Tag: finance

Officials over the weekend would not disclose why three armed stealth fighter jets were scrambled for an “irregular air patrol,” according to Honolulu Star-Advertiser. 

“The 154th Fighter Wing launched two F-22 Raptors from Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam at approximately 4 p.m. Sunday,” Pacific Air Forces wrote in an email.

“A third was launched at approximately 5 p.m.”

The command at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam said the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requested the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to “conduct an irregular air patrol and the situation resolved, prompting the fighters and a KC-135 Stratotanker (a refueling plane) to return to base. We cannot discuss further specifics of the situation.”

Scrambling stealth fighter jets is not uncommon. 

For example, F-22s are tasked with intercepting unknown or potentially threatening aircraft that approach or have entered U.S. airspace.

But what remains a mystery here is that usually, the military is open about its encounters. 

The War Zone submitted a Freedom Of Information Act request into what happened Sunday afternoon and received a short non-response…

 

Authored by José Niño via The Mises Institute,

These days it’s not your typical latte-sipping millennials who are going woke.

Taking a stroll around America’s largest metro areas will have one believe social justice is the latest fad that’s sweeping across corporate boardrooms.

Much has been written about woke capital—businesses’ recent pivot to signal their affinity for leftist movements—and what it means for society at large. Suffice it to say that since last year, this trend has accelerated at breakneck speeds.

Scratching one’s head in utter confusion should be a natural response to corporate America’s virtue signaling. One has to wonder why big business, which has traditionally been perceived as a reactionary institution aligned with the political right, would make common cause with radicals on the cultural left. Counterintuitive as it may seem, corporations and prominent business moguls have many incentives to jump on the virtue-signaling bandwagon.

For megacorporations, woke signaling is a matter of self-preservation in order to protect themselves from ravenous mobs in both the virtual and physical realms. What’s more, in a time when hall monitors—state and nonstate—are lurking around every corner waiting for individuals to commit some kind of impropriety, many institutions will go out of their way to signal their compliance with the regime’s standards. Not abiding by the regime’s accepted behavior comes with major social and financial costs that the bulk of businesses are not willing to bear.

For wealthy members of society who have leftist inclinations, there’s a diminishing marginal utility of money, as Mises Institute president Jeff Deist spelled out in an interview with Jay Taylor two years back. Put simply, spending hundreds of millions on civilization-destroying campaigns is a casual expense for America’s premier tycoons, who have plenty of money to spare after covering their expenses on basic necessities. 

When someone is rich, say an individual who has $10 billion, they have the luxury of throwing money at uneconomic ventures without losing any sleep about meeting their basic economic needs. The multibillionaire spearheading a woke project that is rejected by the public will not land in the poorhouse from the financial fallout. They can go back to their private affairs or pivot to another political cause that is not as divisive. By contrast, for a small business owner, such virtue signaling could mean bankruptcy if their customer base tends to be right wing or is at least hostile toward culturally radical virtue signaling.

Indeed, one of the more perverse developments in Western societies is the rich’s penchant to squander away the wealth they’ve accumulated by funding all sorts of bizarre social projects. Only in such a developed economy, characterized by hyperabundance and unprecedented luxuries, can people engage in bizarre activities that in previous eras would have been viewed as masochistic and self-destructive.

The likes of George Soros and Michael Bloomberg offer stark counterexamples to the business elites of the past. The two financial titans have built a reputation of bankrolling a wide network of gun control groups which strive to pass legislation designed to infringe on millions of people’s ability to defend themselves. By contrast, Bloomberg and his left-leaning oligarchical counterparts have the luxury of living in gated communities and relying on private security to defend themselves. In fairness, business magnates in previous eras were likely not fervent champions of wedge political issues like gun rights, but you would not see them enthusiastically throwing their weight behind the latest political fads the Left gravitates toward these days.

Bolsheviks and Billionaires

Although the Left has changed in its overall strategy, going from class-reductionist conflicts toward an identity politics focus over the course of the past century, there exist several commonalities between the contemporary left and its past iterations. Foremost of these is its elitist origins.

In his polemical work, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, economic historian Antony Sutton uncovered the oligarchical backing of Bolshevism—the twentieth century’s most destructive political movement in terms of the body count and economic mayhem it unleashed in countries that embraced its precepts.

Contrary to the mythology that leftist historians have created, Bolshevism was no spontaneous uprising of workers, but rather a movement of elite aspirants. Lenin himself counted on a law degree and worked as a writer and political activist during his time in exile while living in Switzerland, Germany and the United Kingdom. Similar to Karl Marx, who relied on industrialist Friedrich Engels’s lavish patronage to subsidize his daily activities, prominent financiers such as Swedish banker Olof Aschberg helped bankroll Lenin and his revolutionary compatriots, Sutton’s work revealed.

