Comments (0) “Just as war is the natural consequence of monopoly, peace is the natural consequence of liberty.” -Gustave de Molinari
March 11, 2010
Regular blog posts are below the cartoon.
Lazarowitz on Moral Capitalism, ObamaCorps, Government Medicine vs. Inalienable Rights, Compulsory Medical Monopoly, Conservatives’ Military Socialism, Trading In Keynesian Clunkers, The Inalienable Right to Secede
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This new proposal by Charles Schemer and Lindsey Scam for a “worker ID card” brings us closer to the communist paradise Barack Obomber dreams about.
There can be no doubt that giving government that kind of power will further diminish our liberty, and individuals’ private information and security will be compromised and violated by government officials. As U.S. Rep. Ron Paul has observed,
A national ID card will have the same effect as gun control laws: criminals will ignore it, while law abiding people lose freedom. A national ID card offers us nothing more than a false sense of security, while moving us ever closer to a police state.
If there must be “worker ID cards,” then with such things, the only way to protect our liberty, security and privacy is to have competing ID card production and distribution agencies handle those services.
The Mises Institute posted a 1992 article by the late Murray Rothbard, A Strategy for the Right, this week. It is quite a lengthy, somewhat informal article—part political analysis, part diary—summarizing how Rothbard had seen “the Right” develop throughout the 20th Century. He discussed conservatives and neoconservatives, but doesn’t really say much about the Republican Party, although he does do that in this other article he wrote two years later regarding the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” Had he lived another 15 years, Rothbard would have seen how conservatives lost their adherence to conservatism, and instead made the Republican Party their priority, as conservatives have done nothing but support Big Government, supposedly in the name of fighting terrorism. However, in the 1992 article, he does provide some insight from his own experiences with the Republicans:
One of the leaders was my friend Howard Buffett, Congressman from Omaha, who was a pure libertarian and was Senator Taft’s Midwestern campaign manager at the monstrous Republican convention of 1952, when the Eisenhower-Wall Street cabal stole the election from Robert Taft. After that, I left the Republican Party, only to return this year for the Buchanan campaign. During the 1950s, I joined every right-wing third party I could find, most of which collapsed after the first meeting. I supported the last presidential thrust of the Old Right, the Andrews-Werdel ticket in 1956, but unfortunately, they never made it up to New York City.
In my opinion, things haven’t changed much these last 50 or 60 years with conservatives and Republicans. They still support government-business mergers and protectionism, and Big Government in the name of this or that.
Thanks to the two Bush presidents, conservatives have been as responsible for the expansion of government and decline of our liberty as have the leftists. When rationalizing their end-justifies-the-means philosophy, the conservatives claim that “Times are different now—the Founders who wrote and approved the Declaration of Independence didn’t have to deal with Islamic terrorism, etc.” This is an example of the conservatives’ own moral relativism, that the Constitution is a “living, breathing document.”
In the 1950s, National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr. had abandoned what had been the conservatives’ mantra of limited government and national sovereignty in favor of Big Government with the powers to aggressively expand government’s military reach into foreign territories and surveillance of one’s own fellow citizens in the name of fighting communism. And in supporting those government intrusions and expansions, Buckley and his ilk became the communists they supposedly feared and detested.
And as the Buckley conservatives crusaded against communism, the modern Bush conservatives went on a jihad against Islamic terrorism, engaging in fear mongering as justification for more egregiously expanded governmental powers and intrusions. The terrorized pro-war electorate responded to the state-issued rhetoric like the Muslim radicals responding to their leaders’ anti-American chants. At least, that’s how I see that.
Today’s conservatives are not “conservative.” Their priority is not conserving the traditional values and morality of our Founding Fathers. Otherwise, they would not have been following the path of socialism and government expansionism led by the two Bush presidents over these past 20 years.
Russell D. Longcore: The Secret Government That YOU Maintain
….The government rules over a man without his consent, therefore making him a slave. But the government occasionally allows the slaves to choose their masters by a majority vote. A man is no less a slave just because he is allowed to vote on his master every certain number of years. Men are slaves because they are state property, and their lives are controlled by other men whose power over them is absolute and without responsibility….
…States that contemplate secession should NOT use the Constitution as a template, but as the founding document NOT to use to create a “new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”….
Butler Shaffer: Running on Empty
…For various reasons that go beyond a principled criticism of our centrally-directed, vertically-structured society, the institutional order is in a state of turbulence. Political, corporate, and educational systems are increasingly unable to meet even the most meager of popular expectations. Our world is becoming more and more decentralized, with vertical systems being challenged – and even replaced – by horizontal networks governed by autonomous and spontaneous human activity. In the face of such changes, the establishment has become desperate to reinforce its crumbling walls. Because the state is defined in terms of its monopoly on the use of violence, it is not surprising to see it escalating the use of brute force in an effort to maintain its position…..
