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By Scott Lazarowitz, March 9, 2010 11:49 am

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…..

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By Scott Lazarowitz, March 9, 2010 5:00 am

“Just as war is the natural consequence of monopoly, peace is the natural consequence of liberty.” -Gustave de Molinari

March 9, 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

Check out the “Noteworthy Articles” and “Recommended Books” on the Right Sidebar.

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By Scott Lazarowitz, March 6, 2010 6:07 pm

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….

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By Scott Lazarowitz, March 6, 2010 9:59 am

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.).”

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By Scott Lazarowitz, March 5, 2010 1:29 pm

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.”

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By Scott Lazarowitz, March 5, 2010 6:28 am

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.”….

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By Scott Lazarowitz, March 4, 2010 11:02 am

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.

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By Scott Lazarowitz, March 4, 2010 6:43 am

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.

And Walter E. Williams adds:

….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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By Scott Lazarowitz, March 2, 2010 4:56 pm

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments today on a case involving the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the right to bear arms. It seems that the justices who heard a case two years ago, that decided that the right to bear arms is an individual right, are indicating that they’ll probably decide in that same general direction again with this case. This case is to do with whether citizens can challenge a local law that restricts 2nd Amendment gun rights as well as a federal law.

SCOTUS Justice Jean-Paul Stevens revisited his belief that the right to bear arms should apply to your home, but that it isn’t “a right to parade around the street with a gun.” Hmph. I think we’d be better off with a Justice Samantha Stevens rather than a Justice Jean-Paul Stevens.

Does Justice Stevens believe that our God-given right of self-defense applies to us only in our home, but not when we’re out in public? I think it’s time to change the Depends, Justice Stevens—you’re all wet on this.

(And I’m sure we know how Justice Sonia Sosomaybe will vote on this, given that she refused to say whether or not we even have a right of self-defense.)

BTW, Tom Goldstein predicts that Jean-Paul Samantha Stevens will be retiring after this current term, but that Ruth Buzzi Ginzburg will NOT retire.

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By Scott Lazarowitz, March 2, 2010 1:01 pm

I was influenced by philosopher Ayn Rand, author of the recently revived Atlas Shrugged, but in these later years I’ve learned more about her. I really didn’t know that the “Ayn Rand cult” was a….cult.  I was never a part of that or any kind of “cultish” organization. However, I still learned a lot about capitalism, private property, the power of the collective vs the rights of the individual, “faith vs reason,” etc. thanks to Rand’s writings and lectures. But I found these interviews of Ayn Rand by the very young but now 117-year-old Mike Wallace from 1959, and by the typically pretentious and supercilious communist-jerk Phil Donohue (at least Part 1 of 5 anyway) from c. 1980, and thought that others (and people who love nostalgic stuff) might find these of interest.