It’s perhaps counterintuitive for financial heavyweights to throw their weight behind an individual and a movement advocating for the destruction of private property, but it makes sense when analyzing how rent-seeking economic actors behave in the context of state centralization.

The inherently centralist nature of socialist systems, even when policymakers make deviations around the margins, as seen with Lenin’s New Economic Policy, remains attractive to unscrupulous financial actors, who seek to exploit these features for the sake of easy profits while not facing any serious competition. Sutton observed how economic radicals and big financial interests can become strange bedfellows:

Bolshevists and bankers have then this significant common ground—internationalism. Revolution and international finance are not at all inconsistent if the result of revolution is to establish more centralized authority. International finance prefers to deal with central governments. The last thing the banking community wants is laissez-faire economy and decentralized power because these would disperse power.

Likewise, Ludwig von Mises acknowledged in Omnipotent Government how the salt of the earth are not the ones responsible for making collectivist political movements mainstream:

It is not true that the dangers to the maintenance of peace, democracy, freedom, and capitalism are a result of a “revolt of the masses.” They are an achievement of scholars and intellectuals, of sons of the well-to-do, of writers and artists pampered by the best society. In every country of the world dynasties and aristocrats have worked with the socialists and interventionists against freedom.

“Wokeness” as a Public Relations Strategy

Furthermore, woke signaling has an obfuscation function that businesses and individuals can use to divert attention away from their questionable behavior. In a world dominated by woke standards of conduct, these actors are banking on the assumption that being against the prevailing orthodoxy constitutes a larger social offense than providing shoddy services or participating in morally questionable behavior.

Instead of competing with other companies on the basis of fulfilling consumer wants, companies try to one-up each other by trying to display their woke credentials. Those with skeletons in their closets would likely find use in this type of signaling as a way to avoid any unwanted attention. Going woke acts as a release from all social obligations. By viewing their nation’s history as fundamentally bigoted, individuals and institutions no longer feel compelled to abide by basic rules of decency and serve their clients and community.

With this in mind, one cannot underestimate the role of ideology in shaping the way corporate actors behave in contemporary times. Business magnates are often caricatured as homines oeconomici whose only concern is profit and who see human relations through an exclusively transactional lens. Such a perception understates the level of socialization that has permeated across class lines throughout America.

There’s nothing special about the upper-middle class and higher that exempts them from being infected by the cultural left’s ideology. As a matter of fact, America’s well-to-do grow up in milieus, from the educational institutions they’re enrolled in to the social clubs they participate in, that expose them to the dominant political and social trends. Over the course of their development, many members of this class end up being conditioned to accept the established ruling doctrine.

The current crop of business elites have little in common with Gilded Age corporate titans who still operated within the confines of bourgeois propriety. In fact, traditional values and resistance to cultural radicalism are more the province of the working classes and other Americans who have not placed themselves in the PC conveyer belt that is the contemporary education-to-corporation pipeline.

One thing is certain, though: woke leftism is not about fighting for the interests of the common man. Grievance politics’ ornamental displays of victimhood only obscure the oligarchical nature of this project.

Mainstream media is positively giddy with excitement that “tough on Russia” Joe Biden will finally “confront” Putin during their highly anticipated summit in Geneva on Wednesday. Though any level of diplomatic “check mate” won’t come publicly as Biden will give a solo press conference, ensuring that he can give his version of events to a pliant press pool, which one admin official earlier described as communicating “with the free press” (…the implication being that Putin’s presence would somehow make it not a “free press”).

During Biden’s Monday press conference at the end of the one-day NATO summit in Brussels, the US president vowed: “But I will tell you this: I’m going to make clear to President Putin that there are areas where we can cooperate, if he chooses.  And if he chooses not to cooperate and acts in a way that he has in the past, relative to cybersecurity and some other activities, then we will respond. We will respond in kind.”

Biden additionally said in his NATO summit remarks: “There need not be — we should decide where it’s in our mutual interest, in the interest of the world, to cooperate, and see if we can do that.  And the areas where we don’t agree, make it clear what the red lines are.”

And then the president dubbed Putin “a worthy adversary”…

I have met with him. He’s bright. He’s tough. And I have found that he is a — as they say, when you used to play ball, “a worthy adversary.”

As we highlighted earlier, much of this “adversary” talk is more simply geared toward a US domestic audience, particularly a Democratic base which has been primed and pumped for years on the Russiagate and ‘interference’ kool-aid…

Mainstream media are barely reporting – and at times distorting – olive-branch remarks by Putin, and are at pains to “accentuate the negative”. We are particularly concerned over the incessant media commentary on “Russian hacking”, which seems to be aimed at mousetrapping you into an ill-advised confrontation with Putin. Revelations since the last summit in July 2018 – including testimony under oath to Congress – give President Putin some very high cards. Should things get acrimonious, he might decide to put them into play.

