by Jacob G. Hornberger

May 4, 2026

Yesterday, the New York Times published an article detailing a heart-rending story, one rooted in President Trump’s tariff sprees and his illegal deadly and destructive war on Iran. The article, entitled “The Last Days of Butter Ridge,” details the story of Brad Watson, 41, and his family, who owned a dairy farm named Butter Ridge in Pennsylvania.

The Watson family has been dairy farming since before the Civil War. But no longer. Watson recently had to auction off all of his dairy cows, each of which had a name that Watson’s children had given them.

The reason that Watson lost all of his dairy cows? Two reasons: Trump’s tariffs and Trump’s war on Iran, which have caused fertilizer costs to soar. Barely making it as it was, the tariffs and the soaring fertilizer costs sent the Watson dairy operation over the cliff.

One of the hardest parts about reading the article is the impact on Watson’s kids, who no longer have their beloved dairy cows to milk every day.

Of course, the Watson story is just one of many across the United States. There are countless other people who are suffering the consequences of Trump’s tariff sprees and his illegal war of aggression on Iran. Only a few of these horror stories will end up in the mainstream press.

The end of Spirit Airlines is one that most everyone is familiar with. Barely able to make it, a few years ago the low-budget airline tried to merge with Jet Blue. There is one problem, however: Spirit was required to seek permission from the federal government, which serves as people’s daddy in our “free-enterprise” system. But daddy said no because a merger, daddy claimed, would be “anti-competitive.”

Then Trump launched his illegal (i.e., no congressional declaration of war) on Iran, which, as everyone knows, has caused the price of jet fuel to soar. That threw Spirit over the edge, just like the soaring fertilizer costs threw the Watson dairy farm over the edge. Spirit Airlines is now dead. I can’t help but wonder how our federal daddy now feels about denying permission for that merger.

There is one aspect to this that perhaps — just perhaps — will cause the American people to come to the realization of what their daddy government has done for the past several decades to the people of Iran with its brutal and ruthless system of economic sanctions. The Iranian people have been suffering the loss of their businesses, their jobs, and their family heirlooms for years because of those sanctions, just like the Watson dairy farm and Spirit Airlines.

That’s the aim of sanctions — to impose extreme economic poverty on the citizenry of a country in order to achieve a political end, such as regime change. As I have long contended, that type of policy is the epitome of evil because it targets innocent people with severe economic harm or even death through starvation or illness as a way to achieve a political goal. In other words, it’s no different from terrorism except that this is state-sponsored terrorism.

It is worth pointing out that there are other statist factors that have brought about the demise of the Watson dairy farm and Spirit Airlines, ones we have come to accept as part and parcel of our “free-enterprise” system.

One of those factors is income taxation, which our American ancestors rejected for more than a century. Add up all the amount of money that the Watsons and Spirit Airlines have been forced to pay to the federal government in income taxes over the years to fund the welfare-warfare state. Just imagine the nest egg they would have in the bank that could have helped them get through bad times.

Another factor is the Federal Reserve and America’s paper-money system. Again, our American ancestors rejected both of these statist programs for more than 100 years. Today, like income taxation, they are considered to be part and parcel of America’s “free-enterprise” system. Just add up the amount of money that the Federal Reserve has plundered and looted from people, including the Watsons and Spirit Airlines, through inflationary debasement of their money. That money too would have provided a very nice nest egg to help people get though the difficult times in life.

The problem is that Americans have come to accept these statist systems as a necessary part of life. But they are not. As I detail in my video series “The Evil Within,” evil systems have been grafted onto America’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic — evil systems that our American ancestors rejected for more than a 100 years.

These evil systems include a government-regulated economy, including antitrust laws, a national-security state system, a foreign policy of interventionism (including sanctions, embargoes, blockades, and illegal wars of aggression), a progressive federal income tax, omnipotent presidential power to impose and raise tariffs (i.e., taxes) on the American people, a central bank and and constant bouts of inflated quantities of paper money, and much more.

There are some who say that the solution to all this evil is simply to get “better” people in public office. But when “better” people get involved with evil systems, evil always wins, especially by getting “better” people to advance evil in the name of doing “good.”

There is only one good way to deal with evil: Don’t reform it. Don’t fix it. Don’t improve it. Don’t get “better” people to manage it. Instead, eradicate it, fully and completely. Dismantle the national-security state and restore our founding system of a limited-government republic. End both tariffs and income taxation. Dismantle the welfare-warfare state and the regulated economy. Restore our founding foreign policy of noninterventionism. Restore sound money by ending the Fed and paper money and replacing them with a free-market monetary system.

Eradicating evil from our system won’t save the Watson dairy farm or Spirit Airlines, but it would save lots of other people and companies. If the economic tragedies suffered by the Watson family and Spirit Airlines could help raise the vision of the American people to this higher level, their loss will not have been in vain.