(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article do not represent the views of any institution, organization, or affiliation associated with either the author or the members/affiliates of godarchy.org. The author is writing primarily as an independent scholar and not within any other role, position, or capacity.)

(Preface: While I come to a different conclusion, this article is not primarily directed at Jeff Wright Jr.’s recent LCI post on Syria, but rather at libertarian leaders and developments at large, so please read it that way. Also, since this is a piece of humbling internal criticism, I’ll avoid using most names to soften the tone. Those in the highest positions of power and social responsibility are obviously exceptions.)

Introduction

This brief essay is an attempt to consolidate some of my opinionated thoughts on…well, how should it be framed in the first place?

1. “The President’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria.”
2. “The U.S.’s betrayal of anti-ISIS allies in the Middle-East.”
3. “Trump and Company’s bloody capitalist gains.”
4. “The destruction of Rojava—the greatest hope towards long-term peace in the modern Middle-East.”
5. “Russia’s big win: filling the new Syrian vacuum.”

As far as I’m concerned, all of these are true and legitimate constructions. That’s partly what makes this discussion so complicated: ethics, politics, economics, sociology, all wrapped into one (…and then blown up).

My main purpose here is simply to explain (a) how and why, in a rare political event, Trump played libertarians en mass (via the Syria withdrawal), and (b) why the end of Rojava is a tragedy, not just for those living there, and not just in general terms of suffering, but for the whole world—and Christian anarchists should be particularly troubled.

The Alluring Non-Copy-Edited Tweets of a Sleazy Real Estate Developer

As strange as it sounds, it only took a few, specifically-worded tweets by the U.S. President and many (not all) libertarians went to bat for his decision to withdraw troops from Rojava (northern/northeastern Syria). In classic political fashion, the President pumped out stock phrases and slogans from a certain group and reiterated them over and over again, like brightening a light in front of a swarm of moths. Whatever this hubbub was about, leaders of the group couldn’t resist, and within a matter of hours, the masses morphed into scolding others on social media for daring to challenge the President’s choice. “He’s finally come around! This is our one chance to implement one of our pet issues through the head of the state! Don’t be a dolt and complain about the President now!” Libertarians were the target this time. So the stock phrases came from Ron Paul, Rand Paul, others, and asserted non-interventionism (getting the U.S. out of other nation’s business).

But it was barely 36 hours since Trump solidified the order and all the hopes and dreams of vicariously re-incarnating Ron Paul in the oval office came to a crashing fall. In the same three-day period that Trump re-assured the public about getting out of useless Middle-Eastern wars, he ordered a troop-surge to go over and protect Saudi Arabia’s oil operations, increasing U.S.’s presence in the Middle-East. Worse, the U.S. troops from Rojava didn’t come home, but were instead re-deployed with new tanks and armored vehicles to the south. To what end? To defend not people, but…oil fields. Then, again in classic American Empire fashion, the President authorized a special ops strike that killed a leading ISIS figure on the same map (ironically carried out with essential help provided by the Kurdish SDF, which the President refused to acknowledge).

This event (a) proved that Trump wasn’t just letting Turkey and Russia push the U.S. around, (b) confused his critics entirely about (not) fighting overseas and the Middle-East, and above all, (c) provided a much-needed distraction from an accumulating impeachment inquiry. (Bill Clinton did something similar if you recall, only it was an airstrike instead of an underground shoot-out. Those were also the days when conservative evangelicals wouldn’t tolerate a President who had sexual affairs and tried to cover them up. Times be a-changin’!)

The calculations of the President (and his key supporter on this decision, Rand Paul), were also mistaken. Turkey ignored Trump’s threats, invaded Rojava, and facilitated the prison-break of ISIS fighters (the real “Islamic terrorists”). The Kurds (via Syrian Democratic Forces or “SDF”)—who were five-year allies with the U.S. and lost 11,000 of their own soldiers defeating ISIS—sought desperate help from Assad (allies with Iran) and the Russians. The Pentagon spokesperson and President repeatedly lied to the public about “not abandoning the Kurds.” General Petraeus (yes that Petraeus) admitted that the U.S. had indeed, just committed a genuine “betrayal.” Certain Christian churches were targeted and attacked for the first time in a century. Even die-hard fans like Franklin Graham and the evangelical Zionist-base condemned the decision. Pat Robertson remarked that Trump may have lost “his mandate from heaven.”

