He is a very austrian oreinted economist, whos also interested in pre-Austrian french theory. Mises.org script interview Here
From 2001-2002 he was the chief economist in the Department of Labor. Said he got the job through an old contact
Reynolds also wrote a book that destroyed the case for labor unions. But.....He's one of these batcrazy 911 truthers. His Troofer Website here *shakes head. where did it all go wrong?
do we get free cheezeburger in socielism?
Why didn't the government design 911 so that it was Iraqi state agents who performed the attack? They were desperately looking for some reason to occupy Iraq, but only came up with unfounded suspicions of weapons of mass destruction. And even so, why didn't they plant some WMD in Iraq after the invasion, to claim that Saddam had constructed it? That'd be a rather simple and efficient conspiracy for the administration to pull through. Instead it was caught with their pants down and deeply humiliated and mistrusted in the eyes of the whole world, when no WMDs were found.
Instead, the truthers claim, the gov't designed 911 so that some Saudis (citizens in a country which is very strongly allied with the US and a crucial support for occupying Iraq) were blaimed. And particularly a Saudi leader who hides in Afghanistan. So the purpose of 911 was to get a reason to invade Afghanistan, not Iraq. And Afganistan is a place nobody wants to invade because:
1) It is the most unimportant country in the world! Just look at its location and its economic potential. Rumsfeld quickly "ran out of targets" because there existed no building and no item whatsoever in the whole country worth more than a bomb.
2) It is the last country in the world where one wants to fight a war. There are lots of tough warriors around in that vast mountainous country who never surrender. Negotiations are impossible and there will be no peace until either they have all died, or the invader retreates.
Hitler arranged a fake Polish attack into Germany in 1939, as a pretext for invading Poland. Note: POLAND! He didn't use the fake Polish attack as a pretext for invading fncking Luxembourg!!! This is where the whole 911 truther industry derails completely. Even if it was a conspiracy, it doesn't add up at all. 911 was simply an attack pulled through by one of the many hateful fanatic islamist suicide groups. The administration opportunistically used this attack in order to boost its powers over American citizens.
The 911 truthers have nothing going for them. Nothing at all! They actually give conspiracy theorists a bad name.
It's not fascism when the government does it.
“We must spend now as an investment for the future.” - President Obama
I'm not much of a 911 truther either. I understand too little of the physical context to judge whether or not the WTC could've been brought down by a plane. I don't know whether an airplane rookie could've pulled off all these flight maneuvers. All I know is that historically, false flag operations seem to be standard procedure for some elements within the US government and that 911 fits the pattern. Instead it was caught with their pants down and deeply humiliated and mistrusted in the eyes of the whole worldDestroying America's reputation in the world. Setting the pretext for talking points like "We can't have unilateral operations by sovereign nation states anymore. We need a global framework of supranational checks and balances to prevent this from happening." Even if you're not a nationalist, you might prefer a bureaucrat in your neighborhood to a bureaucrat on the other side of the world.It is the most unimportant country in the world! Just look at its location and its economic potential. Rumsfeld quickly "ran out of targets" because there existed no building and no item whatsoever in the whole country worth more than a bomb.All the better. Had Saudi Arabia been attacked, oil prices would've skyrocketed, creating domestic unrest and new, unforeseen conflict zones. This is actually the best option - a terrorist attack to commence total surveillance of the domestic population while fighting a non-existent enemy in an unimportant wasteland.There are lots of tough warriors around in that vast mountainous country who never surrender. Have you read 1984? A war that can never be won is a great opportunity to continually expand power by keeping an enemy figure in people's head that distracts them from what's really happening. The strongest, most powerful military and intelligence services in the world can't find an elderly man with serious ailments who allegedly controls legions of fighters among which not one single man is ready to talk? That's why we need to fight a never-ending "war on terror"?These are just suspicions, of course. Some of them do, however, sound disturbingly accurate to me.
These days credibility means being accepted by state employed pseudo-intellectuals. If you don't believe that the incentives are in place for this sort of thing to happen you must be blind.
It seems odd to me how many classic liberals are willing to adopt the "taxation is theft" and "the state are criminals with good PR" rhetoric and yet when it comes to putting this to practice many are clueless.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"
Bob Dylan
GilesStratton:It seems odd to me how many classic liberals are willing to adopt the "taxation is theft" and "the state are criminals with good PR" rhetoric and yet when it comes to putting this to practice many are clueless.