Meanwhile, Russian official sources have revealed the agenda for Wednesday’s bilateral summit, which is to include cyberattacks and cybercrime, fighting the pandemic, the war in Donbass and Ukraine issues, and then there’s no doubt Biden will focus heavily on human rights. 

President Biden says if jailed Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny were to die in prison it would be a “tragedy.”

“Navalny’s death would be another indication that Russia has little or no intention of abiding by basic fundamental human rights” https://t.co/WqfuBhPQMA pic.twitter.com/qBl94yuT8Z

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) June 14, 2021

The two presidents are due to meet at 1pm local time at Geneva’s historic Villa La Grange.

* * * 

In the meantime…

TIME cover blasted for over-the-top attempt to make Biden ‘look cool’ ahead of Putin meeting https://t.co/iz4gKGgGfS

— Fox News (@FoxNews) June 11, 2021

By Steve Englander, head G10FX research and NA Macro Strategy at Standard Chartered

FOMC Preview – Taper to be discussed but quickly dismissed 

Key highlights:

• Tapering very likely to be discussed and dismissed, unlikely to be mentioned in the statement

•  UST market unlikely to see major moves; ongoing absence of 2023 hike in dots may be read as dovish

•  Soft recent data discourages a hawkish signal until the FOMC has more clarity on growth and inflation

Talk is cheap

The 16 June FOMC is unusual in that there are potentially several market drivers in both directions but no dominant one:

• Tapering of asset purchases will likely be discussed, given the number of FOMC participants who have raised the issue, but we expect Chair Powell to stress that all (or almost all) participants see tapering action as very premature.

• It is a close call on a 2023 hike in the June projections; on balance we think the FOMC will wait until 2024 projections are introduced in September and put the first hikes in 2024.

• The 2021 forecast of core inflation is likely to rise, but we expect 2023 core inflation unchanged at 2.1%. The end-2021 unemployment rate projection rising from its current 4.5% would be a dovish signal.

• We do not see rates on reverse repos (RRP) or overnight reserves (IOER) being raised at this meeting but they could well be raised in the coming months.

• The inflation update in the statement could edit the May comment to implicitly acknowledge higher inflation but not as a policy factor: “With inflation running persistently below this longer-run goal, The Committee will aim to achieve inflation moderately above 2 percent for some time”.

• Fed Chair Powell will likely push back against the view that the rebound has come off the rails but not spook the market by completely ignoring data softness.

We anticipate the FOMC giving itself a few more months to assess incoming data on both inflation and growth, recognizing the potential embarrassment of another episode of premature hawkishness. FOMC comments will be in the context of sluggish economic data (including a risk of soft May retail sales data, due 15 June) and much less aggressive market pricing (Figure 1).

We see a small chance that the FOMC will indicate that it is advancing its normalization schedule, but at current yield levels such a shift would likely have a big bond market impact. The FOMC is much more likely to advocate and practise patience in assessing the underlying trends in activity and inflation, which points to very moderate signals. Yields have some downside if the FOMC sees the recovery as being more sluggish than earlier expected, but such overt pessimism would surprise us.

We, and we suspect the FOMC, expect the activity data to firm in the coming months, and the center of the FOMC may even be worrying more about inflation; but incoming data makes it risky to be overtly hawkish.

We don’t see a spike in yields unless the tapering discussion is accompanied by added inflation concerns in the out years. Many have discussed labor-market tightness, but real wages have not moved much this year, with inflation offsetting a big chunk of nominal gains. And inflation expectations in surveys such as the New York Fed’s still show increases in the coming years. So far the upward inflation move is heavily concentrated in a few small sectors. We expect the FOMC to argue that the evidence supports a transient rather than permanent inflation pick-up, but perhaps with slightly less conviction than before.

Given the decline in breakevens recently, particularly in the 2Y-3Y sector of the curve, the market may be caught off-guard if the 2023 core PCE projection rises from March’s 2.1% forecast. Markets could see such a rise as inconsistent with the Fed’s view that the inflation pick-up is transient. A 2.2% core inflation projection for 2023 could be seen as close enough to the upper end of “somewhat higher” to justify beginning policy rate normalization. We think that nine (including Powell) will push for unchanged signals, and expect a few swing participants to go with the Chair. While projections are not discussed or debated at FOMC meetings, we suspect that participants develop an understanding of which projections are potentially sensitive and reflect carefully on those projections.

Yields could also rise if Fed Chair Powell looks through recent data, conveying a message that the Fed is convinced that the current soft data patch is temporary. But given FOMC emphasis on making policy based on current data, he is likely to argue that they expect robust growth but need to see how growth plays out.