(Other evangelicals, of course, saw the President’s decision differently: “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way.”)

As all this unraveled, the director of the Department of Homeland Security resigned, the director of the Department of Energy (Rick Perry) announced resignation, and 300,000 people in Rojava lost their homes precipitating a new European refugee crisis. This isn’t even to mention the two-month advanced-warning from the Pentagon, which issued a “scathing” report with disturbing insights about 18,000 ISIS militants committing all of the unimaginable evils it did before.

So that’s it in brief:  Screaming. Blood. Death. Disaster. Trauma. Needless. Predicted. Discouraged. Yet systematically legitimized and twisted by all perpetrators and responsible parties.

Defending the Undefendable

“We have no friends but the Mountains.” – Kurdish saying

The ongoing “libertarian” justification of what will go down as one of the most cruel and disastrous foreign policy decisions in modern American history, seems to be this: there is no such thing as a bad “non-interventionist” policy. To be rigorously non-interventionist is inherently good—even when it clearly isn’t. It is “good” and “right,” even if it directly facilitates far greater wars, and the real possibility of genocide and ethnic cleansing, as it did in this very case. The ends justify the means. No one, not even individuals who are able to defend those being imminently violated, are under any obligation to protect the victims—even if both parties have built up a relationship of mutual trust. Nor is anyone living in the states (like myself) obligated to call-out such passivity. “Getting out”—and getting out now, here, and in these circumstances, is apparently all that matters, and it might as well have the blessing of God.

Speaking of, we might be reminded of a rather old tweet from a much wiser King. It’s a tweet that poses a contrasting perspective to the cold, secular, Walter-Block style libertarianism of ‘I am not my brother’s keeper, even when he’s being murdered,’

Rescue those being taken off to death;
and from those staggering to the slaughter, don’t hold back.
If you say, “Look, we didn’t know about it,”
the one who weighs hearts—doesn’t he understand?
The one who protects your life—he knows.
He makes people pay for their actions. (Prov 24:11-12, CEB)

Non-interventionism is not an end in itself, as this wisdom (the real kind) might poignantly remind us.

In the first article of the first volume of The Christian Libertarian Review, I specifically made it a point to say that Christian libertarianism contrasts from secular libertarianism on this very issue: the foundations of the good life and a sound politic is not simply “do not do what is violent,” but “do not do what is violent” plus “do what is just.”

What would that look like in this situation?

At the very least, it would suggest that those individuals who felt compelled to protect those being attacked have the right to (and/or even ought to have done so) instead of “obeying orders.” What uniforms they were wearing, what political party they identified with, what ethnicity or religion they embodied, what logic their authority-figure announced on social media matters nothing when genocide is on the horizon. Surely the twentieth century would have already taught us that much.

Sadly, others see it differently. And the hoop-jumping devised to justify the President and his decision at this point (including that of libertarian and anarchist Christians) stretches the imagination. Despite the fact that the U.S. has over 800 military bases spread across 70 countries around the world, we are somehow still told that this one decision to withdraw a handful of troops from Rojava was not only “necessary,” but wise. (Even “infinitely wise.”) Supposedly, this unfolding and needless tragedy of death, violence, and instability would probably occur if some of the 170,000 active military personnel around the world were similarly withdrawn. Supposedly, we (the American “we”) had to start ending needless overseas wars somewhere (despite the fact that Rojava hasn’t been at war since it defeated ISIS this past March, was an oasis of forward-looking stability in the Middle-East, and was uniquely vulnerable amongst countless other situations). Supposedly, there just wasn’t any other reasonable options (despite the fact that Trump’s decision was repeatedly repudiated by Defense staff, military generals, and others).

And to top it off, supposedly, any dissenters of this constellation of dubious excuses can be safely dismissed with the wave of a hand, all while mumbling the atoning incantations of “ending endless middle-eastern wars” and “non-interventionism.”

