I can only assume that almost no one in the Florida legal system working on his case, from the judges to his lawyers, are the same today as they were in 1980. Many of them are probably retired or dead. I wonder if Waterhouse even remembered why he was on Death Row by the time he was executed. How do you put this into context for new guards in the prison, many of whom weren’t even born when Waterhouse was convicted?

While the crime was certainly horrendous, how can we measure the costs and the benefits of the death penalty? I wonder if the damage to society was worth the estimated $24 million it takes to execute criminals in Florida? The average length of time executed prisoners in Florida spent on Death Row since 1976 is a little more than 13 years. American justice is clearly not addressing the problems of crime, and the death penalty is one of the worst examples of this. It’s highly inefficient from an economic standpoint.

With regard to the death penalty in particular, it makes no sense. Let’s grant the position that the state should have the right to decide who lives or dies. I’m not interested in discussing that, so take it for granted. Let’s also pretend that the state never makes a mistake when it executes someone. What sort of restitution is granted by keeping someone on death row for 32 years for raping and killing someone? The victims, or in this case the family of the victims, is forced to pay (through taxation) for the incarceration of their aggressor. How is that fair? How are the victims made whole? Where is the justice?

All we know is that a man was executed for a crime no one remembers through a process which took an innumerable amount of human and financial resources to carry out.

The battle lines are forming in Washington DC.  Barring any tricks which the embattled (racist, redneck, kooky, backward, radical, unelectable) libertarian wing of the Republican Party may still have up its sleeve, it seems to be another contest between Marxist-Leninist Socialists who will take everything we have in the name of social welfare, and National Socialists who will take everything we have in the name of national security.  Much like in Alien vs. Predator, whoever wins, we lose.

I think we’ve crossed the Rubicon toward tyranny and fiscal ruin long ago, and the important thing now is to brace for calamity.  A fiscally conservative friend of mine is appalled by my cynicism.  He invokes America’s greatness and my veteran status in an attempt to bring me back to the noble cause of shutting up and blindly supporting the Republican Party.  He recently encouraged me to watch Allen West’s speech at CPAC 2012.  He wants, presumably, for me to give people like Allen West my time, money, attention and respect, because nothing is more important that defeating Obama (. . . says the Predator about the Alien).

In the speech, Allen West goes on at length about the virtues of the Constitution.  He said, “[The founders] laid out in no uncertain terms the types of things government would have the right to do, and the types of things it wouldn’t.”  I’d love to hear him reconcile this with his discussion of “a Chamberlin-Churchill moment,” and “kinetic solutions” to Iran’s nuclear research, and “the precipice of World War Three.”  Does he know the Constitution requires presidents to seek congressional declarations of war?  Or does he, like most politicians, only believes in the Constitution when it foils his political opponents.

He said, “The founders knew that if government were allowed to restrict the freedom of the people . . . freedom would not long survive,” yet he voted in favor of renewing Patriot Act provisions.

He decries reckless spending: “We’ve allowed the federal bureaucracy to balloon out of control,” yet he voted in raise the debt ceiling.  When questioned by Young America’s Foundation’s Ron Meyer, he asked for the thing all politicians have always requested: unity and support.  Presumably, Allen West’s rapid betrayal of the principles he invoked in his campaign would be remedied if only I gave him more money, time, attention and respect.

Allen West asked the CPAC audience, “Will we re-dedicate ourselves to the values upon which the United States was founded?”  Yet he voted in favor of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes military arrest and detention “without trial until the end of the hostilities” of American citizens.#

His attempt to explain how indefinite detention of American citizens was not indefinite detention of American citizens tried to substitute volume and bold gesticulation for content.  It didn’t address the bill’s most damning part.  As detailed by Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, NDAA explicitly “‘affirms that the authority of the President’ under the AUMF  ’includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons.’”  Also, “It expressly empowers the President — with regard to anyone accused of the acts in section (b) – to detain them ‘without trial until the end of the hostilities.’”

Pointing out the hypocrisy of a politician is like shooting a very big fish in a very small barrel (with a 12-guage shotgun).  Allen West gets my attention only because of how aggressively he is marketed to people who believe in individual liberty, the Constitution, and fiscal prudence.