The biggest dovish risk that we see is if the unemployment rate projections rise. The unemployment trend since January does not jive with the current 4.5% median projection (Figure 2). If that rises, and especially if the increase is not made up in later years, investors may contemplate an even slower anticipated future tapering path. Powell has been at pains to stress that projections are not policy signals, but more elevated unemployment projections would be indicative of added caution on growth prospects. While Fed rate hike pricing has retreated somewhat since the March and April FOMC meetings, the market still prices in about 2½ hikes by end-2023, so there is room for further paring if the projections suggest slower normalisation (Figure 3).

There are enough FOMC participants arguing that is time to begin the tapering discussion that it would be a surprise if there were none. Too many Fed speakers have mentioned tapering for it not to be discussed; it would look as if they were avoiding mention of the elephant in the room. However, we expect the possibility of near-term tapering to be dismissed quickly without mention in the statement. Given the run of data, it is more credible for Fed Chair Powell to say that there was broad agreement that sufficient progress had not yet been made and concrete discussion was premature.

We think the bond market will react negatively initially to the mention of a tapering discussion, especially given that 10Y UST yields are well below levels prevailing immediately before and after the March and April FOMCs. The dominant market view looks to be that any mention of a tapering discussion is the first step towards normalization. We don’t think this reaction will persist and expect the dismissal of an imminent move to reassure investors. The scenario would be different if payroll gains had averaged 900,000 the past two months rather than 418,000.

The World Health Organization is “highly compromised” and unfit to lead an investigation into the origins of COVID-19, according to former CDC head Robert Redfield.

“Clearly, they were incapable of compelling China to adhere to the treaty agreements that they have on global health, because they didn’t do that,” Redfield told Fox News on Tuesday. “Clearly, they allowed China to define the group of scientists that could come and investigate. That’s not consistent with their role.“

In March, Redfield told CNN that he doesn’t believe the natural origin theory which posits that COVID-19 jumped from a bat to a human through a yet-to-be determined intermediary species.

“I think they were highly compromised,” Redfield said of the World Health Organization (WHO), which ‘investigated’ the origins of the pandemic in what was nothing more than political theatre conducted by a highly conflicted group – one of whom, Peter Deszak of NGO EcoHealth Alliance, worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and was funded to the tune of millions of dollars by Anthony Fauci’s NIH.

Redfield slammed Fauci during the interview, saying that while he supports the lab-leak hypothesis, “Other individuals, Tony Fauci, for example, would say that he prefers to support that it evolved from nature.”

“Now, why would that be?” asked Redfield, adding that “sometimes scientists when they bite into a bone on a hypothesis, it’s hard for them to move on.”

“I guess if I’m disappointed about anything about the early scientific community it’s that there seemed to be lack of openness to pursue both hypotheses,” he continued.

Authored by Alex Wu via The Epoch Times,

Facing the Chinese communist regime’s increasing aggression in the Asia-pacific region, the newly appointed Indo-Pacific Commander John Aquilino has recently requested an additional $890 million in spending from Congress to strengthen military equipment in Guam, Alaska, and Hawaii for possible military confrontations. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s top Asia official revealed a new strategy to contain China in the region.

Adm. John C. Aquilino and Adm. Philip S. Davidson with Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin arrive at at a Change of Command ceremony for the U.S Indo-Pacific Command, at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam west of Honolulu, Hawaii, on April 30, 2021. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser via AP)

Aquilino said that the spending request is less than 1 percent of the total authorized amount allocated to the Department of Defense, but is “critical for deterring China’s decision calculus,” Foreign Policy reported on June 8.

Portions of the additional spending request will be used for missiles and improving facilities—$231 million will be used to strengthen air defense and missile defense in Guam, because it is within the range of Chinese missiles; $114 million will be used to improve facilities in Alaska and Hawaii to ensure that they can maintain digital communications with U.S. forces and allies conducting military drills in the Western Pacific. Prior to this, the budget proposed by the Indo-Pacific Command was $5.1 billion.

Aquilino sent a letter to the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Adam Smith, and other members of Congress last week, emphasizing the importance of increasing funding and proposing plans “to ‘seize the initiative’ by providing a pragmatic and viable approach that deters potential adversaries from unilaterally attempting to change the international rules based order, reassures allies and partners, and shapes the security environment.”

He also warned that the time for Beijing to launch an attack on Taiwan may be sooner than what most people think. He said the Hawaii-based military command needs more resources and troops to respond to the Chinese regime’s possible rapid attack on Taiwan.

Meanwhile on June 8, the Deputy Assistant to the President and Coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs on the National Security Council Kurt Campbell, talked about a few key areas of a new strategy to contain the Chinese regime in the region, at an event organized by the Center for a New American Security.

Australian Scott Morrison (L) participating in the inaugural Quad leaders meeting with President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a virtual meetingin Sydney, Australia, on Friday, March 12, 2021. (AP Image/Pool/Dean Lewins)

He said the United States is “working closely with allies like Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and others” to assist island nations in the Pacific, especially in South Pacific, where the competition for influence between China, the United States, and allies has intensified in recent years.

