Worship of the MobSeveral months ago, I was visiting some friends in Sydney and was invited to the house of a friend-of-a-friend for some late night drinks and a chat. My host and his friends were left-wing bohemian types and had been informed by my friend that I am a "free-market anarchist," or something like that. They found this notion intriguing, and so they quizzed me on what that means, and this naturally led into a discussion of the merits of a free market versus a democracy.
The discussion ... (more)
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Pre-Election EuphoriaThe year before a presidential election is a period of great euphoria for the American people, for this is the period of time when presidential candidates are extremely nice to the American people.
And why not? They’re seeking votes. They’re seeking to be elected or reelected. They have to be nice.
This is the time when presidential candidates promise tax cuts and increases in welfare benefits. They promise to create jobs. They assure us that they&rs... (more)
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The State of the Union: Just Another Reality Show It looks just like a reality show that’s not going to be renewed for another season. President Obama’s State of the Union ratings are headed in the same direction as American Idol’s so far this season – down.
Let me make a secret confession right here. For years, the producer of my radio talk show and I would draw straws each January to see who would "have the high privilege and distinct honor" of watching the president’s State of the Un... (more)
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Leon Panetta's explicitly authoritarian decreeCBS News‘ Scott Pelley appears to be one of the very few American journalists bothered by, or even interested in, the fact that President Obama has asserted and exercised the power to target U.S. citizens for execution-by-CIA without a shred of due process and far from any battlefield. It was Pelley who deftly interrogated the GOP presidential candidates at a November debate about the propriety of due-process-free assassinations, prompting Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Michele Bachma... (more)
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The Three Biggest Lies the Government Is Telling You Government lies are legion.
So many are its lies, that narrowing them down to three of the most important is a demanding task. But our current crisis has been chiefly enabled by monetary policy, fiscal policy, and the global military empire. So I have chosen to focus on lies about each: the Federal Reserve, the orchestrator of monetary policy; the U.S. budget, the accounting of government fiscal policy; and a few of the Empire’s war lies. I am sharing just a ... (more)
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The Alleged Serving Size ScandalWhen you eat Oreo cookies, if you do eat Oreo cookies, how many do you eat? Three sounds sort of reasonable to me. Surely, after three, you have been "served." If I were a guest at someone's house and ate more than that, I would try to do it surreptitiously.
But of course, this is all subjective. Maybe you think one Oreo constitutes a serving, especially if eaten with the proper care and technique we all perfected in third grade. Or you could be like a typical teen and think that ... (more)
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The Statist of the UnionUnsurprisingly, President Obama’s campaign speech masquerading as the routine address to Congress, spelled out in the Constitution and known as the State of the Union, was saturated with every prevalent form of modern American statism--protectionism, corporate-liberal socialism, nationalism, and militarism. In a couple areas, however, he was particularly bold in his statist proposals.
Obama blamed “jobs and manufacturing . . . leaving our shores” for the poo... (more)
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Drowning In HypocrisyThe US government is so full of self-righteousness that it has become a caricature of hypocrisy. Leon Panetta, a former congressman who Obama appointed CIA director and now head of the Pentagon, just told the sailors on the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier, that the US is maintaining a fleet of 11 aircraft carriers in order to project sea power against Iran and to convince Iran that “it’s better for them to try to deal with us through diplomacy.”
... (more)
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The Invisible EconomyRobert Neuwirth is a journalist who is preoccupied with this question: What do people do when the state has made satisfaction of their wants, their natural desire to improve their lives, almost impossible?
Neuwirth would almost certainly not pose the question in quite these terms. On the one hand, he understands quite clearly that this is precisely what is going on — that it is the state that has put people in the position he describes so well. In his first book, Shadow C... (more)
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It's Treason to DisagreeA horrifying aspect of modern life is how nearly daily threats to fundamental freedoms and human rights require that citizens become politically aware and active.
Here we are struggling to put food on the table, cultivate a civilized private life, support things we care about, manage our households and otherwise meet all the challenges of modern life and then some jerk politician pushes some dangerous legislation that poses an all-out attack on everything we take for granted.
... (more)
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Rules of American justice: a tale of three casesDevelopments in three legal cases, just from the last 24 hours, potently illuminate the Rules of American Justice. First, the Justice Department yesterday charged a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, with four felony counts for having allegedly disclosed classified information to reporters about the CIA’s interrogation program. Included among those charges are two counts under the Espionage Act of 1917, based on t... (more)
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Western justice and transparencyOn Saturday in Somalia, the U.S. fired missiles from a drone and killed the 27-year-old Lebanon-born, ex-British citizen Bilal el-Berjawi. His wife had given birth 24 hours earlier and the speculation is that the U.S. located him when his wife called to give him the news. Roughly one year ago, El-Berjawi was stripped of his British citizenship, obtained when his family moved ... (more)
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The Rise of the Praetorian ClassMuch attention has been paid to the “disappearing middle class” and the “vanishing American Dream.” While the observations are largely accurate, they are also misleading. The traditional three-tier model of the upper, middle and lower class broadly categorizes people according to income and net worth. One significant problem with this model is that membership in any particular class is very much in the eye of the beholder. One man’s “scraping by” ... (more)
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Violating Rights in the Name of PropertyYou know that anti-piracy video you sometimes see at the beginning of movies? It explains how you wouldn't steal a handbag, so neither should you steal a song or movie by an illegal download. Well, it turns out that the guy who wrote the music for that short clip, Melchoir Rietveldt, says that his music is being used illegally. It had been licensed to play at one film festival, not replayed a million times in DVDs distributed all over the world. He is demanding millions in a settlement fee from ... (more)
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Conservatives versus Libertarians on Income Taxation The current debate over income-tax rates in the GOP presidential race highlights another major difference between conservatives and libertarians. It is a debate that involves moral, philosophical, economic, and practical issues. Most important, it is a debate over the meaning of freedom.
