 The Mises Institute has a new free book for minor issues fans. Dr. Guido Hulsman's How Inflation Destroys Civilization. Learn how inflation isn't only making us poor, it's harming our culture, meant to well-being, and the moral foundations of civilization itself. Get your free copy today at mises.org slash issues free. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues Podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute. The real prospects of war are hardly ever mentioned in the mainstream media, but those prospects are all too real for the United States and the world. The probabilities are not inconceivably low as the media would have us believe, but are unimaginably high relative to the last 40 years. Even if the worst does not come to pass, it might open the door for another terrifying and much more widely anticipated development. Atomic scientists have set the doomsday clock to only 90 seconds to midnight, representing the extinction of the human species. This is the shortest time interval they have ever set over the last 77 years of the clock's history. Once the war escalates, the difficulty of stopping it also worsens. The destruction of life could be enormous. Likewise, with the destruction of capital, with an advanced capitalist global economy, the standard of living would plunge toward subsistence. The production of modern goods like electricity would be problematic and inventories of basic goods would be quickly exhausted. We saw this in a small way with the government's COVID emergency. Capitalism is not a free-flowing fountain of goods and services and new technology, but it's something that requires a constant input source of labor from workers, capital from savers, and risk-taking management from entrepreneurs. War disrupts and destroys this process. All war is bad for the economy. There is no exception to this rule. The next war of a global scale will be catastrophic. Survivors would face a dystopian future. American citizens have been protected from direct involvement in war for over 150 years, but such protection no longer exists when the prospects of the next war involve intercontinental missiles, cyber war, terrorism, to say nothing of nuclear and biological weapons. Are the prospects that dire? One, the US has been fighting a proxy war in Eastern Europe against nuclear power, Russia, and its allies for several years now and is openly flaunting its attempt to expand that war. Two, the US has been fighting a proxy war in the Middle East against Iran and its allies. Currently, we are waging a war with the UK against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Three, the US is engaged in a trade war with China, and trade war is more akin to war than it is to peaceful negotiations. We are also disturbing the peace between China and our allies in South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. Most troubling is that the US is pushing for war in almost any conceivable way. One, the Biden administration seems to be unhinged and directorless, except with respect to increasing the prospects of war, not peace at every turn. Two, the US and other nations have resorted to sanctions on a colossal scale. Americans are often under the impression that sanctions are an alternative to war, but sanctions are considered an act of war. Sanctions are certainly a prelude to war and they don't hurt the target regime or its ruling elites, but it does hurt the poor citizens of the target country and even the citizens of the sanctioning state. Sanctions that steal assets from the owners in foreign countries, a current tactic of the US government, will greatly undermine the value of the US dollar and US government bonds by both our enemies and friends alike. This will backfire on Americans in the form of higher prices and higher taxes. Three, the drive to expand NATO and to have massive war games in Europe is a precipitating factor pushing the war in Ukraine into a wider and less predictable theater. This will expand the scope and type of warfare and will threaten millions more with devastation that will bleed into the world economy and disrupt the distribution of basic things like food and fuel and drive up prices around the globe. Now you may think I'm overstating the prospects of war. I hope I am, but the probability should not be underestimated, should be carefully examined and widely understood throughout the population rather than downplayed and dismissed out of hand. The current situation should be a cause for action, a great political ideological reaction in favor of peace. The best existing hope is the political opposition to foreign aid for military purposes in the case of Ukraine and Israel. I wish no harm to the people of those countries. I wish only for peace for all concerned. The opposition to illegal immigration is also somewhat reassuring, but make no mistake about it. This is no time for political compromise. Trading for an increased border security budget in exchange for more foreign military aid is not an acceptable compromise. A more likely yet still troublesome outcome. The global political elites, such as George Soros and those at the World Economic Forum, can sense that their agenda is in trouble. Their agenda of political globalism, financial repression of us all, anti-humanism and radical environmentalism now faces increasing opposition in the United States and around the world. Their science has been debunked and they are losing elections. The increasing prospects of war, the beginning of widespread death and chaos, and the inability of the United Nations and other major nations to solve such problems could be just the thing they need to push their agenda forward. So even if we turn back the prospects of global war, we need to be on guard against the terrifying prospects of their new world order, which the global elites will use to enslave us. Their so-called great reset posits a fundamental reorganization of society from one based on individual property rights to a nebulous slavery for all.