Dinosaurs Need to Get With the Times

The New York Times now has its paywall in effect. It is extremely doubtful that it will last that long, as the newspaper with All the Fabrications that Fit on One Page has been such a propaganda rag for the State at a time when the State’s corruption and ineptitude is getting much exposure these days.

Business Insider gives tips on how to get around the Times‘s paywall, including deleting cookies and using different browsers, but I will not participate in suggesting ways to circumvent a business’s requirements for paying to use the business’s service. I’m not even sure if “IP” is the issue.

But the Times needs to get with the New Media, and new technologies involved with their publishing. They obviously still don’t understand how the Internet works. There are many other websites and blogs that often link to the Times’s articles, including my own blog.

At least I did. The Times needs to understand that when other blogs and websites link to the Times, that brings New Readers to the Times, which means new and more people viewing not just the Times’s articles but their Ads, which means greater number of clicks on their ads, which means more purchases of their advertisers’ products and services, which means more revenue for the Times – all provided for the Times, for FREE by these other websites and blogs linking to the Times! They need to stop being such dinosaurs, and they need to understand these new ways of doing things, and get with the times.

I stopped linking to the Boston Herald a long time ago  when I saw that they archive their articles after only 7 days and require you to pay to see their “older” articles. Why should I have a link to an article when a reader might see that post in two weeks and click on a link only to see that one has to pay to view the actual linked article? Obviously, I won’t be linking to the New York Times any more.

As for deleting cookies, I’ve been deleting cookies on the browser for years now, sometimes during Internet sessions, but usually when I’m finished and closing the browser. But deleting cookies on the browser during sessions is not a good idea if you’re in the middle of working on something in which you are logged in, because  the cookie that’s keeping your logged-in status recorded must stay in place while you’re doing your work or working on a post (unless you “save” your material thus far, before deleting cookies).

The reason I’ve been deleting cookies regularly is to protect myself from tracking cookies — many advertising websites now do tracking of your Internet browsing, and to do that they place a tracking cookie on the browser. But it’s even more than just tracking from which one has to protect oneself. In 2005 I had a crash course in all this stuff with my previous computer (actually, my computer ’01-’05 previous to my previous computer which is previous to my current computer), because of this spyware/malware/trojan/virus that ruined that earlier computer.

Since then, I’ve been using Firefox for a browser. However, the newest version of Firefox, FF 4, seems to be a big disappointment to many people, so I’m sticking with FF 3 for now. I also have Safari, but it just doesn’t have some of the features that I get from Firefox. (To even comment on Internet Explorer would be a waste of time.) But one thing that Firefox lets you do is prevent specific websites from placing cookies on your browser. You click on Tools>Options>Remember History (scroll down)>Use custom settings for history>Exceptions, and then type in the name of website whose cookies you want to block (e.g. “NYTimes.com”).

“War Powers” Arguments

The blogosphere is spastic with this raging argument between neocon talk show host Mark Levin and economic historian Thomas Woods (author of Rollback, Nullification, and Meltdown, among several other works), regarding the existence of a U.S. president’s Constitutional authorization to start a non-defensive war without Congressional approval. As usual, warmonger Levin apparently believes in unquestioned presidential executive (i.e. dictatorial) power to do whatever he wants to do, without anyone else’s approval and based on nothing but his own whim, and Woods has given Constitutional interpretations and historical cases to show that the Constitution does not allow the president to just start a war whenever he pleases. Some of their arguments can be viewed here, here, here, here, here, and here (so far).

But I have a different take on all that. First of all, if Levin actually believed in the original intent of the Founding Fathers, as many so-called conservatives claim to do, then he would understand the true meaning and wisdom underlying George Washington’s and Thomas Jefferson’s advice that our U.S. government keep itself out of other nations’ business, but not get in the way of free, private Americans’ right to travel and trade freely with and among others in foreign nations. There is a basic morality involved in such wisdom to which the politically-motivated and morally-compromised U.S. Constitution just does not adhere.

Because of internationalists, globalists, collectivists and statists of Levin’s ilk, the U.S. government’s military has been used for many, many decades primarily as the president’s personal army, carrying out the political agenda of a president’s typically narcissistic concerns of getting himself reelected, or getting members of his party elected. That’s the bottom line. That is what militarism in a democracy has given us: short-sighted political calculations, at the expense of long-term economic calculation and fiscal/societal responsibility.