War in incompatible with all of these things, and Allen West is just another neo-con in a tea bag, the latest rebranding of the philosophy of endless war.

Herman Cain tries to play the victim when comes to his past as a Federal Reserve official. He says questioning his past with the Fed is stupid, despite the fact that the Fed has been secretly loaning money. The Fed gave bailouts to Libya. If an audit wouldn’t produce any useful information as Cain asserts, then why is it that the books are closed? The Federal Banking Agency Auditing Act of 1978 prohibited Government Accounting Office audits of:

1. transactions for or with a foreign central bank, government of a foreign country, or nonprivate international financing organization;
2. deliberations, decisions, or actions on monetary policy matters, including discount window operations, reserves of member banks, securities credit, interest on deposits, and open market operations;
3. transactions made under the direction of the Federal Open Market Committee; or
4. a part of a discussion or communication among or between members of the Board and officers and employees of the Federal Reserve System related to clauses (1)–(3) of this subsection.

As the old saying goes, if the Fed has done nothing wrong, why are they trying to hide what they’ve done? And why is Herman Cain, a former Fed official, so incredulous when it comes to auditing the Fed? We know through partial audits, fought tooth and nail by the Fed, that they gave bailouts to Libya, to failed banks, and they’ve done so in secret. Robert Auerbach’s book Deception and Abuse at the Fed shows how the Fed was giving loans to Iraq during the 1980s, that monetary policy meeting minutes are deliberately made unreadable by the general public, and that Fed officials have been caught in the past abusing their privileges as “oracles” for personal gain.

What really got me interested in Herman Cain was how wrong he has been about the economy despite being portrayed as a successful businessman. He poo pooed the housing bubble in 2005. In 2008 he wrote that the economy was fine less than two weeks before Lehman Brothers failed, which was used as an excuse by the politicians in Washington to give bailouts to failed bankers with our money. Herman Cain supported the bailouts, of course.

This morning I had a chance to ask Herman Cain about his economic prescience, or lack thereof:

It’s common knowledge that Herman Cain was successful as the CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, but what people don’t often look at is another business where he wasn’t so successful. He was the chair of the compensation committee for Aquila, Inc., an energy company which failed Enron-style in the early 2000′s. He may have been a good pizza man, but he ended up screwing plenty of people out of their savings in this failed company.

He’s also displayed his ignorance in foreign policy, calling a country which formerly hosted US military bases important for the war in Central Asia “Uzbeki–beki-beki-beki-stan-stan.” He’s not saying who he’s looking at for foreign policy advice despite his wishy-washy positions in that area. The man who appears to be his campaign adviser for foreign policy is alleged to be part of a group of corrupt lobbyists.

In short, Herman Cain is another plastic man establishment candidate. Nothing different than the rest of them. His positions display at best ignorance and at worst they are signals that he supports the same corruption that is endemic in the system today.

Let’s contrast this story with the ongoing coverup of the sale of “assault rifles” and other military-grade small arms to Mexican drug cartels. This program, known as “Fast and Furious” (possibly named after the films which feature outlaws driving fast cars), led to the death of an American ATF agent and the deaths of many Mexican nationals. The ATF has been clandestinely working to arm Mexican drug cartels, which has had the effect of destabilizing the country to our south. The people involved have been promoted out of their positions because of their criminal ineptitude, and the Obama Administration and Department of Justice have denied wrongdoing. The guns going over the border causing so much carnage have given the Obama Administration cause to make selling guns to those legally able to own guns harder.

When Obama was elected, he made a promise to stop raiding medical marijuana dispensaries. This hasn’t happened. Instead, federal enforcement of drug laws against people seeking a safe alternative to prescription drugs has increased. Keep in mind, prescription drugs are responsible for pushing the death toll from drugs in America higher than traffic fatalities, yet it is marijuana which is illegal (challenge to the reader: find a single death attributed to marijuana overdose).