Combined with a whole lot more popular opinion than can be covered here, one might adequately describe a large chunk of the dominant discourse as follows: not only was the decision itself saturated with layer upon layer of profound, awe-inspiring stupidity that invoked more wide-spread and diverse condemnation of the President than any other single decision on that record, but it is also justified with an equivalent amount of sophomoric ethical rationalizing, political banalities, mythical and nostalgic archaism, inane and trite out-of-context slogans, street-side fortune-telling, and tropes of self-righteous moral superiority frequently spewed from the keyboards and Xbox controllers of (at least) a white doomer generation fearful of extinction because of “the Mexicans,” “the Jews,” “the dems,” “the Arabs,” who faithfully hoard their bump-stocks and 30-round magazines as they await the nuclear, zombie, and feminist-multiculturalist apocalypse.

If the withdrawal from Syria is anything that the masses have agreed on, it is that it was baffling. Inexplainable. Beyond reason. (Even Lindsay Graham took nearly a week before coming up with something.) But to then actually suggest that “this is just proof that the President is a genius, smarter than all of us”—instead of drawing the obvious conclusion that this was unbelievably dumb, and it’s what happens when a person in power pretends to be an expert in all fields of knowledge—is even more absurd.

So I really don’t think these harsh reflections are unjustified. And if it seems too blunt of a judgment, or too impossible of a possibility that absurdity has been swapped for genius even by those calculated theorists who purport to uphold reason, I think this just might go to show how deeply the emperor’s cult personality, combined with the prestige of power and fog of war-fatigue, has seeped into our collective consciousness.

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. – Diedrich Bonhoeffer

Nevertheless, as catastrophically disastrous as the decision has proven to be by all accounts (and just remember: it hasn’t even been 30 days), it still remains baffling what would have driven a politician to risk losing support during an election season. What could possibly be more important than securing MAGA 2020? What deities are there in the universe that clamor for the human heart more than the Oval Office?

Mammon

“I have made the tough decisions, always with an eye toward the bottom line. Perhaps it’s time America was run like a business.” – Donald Trump (Caesar)

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be loyal to the one and have contempt for the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” – Christ (Lord)

In 2012, the President of Turkey stood alongside Ivanka Trump, her proud father, and other dedicated supporters to witness the opening ceremony of the majestic Trump Towers in Istanbul. “I have a little conflict of interest because I have a major, major building in Istanbul,” Trump said in 2015. “It’s a tremendously successful job. It’s called Trump Towers — two towers, instead of one, not the usual one, it’s two.” This is the only real-estate investment of its kind owned by the Trumps in all of Europe. And yes, it is “yuge!”

Recall that about a day before the first American troops began moving out of Rojava, the President threatened to “shut-down” the Turkish economy if Erdogan invaded. Obviously, this would have tipped over Mr. “America First’s” own gravy-train. Knowing that this threat was all foam and no beer, Erdogan immediately began attacking Rojava hours later. After a week, it was total chaos: hundreds of thousands of civilians were displaced and hundreds killed (including targeted unarmed civilians). The Turks had basically took over the border and its cities in “Operation Peace Spring” with only the Kurdish people themselves defending their homes. The White House predictably (a) issued more (fake) economic threats and (b) never carried them out.

You’re probably thinking: how can a President have such a plain and explicit conflict of interest—and one that directly undermines his/her country’s own interests? Well, as the quote of this section notes: this is part of what it means to be President now. “America first” in Trump’s administration is “me first.” This incredible conflation of principle, policy, and ethic is dismissed as “entertaining” and “hilarious” instead of alarming (not to mention unconstitutional). Trump continues to be sued by over a dozen members of congress for this overt conflict of geopolitical interest—and rightly so.

In the meantime, the President managed to squeeze every penny out of the situation. That’s what he does best (and America wanted the ruthless capitalist). Resurrecting new tariffs on steel in the middle of the chaos served as a cover for all of the blood, because this time the tariffs were “against Turkey.” Like with all of his tariffs, if and how much these tariffs profited Trump will probably never be known. But they certainly re-assured American steel mills that Trump has their back (i.e., the US government won’t allow foreign producers to undersell American companies; or stated differently, the White House won’t allow American consumers from buying the cheapest products, because they’re not American products). Some Republican Senators didn’t take the bait, and maybe even remembered Trump’s shocking (and embarrassing) remarks that the “Kurds didn’t help us with Normandy.” (Especially if the U.S. didn’t “abandon the Kurds,” why is this kind of stab necessary in the first place?)