Even Major Women Political Achievements Aren’t Enough to Change Things

Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman on a major-party presidential ticket, died on Sandra Day O’Connor’s 81st birthday. O’Connor was the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, representing another major achievement for women in America. Also, just the day before Ferraro died, Rep. Michele Bachmann announced her “exploratory committee,” i.e. campaign for the presidency. A bunch of coincidences? Probably. But will Bachmann win the presidency? Or will Bachmann win the nomination and lose to Obama? Or will Bachmann win the VP spot and end up like Ferraro, being on a losing ticket? Or will Bachmann not even get any nomination, and end up like Elizabeth Dole, or worse, like Patsy Schroeder in a weep-fest? Who knows.

Incidentally, while Geraldine Ferraro-Zaccaro was the first woman major-party vice-presidential nominee, she was not the first woman on a party ticket in a presidential election. In 1972, Tonie Nathan was the Libertarian Party vice-presidential nominee, with John Hospers as the presidential nominee. They received one electoral vote, making Nathan the first woman in U.S. history to receive an electoral vote.

Unfortunately, the LP has not gained any traction since then, in my opinion. In 1988, I voted for Ron Paul, and was extremely disappointed in his low vote count. Political parties are not the right way to go, that is, if you want to undo all the intrusions that government, especially the U.S. government, has inflicted Americans with in over 200 years of this country’s existence. What it will take is convincing people of the immorality, impracticality and counter-productivity of allowing a centralized compulsory territorial authority to have power over the lives and property of others, which gives the agents of the State the power to be above the law and have the power to use compulsion against others. The more people amongst the population who are made to be aware of these truths, the more who will withdraw their consent to being abused, beaten, raped, robbed, defrauded, bamboozled, exploited, expropriated, kicked around, banged up, tyrannized and violated.

Turning to politicians to solve things is not the answer.

The Fascist, Communist, Criminal Police State of America

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) reports that the Nazi federal government in Washington that owns our lives plans to study new anti-”terrorism” technologies (frankly, I’m terrified of this damn Nazi out-of-control criminal organization in Washington and what they’re doing to our Liberty, or what’s left of it! It is THEY who are the terrorists!), to use the same kind of “back-scatter” radiation-cancer-causing scanners and cameras on pedestrians and motorists on public streets that DHS describes as “a walk through x-ray screening system that could be deployed at entrances to special events or other points of interest.”

The material obtained from DHS (Department of Hitlers and Stalins) by EPIC also includes references to the corporate contracts, the special interests whose cronies would benefit from such egregious invasions of our privacy, our Liberty and our security. Those corporations include, according to Forbes, “Siemens Corporations, Northeastern University, and Rapiscan Systems.” Hmmm. More profits for Rape-scan and Michael Chertoff. These criminals are sick, and yes, they are criminals in Washington, including the war-starters Bush and Cheney, and the elder Bush who started all this, as far as I’m concerned.

According to the Forbes blog,

One project allocated to Northeastern University and Siemens would mount backscatter x-ray scanners and video cameras on roving vans, along with other cameras on buildings and utility poles, to monitor groups of pedestrians, assess what they carried, and even track their eye movements. In another program, the researchers were asked to develop a system of long range x-ray scanning to determine what metal objects an individual might have on his or her body at distances up to thirty feet.

This totalitarian police state scheme is primarily because of Bush, who could never have been elected to anything had his daddy not been a previous president, and Cheney, who has spent his entire adult life feeding at the public trough starting with being Donald Rumsfeld’s assistant in the 1960s (after flunking out of Yale and having to extend college for two extra years in Wyoming because of his poor academic performance, and after his drunk driving arrests, and getting draft-deferments so that he could later be called the “draft-dodging chickenhawk warmonger” by his many fans). And I’m not kidding about “feeding at the public trough.” Cheney, with the exception of his five years as Halliburton CEO and his years with those neocon think tanks (if you call it “thinking”), Cheney literally has been employed by government, or benefited from government contracts (via Halliburton, etc.) most of his adult life.