In my opinion, it's because there are more reformists than radicals. It's easy to mouth amongst sympathetic souls, what Rothbard or someone else had the courage to say first. It's takes real courage to carry that message with conviction, out into a public that doesn't want to hear that it is complicit in crime.
ProudCapitalist:The 911 truthers have nothing going for them. Nothing at all! They actually give conspiracy theorists a bad name.
You're missing the point. I'm not here to defend 9/11 Truth. I want to know why we're worried about credibility more than we are about being right. I want to know why people would trust the government over a known, knowledgeable Austrian.
ProudCapitalist:It is the last country in the world where one wants to fight a war.
You have a fundamental failure of understanding when it comes to geopolitics in that region.
Everyone wants to fight a war in Afghanistan. It is very valuable as a transportation vector for oil and gas.
The problem is, fighting a war in Afghanistan is hell. It's not a mistake or coincidence the British, then the Russians, and now the Americans are fighting over Afghanistan, and not Ethiopia. It's the big prize in the coming energy war with China and India.
Rothbard on "conspiracy theory" has been mentioned here. And my point is that the 911 truthers break his basic premise for how a conspiracy could be derived: the connection between the event the conspirators fakes, and the action of the conspirators.
The most notable effect of 911 was that the US invaded Iraq. Therefor, the conspiracy theory method of Rothbard requires that the 911 event somehow justifies such an action. It doesn't, since 911gives exactly no connection to Iraq whatsoever. Not even in the words of alledged conspirators themselves. The US government used a story about WMD, which is totally disconnected from the 911 event. The 911 event is most notable for it having been pulled through, again even according to the official story, in the absence of WMD, and indeed, even without the use of any weapons at all, beyond knifes.
A staged attack should've given some reason for the US to invade Iraq. It didn't. Therefor, any and all 911 truthers violate Rothbard's basic concept of what a conspiracy is. 911 gave no justification whatsoever for attacking iraq. It does NOT fit the historic pattern!
(Those strange anthrax findings following 911, however, do have some potential for being a gov't conspiracy in order to give reasons to "fight WMD" in general).
Sphairon:I'm not much of a 911 truther either. I understand too little of the physical context to judge whether or not the WTC could've been brought down by a plane.
Why would that issue matter? Why would conspirators have taken the huge risk of using cruise missiles, instead of ariplanes, or placing explosives in the buildings? Such actions would've increased the risk of the conspiracy to be discovered very greatly, while adding no effect at all. It would've been bad enough if the planes had hit the buildings and left them upright on fire. How they collapsed is a non-issue.
Destroying America's reputation in the world. Setting the pretext for talking points like "We can't have unilateral operations by sovereign nation states anymore. We need a global framework of supranational checks and balances to prevent this from happening."
Then they might as well have done without 911, and simply invaded Canada some random Monday morning.
Have you read 1984? A war that can never be won is a great opportunity to continually expand power by keeping an enemy figure in people's head that distracts them from what's really happening. The strongest, most powerful military and intelligence services in the world can't find an elderly man with serious ailments who allegedly controls legions of fighters among which not one single man is ready to talk? That's why we need to fight a never-ending "war on terror"?
ProudCapitalist:But that does not imply that the US gov't designed the 911 events.
You're right. But the government did devise Northwoods, which is very similar to 9/11. So would you agree that the government has
1. Considered false flag terror
2. Planned false flag terror with airplanes
3. Used false flags in WWI and Vietnam
?
Instead of trying to argue motive (which we can never know for sure without being able to read minds), why not just argue actions?
Sure, innovative special operations officers come up with plans for almost everything. But Northwood it conceptually very different from the alledged 911 conspiracy, because it designed a clear connection between the terror attacks and the country which the US wanted to invade (Cuba). That is the classic fake pretext for war which not only Hitler used when invading Poland, but even a Swedish king used in 1788 when invading Russia. Russia then at war with Turkey was weakened, and with a swift surprice operation from the then Swedish province of Finland, the Russian then capital St. Petersburg might be captured. But the king did not have consitutional authority to start an aggressive war, so he needed the formality of a (fake) Russian attack on a Swedish border post to lead a "defensive war". Hitler did the same thing (with Poland) but only for propaganda purposes.
Since 911 has no connection to Iraq, this often repeated historic pattern is broken.
If 911 was a conspiracy, then the offical story would've been: "Saddam Did It!!!"
ProudCapitalist:If 911 was a conspiracy, then the offical story would've been: "Saddam Did It!!!"
But that was the story. After Afghanistan was secured.
