and systematic theft of private resources, rather than the economic means of honest labor and trade.

For the past six weeks, as this US-Israeli war with Iran has played out, the economic impact of the conflict has gotten a lot of attention. And rightfully so.

John Maynard Keynes was a terrible economist, but he understood politics and ideology quite well. He understood how political ideas gain influence and are communicated to the public. This was partly why he cultivated alliances with universities and sought to use scholars as a means of influencing government policy. Keynes understood that ideology and ideas generally filter down from academic institutions into the general public by way of mass media, school teachers, and political elites. Keynes knew that no one is immune from this process of transmitting ideas.

President Trump is waging or threatening to wage several presidential wars, ostensibly violating the Constitution, which specifies that only Congress, not the president, has the power to declare war, but the president controls the armed forces.

The president is waging war or threatening to wage war “without the authority of a Congressional war declaration,” says Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky). “This is an act of war,” Rand recently said in discussing the US invasion of Venezuela. The same arguments are now made as the US wars on Iran.