The drug war has been an abysmal failure for America. We all learn in our public schools that Alcohol Prohibition in the 1920s was very bad because it gave rise to gangsters, but the correlation is not made with respect to the ongoing drug war, which siphons away tens of billions of dollars per year from the productive economy and has put hundreds of thousands of people in prison for trafficking in weeds. The violence found in the drug war is a problem caused by prohibition, and the government continues to shift blame from itself to users in order to justify further interventions in the economy.

Rachel falls into the lie that “Islamofascists” are trying to attack us for no reason, and that war overseas is justified to keep them away from the US, and keep Russia and China from occupying the Middle East. I don’t understand this last notion about Russia or China, but he’s completely wrong on the rest of the counts. As I’ve already demolished his main man Rick Santorum and the rest of the clowns on the issue of foreign intervention leading to blowback, I don’t think I’ll go too far into it. All one really has to do is just pay attention to what they say. It’s the occupation, stupid. Ron Paul isn’t trying to justify attacks against the US, he’s merely pointing out why others do them. If we were to follow the warmongers logic, then we’d necessarily have to conclude that the US government hates the Afghan people for their religion and that’s why they invaded their country after 9/11, not the fact that it was rumored the terrorists attacked the US on 9/11 from there. There’s a difference between understanding motivations and justifying actions, and the warmongers just do not understand this.

Rachel also misrepresents neoconservatism. This is probably purposeful because the neoconservative philosophy advocates Machiavellian pragmatism (read: doing anything and having no principles) to achieve a Platonic ideal (read: total state with a lack of individualism). In other words, neoconservatives are snakes in the grass scheming for power over all. Their Straussian philosophy combined with their Trotskyist past leads them toward being “big government conservatives,” but there is nothing conservative about their policies. For more on the topic of neoconservatives, I have an interview airing with Bradley Thompson on his book Neoconservatism: An Obituary of an Idea at Radio Free Market soon, but for now have a look at David Gordon’s review of the fantastic book. Neoconservatives aren’t necessarily socially liberal as Rachel claims, nor are they necessarily fiscally conservative; in fact, it’s usually libertarians who are described as being “socially liberal and fiscally conservative” (although this isn’t necessarily true).

When Rachel starts discussing libertarian philosophy, he really doesn’t even do the idea of libertarianism justice. A really easy way to demonstrate this is the ongoing hostility between libertarians of various think tanks continuing to have fights.  What I’m getting at is that there are many ways to discuss libertarians, and to simply put them into one big group and to say what they all believe is yet another means of strawmanning.

But let’s look at some of the policies that Rachel discusses with regard to libertarians. For one, legalizing the vices which society has banned will probably have a net benefit to the nation. Decriminalization worked for Portugal (hint: decriminalization decreases, not increases government intervention).

Prohibition has a very real economic effect. Prices are increased as a result of prohibition, which gives incentive for people to sell these banned goods, whether it is crack, smack, or sex. These markets become violent because the people who are selling the goods are not concerned with upholding the rule of law. Legalizing drugs would have the effect of stopping more than 1.5 million people from getting arrested per year (a disproportionate amount of whom are minorities, which is ripping apart those communities). Nothing says police state like having the highest absolute prison population and percentage of the population imprisoned on the planet.

Oh, and the irony is that the drug war has made us less free without having the promised benefits. The PATRIOT Act, meant to keep us safe from the “Islamofascists,” is being used overwhelmingly for the drug war not terrorism. Bank secrecy laws are enacted to stop people from “trafficking drugs” by allowing the government to snoop in on all your bank accounts. Drugs are more prevalent and powerful today than ever. Under-deliver and over-promise: that’s what conservatives like Rachel enjoy.

I don’t know about this whole “Judeo-Christian Constitution” thing the guy is talking about, either. The US common law has its roots through 800 years of tradition from England. This tradition, along with the works of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, were the basis of the Constitution. Plus, the words “god” and “Jesus” do not appear in the Declaration of Independence or Constitution. In fact, the US signed a treaty with the “Islamofascists” in 1797 that said the US was not founded on the Christian religion.