The President also decided that, not only should the Omar oil fields be protected by deployed U.S. troops, but actually suggested that Exxon Mobil (which was led by the former secretary of state, Rex Tillerson) should just take them over! None of this is even to mention the whole dynamic of controlling land for pipelines. (Americans can get an idea for this given that this debate continues to rage within U.S. borders regarding the Keystone XL pipeline.)

As far as I can tell, it is not inaccurate to say that the President unilaterally turned over a chunk of land to his frenemy business partner(s) Erdogan and/or Putin (or the private interests behind them), perhaps even leaving it up to them who would share the spoils in exchange for “benefits.” But whatever the actual deal was and how much was gained, the cost to everyone else was absolutely staggering. And it also complicates the future. As of October 29, 2019, the Turkish government, the U.S. government, Russian government, Syrian government, and the Kurdish people with their militia (SDF) all now have military on the same plot of soil. (Today in Geneva, Syria is drafting a new constitution for its government with the “help” of Iran, Russia, and Turkey, moderated by the UN, largely in hopes of providing some plan for the whopping 6 million war-torn refugees.)

So in case there was any doubt, the U.S. is primarily in the Middle East for oil (not freedom and democracy), and Trump could care less about who dies or how many—as long as he gets a cut in the end. This is no theory. He has asserted this loyalty to mammon for his entire career, consistently acted on it, and explicitly affirmed it in public discourse. Besides, the “bottom line” is the only narrative thread that can decode an otherwise deranged series of contradictory tweets.

“Perhaps America should be run like a business.” Cool. But what kind of business?  Is it the kind where the boss is an invisible figure that does something positive for society, inspires people, and ensures that employees feel safe and enjoy what they’re doing? Or is it the kind of business that manipulates, coerces, and leaves trusted partners high and dry all in the shameless pursuit of power and control?

Trump’s former Attorney General recently attempted to re-assure the public by saying that the “abuse of power is not a crime.” Aside from the fact that criminal activity is not a necessary condition for impeachment, this only re-assures the worst fears of the American citizen: a bona fide tyrant occupies the White House.

How Ending Rojava is a Setback for the Long-Term Peace in the Middle-East

So we’ve seen that Ron Paul was right once again—not on foreign policy choice, but on the President’s ability to gain power even over those who shouldn’t provide it: Trump is a master demagogue, a person who regurgitates whatever interior ideas and phrases that people want to say themselves. Like others, the President’s twitter account is a pull-string doll, where listeners are already programmed to disregard things they think are “off” or “joking,” neglect those that they can’t tell are actually “serious,” and attune to bless those things that they love to hear.  Minority groups (and those who perceive that they are minorities, like white males in North America) are the most prone to wanting a voice. This, combined with a poor understanding of foreign policy, manufactured libertarians’ support.

But there’s a bigger irony on this front.

The biggest irony is that Rojava happens to be a stateless society based on the libertarian, progressive, anarchist (and yes, “Christian”) principles of decentralized power, social justice, and peace-making. There is no “state,” no “President” or “Prime minister” in Rojava—and that’s exactly how the Kurds like it, and that’s what they intentionally established. It’s a loose “democratic confederacy” of peaceful, self-autonomous, local villages and cities protected by a militia and formalized through a charter.

Despite the Turkish military superiority, the decentralized strategies of the SDF militia are so effective and frustrating to Erdogan in particular that he deems the entire force a “terrorist organization” that uses “guerrilla warfare.” (Unfortunately, however, these terms are occasionally accurate for some of the radical, anti-Turkish, pro-revolutionary persons within the SDF, like the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK.). In my communications with Rojavans, some of their inspiration comes from the world of cryptocurrency. Rojava has tried to approximate a “blockchain nation.” There is no king, no ruler, no need for top-down hierarchy.

At the end of the day, despite setbacks and faults, Rojava’s “radical experiment in democracy” has succeeded as much or more than other similar anarchist projects like the Seasteaders, Creative Common Law, and special economic zones. To get a taste of this power-to-people spirit, the Preamble of the Charter of Social Contract (2014) reads:

We, the people of the Democratic Autonomous Regions of Afrin, Jazira and Kobani, a confederation of Kurds, Arabs, Syriacs, Arameans, Turkmen, Armenians and Chechens, freely and solemnly declare and establish this Charter.