Kelley Vlahos: Liz Cheney Wants to Keep America Safe
….Sadly, her recent transformation from unremarkable State Department political appointee to emboldened jihad hunter and curiously aggressive television pundit, has that cynical whiff of someone trying to position herself for political office. “It’s time for us to stand up and take this country back!” she declared, echoing, almost flatly, the same sentiments from eager pols Marco Rubio and Rep. Jim DeMint earlier that morning…..
Gary North: Gold Money: Power to the People
…The crucial power to restrict the growth of bureaucracy is the power of the veto. This power used to be imposed by juries. This became the great threat to the power of bureaucracies. This is why they began to substitute administrative law courts for civil courts. There are no juries in administrative law courts.
….The international trade system, 1815 to 1914, rested on an agreed-upon gold standard by major nations. They agreed to redeem their nations’ currencies in gold coins.
This kept power in the hands of the people. The person holding a receipt from a bank or a bank note could demand gold coins for these paper receipts. The veto power was in the hands of citizens….
….It ended in the United States in 1933, by Roosevelt’s Executive Order. He confiscated the people’s gold at $20 an ounce. Then, in 1934, he hiked gold’s price to $35.
That act of national theft unshackled the bureaucrats….
…The great winners have been the bureaucrats. They have escaped vetoes by governments, because governments have escaped the public’s vetoes that were created by gold-redeemable currencies.
This is why all big-government politicians and their obedient, salaried intellectuals hate anything even remotely resembling the nineteenth-century gold standard….
Stephan Kinsella had this particularly informative post responding to Sheldon Richman’s suggestion, in addition to opposing using the word “capitalism” to refer to “free markets,” to oppose capitalism because of the “business-government collusions” that the word “capitalism” supposedly connotes. Stephan also links to Bryan Caplan’s disagreement with Sheldon. I disagree, too. Stephan posted that post on the Mises Economics Blog, and here are the bunch of comments there including further comments by Stephan and Sheldon.
If you want to learn and understand the concepts of “capitalism” and “free markets,” you should check out all those links and read the discussions and comments. If you’re an economics student (formally or informally), don’t bother buying any textbooks, you’ll get much more out of those discussions.
In my opinion, if “Capitalism” is defined as “private ownership of the means of production,” then “private ownership” already includes recognition of individual rights and “free markets.” Because Natural Laws include protection of those rights: “don’t steal,” “don’t aggress against others,” etc.
If you really need an “ism” replacement for the word “capitalism” to describe “free markets,” then how about just “voluntarism,” although, while that word refers to “free from coercion,” that doesn’t seem to contain a “private property” aspect.
Perhaps “privatism” could accomplish describing both associations and markets that are free from coercion and free from external intrusions. In Wikipedia’s description of the word “privatism, ” it notes, “privatism is the concern with or pursuit of one’s personal or family interests, welfare, or ideals to the exclusion of broader social issues or relationships.” However, while “to the exclusion of broader social…” could be meaningful, it is more accurate to refer to “not permitting of or protection from external intrusions (trespassing, aggression, etc.).”
Glenn Greewald refers to neocon Bill Kristol as a “fear-mongering smear artist” along with VP Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney. I didn’t know he was an artist, but honestly, if Kristol is so bad in his canvas painting it actually frightens people, perhaps he should give it up.
On his blog yesterday, Greenwald compared Kristol and Cheney to Sen. Joseph McCarthy of the notorious McCarthy hearings, in which alleged “communist sympathizers” such as Hollywood elites were being “blacklisted,” and in some cases criminally prosecuted. That was the origin of the term McCarthyism. Greewald noted how Edward R. Murrow in the 1950s was critical of McCarthy on Murrow’s TV show, and how CNN’s Wolf Blitzer’s treatment of this issue is a “full-scale collapse from Murrow,” as far as journalistic integrity and objectivity are concerned.
….By contrast, Wolf Blitzer — receipient of an Edward R. Murrow award — sees such smear campaigns as nothing more than an “intense debate” to neutrally explore and excitingly promote. The last thing I would ordinarily do is watch a Wolf Blitzer broadcast, but I knew that this was going to be a heinously illustrative episode in modern political journalism — at best the vile McCarthyite campaign was going to be presented in the standard “each-side-says” format which defines modern journalistic ”objectivity” — but it was far worse than even I expected…..The two segments, from start to finish, were constructed based on the exact McCarthyite narrative Cheney and Kristol puked up, and although Blitzer did note that even some Bush officials found the ad to have gone “too far,” the entire 30 minutes of broadcast time — both when the story was repeatedly previewed and when it finally appeared — continuously reinforced the smears with both graphics and Blitzer’s words….
