Public employee unions have used their built-in advantages to damage this country’s political economy and work hardships on taxpayers.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/capture-constitution-how-public-sector-unions-exploited-free-speech-suppress-black-upward-mobility

The Council on Foreign Relations emerged from a 1921 merger, Morgan-dominated from top to bottom, with Elihu Root as honorary president and Morgan’s chief counsel as president. Rothbard recounts the founding of its journal Foreign Affairs, and how after World War II the Rockefellers displaced the Morgans as the senior partners of the Eastern Establishment.

Rothbard traces Kennedy’s foreign policy appointments back to Lovett, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Lehman Brothers, then to the Bay of Pigs and the sugar company interests entangled with it. The chapter closes on Kennedy’s last foreign policy act: the green light to oust and murder South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm.

Justin Raimondo places the essay in Rothbard’s career, showing how methodological individualism and the Austrian analysis of banking combine into a history of the American elite. He draws out the Nock, Flynn, and Chodorov insight at its center: the biggest capitalists have been the deadliest enemies of capitalism.

Rothbard traces the Milner Group from Rhodes’s 1891 society through its command of British postwar planning and the expert delegation at Versailles, to the founding of the Institute of International Affairs in Paris in 1919. Its first American member had come to notice by attacking the American Revolution and praising the eighteenth-century British Empire.

Established at the end of 1913, the Federal Reserve made Allied loans and wartime deficits possible by centralizing reserves and backstopping the banks. Rothbard traces the five-year campaign by Morgan, Rockefeller, and Kuhn, Loeb interests, then follows Benjamin Strong’s Morgan ties and the inflation undertaken to prop up the pound—setting the stage for the collapse of 1929 to 1931.

Johnson kept the hawks and replaced doves as they were ousted. Rothbard details the July 1965 meeting at which escalation was decided and the committee of power-elite figures formed to back it, along with Ellsworth Bunker’s role in the invasion of the Dominican Republic and the sugar interests it protected.

After 1873 the House of Morgan became the leading investment firm in the country and, through Cleveland’s Democratic administrations, a decisive voice in foreign policy. Rothbard follows the Morgan and Rothschild men through the State, War, and Navy departments and into the gunboat diplomacy stretching from Nicaragua and Santo Domingo to the road to war with Spain.

Rothbard reads the Second World War through rival interests: Rockefeller pressure for war with Japan over oil and rubber, Morgan commitment to Britain and France. He then follows the postwar Eastern Establishment, its “Cowboy” Sun Belt challengers, and the CIA operation in Iran that cut five American oil companies in for 40 percent of the new consortium.

Writing after the 2008 collapse and the bailouts, Anthony Gregory argues that left and right each see half of the corporate-state picture and refuse the rest—one blaming Wall Street while excusing its president, the other detecting elitism but declining to question the warfare state. He makes the case for Rothbard’s power-elite history as the tool partisan analysis cannot supply.