He added that the Quad bloc—the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue composed of the United States, Japan, India, and Australia—would have another leaders’ meeting later this year, and it is open to other countries that have shown “interest” in joining the group to deal with the security threats posed by the Chinese regime in Asia Pacific.

Campbell emphasized that the United States is committed to continuing to provide defensive articles to Taiwan, but he also reminded Taiwan to take measures to step up its own defense capabilities.

Campbell said that China has only itself to blame for a global backlash against its policies, including the militarization of artificial islands in the South China Sea, and its aggressive approach to global diplomacy, which Beijing’s foreign policy establishments know. However, he asked, “But is that getting through to the most inner-circle in the Chinese leadership? I think that’s a question we can’t answer.”

Ahead of tomorrow’s FOMC decision, and in general, two clear camps are emerging when it comes to the increasingly acrimonious debate whether the current soaring inflation is “transitory” or not. In one camp we have the establishmentarians: those with little vision, limited imagination, and whose job precludes them from conceiving of any outcome but that accepted by the groupthink led by the Fed. As noted earlier, this now includes the vast majority of Wall Street…

… not to mention most central bankers and virtually every TV newscaster and reporter, desperate to hit that career pinnacle of asking the Fed chair a ridiculously boring and boneheaded question one day: a career goal that will never happen if one dares to think originally.

In the other camp we have a handful of contrarians, “divergents”, and the occasional brilliant trader such as Paul Tudor Jones ( “buy commodities, buy crypto, buy gold”), Kyle Bass (“real inflation is 10%…The Fed has got to really start thinking about food prices.”) and Michael Burry, people who took the opposite side to the consensus and won big.

People always ask me what is going on in the markets. It is simple. Greatest Speculative Bubble of All Time in All Things. By two orders of magnitude. #FlyingPigs360

— Cassandra (@michaeljburry) June 15, 2021

They will likely end up winning again.

Today we can add one more to what will soon be the winning team: Wincrest Capital founder Barbara Ann Bernard was quite clear where she stands on the temporary/permanent inflation debate when in an idea with Bloomberg she said that “The idea that inflation is transitory is nonsense.”

Picking up on what BofA, Deutsche Bank, and increasingly more “serious” analysts have said, the chief investment officer of the Nassau, Bahamas-based Wincrest said that much of the Biden administration’s agenda, including reducing wealth inequality and promoting the ESG hypocrisy, support a structural lift to inflation.

Naturally, Fed officials, who have been always wrong about everything but can cover up all of their mistakes with ever more grotesque amounts of money printing, have been taking the opposite view, emphasizing that a recent surge in inflation won’t last. A lot is riding on this debate, and if money managers like Bernard or Paul Tudor Jones prove correct, it could mean that central bankers will have to move ahead with plans to begin normalizing their ultra-loose monetary policy.

Unlike many of her peers, Barnard has no problem with being outspoken: the money manager began her career in finance at 15, when she persuaded the iconic investor John Templeton – a fellow Bahamian resident – to take her on board for the first of what would become a series of summer jobs at Templeton Global Advisors. Her career also included stretches at Deutsche Bank AG in alternative investments and at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. as an investment banking analyst.

For Bernard, the U.S. administration’s focus on wealth distribution and the potential for higher minimum wages in some states could put more money in more pockets, adding to price pressures. Talk of a carbon tax and increased focus on environmental, social and governance initiatives also stand to add to companies’ costs.

“All of that plus changing supply chains is inflationary,” she said, making a point so obvious one can see why nobody at the Fed can grasp it.

Like PTJ she plans on making money when the “transitorists” are proven wrong, and like PTJ she is going long commodities, such as nickel and copper. On Monday, iconic trader Tudor Jones told in an interview with CNBC that inflation risk wasn’t transitory. If he were on the investment committee of a pension fund, he said he’d “have as many inflation hedges on as I possibly could.”

Yet despite growing warnings from some of the most erudite traders of their generation, the Treasury market appears unfazed by the inflation risk, and as we noted previously, yields in the world’s biggest bond market aren’t far above a three-month low set Friday. The rate is down from a March 30 peak of 1.774%. The bond market’s most-watched proxy for inflation expectations has also faded from recent highs.
Bernard’s take is that the market is ill-prepared for what’s ahead (we discussed this in “5 Reasons Why Treasury Yields Tumbled Even As Inflation Surges… And Isn’t Transitory“).

“There are ways to outrun inflation,” Bernard said. “But if you just sit there, you are going to get rolled over.”

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

The media has given highly favorable coverage to a new book by Dr. Carol Anderson, chair of Emory University’s Black Studies Department, that argues that “[the Second Amendment] was designed and has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable.” 

In interviews with media outlets like CNN and NPR Anderson’s theory is not challenged on the history and purpose of the Second Amendment.