Not to mention Rachel goes ahead and blatantly misrepresents libertarians on other social issues. Dr. Paul is a Christian who does not believe in abortion, yet somehow all libertarians are in favor of abortion. Many libertarians I know are religious and/or abstain from substances; Dr. Paul said during a previous debate that most of us don’t need the government to tell us not to do heroin, so why does it need to be illegal? These sorts of nuanced points cannot be understood by regular conservatives, so they resort to nonsensical attacks like the video above.

Alonzo Rachel’s statements would be easier understood if sung:

You quoted a professor of journalism, Mitchell Zuckoff, and the Social Security Administration for your information. If you look through the SSA website, you’ll also find they admit that money coming in goes right back out, regardless if it is for Social Security transfer payments or for the war.

Let’s not forget that three Nobel winning economists (Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, and Paul Krugman) all agreed that Social Security was a Ponzi scheme.

The fact is that Social Security does require increasing numbers of people and/or money so that it can meet its obligations with changing demographics.  That is a classic example of a Ponzi scheme.

The quotations you give from Professor Zuckoff only tell half the story. People are told that they are paying into their retirement, when Social Security plainly and openly operates as a transfer payment scheme from the working to the retired. Social Security can only be “tweaked” to avoid failure by increasing taxes on the working population, meaning the payment system does require more resources to be sustainable (a la Ponzi scheme).

Finally, the third quote, that Social Security is morally different therefore it cannot be a Ponzi scheme, is equivocation. If a starving person steals bread from someone who has more than his fill, while some may justify this as being a “legitimate” wealth transfer, this doesn’t change the fact that it is stealing.

If something walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, what would you call it?

PS: I’m no Rick Perry fan. In fact, I recently had a heated exchange with him on his record as governor, using numbers from your website.

The horrible terrorist acts on 9/11 were not because of religion as many continue to claim, but the fact that violent occupations lead to violent responses. In 1998 and 2002, Osama bin Laden declared that the US policy of supporting corrupt regimes in the Middle East and killing scores of civilians in Iraq through sanctions was the reason he would attack America.

Americans would not tolerate foreigners creating pain and suffering on our people, so why should we expect others to tolerate American foreign policy which has caused so many problems abroad? Robert Pape, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, showed that 95% of all suicide bombings are not motivated by religion or ethnicity but to repel a foreign occupation.

American foreign intervention has historically led to numerous negative unintended consequences around the world. In 1953, the CIA overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran and installed a pro-US dictator for the benefit of Western oil countries. By 1979, the people of Iran had enough and overthrew the Shah but another government was installed which repressed the people even more. Christopher Coyne, professor of Economics at George Mason University, found an overwhelming majority of countries where the US intervened in the past century haven’t even become as “free” as Iran is now.

Iran isn’t the only failure of note. The prime minister of “free” Iraq routinely arrests political opponents. Afghanistan is more unsafe than ever, where drug lords (supported by the US government) run the country, the government itself is incompetent and lacking legitimacy among the people, and the US-backed government has been a major point of contention between longtime nuclear weapon armed rivals India and Pakistan. The drone bombing campaign in Pakistan indiscriminately kills civilians. The US government worked closely with the Gadaffi regime to rendition terror suspects in Libya among other types of aid, before working with the rebels (many of whom fought and killed Americans in Iraq).

These interventions have been far too costly in blood and treasure. 3,000 Americans died on 9/11, and another 5,500 have died “fighting for freedom” overseas. Thousands of Americans suffer from mental trauma or have become amputees because of these wars without end. More than 100,000 Iraqis and tens of thousands of Afghans have died. There is no way to know how much these wars will cost in the long run, but economist Joseph Stiglitz thinks it will be far beyond $3 trillion.

Ultimately, we have become less free because of the War on Terror. The PATRIOT Act has allowed the US government to spy on citizens. Americans sacrifice privacy at the airport, despite the TSA is mostly incapable of securing airports or detecting threats. The FBI created a massive network of agents provocateur to justify draconian anti-terrorist laws. Veterans are murdered during no-knock SWAT raids absent any evidence of wrongdoing. Food cooperatives are being raided by government agents for the Very Serious Crime of selling raw milk.

