Over the past twenty years, the United States has increasingly tried to claim that Washington does not believe in spheres of influence and that only supposedly imperialist states like Russia are interested in spheres of influence. This has always been nonsense, of course, especially since Washington’s Monroe Doctrine explicitly claims a sphere of influence for the United States.
The Western sanctions against Russia seem to shock very few Westerners. Yet, for several reasons, these sanctions should at least be the subject of lively debate in Western societies.
Decolonization is the latest buzzword to signal the confusion of multicultural activists who unwittingly endorse Western culture. By divorcing the British monarchy to become a republic, Barbados has sparked new debates about the relevancy for ex-colonies of retaining the monarchy.
European politicians are eager to be seen as “doing something” to oppose the Russian regime following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Most European regimes have wisely concluded—Polish and Baltic recklessness notwithstanding—that provoking a military conflict with nuclear-armed Russia is not a good idea. So, “doing something” consists primarily of trying to punish Moscow by cutting Europeans off from much-needed Russian oil and gas.
Perhaps the greatest lesson to be learned in economics is that public policies have seen and unseen effects. The mastery of such a lesson is what separates the good from the bad economist. “The bad economist,” writes Henry Hazlitt, “sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences.
Decentralization has long been at the forefront of the minds of Austro-libertarians. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, for instance, appeared on Austrian television this month sharing his dream of a Europe “which consists of 1,000 Liechtensteins.”
As Sasha Levine reveals in his ground-breaking book, Surveillance Valley, at the height of the Cold War, US military commanders were pursuing a decentralised computer communications system without a base of operations or headquarters, that could withstand a Soviet strike, without blacking-out or destroying the entire network.