Like the contested claims of the “1619” project (which posited that slavery was the motivation for the establishment of the colonies), there might be a reluctance by academics to raise the countervailing historical sources out of fear of being labeled insensitive, defensive, or even racist. 

However, this is not a new theory and, while there were concerns at the time about slavery and uprisings, the roots of the Second Amendment can be traced largely to England and the fears of government oppression. The point is not to dismiss this consideration for some pro-slavery figures at the time but to put those statements in a more historically grounded and accurate context.

The book, “The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America,” is the latest work of Anderson who previously published “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.”  NPR bills its interview as “Historian Carol Anderson Uncovers The Racist Roots Of The Second Amendment.”

In truth, this is not a new theory and was long preceded by more detailed accounts by figures like Carl Bogus who wrote the 1998 work The Hidden History of the Second Amendment. Carl T. Bogus, The Hidden History of the Second Amendment, 31 U.C. DAVIS L. REV. 309 (1998); see also Carl T. Bogus, Race, Riots, and Guns, 66 S. CAL. L. REV. 1365 (1993). These works are worth reading as are the writings of my colleague Robert Cottrol (and my former colleague) Ray Diamond. See Robert J. Cottrol & Raymond T. Diamond, The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration, 80 GEO. L.J. 309 (1991).

Bogus highlighted the quotes used later by Anderson, including a warning by Patrick Henry that the Constitution gave too much power to the federal government in the “common defense” and did not leave enough powers with the states to defend themselves. Bogus asked “What was Henry driving at? In 1788, Americans did not fear foreign invasion.  Nor did Americans still harbor the illusion that the militia could effectively contest trained military forces.” His answer was slavery and its preservation.

Slavery was a matter discussed both at the Declaration of Independence and during the Constitutional debates. There were those who were concerned about efforts to abolish slavery as well as slave uprisings. However, the Second Amendment does not appear the result in whole or in large part due to those fears. The right to bear arms was viewed as a bulwark against oppression of citizens by the government. In Northern states where slavery was not as popular, the Second Amendment was an important guarantee against that danger of tyranny. For example, the Pennsylvania Constitution (that preceded the Constitution) included these provisions:

That the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and their own state, or the United States, or for the purpose of killing game; and no law shall be passed for disarming the people or any of them, unless for crimes committed, or real danger of public injury from individuals; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; and that the military shall be kept under strict subordination to and be governed by the civil power.

The inhabitants of the several states shall have liberty to fowl and hunt in seasonable times, on the lands they hold, and on all other lands in the United States not enclosed, and in like manner to fish in all navigable waters, and others not private property, without being restrained therein by any laws to be passed by the legislature of the United States.

New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and other states had similar precursors to the Second Amendment.  The Framers had just overthrown a tyrant and the image of the militia and the famed “Minutemen” remained fixed in the minds of many at the time.

James Madison captured this purpose in in Federalist No. 46 when he noted that a small federal standing army would be opposed by “a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands” which would be able to defeat a tyrannical standing army. He was highlighting “the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation”

Likewise, important contemporary writers at the time connected the Second Amendment to values heavily steeped in the shared history from England. There were also strong cultural and practical value placed on gun ownership, a right that was limited in England. This was still a young country where many lives along the frontier and relied on guns to sustain themselves and their families in terms of both security and sustenance. There was also a deep-seated mistrust of both a standing army and a centralized government.

That is evident in St. George Tucker’s American edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries (1803). In his publication of Blackstone, Tucker added two footnotes that reflected the thinking of many Framers:

[fn40] The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Amendments to C. U. S. Art. 4, and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government.

[fn41] Whoever examines the forest, and game laws in the British code, will readily perceive that the right of keeping arms is effectually taken away from the people of England.  The commentator himself informs us, Vol. II, p. 412, “that the prevention of popular insurrections and resistence to government by disarming the bulk of the people, is a reason oftener meant than avowed by the makers of the forest and game laws.”

Tucker later explained this point further:

“This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty . . . . The right of self defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. In England, the people have been disarmed, generally, under the specious pretext of preserving the game: a never failing lure to bring over the landed aristocracy to support any measure, under that mask, though calculated for very different purposes. True it is, their bill of rights seems at first view to counteract this policy: but the right of bearing arms is confined to protestants, and the words suitable to their condition and degree, have been interpreted to authorise the prohibition of keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game, to any farmer, or inferior tradesman, or other person not qualified to kill game. So that not one man in five hundred can keep a gun in his house without being subject to a penalty.”

There are a myriad of historical sources expounding on this rationale for the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court has itself highlighted that rationale in its discussions of the history and purpose of the Amendment.

