Over the weekend, President Trump ordered dozens of air raids on many targets spread around the country of Yemen. The US military claimed the strikes killed “multiple” leaders of the group Ansar Allah, better known as the Houthis.
The primary purpose of the federal judiciary is to make sure that anything the federal government does is almost never, ever, ruled to be unconstitutional. This is Hamilton’s constitutional regime. A believer in unlimited government, Alexander Hamilton’s constitutional belief was that the constitution can and should be used as a rubber stamp on unlimited government — as long as the government is run by “well behaved” politicians like himself, he insisted.
[For an audio version of this talk, see March 20th’s episode of Radio Rothbard.]
Over the weekend President Trump ordered a massive military operation against the small country of Yemen. Was Yemen in the process of attacking the United States? No. Did the President in that case go to Congress and seek a declaration of war against the country? No. The fact is, Yemen hadn’t even threatened the United States before the bombs started falling.
“We will not stand idly by while this regime pulls the wool over the eyes of the American people,” proclaimed Sheria Smith, the president of American Federation of Government Employees unit representing more than a thousand federal Education Department employees fired by the Trump administration.
A war economy is characterized, above all, by an extremely high time preference (i.e., a focus on the present). The conduct of war requires that scarce resources—previously allocated to the production of capital or consumer goods—be reallocated to the mobilization and operational readiness of the nation’s fighting forces. As Mises said, “War can be waged only with present goods.”
Why should we care today about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963? That fateful day in Dallas is, after all, a long time ago: those of us, like me, who can remember the day are at least in their sixties. The short answer is that it reveals something essential for us to know about the American government and the Deep State that runs it.
I’ve been thrilled with much of what Donald Trump has done as president.