The motivations for the War on Terror are nebulous at best. Many say this War on Terror is a war for oil and other natural resources. Others claim the War on Terror is simply to perpetuate the defense industry. Some contend it “spreads democracy” and keeps America safe. Whatever the purpose, the War on Terror has clearly been negative for millions here and abroad, and now is simply time to end it. The freedom Americans believe is being defended by troops overseas is being destroyed at home by their own government.

Update: this post was re-published in the University of Iowa student newspaper, The Daily Iowan.

Journalist Andrew Reinbach’s piece titled “Giving Ron Paul the Media Attention He Deserves” is a fact-free article which spouts many points constantly used to attack the idea of sound money. He makes four arguments: Ron Paul is supported by the John Birch Society therefore he is a bad person, the Constitution does not allow for competing currencies, there isn’t enough gold to revert to a gold standard, and Ron Paul has a conflict of interest with respect to gold.

On the first point, that the John Birch Society has endorsed Ron Paul, so what? Did Reinbach make similar complaints about Jeremiah Wright’s endorsement of Barack Obama? Heaven forbid that an organization that Ron Paul has spoken in front of numerous times would endorse him.

Secondly, his assertion that competing currencies is unconstitutional is a dog that doesn’t hunt. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution enumerates the powers that the Congress has. This list, while meant to be exhaustive, doesn’t prohibit others from doing many of these things. Section 10 is the provision which prohibits States from doing certain things, but no where in the Constitution is private coinage prohibited.

The best example of this notion of enumerated powers is the Post Office. The Congress has given monopoly power over first-class mail to the United States Postal Service, an organization whose financial troubles are so dire that they would actually consider slowing down mail service to save money. This inefficient organization, while given a monopoly by Congress based on power in Article I, Section 8, is not implied to have monopoly power in the Constitution. As abolitionist and entrepreneur Lysander Spooner noted in 1844, this power does not prevent other people from establishing postal service. And so Spooner created a private mail company, The American Letter Mail Company, to directly compete against the monopolistic United States Postal Service, which at the time was charging anywhere from 14.5¢ to 25¢ for a one page letter (in comparison, first-class mail stamps today cost 44¢) and was seen by many as corrupt. Spooner’s company was created to challenge both the high prices and constitutionality of the mail service. He announced a new postal service which would mail letters for 6¢, and this quickly drew the ire of the Congress and Postal Service. Court battles ensued, in which Spooner was victorious, but Spooner’s ultimate victory was actually in the end of his company: he forced the Congress to reduce postal rates which put him out of business.

Today, we think nothing of shipping packages and letters through alternative carriers such as FedEx and UPS or sending email. Both of these methods are efficient and cost-effective for users, yet they do run afoul of Reinbach’s assertion that a power enumerated by the Constitution gives the federal government the exclusive monopoly over it.

Returning to the topic of money, it wasn’t until 1862 that there was a single US dollar. Through nearly the first century of the United States, banks issued competing banknotes backed by specie (physical gold and silver) and state government bonds. In 1862, as the Union was having a hard time getting American banks to become nationally chartered under the National Banking Act, it created the Legal Tender Act which created a tax on non-nationally issued banknotes. This tax made it easier for the Union to float debt in order to pay for the expensive and bloody Civil War. This new monetary system adopted by the US government led to massive price increases throughout the North (although the South suffered much worse inflation due to their currency schemes).

One final point to mention with respect to competing currencies is that the government is so scared of private competing currencies that those who dare challenge the government’s monopoly on issuing currency are deemed “terrorists.” I wonder if Spooner would have been arrested for terrorism if he were alive today? The notion that the government needs to have exclusive power over coining money goes back to the age of the Romans, when emperors routinely debased currencies in order to pay for the expansion of the empire. Today, debasement of the currency is euphemistically called quantitative easing and cheered by the court economists and hagiographs in the media, despite the fact that it is still possibly punishable by death to debase currency.

It’s clear in plain language and with historic precedent that competing currencies are constitutional. Reinbach’s second point regarding the unconstitutionality of competing currencies is thus demonstrably false.