The Anderson book effectively repeats the arguments of Bogus but she offers a far more fluid and casual treatment of the history, as is evident in a recent interview:

“…George Mason. Patrick Henry and George Mason really teamed up like tag team taking on the Federalists and the Constitution. What they argued, was that the Constitution put control of the militia under federal control. That meant that Virginia would be left defenseless, as they saw it, when there is an uprising. When there is a slave uprising, that they could not count on the North. They could not count on the federal government and those in Congress to deploy the militia to help out in the midst of a slave revolt.

And they were like, ‘you know, the North detests slavery and we will be left defenseless. I mean, can we really count on those folk?’ and Madison is arguing, ‘look, you got the Atlantic slave trade. Look, you got the three fifths clause. Look, you got the fugitive slave clause, you’re protected.’ And Patrick Henry’s like, ‘No, we are not.’ And so you started seeing the momentum for a new constitutional convention. And that was the last thing James Madison wanted, because he’s like, ‘if these folks get another bite at this, we’re gonna end up with the Articles of Confederation again’.”

…

This is the payoff to Patrick Henry and to George Mason. Look, the militia is here. And what it does is it says that the feds cannot interfere with the militia. You are safe to have your militia to defend against slave uprisings. So sitting here in the Bill of Rights, we have an amendment that is about denying Black people their rights.”

That is not, in my view, an accurate account of what was said by some of these figures and, more importantly, what was the primary motivation for the Second Amendment.

While I disagree with the analysis and conclusion, I value the discussion of how slavery may have impacted this and other amendments. Slave revolts were a concern in the South and that fear no doubt reinforced the desire to have a guaranteed right to bear arms, particularly for slave holders like Patrick Henry. I simply disagree with the sweeping generalizations and conclusions reached in the book. Moreover, this is not a new theory as suggested in these media accounts. Indeed, the case was made stronger by academics like Bogus and the general subject is presented with far greater depth and understanding by academics like Cottrol and Diamond.

Just days after we noted that people in South Korea saw bitcoin as their “only chance of escape” from their social status, it looks as though non-fungible tokens are also catching on in Southeast Asia. 

At least that was the topic of a new report by Nikkei, which took at look at how skeptics and believers are clashing head-to-head about NFTs, whether they have any value and whether or not they could be the future of asset ownership and finance. 

“NFTs are indeed changing the lives of some Southeast Asians” the report notes, with some people using them to earn extra income. One such person is Gilbert Jalova, who has been buying and selling digital assets in a game called Axie Infinity. He can earn up to $550 a month doing so, the report notes, which is “more than he makes in his regular job”. 

Jalova said: “It’s a huge help to us and at the same time, it has become our family bonding.”

The report estimates that more than 80% of Axie Infinity’s player base comes from emerging economies where it is tough to find work or where inflation has run rampant. 

“People are turning to these games as a way to supplement their income or as an alternative means of employment,” one Filipino game developer said. 

Riky Candra, a 20-year-old university student in Pekanbaru, said: “I’ve managed to earn a total of around 10 million rupiah ($700) in the year that I have been playing. I’m able to spend that on daily campus needs, such as books or other equipment, and I tend to set aside some for deposit as future assets.”

Trung Nguyen, co-founder of the game’s developer said an NFT is a way “to represent objects that are unique in nature. So it’s a very good fit with game characters and game assets.”

Artists in Southeast Asia are also cashing in on NFTs. One artist, who goes by the name Monez, sold his first NFT artwork in March of this year for 0.8 ETH, or about $1200. “In the real world … people buy the first painting from the painter, which is usually very cheap, and can sell it for double the price, but the original artist is still poor because we get [only the first payment],” he said.

But there is still some skepticism about NFTs looming. Naohito Yoshida, founder and CEO of Digital Entertainment Asset, pointed out the lack of liquidity: “Liquidity in the NFT market could be a potential risk. If someone buys NFTs for purely collection purposes, there won’t be much of a problem. But if people are buying for investment purposes, then low market liquidity will be an issue, as it means you will not be able to sell it when you want.”

And there are already “signs that liquidity may be drying up, or that the NFT bubble is bursting,” Nikkei writes. While $101 million of NFTs sold on May 3, that number has dropped to about $2 million per day by the end of may. 

Poltak Hotradero, business development manager at the Indonesia Stock Exchange, concluded: “For the digital natives of the younger generations, it will be easy. But for older generations, I don’t think they can appreciate NFTs [on a] par with tactile arts which they can see and touch.”

Authored by John Miltimore via The Foundation for Economic Education,

More than a dozen states have passed or advanced legislation to place new checks on the powers of public health agencies in the wake of the pandemic…

Mike Fratantuono grew up in a restaurant. Literally.

For decades, Sunset Restaurant in Glen Burnie, Maryland, was the family business. Over the years, he’d done seemingly every job imaginable: busboy, bartender, and butcher; prep cook and plumber; handyman and manager.

Fratantuono says that’s what made it so hard to watch the family’s legacy become a COVID casualty in 2020.

