Vincent Cook



Articles by Vincent Cook

“Personnel Is Policy” Means the Rule of Law Is Dying

President-elect Donald Trump’s announced cabinet and White House staff appointments for his next administration have attracted praise from supporters, outrage from opponents, and even criticism from libertarian podcasters like Ron Paul and Radio Rothbard hosts Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop regarding Trump’s hawkish national security picks. Everyone agrees that “personnel is policy” though, meaning that the outspoken policy preferences of many of Trump’s appointees marks a sharp departure from the status quo in Washington DC.Much like the former Cold War sport of “Kremlinology”—where pundits and academics claimed to discern shifts in Soviet policy by observing which personalities were standing closest to the Great Leader during Red Square military parades or by reading between the lines of

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Elon Musk’s Blunder: There Is No “Efficient” Government

After astounding achievements like performing seemingly-crazy and impossible feats of rocket engineering, making satellite internet service practical, rescuing social media from covert government censorship, and even managing to build battery-powered vehicles that are rather more useful and cool than golf carts, Musk slipped up and committed a colossal blunder recently. He took on an insurmountable challenge that even his extraordinary genius and indomitable will won’t be able to handle.This prediction is not based on any fake news involving hitherto-unknown intelligent lifeforms on Mars mounting an armed resistance to Musk’s ambition to colonize the red planet (figure 1). Rather, this prediction involves apodictic truths of economic theory that render the goal of Musk’s latest project a

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There Is No “Efficient” Government

After astounding achievements like performing seemingly-crazy and impossible feats of rocket engineering, making satellite internet service practical, rescuing social media from covert government censorship, and even managing to build battery-powered vehicles that are rather more useful and cool than golf carts, Musk slipped up and committed a colossal blunder recently. He took on an insurmountable challenge that even his extraordinary genius and indomitable will won’t be able to handle.This prediction is not based on any fake news involving hitherto-unknown intelligent lifeforms on Mars mounting an armed resistance to Musk’s ambition to colonize the red planet (figure 1). Rather, this prediction involves apodictic truths of economic theory that render the goal of Musk’s latest project a

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Is America Turning Fascist?

On October 25, ABC News published the results of a survey of 2,392 registered voters where 44 percent of the respondents said that Donald Trump is a fascist, while 23 percent said that Kamala Harris is a fascist.

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Kamala Harris and Her Socialism with 1930s-German Characteristics

Presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, responding to accusations that she is a Marxist and has been concealing much of her economic agenda from the public, gave a speech at the Economic Club of Pittsburgh on September 25 attempting to reassure voters that her earlier proposals for price controls, debt cancellations, and consumer subsidies, as well as her new proposals are not a Bolshevik assault on capitalism, but are intended to create an “opportunity economy” for the benefit of the American middle class. She affirmed “Look, I’m a capitalist, I believe in a free and fair market” and went on to specify three “pillars” of how she intends to confer the blessings of “opportunity” on market actors. Harris spelled out a basic principle underlying her proposals as:I believe an active partnership

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The Trump Campaign Tries to Buy Votes by Subsidizing IVF

With Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris proposing costly new interventionist schemes and co-opting Republican talking points in order to neutralize the unpopularity of rising prices among swing voters, her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, has responded by stealing a page from the Democrat state-building playbook. He has raised the bidding for votes with a preposterous new interventionist proposal of his own—a plan to boost fertility rates by turning in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments into a free service, to be paid for by a combination of government subsidies and mandates on health insurers.Traditionally, advocacy of IVF subsidies has been a staple of the same groups on the “progressive” side of the culture wars that have championed government-subsidized abortions on

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Praxeology and Robert Malone’s “Surveillance Capitalism”

Dr. Robert Malone’s recent Mises University talk, PsyWar: Enforcing the New World Order, raises important and timely questions about advanced mass psychological manipulation capabilities being weaponized by globalized corporatists through what he calls the “surveillance capitalism,” practiced by firms like Amazon, Google and Facebook.

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Democrats to Escalate Their War on the American Economy

Democrats didn’t even bother to wait for their 2024 National Convention in Chicago to appoint their replacement presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, and to tout the new economic planks to be added to the party’s platform. In her August 16th speech on the economy, she pledged her loyalty to the party’s current interventionist agenda, professing that the Biden regime’s policies have supposedly been good for the middle class and that she will continue to support Democrat principles of state-guaranteed economic security for them ( “…your salary should be enough to provide you and your family with a good quality of life”; “No child should have to grow up in poverty”; and “After years of hard work, you should be able to retire with dignity.”). However, Harris acknowledged that the cost of

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Republicans declare war on the American economy

The 2024 Republican National Convention will be remembered for the raw emotions evoked by an attempted assassination the preceding weekend of its presidential nominee Donald Trump and for the now mostly Trumpified Republicans posing as the populist champions of American workers against the elitist Democrats.This convention, however, should be remembered for another reason too. It marks the entrenchment of an organized “national conservative” movement within the party that espouses an anti-free-market ideology, overtly scorning individual liberty in favor of a powerful nation-state. This shift in Republican thinking is most clearly evident in Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as the party’s nominee for vice president (who recently explained his “NatCon” principles in a Foundation for American

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