“Alarmed by Russia.”  Yeah, right.  From Military Times.

Excerpt from Human Action, posted at Mises.org:

“The truth is that the alternative is not between a dead mechanism or a rigid automatism on one hand and conscious planning on the other hand. The alternative is not plan or no plan. The question is whose planning? Should each member of society plan for himself, or should a benevolent government alone plan for them all? The issue is not automatism versus conscious action; it is autonomous action of each individual versus the exclusive action of the government. It is freedom versus government omnipotence.

Laissez faire does not mean: Let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: Let each individual choose how he wants to cooperate in the social division of labor; let the consumers determine what the entrepreneurs should produce. Planning means: Let the government alone choose and enforce its rulings by the apparatus of coercion and compulsion.

Under laissez faire, says the planner, it is not those goods which people “really” need that are produced, but those goods from the sale of which the highest returns are expected. It is the objective of planning to direct production toward the satisfaction of the “true” needs. But who is to decide what the “true” needs are?”

Or, put another way, who do those clamoring for greater control over the lives of everyone else despise voluntary interaction?  Why do they desire the ability to drive a wedge in between the voluntary associations of free individuals?

Privacy is a enemy of the State.

From The Intercept.  Arms sales, billions of taxpayer dollars, and God-knows-what-else.

The Baltimore Sun reports that the cop caught on video slapping around a 16-year old student had been fired from a department in 2003 for a wrongful Taser attack.  Who handles the hiring of these public school “resource” officers?

From Reason.  Relevant chunks: “The Export-Import Bank is an outfit that mostly extends loans to powerful foreign companies in exchange for buying products from large and well-connected U.S. companies. As Sanders asked Clinton, “Do you know what the other name of the Export-Import Bank is, what it’s called in Washington? It’s called the Bank of Boeing because Boeing itself gets 40 percent of the money discharged by the Export-Import Bank.” Sanders is right.

Moreover, close to 70 percent of the bank’s loan guarantees benefit Boeing alone. In spite of what most Democrats in Congress try to argue, the Ex-Im Bank is indeed in the “big business” business, with about 65 percent of its activities benefiting 10 domestic firms. The same is true for the bank’s beneficiaries abroad. The Ex-Im Bank’s own data show that such wealthy companies as Mexican state-owned oil giant Pemex and the airline Emirates are the top beneficiaries of the U.S. taxpayers’ largesse.”

Hillary, of course, supports the Ex-Im Bank, as this Washington Times editorial explains.

Militarized cops plan on using drones to spy on Spring Break parties.

From the Washington Post.  Launched from a fighter jet, these “micro-drones” can swarm an enemy and do God-knows-what to them.  The current rationalization for the program is that it’s to counter Russia and China, of course.

From the NY Times.  The plan appears to be: bomb them, circle around, bomb them again, let US-funded “rebels” do some fighting, then more bombs.  Must sound pretty foolproof to the masterminds who orchestrated the original Libyan campaign.

Bloomberg.  It is laughable to think that Russia, a country bleeding citizens and fast spiraling to Third World status, is any kind of a threat to Europe, the US, or the world.  Putin’s “incursion” into Crimea was nothing of the sort, Crimeans are Russian, and want to be a part of Russia, in the same way that the borderlands of Georgia wished to secede from the Western-installed stooge government in 2008.  How much NATO build-up can ride on those talking points of an “assertive” Russia?  American taxpayer-funded NATO surrounds Russia, and weapons paid for by those same taxpayers are now being sent to the “front lines”, goading Putin into making one tiny wrong move.  Trip-wires have been set up via recklessly expansive NATO membership, and if Russia gets into a skirmish with one, we all have to chip in.  Auto-interventionism.