In the Gulag, political prisoners were systematically terrorized by ordinary criminals with the encouragement of the authorities. It was hoped this would help the regime liquidate the state's ideological enemies.
The regime has increasingly been consumed with paranoia over threats to itself—propagandistically termed "threats to democracy"—while real crime against private citizens is clearly not a priority at all.
Murray Rothbard wrote that egalitarianism was a war against nature. Statism has become a war against reality.
Federal prosecutors and other law enforcement agents are turning blockchain firms into government subsidiaries. The real goal is to criminalize what really are lawful, private exchanges.
When Mises wrote that the fascists had "saved European civilization," he could have been describing Francisco Franco of Spain, who kept Spain from becoming a communist dictatorship.
In 1944, F.A. Hayek's best-selling book, The Road to Serfdom, warned the West that the "free" nations would lose their freedom as government expanded. He was right.
After governments create crises, they use those crises to seize new powers. After the crisis subsides, governments give up some, but not all, of their new authority, which we call the ratchet effect.
While Americans believe the First Amendment protects their speech, the US government and mainstream media have joined together to suppress speech that does not coincide with government policies.
Socialists and communists claim to support the rights of "indigenous" peoples. However, that support rings hollow given how the USSR abused the native peoples of Siberia, all while American socialists and communists uncritically supported the Soviet Union.
Trump is essentially being prosecuted for questioning the outcome of an election, and federal paranoia about protecting its own aura of legitimacy is entering a new highly aggressive phase.