Obviously, the obsessive Security State Nazis have never read the Declaration of Independence, and do not have any understanding of the concept of presumption of innocence, Due Process and the right to be left alone by the government unless and until agents of the State have actual specific reason to suspect a specific individual of having committed a specific crime of theft, trespass or physical aggression against another specific individual or group (victim). Otherwise, people have an inherent inalienable right to be LEFT ALONE. I am so sorry that retards don’t understand that.

That means that we all (Yes, ALL, even including Muslims and Arabs, Ms. Geller. I know, that Helen is way out there. Oh, well.) have a right to go about our business, walking along the sidewalks or driving our cars, without our belongings being searched, or our bodies and vehicles being scanned, and without being asked for “our papers,” or even being approached by any agent of the State or by any police or military agent. I am sorry that some people just don’t understand these things.

As I noted in my Tea Partiers May Need the ACLU Soon, these conservatives and war supporters who have been supporting the past ten years’ police state, given to us by Bush and Cheney, and who supported the PATRIOT Act for purely emotional and fear-monger reasons and without actually reading through the bill, may soon regret their support for such idiotic and retarded anti-American, anti-freedom and anti-security policies, as such policies are surely to be used against them by all those lefty Cass Sunsteins who slither around in Washington looking for any excuse to pry, search, censor, oppress and who hunger for that police power they love so much. (“Liberals?” What a joke!)

Kevin Carson notes that it doesn’t even matter what the “law” is, as “law enforcement” (another joke) officials don’t really care what the actual laws are, and are really going to do what they please, what serves their need for more power over others, and  use “asset forfeiture” as an excuse to merely steal from their fellow citizens.

I think the “collective bargaining” fights in Wisconsin have been exposing exactly what America has become, this entitlement mentality in which “laborers” organize themselves to take what they want from the actual producers of society through the armed force of government. They have a right to your stuff, as do the National Security police state contractors who benefit from the police state contracts, as they are merely living off the same taxpayers and producers via the Pentagon and DHS’s own redistribution-of-wealth schemes.

And our Liberty is being burned to the ground by these criminals. And so is our security as well. We are literally less secure now, because we have these goddamn police intruders literally perpetrating crimes of aggression, theft, and trespass against presumably innocent people, with all these presumption-of-guilt schemes. It is the agents of the State who are the real criminals and the real terrorists. The criminal State. Don’t any of those people have a conscience?

The State vs. Christian Moral Values

March 21, 2011

© 2011 LewRockwell.com.(Link to article)

Political activist Kevin Zeese has this article about the U.S. military’s imprisonment and solitary confinement of Army PFC Bradley Manning, suggesting that when the U.S. government persecutes alleged whistleblowers in such a manner, it is a warning to all of us that we ought not even think about revealing the government’s illicit acts. And Laurence Vance asks the question, “Is Libertarianism compatible with religion?” describing the relationship between Christianity and the political philosophy of libertarianism. Both Zeese’s and Vance’s articles are transcripts of speeches they had given recently.

To me, libertarianism is the political version of the philosophy Live and Let Live, while Christianity, from my understanding of it, is the religious expression of that philosophy. My own basic philosophies are, “Do unto others what one would want others to do unto you,” and “Don’t do unto others what one would not want others to do unto you.”

I believe in the libertarian view that advocates a society of voluntary associations and contracts amongst the people, and not a society of compulsory associations and contracts. Behaving peacefully is important, as is respecting the rights of others. Those rights include the right of the individual to be free from aggression, which means one must not be permitted to violate anyone else’s person or property – no theft (or fraud), no trespass, no physical aggression (except in defending and protecting oneself against previously-initiated aggression by others).

The Bush crusaders (now the Obama crusaders) who wanted to push their will onto others in foreign territories have not been “Christian” in the aforementioned sense. And supporters of the government’s use of violence, military destruction of property, the murder of innocents and the territorial occupation of foreign lands, cannot honestly claim to believe in Christian moral values.

And those who are rightfully angered when criminals hijack planes and murder 3,000 innocent Americans, but then advocate or condone the U.S. government’s own murders of innocents (in fact, hundreds of thousands of them) abroad, cannot honestly claim to believe in the philosophy, “Don’t do unto others what one would not want others to do unto you.”

Sometimes I wonder, when it comes to some people’s view of patriotism, whether they are really loyal to our country of America or whether their loyalty is more with the government, right or wrong.

