Lionel Nation: Judge Napolitano Is an Impeachment Hoaxer Quisling

Judge Napolitano

Judge Napolitano continues to be put under the microscope after his seeming 180-degree turn against President Trump.

David Bauder at AP last week analyzed the switch in an article titled, Fox legal analyst Napolitano emerges as Trump critic.

Then Brion McClanahan, the important historian and author of The Founding Fathers Guide to the Constitution, took a measured look at Napolitano's analysis. He was trying to be polite to the judge but it was devastating:




And then Lionel Nation came into the picture hurricane style with his attack on Napolitano.

Although most of what Lionel said was spot on, going at Category 5 power, there were a few head-scratchers. For example, he equated libertarians and constitutionalists. While there are some similarities, they are far from the same. It is ironic that he would make this error at this time, when a new book, Conceived in Liberty, Volume 5: The New Republic, by the great libertarian Murray Rothbard was just published, which makes it clear that libertarians are no constitutionalists.

Rothbard ends the volume this way:

The Constitution, with its inherently broad powers in the elastic clauses, would increasingly support an ever larger more powerful central government. In the long run, the liberals though they could and did run a gallant race, we're doomed to lose--and lose indeed they did. In a sense, they're supposed to be unrealistic radicals who would totally reject the Constitution and try to rend it asunder...would be far more perceptive about the realities and the potentials of the American constitutional system then those liberals working within it.

Then with full hurricane winds continuing to blow, he calls Lionel Robbins, Lionel Robinson, and says Robbins was a libertarian.

And although he had free-market leanings, even Misesian leanings at one point, he later became a Keynesian. You are not against government planning if you are a Keynesian.

Rothbard reported:

[B]y the end of the 1930s, every one of Hayek’s followers had jumped on the Keynesian bandwagon, including Lionel Robbins, John R. Hicks, Abba P. Lerner, Nicholas Kaldor, G.L.S. Shackle, and Kenneth E. Boulding.

Perhaps the most astonishing conversion was that of Lionel Robbins. Not only had Robbins been a convert to Misesian methodology as well as to monetary and business-cycle theory, but he had also been a diehard pro-Austrian activist. A convert since his attendance at the Mises privatseminar in Vienna in the 1920s, Robbins, highly influential in the economics department at LSE, had succeeded in bringing Hayek to LSE in 1931 and in translating and publishing Hayek’s and Mises’s works.

Despite being a longtime critic of Keynesian doctrine before The General Theory, Robbins’s conversion to Keynesianism was apparently solidified when he served as Keynes’s colleague in wartime economic planning. There is in Robbins’s diary a decided note of ecstatic rapture that perhaps accounts for his astonishing abasement in repudiating his Misesian work, The Great Depression (1934).

Robbins’s repudiation was published in his 1971 Autobiography: “I shall always regard this aspect of my dispute with Keynes as the greatest mistake of my professional career, and the book, The Great Depression, which I subsequently wrote, partly in justification of this attitude, as something which I would willingly see forgotten”. Robbins’s diary entries on Keynes during World War II can only be considered an absurdly rapturous personal view.

 -RW