To me, this is just another example of what American journalism has become, as the news reporters, anchors and editors, and, yes the Roto-Writers of the New York Times, just do not comprehend the concept of objectivity. Many of them are shills for the Democrat Party, or just are products of government-run schools and have been brainwashed to worship the State (whether the State is led by Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives). When there are more “Tea Party” protests—and there will be—I hope that the state-shilling news media don’t, as Murrow said, “confuse dissent for disloyalty.”
William Grigg: Police Abduction By Quota
A few months ago, Zebulun and Elijah Colbourne were among five New York City teenagers arrested and held overnight in jail in order to fill an official quota. The citation claimed that the teenagers, who had been racing in the sidewalks, were engaged in “tumultuous and violent conduct that caused public alarm.” They were given a summons, handcuffed, and held in a cell before being released the next morning without further action…..
….Adil Polanco, a five-year veteran of the NYPD’s 41st Precinct in the Bronx, confirmed to WABC that police are under relentless official pressure to make arrests and issue summonses in order to meet arbitrary quotas.
“We are stopping kids walking upstairs to their house, stopping kids going to the store, young adults … [i]n order to keep the quota,” discloses Officer Polanco. “Our primary job is not to help anybody, our primary job is not to assist anybody, our primary job is to get those numbers and come back with them.”….
In AWOL in the Bunning Battle, NRO’s Andy McCarthy recognizes how the Republicans are not serious about dismantling Big Government, or preventing the Soviet Health Care proposals that President Obomber wants to force on us.
….Democrats know the electoral setbacks will only be temporary. They are banking on the assurance that Republicans merely want to win elections and have no intention of rolling back Obamacare, much less of dismantling Leviathan.
For my money (while I still have some), that’s an eminently sound bet. The Bunning battle, in which the GOP was nowhere to be found, is the proof….
….. Even if the GOP gets a majority for a couple of cycles, even if President Obama is defeated in his 2012 reelection bid, Obamacare will be forever. And once the public sees that the GOP won’t try to dismantle Obamacare, it will lose any enthusiasm for Republicans….
I hope so.
Now if we can only get McCarthy and the NR crowd to recognize the Soviet-like Leviathan Big Government that George W. Bush’s military socialism has given us, that is also destroying America.
On the Lew Rockwell Blog, Laurence Vance asks if any Republicans believe in a free market in health care:
That is, no medical licensing laws, no mandatory insurance, no FDA, no Department of Health and Human Services, no Medicare, no Medicaid, no SCHIP, no National Institutes of Health, no restrictions on the sale of medical devices, no federal laboratories, no federal funding of community health centers, no federal grants for medical research, no federal funding of clinical trials, no community rating laws, no federal databases, no special privileges for the AMA or Big Pharma, no restrictions on organ sales, no federal nutrition guidelines, no federal vaccination programs, no HIV/AIDS prevention initiatives, and no federal mandates, controls, or regulations of any kind.
Any Republican in favor of any of these things is not in favor of a free market in healthcare.
….While American politicians and intellectuals have not reached the depths of tyrants such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler, they share a common vision. Tyrants denounce free markets and voluntary exchange. They are the chief supporters of reduced private property rights, reduced rights to profits, and they are anti-competition and pro-monopoly. They are pro-control and coercion, by the state. These Americans who run Washington, and their intellectual supporters, believe they have superior wisdom and greater intelligence than the masses. They believe they have been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Like any other tyrant, they have what they consider good reasons for restricting the freedom of others. A tyrant’s primary agenda calls for the elimination or attenuation of the market…..
Meanwhile, Gary North fisks David Frum’s hatchet job(s) of Ron Paul:
….Ron Paul had once again caught Beltway conservatives by surprise. All they could do was spin their way around this. With the Web, this no longer works.
Ron Paul is most famous for his bill to audit the Federal Reserve. Frum was too savvy to mention this. That would identify him as an apologist for the FED, which is exactly what he is. So, he went after Paul’s view of gold as money. This, all good Beltway conservatives know, is safe.
Or was.
So let’s rediscover why it was that Americans abandoned the gold standard in the first place.
In 1929, the U.S. economy slumped into recession. Under the weight of a series of terrible decisions, that recession collapsed into the worldwide Great Depression.
Americans abandoned the gold standard because Franklin Roosevelt, on his own authority, announced that any American or resident in America who did not turn in his gold would be prosecuted. If David Frum is not aware of this, then he spent way too much money and way too much time getting a masters degree in history at Yale…..
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