Now, the State is an institution of compulsory government, an institution of territorial monopoly in which the agents of the State have been given authority over the rest of the population. The State’s agents are not given authority through voluntary association or contract or the consent of those over whom State authority rests, but by compulsion. The State’s authority is enforced not by the Rule of Law but by the State’s own self-assigned officialdom and armaments, and threats of aggression.

The State’s existence is on the inherent institutionalization of trespass and aggression. If one’s loyalty is to the State, as opposed to being loyal to the Rule of Law and to moral values, then one’s loyalty to the State requires one to support acts by agents of the State that are immoral, thus un-Christian. Unfortunately, too many people, in their intellectual laziness and their passive, blind obedience to anything the State tells them, have accepted their government’s crimes against others (including against themselves, such as with the TSA and other domestic violations of person and property), in the name of “fighting terrorism,” or punishing people for using drugs or whatever.

It is very difficult for me to believe that someone who is Christian-minded and who believes in the aforementioned moral values could approve of a government knowingly apprehending and detaining totally innocent individuals at random as the Bush Administration had done for years following 9/11. Or the U.S. military’s and CIA’s indiscriminate drone-bombing murders of innocent Afghani and Pakistani civilians. Those who believe that’s okay but don’t believe it’s okay for Al-qaeda or the Pakistani government to fly remote-controlled drones over the U.S. and indiscriminately murder innocent Americans do not believe in the philosophy, “Don’t do unto others what one would not want others to do unto you.”

And how could true adherents to Christian moral values have approved of our own government during the early 1990s deliberately destroying Iraqi civilian infrastructure that damaged electrical, water and sewage treatment facilities, causing the Iraqis to have to use untreated water, and with the intention of causing disease and death? Which the U.S. military did do, followed by the U.S.-led sanctions that included withholding the materials needed for rebuilding the infrastructure, causing skyrocketing cancer and child mortality rates by the year 2000. This was the intention of the military, as told in the Washington Post in 1991, and by James Bovard in this article.

I frequently refer to that Bovard article and similar ones on the U.S. government’s treatment of Iraq during the 1990s, because we are rarely told the truth by the mainstream media. Sometimes, the truth needs to be extracted, especially out of secretive government bureaus, just as a dentist pulls a tooth. Yes, it is obviously that painful to most government and military bureaucrats for the truth to be revealed.

When dealing with an institution that relies on secrecy in order to cover up its immoral acts, alternative news sources and reporters are needed. Currently, the mainstream news media are well-entrenched with the State’s propaganda.

Remember, the truth shall set you free.

That brings me to the issue of Army PFC Bradley Manning, accused of leaking documents that exposed various acts of diplomatic buffoonery and corruption as well as alleged war crimes by the U.S. military, and more recently, accused of “aiding the enemy,” even though the military has not revealed exactly who the enemy is. The leaker didn’t leak documents to any foreign government, only to a media organization, and the military has acknowledged that no Americans stationed abroad and no Americans here in the U.S. are in any danger because of the leaked information. And there are many questions as to whether or not Manning is the actual leaker.

If Manning actually is the document leaker, then he certainly couldn’t have done that out of any loyalty to foreign governments, and probably didn’t do it with any particular criminal intent. The leaks were most probably out of loyalty to America, a nation that purports to be one of Liberty in which the people were intended to have authority over their government, and not the other way around. America was intended to be a nation whose foundation rests on the morality of presumption of innocence and Due Process. Those American values are much in sync with the aforementioned Christian values.

But how can anyone who believes in Christian values approve of the kind of imprisonment, solitary confinement, sleep deprivation and forced extended nudity that Bradley Manning has had to endure for many months, especially when he has not been tried nor convicted of any crimes?

And, if he is tried and convicted, what are the crimes that he would be convicted of? Harming Americans’ security? The government has already stated that no leaks have put any American or soldier in harm’s way.

No, the real crime that has been committed has been that of exposing the crimes of the State, pure and simple. In an authoritarian society, that is the kind of “justice” one can find, and it certainly isn’t Christian or moral. Over the past century, many more crimes have been committed by States, not in the name of religion but in the name of democracy or other political world view, including by the U.S. government – murders of innocents, theft and destruction of property, counterfeiting, violations of basic civil liberties – than could ever have been committed by private individuals or groups outside of the government sector of societies.

