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October
12
2022

The Rule of Power
Paul Craig Roberts

Last week PayPal, an online service for making and receiving payments, announced that at PayPal’s “sole discretion” $2,500 would be seized from accounts of those PayPal decided were guilty of spreading misinformation.  “Misinformation” is whatever some speech control office at PayPal doesn’t like or dissent from official narratives.  In other words, PayPal announced a policy of thought control as described in George Orwell’s1984. See this and this.

Moreover, $2,500 would be seized for each bit of misinformation, apparently even for errors resulting from being misinformed or from misunderstanding.  If an account holder spreads misinformation twice, $5,000 is seized; ten bits of misinformation costs the account holder $25,000.  Since the definition of misinformation is at PayPal’s sole discretion, it wouldn’t be long before PayPal, faced with missing its quarterly expected profits, would jack up its earnings by seizing people’s accounts.

It is unclear how a person spreads “misinformation” on a payments mechanism.  Does it mean that “spreading misinformation” means donating to an organization that challenges official narratives?  Does it mean that PayPal would have an army of employees watching social media comments of account holders and reading their emails?

The first seizure was in England where the robbed account was that of the Free Speech Union.  It caused an uproar and protests from Members of Parliament and PayPal’s former president, and a couple of days later PayPal said that PayPal’s announcement that it was going to seize money from customers’ accounts for spreading misinformation was itself misinformation. 

Think about this for a moment.  If PayPal can seize $2,500 from your account because some woke freak in PayPal’s Thought Control Police Force finds your opinion “offensive,” so can your bank, your 401k, your IRA, your investment account.  Your credit card company can bill you $2,500 for each disapproved statement and turn your account over to bill collectors when you don’t pay.  Maybe your car and house will be seized.  Once central banks impose digital money on their insouciant populations, people can be robbed at will by every approved party for every imaginable offense.

A Fish Rots From the Head

Where did PayPal get the idea that it can seize the money of people whose statements it disapproves?  Obviously, they got it from the US government.  The US government has seized people’s property because the property “facilitated a crime,” which means that a crime took place on the property by someone, not necessarily the owner (The Tyranny of Good Intentions by Paul Craig Roberts).  The US government seized Venezuela’s gold because it disapproved of Venezuela’s politics.  The US government seized Russia’s central bank reserves when Russia intervened in Ukraine to protect the Russian population of former Russian territory.  US lawmakers want to punish Saudi Arabia for tending to its own interest instead of Washington’s.  The California government wants to steal the medical licenses of doctors who ignored medical protocols designed to serve Big Pharma’s profits and instead saved their patients’ lives.

It should be obvious that Western Civilization no longer exists.  A civilization is defined by its values, such as free speech, and when those values are no longer honored, the civilization no longer exists.  

Think about what the US government has done to Julian Assange.  His decade long incarceration in the absence of charges, trial, and conviction violates all legal principles that comprise our constitutional protections from arbitrary and unjust treatment by government.  It shows how far gone we are that Assange’s illegal and unconstitutional treatment continues year after year and produces no outrage from Congress, media, law schools, bar organizations, courts, or the American population.  The official narrative is that he is a Russian spy and we have to get him at all cost, including the establishment of precedents that destroy our security from arbitrary and ruthless oppression.  The assertion that Assange is a Russian spy is an intentional lie, and for the sake of supporting a lie we are depriving ourselves of our constitutional protections.

The US government’s policy of seizing whoever’s property it wants to seize is spreading worldwide.  If the home of democracy and the rule of law can arbitrarily do as it likes, so can the South African government which says it is considering seizing the farms of white people without compensation. In other words, there is no longer a rule of law. There is a rule of power.

The rule of power is what Putin, Xi, Maduro, and the American and European peoples are up against, and they seem very slow to realize it.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

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