In pursuit of freedom, justice, dignity and democracy and led by principles of equality and environmental sustainability, the Charter proclaims a new social contract, based upon mutual and peaceful coexistence and understanding between all strands of society. It protects fundamental human rights and liberties and reaffirms the peoples’ right to self-determination.

Under the Charter, we, the people of the Autonomous Regions, unite in the spirit of reconciliation, pluralism and democratic participation so that all may express themselves freely in public life. In building a society free from authoritarianism, militarism, centralism and the intervention of religious authority in public affairs, the Charter recognizes Syria’s territorial integrity and aspires to maintain domestic and international peace.

So much to comment on here, but you can tell that his orientation is peculiar. Rojava has its inspiration in the work of Abdullah Öcalan and by extension, the famous anarchist Murray Bookchin. Both began as communists who, like so many others, eventually became disillusioned with Stalinist authoritarianism. They realized that to achieve more freedom, economic prosperity, and environmental sustainability, the world needed to leave behind the one, popular institution that nobody ever questioned: the modern nation-state.

As any good sociologist has written, the state is a “territorial monopoly on the means of physical violence.” That is, if we put all the anthems and marching bands away, all that’s left of “government” is a small, elected (or unelected) gang with an army that tax-farms its border-protected fields (the citizenry). The monopoly is made clear by its double standards. Theft for this group is “taxation,” mass murder for this group is “war,” sexual assault is “a drug search,” land theft is “immanent domain,” bribes are “campaign contributions,” and so on. The state is the only institution in society that operates on the basis of involuntary exchange instead of voluntary exchange. And whether you vote for its leaders or not, and whether your elected leaders represent you or not, and even if there are 10,000 strong marching in the streets protesting injustice and destroying government buildings (currently happening here, here, here, and here), the state still considers its authority “legitimate” and according to the “just consent of the governed.”

As Öcalan himself stated, “The nation-state itself is the most developed complete monopoly.” Through “naturalization,” people’s unique characteristics are lost, and thus people are dehumanized. “The notion of citizen has been created as a result of the quest for such a homogeneity.” He even goes as far as to say that “The citizenship of modernity defines nothing but the transition made from private slavery to state slavery.” It’s clear, then, that for his own people, declaring independence isn’t going to help things. “A separate Kurdish nation-state does not make sense for the Kurds”; “We did not believe…that any ready-made political blueprints would be able to sustainably improve the situation of the people in the Middle East. Had it not been nationalism and nation-states which had created so many problems in the Middle East?”

Exactly: statism and nationalism are the problems, not the cure. Instead of building an empire (whether in America or the Middle-East), we should be dismantling the empire. Instead of putting control in the hands of the few, platforms should be established that put control in the hands of the many.

But the anarchist, Democratic Confederacy of Rojava is not anarcho-capitalist. In fact, it is explicitly critical of modern capitalism. Why? Because (a) concentrations of power are a threat to freedom whether they are public (political) or private (capitalist); (b) modern capitalism has, despite equivalent or worse circumstances under statism, a poor track record of exploiting both people and the environment; (c) capitalism since the mid-twentieth century is crony-capitalism dominated; the corporate elite control populations through the state apparatus.

It is no irony, after all, that the modern nation-state and industrial capitalism emerged at the same time and place, hand-in-hand. The state emerged as a means to protect the new accumulation of capital. Or as Thorstein Veblen put it:

“modern politics are business politics…legislation, police surveillance, the administration of justice, the military and diplomatic service, all are chiefly concerned with business relations,” (The Theory of Business Enterprise).

Here’s how Öcalan  put it:

The new bourgeoisie which rose from this revolution wanted to take part in the political decisions and state structures. Capitalism, their new economic system, thus became an inherent component of the new nation-state. The nation-state needed the bourgeoisie and the power of the capital in order to replace the old feudal order and its ideology which rested on tribal structures and inherited rights by a new national ideology which united all tribes and clans under the roof of the nation. In this way, capitalism and nation-state became so closely linked to each other that neither could be imagined to exist without the other. As a consequence of this, exploitation was not only sanctioned by the state but even encouraged and facilitated. (Öcalan, Democratic Confederacy)

Öcalan also writes that “We…recognized a causal link between the Kurdish question and the global domination of the modern capitalist system.”

