War Guilt in the Middle East
2024-02-26
[A selection from Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, Spring-Autumn 1967.]
The chronic Middle East crisis goes back – as do many crises – to World War I. The British, in return for mobilizing the Arab peoples against their oppressors of imperial Turkey, promised the Arabs their independence when the war was over. But, at the same time, the British government, with characteristic double-dealing, was promising Arab Palestine as a “National Home” for organized Zionism. These promises were not on the same moral plane: for in the former case, the Arabs were being promised their own land freed from Turkish domination; and in the latter, world Zionism was being promised a land most emphatically not its own. When World War I was over, the British unhesitatingly chose to keep the
US States Have a Long History of Defaulting
2024-02-23
The American bankruptcy show of the twenty-first century continues unabated with federal and state government spending. History reveals that some states have defaulted through not meeting a required bond payment, leaving the bondholders and that state’s taxpayers with a debt problem. Today, we might call a state government bond payment default a bankruptcy.
Many bankruptcy filings today are governed by Chapters 7, 9, 11, and 13 of the United States bankruptcy code, which are supervised, reviewed, and completed by federal bankruptcy courts. Federal bankruptcy law does not allow a state to declare bankruptcy, however. Federal law also prohibits individual states from printing their own money as a way out of debt. Government (state and federal) money issued and backed fully or partially by