When the government uses a whistleblower soldier such as Bradley Manning in such an inhumane way for the purpose of warning the rest of us that we all had better be good, obedient sheeple regardless of the government’s crimes against us and foreigners, then it is probably time for the people to actively work to restructure the society and remove that kind of armed officialdom from such an immoral agency.

The current statist society of institutionalized violence and destruction under authoritarian State rule should be replaced by a libertarian, Christian society of peaceful people, acting voluntarily amongst one another, in which everyone – including agents of the State – must follow the Rule of Law.

Former Libertarian Gene Burns Recovers From Fall

One of my favorite talk radio hosts of all time (besides Jerry Williams of course) is Gene Burns. Gene was on WRKO in Boston and, with Jerry Williams (1923-2003) of course, kept WRKO #1 in the ratings for years in Boston radio, mostly during the 1980s. Talk radio now ain’t what it used to be, that’s for sure. But for over 15 years now Gene has been on KGO in San Francisco, his show from 7-10 pm PT, with the usual high ratings. However, he hasn’t been on his show for several months because of a fall he had that hurt his back and caused some bleeding in his brain. After rumors that he was leaving his show, he apparently won’t be leaving and will resume when he’s feeling better. Gene Burns has a history of medical problems and is 70 now. He made an appearance last week on his show filled in by Pat Thurston.

(UPDATE: Gene Burns is now on AM 910 KKSF in San Francisco.)

(UPDATE II: Early 2012, Gene had a stroke and has not returned to his show on KKSF.)

(UPDATE III: May 25th, 2013: Gene Burns died.)

If you’re familiar with Gene, you might know that he briefly was the Libertarian Party nominee for president in 1984, but withdrew because, as he stated at the time on his radio show, he didn’t like the way the LP hierarchy were running things (because they were pinheads, and still are — duh!). During the 1980s, Gene was a “principled libertarian,” being the most pro-private property, pro-freedom-of-association and pro-freedom-of-contract speaker I had heard. (In fact, in 1984, Gene Burns was quite enthusiastically endorsed for president by none other than Murray Rothbard!)

But Gene is not so much a “principled libertarian” in recent years, I’m sorry to say. In 2008 Gene Burns announced that he was frustrated with the LP, as it had “failed to gain meaningful traction,” and because he couldn’t “sit this one out secure in my Libertarian bubble,” he re-registered as a Democrat, and, while it doesn’t state it in his announcement, I believe he said he voted for Obama for president. I had also heard him in the last year say things like, “we need some form of nationalized health care,” and so on. In other words, Gene went from being that principled libertarian that I had learned so much from during the 1980s to, well, a left-winger, quite frankly, and it’s been disappointing, and it’s very sad. Others have noticed the changed.

However, I also heard Gene say in the past year, on the podcasts I had heard, many views that favor personal responsibility, such as leaving people alone on the roads who had not done anyone else any harm (such as “drunk drivers”), but cracking down on drivers whose recklessness actually did cause others harm, including teenagers. He also reiterated his support for “exiling dangerous people,” as in his suggestion during the 1980s of sending dangerous criminals off to some island and letting them fend for themselves (as an alternative to the State-imposed death penalty). So, there’s still hope in some ways.

Anyway, it sounds like Gene is recovering from his accident and will return to his radio show in San Francisco. He’s only 70, after all. These days, 70 is actually still quite young, as opposed to a few decades ago when 70 was still considered “old.” My Grandma Sylvia lived to be in her mid-90s with no major health issues, and passed away only a few years ago. Longevity is a good thing, if you’re in good health that is, but not so much if you have to deal with a lot of pain and suffering. Also, I occasionally listen to Steve LeVeille, the overnight host on WBZ in Boston, early in the morning, and on some occasions on Friday mornings during the 4-5 am hour, “Generosa from Peabody” calls in. She’s 98 and turns 99 in August. There’s a photo of the two of them together at a gathering. It’s nice to hear her call the show and give an update on what she’s doing.

If Gene Burns wants to return to radio, maybe he can consider returning to Boston, and see what the lefty nutsos like Deval Patrick and “Mumbles Menino” are doing to Massachusetts — I’m sure that will cause Gene to return to his libertarian way of thinking.