If only Öcalan were alive to see a real estate developer in the Oval Office order troops to abandon the Kurds and go “secure the oil”!

Much more could be said about this reading of history (which isn’t original, see Hunt and Lautzenheiser’s History of Economic Thought) and the realities of “state-capture” by the private world of business. Crony capitalism is not just a reality, but a whole-sale, large-scale marriage of power that incentivizes violence (military-industrial complex, anyone?). And furthermore, we should realize that anarcho-capitalists certainly don’t have a monopoly on anarchism or the Christian anarchy market. Argue we may, but communitarians, libertarian socialists, and peaceful Marxists actually have meaningful things to say if we only listen.

But regardless of these debates, the society that did emerge in northern Syria had much more to brag about than ending the state and conquering ISIL:

Throughout the visit I met officials and ordinary citizens who enthused about the virtues of participatory, non-hierarchical self-government. I was amazed to find such a widespread consciousness of political ideas barely discussed in the rest of the world. In one town, I found myself debating the finer distinctions of anarchist philosophers — Kropotkin, Bakunin — with a youth organiser who was fluent in the discourse of people power…

…I attended a mass lunch where one family hosted another. A member of the first family had killed a man from the second: lunch marked the families’ reconciliation, the culmination of a collective process of compensation, apology and forgiveness, where the perpetrator, briefly imprisoned, publicly acknowledged his crime. In turn, this act of contrition, supported by his family by means including the ceremonial meal, was accepted by the victim’s relations.

I asked the brother of the murdered man why he didn’t want the killer to face further punishment. His eyes moist with grief, he replied, no: “social peace” was more important than punishment. This was a better way, he argued: what good would be served by a long punishment of the perpetrator? I was staggered and moved. I thought of the barbarity of Rikers Island prison, which I would fly over on my way home to the US. No one in that country would claim that a system premised on punishment over reconciliation has achieved “social peace.” (Financial Times)

Could you imagine if all of the states in the Middle-East adopted this attitude? Can you imagine if the leaders and people all said “forget dictatorships and the state; forget this barbaric prison system and religious wars; we’re tired of empty political promises by musical dictators cycling in and out. We’re decentralizing now, adopting non-aggression, and we’re going to ensure that peace and freedom rule the day, not power and profit”? What if this kind of community spread around the world? Wouldn’t that be the most promising long-term goal?

It’s too bad that Trump and Erdogan just killed it—and with large support by libertarians and Christians.

Epilogue

The whole concept of “borderless” nations is mind-blowing in today’s world of walls. Even though America was started by revolution in a defensive war, most Americans today are utterly anti-revolutionary and seem more in favor of offensive wars.

It is interesting that the UN Declaration of Human Rights and many of its initiatives frequently speak of “stateless” peoples in negative terms. Stateless people are viewed as those who are disadvantaged and pitied instead of those who are free, un-oppressed, and under no ruler’s “authority.” Indeed, the Kurds have worn the “stateless” status with pride, at least for a few moments in history—just as other populations have throughout our past, whether Native Americans, non-colonizing settlers, Medieval Icelanders, or the Bedouin nomads in the Negev.

What’s shameful and sad is not that people are running free on this planet with no Führer to force them into an imaginary promised land of national glory. What’s shameful and sad are those willing to justify violence against such free and peaceful persons. Like education, peace and freedom have always been radical concepts. They certainly are in the Middle-East.

The Nation is nothing at all but simple force. Not in a single Nation are the people of one race, one history, one culture, nor the same political opinion or religious faith. They are simply human beings of all kinds, penned inside frontiers which mean nothing whatever but military force.

…Yet they keep on trying, because individuals control human energy in accordance with their religious faith, whatever it may be. And belief in Authority controlling a fixed, limited, changeless universe is the pagan religion. If this belief were true, then a human world controlled by some kind of human Authority would work. Then such a world would have worked, at least once, at least fairly well, during six thousand years of efforts to make it work. It does not work, for the same reason that a perpetual-motion machine will not work, because the attempt to make it work is based on a false belief, and not on fact. (Rose Wilder, The Discovery of Freedom)

Dr. Jamin Andreas Hübner (BA, MA, MS, ThD) is an economics professor at Western Dakota Tech, University of the People, and a Research Fellow for the Center of Faith and Human Flourishing at LCC International University (Lithuania).