But what to make of Reinbach’s attack on the return to the gold standard? This is where the facts hit the road and nonsense takes their place.

We can assume that when he says we should return to the gold standard–abandoned in 1971 by Richard Nixon–he means every US Dollar would be redeemable for $1 in gold; otherwise, only part of every dollar would be backed by gold, and the whole idea of a gold standard becomes mere symbolism.

As I noted in an earlier post, the gold standard has never meant dollar parity with gold. A gold standard is a system where the monetary unit is a fixed weight of gold. In other words, it’s simply a definition. A gold standard means the monetary unit becomes a unit of measure of that commodity, in the same way that an ounce is a unit of measure in terms of pounds. Declaring that only part of every dollar being backed by gold would be merely symbolism shows complete ignorance about what a gold standard is understood to be by economists.

The gold standard abandoned by Nixon wasn’t a true gold standard per se, but rather a gold exchange standard which meant that only foreign central banks could convert dollars into gold or vice versa. The Bretton Woods treaty abandoned by Richard Nixon in 1971 stipulated that every dollar was worth 1/35 ounce of gold, or in other words gold was worth $35 per ounce. This gold exchange standard was abandoned due to the American government creating more dollars than it had gold in order to pay for its massive welfare and warfare state.

Neither did the classical gold standard mean dollar parity with gold. The classical gold standard, in use before 1914 when the Federal Reserve came into operation, meant that every dollar was worth 1/20 ounce of gold, or that gold was $20 per ounce. The classical gold standard was formally abandoned in 1933 when FDR confiscated privately held gold, made it illegal for US citizens to own gold, and debased the dollar from $20/ounce to $35/ounce. This ratio existed until 1971 (more or less, read the about the complications here).

Reinbach is absolutely correct that the amount of gold in existence would be prohibitive to returning to a gold standard at parity. But that’s a strawman; that’s never been what a gold standard entails. He’s being deliberately deceptive on this point, and I hope Huffington Post readers realize this. Judging from the comments, some do.

Murray Rothbard shows in The Mystery of Banking that one way to return to a gold standard would be to define the dollar in terms of current dollars in circulation in a fixed ratio to government gold holdings. Based on Reinbach’s research that the US government owns 8,133 metric tonnes of gold and the current M1 money supply of $2085.8 billion, Rothbard would say one ounce of gold should be worth $7,271 in a 100% reserve system.

But that’s just one way of examining the problem of returning to a gold standard. The main point is that Reinbach doesn’t know what a gold standard is to begin with, so he probably should refrain from making arguments against returning to one.

Finally, his fourth point with respect to Ron Paul’s supposed financial conflict of interest, is a non sequitur. His position on the gold standard has been consistent since Richard Nixon first ended the Bretton Woods treaty in 1971 (which, incidentally is why he became interested in economics and politics to begin with). His advocacy for sound money has been unwavering in those years, and contrary to Reinbach’s assertion that he is trying to return to a gold standard for personal gain, he’s been railing against unsound money in order to ensure financial stability for America. In 2002, Ron Paul was the sole voice in Congress sounding the alarm against monetary debasement and government incentives which led to the housing bubble which has left the entire world in a state of financial disarray. Simply, Ron Paul believes that the country needs sound money, and he has put his money where his mouth is.

I’d also like to hear Reinbach’s critiques of other conflicts of interest in Congress. Congressman Mel Watt (D – NC), who practically works for Bank of America, gutted the bill to audit the Federal Reserve’s monetary dealings with banking institutions. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D – CA), whose husband has ownership in at least two defense contractors, voted to go to war against Iraq and was an original cosponsor for the PATRIOT Act. Or Governor Rick Perry’s campaign contributions from Merck before he acquiesced to the advice of his former chief of staff turned lobbyist to mandate that all girls in Texas get the controversial Gardasil vaccine.

These examples were just the first to come to my head, and I’m sure we could think of more. It’s clear that there are many conflicts of interest in government, but somehow a man who has an honest belief that people shouldn’t be robbed by the monetary system of the United States is odious in nature. Reinbach is clearly being disingenuous with his allegations.