Yes, Beck Is an “Anarchist”

This morning on his radio show, Glenn Beck was talking about being accused by Media Matters of either being an anarchist or suggesting that the Founding Fathers were themselves anarchists. He did say that he had stated that he and/or the Founders were “two steps above” an anarchist. But in his perhaps too-lengthy clarification of that, he was describing “anarchy” as (paraphrasing) “turning over cars and setting them on fire and shooting the police,” etc.

Beck is not correct on the real meaning of “anarchy.” It literally means “no ruler.” In the more modern era, we can say that anarchy is the absence of a State, or a formal government, or maybe even more precisely, an absence of a formal, organized compulsory government. Theoretically (and in some areas of the world, they have existed), communities can make their own governments, but not make them compulsory, only voluntary organizations. In my view, that does not make a State, because I (personally) define a “State” as a compulsory government that usurps control over all those within a particular territorial area.

When Beck describes “anarchy” as “turning over cars and setting fire to them and shooting the police,” that says nothing as far as whether or not there is an absence of government, compulsory government or a “ruler.” More accurately, “turning over cars and setting fire to them and shooting the police” is criminality. Destruction of property and harming of human life is criminality. Criminals, psychopaths, aggressors and property invaders and intruders do those things, irrespective of whether there exists a State, or compulsory government, or a “ruler.” However, we have seen that the State as it exists today and especially for the past century, and its agents have been the most egregious violators of life, liberty and property ever in World History. And that’s a fact.

What we who advocate true freedom and a society that respects individual rights, private property and free markets in the absence of coercion and aggression, believe should exist is something called natural order, something that Hans-Hermann Hoppe has referred to quite a lot in his writing and lectures, particularly in his book, Democracy, The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy and Natural Order. Here is the Intro to that book at the Mises Institute.

The Bloated Defense Budget Just One Big Example of The Need To Oust Socialized “Defense”

Independent Institute Research Fellow and defense expert Winslow T. Wheeler has this op-ed in The Hill, The Defense Budget: Ignorance Is Not Bliss, in which he notes the ability of the federal government’s protection monopoly to propagandize its need for more socialist redistribution of wealth from America’s actual workers and producers to the much-entrenched military contractors. With the Establishment’s “hyperventilated rhetoric,” Congress has approved of plenty of boondoggles for the contractors and for the over-paid bureaucrats of DOD. But one thing has changed, says Wheeler, and that is the overly-statist-influenced public’s dwindling “aggressive ignorance” about the bloated defense budget, despite efforts of the bureaucrats’ intensive campaign for more, more, more. But while more people are becoming better informed about the huge defense budget, the Pentagon does not seem to be subject to an audit.

Besides being a research fellow at the Independent Institute, Wheeler is Director of Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information (now part of the Project on Government Oversight*) in Washington. The climax of his years as a Congressional staffer was his 2002 article under the pseudonym “Spartacus,” titled, Mr. Smith Is Dead: No One Stands in the Way as Congress Lards Post-September 11 Defense Bills with Pork, after which he was asked by Republican staffers of the Senate Budget Committee to resign. No surprise there. At least 99% of members of Congress don’t like their self-centered hoggishness and gluttony for feeding at the public trough exposed. Shoot the messenger.

Wheeler wrote the book, Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security in 2004.

But as Hans-Hermann Hoppe has noted, and several times, with democracy the temporary rulers have no incentive to actually serve the needs of the taxpaying public, and tend toward short-sightedness when it comes to their use (or misuse) of public assets. The public trough is “everybody’s,” so let’s get as much of it while we can. And this applies to all three branches of government, “the House, the Senate, and the President,” as Sen. Chuckles Schumer would say.

Especially the President and his executive branch. The wars of the last 60 years have been the executive’s wars, and have not had formal Congressional approval. But as with the elder President Bush’s first Iraq War of the early 90′s, which really got the ball rolling as far as starting the U.S. government’s campaign of provoking the Muslims in foreign lands to be against the U.S. (as a bogyman replacement for the commies who went down in flames at that time), the younger Bush’s wars were in the name of “political capital” for his reelection bid. Saddam was the bogeyman for both Bushes, and now Gadaffy will be the one for Obama’s “political capital.”