Anyway, I think you're in denial about the capacity of your government to commit evil and atrocity. I just listened to the Robert Higgs 3 hour book TV episode last night, and with each day, I become increasingly more radical in my views. I have lost the capacity to have any faith in government whatsoever. On the contrary, I fear and expect the absolute worst. And the American (or my Canadian) government is no less capable of horror than any other regime. We are living in an age of media spun lawlessness.
ProudCapitalist:The most notable effect of 911 was that the US invaded Iraq.
The US government used a story about WMD, which is totally disconnected from the 911 event.
February 17 - 1600 - Giordano Bruno is burnt alive by the catholic church. Aquinas : "much more reason is there for heretics, as soon as they are convicted of heresy, to be not only excommunicated but even put to death."
Since the Bush clan seems to have an obsession about invading Iraq, why did they design 911 to be void of connections with Iraq?
Why didn't the 911 design combine Iraq AND trrrsm?
Why did the 911 design focus exclusively on Afghanistan and some prominent Saudis? That only compromised the plan of the Bush clan to invade Iraq, since that plan needed support from the Saudis.
If the purpose was to constrain the liberty of American citizens, then 911 should've been a mega version of the Oklahoma bombings: "The enemy is among us/you!", not: "The enemy is hiding in a cave in a country far away which almost noone has ever heard of".
The Saudi/Afghan connection of the 911, especially the total lack of WMD, and the two great actions of the Bush administration in its aftermath, namely the invasion of Iraq and the War on Trrrsm, doesn't make much sense. To me, it looks very much more like opportunism of the administration to opportunistically try to accelerate their long term plans by making the most out of the 911 attack. As, in a smaller scale, they used the Katarina natural disaster in a similiar way. Even trends like "our population is getting older" is used by governments as a reason to increase taxes and whatever. The government is fishing whatever opportunity comes their way. They have no plan. They are inherently incapable of planning.
Or maybe 911 was a red herring with the purpose of covering up 912! Never heard of 912? Well, that proves how efficient the conspiracy was...
Juan:Okay. You didn't address what I said and just repeat the same fallacy...have fun.
Do you mean this:
Ask yourself this : How did the most sophisticated and paranoid military in the world let hijacked planes roam free after knowing what was happening ? Maybe they didn't have money to buy fuel for jet fighters...?
Well, because many many many airplanes have been hijacked throughout history. Since the 1970s this occurance has decreased alot, though. And never ever has any hijacked airplane been deliberately crashed. If the USAF had shot down hijacked airplanes with the jackass story of an excuse that "otherwise they'd chrashed them into WTC", then all 911 truthers of today would've ravingly drowned themselves in drools over how totally impossible that kind of scenario would've been.
The standard operational procedure since the peak of airplane hijacking during the 1970s, has been to let the hijackers land the plane wherever they desire, and then negotiate or liberate as much of the hostage as possible. Do you ask me why the gov't didn't abandon that policy, which has been well proven during half a century, on 911? "Someone radio'd in that flight xyz has been hijacked, what to do? Just send up a fighter jet and kill kill kill'em all..."
PC, you're committing a logical fallacy by shifting the burden of proof to a negative.
Also, Bush did get to invade Iraq. He actually got a lot of the world to go along with Afghanistan and Iraq. From the view of a neocon, Bush was very successful. I don't understand your argument at all, except that you keep erecting strawmen to make your case.
How can you pretend to NOT understand that a conspiracy demonstrating that bushmen from inner Nowhere were responsible for the collapse of the WTC, is totally non-productive for the purpose of Bush to kill Saddam Hussein? Bush was in desperate need for any reason to attack Iraq. 911 provided zero for that purpose. Bush was desperate to provide at least some construed half-evidence that WMD possibly could be dangerous to the American people. 911 decisively proved the opposite, since it proved that the worst terror attack ever could be performed even without any weapons at all.
Never ever in history has Germany invaded France because they've arranged a fake attack of Poland into Germany.
Never ever in history has Sweden invaded Denmark because they've arranged a fake attack of Russia into Sweden.
But the 911 truthers now claim to have discovered a unique first ever: USA invaded Iraq because some Saudi/Afghans attacked USA... Well then, why Iraq? Why not Luxembourg? What are the connections between the 911 story, and the actions of the US administrations since then? There exists no such connection! According to Rothbards definition of what could be a conspiracy, the 911 cannot be a conspiracy, no more than hurricane Katarina was a conspiracy.
But hey, why even bother! Spend another $1000 on books written in mad fever by lunies who claim that the secret key to all truth lies in a careful analysis of every brick stone in building B9. By all means...