Andrew Reinbach’s attack on Ron Paul displays no integrity with respect to positions held by Paul. Reinbach has established himself to have no credibility on any topic on which he commented on in his article. A return to sound money is not what he asserts it to be.

This very basic concept of cause and effect escapes Rick Santorum, a former Senator from Pennsylvania currently trying to be the Republican nominee for the President of the United States. One of the constant refrains from Santorum is to criticize the foreign policy stance of a fellow Republican, Congressman Ron Paul. From a recent statement:

Congressman Paul needs to realize that they hate us not for what we do, but for who we are.

As the article mentions, Dr. Paul mentioned American invasions of Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, as a motivation for terrorists to attack America on 9/11/2001. America’s occupation of Saudi Arabia was only one of many complaints terrorists had against America. The occupation of Saudi Arabia wasn’t the only motivation for attacking America, according to Osama bin Laden. In 1998 he issued a fatwa against America in which he railed against not only stationing American troops in Saudi Arabia, but American support for Israel and the deaths of thousands of Muslims at American hands as well.

Throughout the 1990s, the United States enforced a no-fly zone and sanctions over Iraq which killed more than 500,000 Iraqi children. The US, in support of its mission to prevent Saddam Hussein from getting “weapons of mass destruction,” bombed Iraq on average every three days. Sanctions prevented Iraq from getting food (which it imported in great quantities) and other vital resources meaning Iraqis didn’t even have safe water to drink.

American officials were unapologetic for what was going on in Iraq during this time:

In this context, it is easy to see why some might be upset over American intervention in the Middle East. The resentment isn’t limited to al Qaeda and the so-called “Islamic extremists.” In 2008, Ron Paul mentioned in a presidential debate that a CIA operation in Iran overthrew a democratically elected President, Mohammed Mossadegh, for the benefit of the Anglo-Iranian Oil company (now known as BP). This sovereign government was replaced by an American puppet, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who ruled with an iron fist. His secret police were trained by the CIA in methods of torture. In 1979, the Shah’s regime was overthrown which led to the imprisonment of American embassy workers. The United States subsequently supplied Saddam Hussein (president of Iraq) with weapons with which to fight Iran in the Iran-Iraq war, leading to millions of casualties. To this day, American politicians continue to beat the war drums against Iran under false pretenses.

This isn’t to say that American intervention is the only intervention which leads to this so-called “blowback.” Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, has constructed a database of thousands of suicide bombers since 1980. He has found that nearly every single suicide terrorist bombing has been not because of religious or ideological motivation but because of foreign military occupation.

The idea that Americans are hated simply because of “who we are” ignores the fact that American foreign intervention routinely leads to negative unintended consequences which may effect people negatively. Christopher Coyne, an economist at George Mason University, studied places where America has intervened. Using the current polity score of Iran, a measure of political and economic freedom, he looked at the effects of American intervention. He found that in nearly two-thirds of the countries where America has intervened in the past century, there hasn’t even been an improvement even to the poor level of Iranian government. Countries like Cuba, Haiti, and Afghanistan are examples of failed American intervention, and in many cases (such as Cuba and Afghanistan) there is measured anti-American sentiment.

9/11 wasn’t an isolated incident in terms of blowback in the modern War on Terror era. After all, it isn’t just a coincidence that Faizal Shazad, the Times Square bomber, came back from his native country Pakistan where the US is continuing a drone bombing campaign killing an inordinate amount of civilians without knowing for certain who it is killing. Nor is it a coincidence that al Qaeda in Yemen sent bombs through the mail or sponsored the underwear bomber after the US dropped cluster bombs on the country and lied about it.

Cause and effect is a constant in a world where man acts. Yet for someone like Rick Santorum it is vital to ignore history and causality in order to score political support for points not based in reality. It’s no wonder that his donations from service members is next-to-nothing, while the man he says is “shockingly misguided” has nearly 150 times the support from those in the military. Maybe this is due to Santorum’s inability to reconcile cause and effect.

Update: Rick Santorum continued to parrot the same nonsense at the Tea Party Debate on 9/12.