“It kills me. We were supposed to be getting ready to celebrate our 60th anniversary this year, and instead we’re packing up and closing at the end of this month,” Fratantuono told the Washington Post last year.

“I try not to get too sentimental about it, because it won’t change a damn thing, but sometimes the stress hits me and my heart starts going like crazy. I get frustrated. It makes me angry.”

Fratantuono is just one of the countless business owners across America who saw their dreams vanish before their eyes in the wake of government lockdowns that crushed their businesses. Now, in the wake of the pandemic, states across the country are advancing legislation to curb the powers of public health departments following one of the most destructive and contentious years in American history.

Reining in Public Health Agencies

In May, the Network for Public Health Law published a report showing that in recent months no fewer than 15 state legislatures have passed or are considering passing measures that would restrict the legal authority of public health departments.

Among the provisions passed or considered are the following:

• Prohibitions on requiring citizens to wear masks;

• Prohibiting health agencies from closing businesses or schools;

• Banning the use of quarantines for people who have not been shown to be sick;

• Preventing state hospitals and universities from requiring vaccinations for employees and students;

• Preventing local governments from exercising emergency powers that are inconsistent with state health department guidelines;

Earlier this year, for example, North Dakota passed legislation making it unlawful for state officials to force citizens to wear masks—just one of a growing number of states to place restrictions on mask orders. In March, Kansas’s legislature passed legislation that removes the governor’s ability to shut down businesses during a public health emergency.

Meanwhile, more than 40 states passed legislation that made it unlawful for health departments to mandate COVID-19 vaccination.

A recent report found that no fewer than 15 state legislatures have passed or are considering passing measures that would curb the powers of public health departments.

This is very good news. pic.twitter.com/5WJbAAGzNV

— Jon Miltimore (@miltimore79) June 9, 2021

A Serious Threat to Life?

The report concludes that opposition to “reasonable” public health measures poses serious dangers to life and health.

“Legislation to stop expert public health agencies from leading the response to health emergencies creates unforeseen, serious risks to life and health,” the report states.

“These laws could make it harder to advance health equity during a pandemic that has disproportionately sickened and killed Black, Hispanic and Latino, and Indigenous Americans.”

Not mentioned in the report, however, are the unintended consequences of the actions taken by public health agencies across the country in 2020. The collateral damage of lockdowns included business closures, job losses, supply disruptions, mass protests, surging violence, increased mental health problems, unprecedented drug overdoses, and a collapse in cancer screenings.

Public health agencies, meanwhile, proved incapable of taming the coronavirus through the use of lockdowns. And these struggles were not confined to the United States.

“A new study by German scientists claims to have found evidence that lockdowns may have had little effect on controlling the coronavirus pandemic,” The Telegraph reported last week.

“Statisticians at Munich University found ‘no direct connection’ between the German lockdown and falling infection rates in the country.”

The Lesson of Lockdowns

The devastating impact of lockdowns, combined with their failure to slow the spread of the virus, demonstrates why states are right to curb the powers of public health agencies.

If 2020 taught us anything, it’s the danger of unchecked executive power. Using emergency powers, governors and public health bureaucrats across the country took unilateral, sweeping, and indefinite measures that massively damaged livelihoods and infringed on the rights of millions of Americans. People were fined and arrested for simply gathering privately or exercising outside, walking a pet, paddling a boat on the water (alone), or taking a child to the park—even though most transmissions took place in homes and the coronavirus is rarely transmitted outdoors.

Americans may disagree on the precise role public health departments should play in society today. But the pandemic reminded us why checks and balances on concentrated power are so important.

The American constitutional system was deliberately designed to avoid concentrated power because the Framers feared it above all else.

“The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty,” wrote John Adams.

The authors of the Network for Public Health Law report express concern that public health agencies are being stripped of the power to act by dangerous radicals. The truth is that dangerously radical government agencies are being put in check.

Ohio, for example, passed a law in March that limits the length of a public health emergency order to 90 days unless it’s extended by the legislature. The same month, lawmakers in Utah passed legislation allowing the state legislature to override state health agency orders during public health emergencies. Missouri, meanwhile, has proposed a law that limits lockdowns to 15 days, after which extensions must be approved by legislative bodies.

These reforms are not radical. They are both reasonable and sensible. They do not represent an attack on science—which tells us what is, not what we ought to do—but are prudent checks on power from lawmakers acting within their rightful province.

“It is necessary to curb the power of government,” the economist Ludwig von Mises noted in Human Action.

“This is the task of all constitutions, bills of rights and laws. This is the meaning of all struggles which men have fought for liberty.”

The preservation of liberty, protected by separating and checking power, is the ideal on which the American system was founded. Following a year that saw Americans’ rights, dreams, and health trampled by central planners wielding vast power with little restraint and few checks, it’s a vision Americans are right to rekindle.

Just ask Mike Fratantuono and the millions of other Americans whose lives were derailed in 2020.