In the recent South Carolina debate, the candidates were asked what they would like to see as the top rate for the income tax. Four of the candidates responded as follows:
Rick S... (more)
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Weighing Planks in a Political ProgramI have noticed many progressives opposed to Ron Paul will say something like this:
"Ron Paul might be right on the drug war, bailouts of Wall Street, the war in Afghanistan, and civil liberties issues, but these are exceptions to an otherwise horrible program. Ninety percent of what he supports is terrible. People on the left should not support him just over a few issues." It fascinates me that anyone thinks this way. I am a shameless libertarian. I love the free ... (more)
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What Is the Point of My Libertarian Anarchism In college in the 1960s I was not a political person. Although I took a keen interest in politics, especially in the war that was raging in Vietnam, I concentrated on my studies, earning a living, and chasing women. After I began work as a professor, in 1968, I gravitated quickly from my collegiate New Leftism toward classical liberalism. As I learned more about Austrian economics, political economy, public choice, and history, I became increasingly libertarian (minarchist variety). My ... (more)
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Doing Your Own ThingThe idea of a society where people are free to "do their own thing" is an appealing one. It is implicit in the slogan "live and let live," which has been adopted by many libertarian groups, and it is also an idea that was central to the Marxist idea of liberation from the alienation of labor under capitalism (which is merely a natural result of the division of labor).[1]
This fuzzy notion, roughly understood, has been a central pillar of many opposing ideological visions of s... (more)
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Conservatives Are Socialists TooConservatives love to accuse President Obama of being a socialist. But as the old adage goes, when they point their finger at Obama, they’ve got three fingers pointing back at themselves.
Consider, for example, three of the biggest socialist programs in America: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. How many conservatives want to repeal those three programs? Hardly any. Almost all of them say they want to save these programs and simply reform them.
Now, ... (more)
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Who are the victims of civil liberties assaults and Endless War?In The Washington Post yesterday, Law Professor Jonathan Turley has an Op-Ed in which he identifies ten major, ongoing assaults on core civil liberties in the U.S. Many of these abuses were accelerated during the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11, but all have been vigorously continued and/or expanded by President Obama. Turley points out tha... (more)
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War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery ... and Fighting Back is "Aggression"The US Department of Defense recently promulgated a new “defense” guidance document: “Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense." I use scare quotes because it just doesn’t seem quite right to use “defense” to describe a document that — like its predecessors — envisions something like an American Thousand-Year Reich.
The greatest shift in emphasis is in the section "Project power despite Anti-Access/Area De... (more)
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10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the freeEvery year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.
Even as we pass ... (more)
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Nickle-and-Dimed in a Protection Racket"Thank you," said the clerk at the municipal court as she handed me back my credit card. I paid a ticket for one of the few "crimes" the police seem to exist to punish in my town: failing to come to a dead stop at a stop sign. This is, obviously, not the same as running a stop sign. No one is in endangered. No one is hurt. No one even notices except police looking for another way to collect taxes. But the charge is the same, regardless: $138.
I instinctively responded the same way... (more)
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Opposing Imperialism Is Not IsolationismWhen pundits and rival politicians call Ron Paul an “isolationist,” they mislead the American people — and they know it.
They know it? How could they not: Ron Paul is for unilateral, unconditional free trade. He believes any American should be perfectly free to buy from or sell to any person in the world. In that sense — the laissez-faire sense — he favors globalization, which, applied consistently, would require a worldwide free market. He’s su... (more)
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Ron Paul, Foreign Policy, and the Republican MainstreamOne of the most fascinating aspects of the Ron Paul campaign is the standard reaction of his opponents to Paul’s foreign-policy positions. They say that Paul's libertarian foreign-policy views are outside the Republican mainstream.
What is the Republican mainstream view on foreign policy? Here are its essential components:
1. Undeclared wars.
2. Wars of aggression — that is, wars in which the United States is the attacking nation.
3. Invas... (more)
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Liberals Love Their DaddyTwelve years ago, I wrote an article entitled “Electing Our Daddy,” which pointed out that every four years Americans go to the polls not just to elect a president bur also to elect a daddy, one who will take watch over them and take care of them, send them to their room when they put bad things in their mouths, force them to share with others, and protect them from the boogeyman.
Well, you’ll neve... (more)
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Don't Fear Iranian NukesIn his speech after the Iowa caucuses, Newt Gingrich warned that “an Iranian nuclear weapon is one of the most frightening things we have to confront.” He was criticizing the non-interventionist views of Ron Paul, but beyond the presidential campaign, we seem to have this bundle of assumptions overtaking the media and most political discourse: Iran is seeking nuclear weapons, and only an unreasonable person would think the U.S. should not do nearly anything to prevent Iran from achie... (more)
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More murder of Iranian scientists: still terrorism?Several days ago I referenced a controversy that arose in 2007 when the law professor and right-wing blogger Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds criticized President Bush for not doing enough to stop Iran’s nuclear program and then advocated that the U.S. respond by murdering that nation’s religious leaders and nuclear scientists. “We should be responding quietly,... (more)
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No Moral Standing to Complain about Iranian Conviction of American U.S. officials are objecting to Iran’s criminal conviction of an American for spying on behalf of the CIA. The Iranians have sentenced the American, 28-year-old Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, to death.
Unfortunately, however, the U.S. government has no moral standing to object to the conviction, given its longtime policy of foreign interventionism in Iran as well its own judicial misconduct since 9/11.
Consider the judicial proceedings in which Hekmati was convicte... (more)
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