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By Scott Lazarowitz, March 12, 2010 12:58 pm

Yesterday on his radio show, Glenn Beck was talking about Ted Turner’s ownership of massive amounts of land, much of it in Montana, and having put it in a “trust” that, after his last child dies, will then be in the hands of government. One of his radio show cohorts made the point that people should do whatever they want with their own private property.  But in this report by LandReport.com,

Turner’s ultimate plan? According to published reports, after his death the properties will go into a trust, which his five children will manage until the last one passes away. At that point, the trust will revert to the Turner Foundation, an Atlanta-based charitable organization that Turner founded in 1990 to preserve the environment.

This suggests that all that land won’t end up in government’s control. However, Beck seemed to be referring to Turner’s involvement in the Environmentalism Movement, and that Turner may have ulterior motives. This FOXNews report notes,

Mike Phillips, executive director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund, a Turner offshoot, insisted his boss is just a “doggone serious rancher,” though one dedicated to preserving the environment.

But Phillips’ very presence is making people wonder. He once worked with The Wildlands Project, an environmental group that wants to create a continent-wide network of nature preserves to save endangered species. The Turner Foundation, the charity arm of Turner’s empire, has contributed money to it and gives millions to dozens of other environmental groups.

Turner’s organizations also have been in discussions with the World Wildlife Fund and the World Conservation Union about conserving bison. The groups have expressed interest in developing a huge park where bison could once again roam the Great Plains.

The FOXNews report also noted that one “conspiracy theory” is that Turner is trying to get control over “the world’s largest underground water system,” known as the Ogallala Aquifer.

Hmmm. He must be really thirsty.

If there really is the possibility that the federal government might end up “owning” even more land than it already illegitimately owns, what does that mean? That means that there would be even more land under the control of even more government bureaucrats, politicians and special interest groups, none of whom had participated in any purchases of any lands and therefore have no legal or moral right to control any such land.

Who knows what any possible future government ownership and control of all that Turner land might include. Could those government officials use such land for future “terrorist detention facilities (and torture chambers)”? Like a “Montana Gitmo”? And, if so, how do we know if a future Marxist Administration, much like the Marxists in the White House now, won’t be designating Tea Party protesters and otherwise “anti-government” types as “enemy combatants” and “terrorists”?

This is one of the many problems we face with the compulsory territorial monopoly of government whose rule over all others is always by temporary caretakers. If only we could get ownership of all property out of the hands of illegitimately formed, monopolistic institutions such as government, and keep the ownership and transfer of property only among private individuals.

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By Scott Lazarowitz, March 12, 2010 5:00 am

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

March 13, 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 11, 2010 2:04 pm

So, while the crooks and fascists in Washington are scheming and conniving to ram a fascist-communist takeover of the medical system down our throats, it appears that, as noted here yesterday, the ignoramuses and nincompoops want to bring back the illegal immigration issue. It’s time for Obamnesty (again!). I don’t know what Ed Schultz (“Schuuuuuultz!!”) and Janeane Garoofaball think about that (as well as Harry Reek and Nancy Smelgrosi), but as Col. Klink would say to all of them: “Dis……missed!!”

This threat of medical fascism and gross invasion of liberty is what’s been on my mind, not immigration. However, if we must deal with that immigration issue, then here are my initial thoughts on that. Given that the federal government’s existence is illegitimate (The Anti-Federalists were right!), the only way to save America, at the very least, is decentralization. And with that, I say let the individual states handle the immigration issue (legal or illegal), and let the people of each state decide what’s best for their individual state, and get the federal government out of it.

Perhaps we should view this issue, as Stephan Kinsella has,  as a matter of private property rights and public use rules of public property. Or, Hans-Hermann Hoppe has compared the migration situations in a monarchy versus that of a democracy. Unlike in a society under monarchical rule, in which the king owns all the territory and therefore has a personal interest in the country’s long-term capital value, in a democracy such as ours, in which the territory is government- and publicly-owned, the “temporary” rulers have no personal  interest in the country’s long-term capital value but do have short-term interest in getting votes in the next election:

What will a king’s typical immigration and emigration policy be? Because he owns the entire country’s capital value, he will, assuming no more than his self-interest, tend to choose migration policies that preserve or enhance rather than diminish the value of his kingdom.

As far as emigration is concerned, a king will want to prevent the emigration of productive subjects, in particular of his best and most productive subjects, because losing them would lower the value of the kingdom…..On the other hand, a king will want to expel his non-productive and destructive subjects (criminals, bums, beggars, gypsies, vagabonds, etc.), for their removal from his territory would increase the value of his realm…. On the other hand, as far as immigration policy is concerned, a king would want to keep the mob, as well as all people of inferior productive capabilities, out….

….in accordance with democracy’s inherent egalitarianism of one-man-one-vote, (temporary rulers) tend to pursue a distinctly egalitarian – non-discriminatory – emigration and immigration policy…. As far as emigration policy is concerned, this implies that for a democratic ruler it makes little, if any, difference whether productive or unproductive people, geniuses or bums leave the country. They have all one equal vote. In fact, democratic rulers might well be more concerned about the loss of a bum than that of a productive genius. While the loss of the latter would obviously lower the capital value of the country and loss of the former might actually increase it, a democratic ruler does not own the country. In the short run, which most interests a democratic ruler, the bum, voting most likely in favor of egalitarian measures, might be more valuable than the productive genius who, as egalitarianism’s prime victim, will more likely vote against the democratic ruler……In fact, such negative externalities – unproductive parasites, bums, and criminals – are likely to be his most reliable supporters…..

Hoppe also suggests a decentralizing of immigration decisions:

….The authority to admit or exclude should be stripped from the hands of the central government and re-assigned to the states, provinces, cities, towns, villages, residential districts, and ultimately to private property owners and their voluntary associations….

But Hoppe recognizes the improbability of such decentralizing, and notes:

…The best one may hope for, even if it goes against the “nature” of a democracy and thus is not very likely to happen, is that the democratic rulers act as if they were the personal owners of the country and as if they had to decide who to include and who to exclude from their own personal property (into their very own houses). This means following a policy of utmost discrimination: of strict discrimination in favor of the human qualities of skill, character, and cultural compatibility….

I can’t disagree with any of that, although I’m sure that Ed Schultz (“I know nothing—nnnnnnothing!!”) and Janeane Garoofaball probably do. However, I am a little pessimistic, and fear that the Obomber-Reid-Smelgrosi Regime will stick it to us again, with Obamnesty, fascist Hitlerian government medicine, and all the rest. We need more Tea Parties!

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By Scott Lazarowitz, March 11, 2010 1:07 pm

Here is a dramatization of how Bush, Obomber and Congress have been destroying our country:

And while Bush didn’t do this, unfortunately, here is what Obomber really ought to do:

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By Scott Lazarowitz, March 10, 2010 6:00 pm

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.

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By Scott Lazarowitz, March 10, 2010 1:03 pm

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.

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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 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.”