In an interview with the Global Beat, a Boston University publication, Winslow Wheeler was asked if it really mattered that the Bush Administration “exaggerated” (i.e. “lied”) about Iraq’s alleged threat of weapons of mass destruction, and he replied that it does matter, but that Congress will not substantively investigate the matter. He also noted how unprofessional the Press has been throughout this post-9/11 “War on Terrorism”:

But the press in this country has been demonstrating in the last decade or so that it has forgotten how to be professional. The press is atrocious on defense and national security issues. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, I pretty much gave up on most American newspapers. There were some journalists who did good work, but I pretty much found the European press to be far more informative about Iraq than the American press. Case one is the Jessica Lynch story. The American press bought the DOD story hook-line-and-sinker. It took the BBC to research it, and the U.K. press to come out with the expose. The American press still hasn’t figured out what to do with it. It is pitiful. I am not optimistic that anybody in this country is going to get to the bottom of it and do some work that will change public opinion about it.

And on the Bush Administration’s case for Iraqi WMD:

If the president had wanted to make that case, he should have. But that is not the case that the president made. The case he made was that Saddam was a threat to us, and that the threat was weapons of mass destruction. That is the case he made. I am not particularly interested in a president who presents a disingenuous case for going to war. Even if you support president Bush, why should you believe him? It has all sorts of consequences. The people who wanted to go to war with Iraq are saying that it is not a big deal, and that (Saddam Hussein) was horrible to his own people, and that justifies the war. Well, that is not what they were telling us. We could see that he was a son-of-a-bitch, but that is not what they built the war on. They built the war on weapons of mass destruction.

GLOBAL BEAT: So the issue is credibility?

Winslow T. Wheeler: It is one of ethics. If you don’t have ethics, you have no credibility.

On the credibility of the nation’s unnecessarily and misguidedly centralized “national defense” monopoly, the Washington Post‘s series last year showed that the DOD has no credibility. (I’ve linked to it here before, but am always glad to do it again, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)

What really has no credibility, and that I will continue to write about in this space, is the system we have, that of monopolized and centralized territorial protection. It doesn’t work. People just don’t realize that our so-called national defense in Washington is a socialist scheme. Economically, the means of production of defense are seized by the federal government, and it is “socialist” because it is a system of public-(or, more accurately, State-) ownership of the means of production in security. Socialism just doesn’t work in any endeavor of life – zilch. For efficient service in anything, there needs to be private ownership (and control) of the means of production, including the labor, and there needs to be competition in the free market of such services for genuine incentives to exist.

Socializing and monopolizing territorial protection and security has time and again motivated the monopolists to use the monopolized military apparatus as a means of provoking the inhabitants of foreign lands, thus constantly creating new reasons for the bureaucrats and parasites to feed off the productivity of the society’s workers.

Related articles for further reading:

The Production of Security, by Gustave de Molinari, contrasting the counter-productive communistic monopolization of security vs. the efficiency and peace that competitiveness  encourages in the free production of security.

Foreign Aggression by Linda and Morris Tannehill, (from their book, The Market for Liberty), describing the free market, private (i.e. honest, without socialist enslavement) alternatives in territorial protection.

Iraqi Sanctions and American Intentions, by James Bovard, on the 1991 example of how the monopolists in territorial security lose control of their judgment and engage in egregiously evil behavior, such as, in this instance, the U.S. military’s intentional destruction of civilian Iraqi water and sewage infrastructure for the purpose of “undermining civilian morale.” In my opinion, only utter idiots (and truly bad people) would engage in such treatments of other human beings, the idiots we find in a centralized bureaucracy such as DOD.

Entering the Soviet Era in America by Tom Engelhardt compares the current self-destruction of the American empire with the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, and discusses the “boundless military ambitions” of the Establishment led by GWB and his “Global War on Terror” and the “creeping giganticism” of the executive branch’s military and Pentagon expansion especially in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy by Murray Rothbard, on how America’s national banking cartel and the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street is what really funds these useless, counter-productive wars overseas whose only real purpose is to line the pockets of not only those parasitic defense contractors, but the financial elites as well.

The Living Reality of Military Economic Fascism, by Robert Higgs, with more on that revolving door between “private” business and government.

The Private Production of Defense (pdf), by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Hoppe suggests that the privatized alternative to State-monopolized “defense” would include insurance and responds to skeptics of such an unconventional, unusual idea.

No More Military Socialism by Murray Rothbard, (from his book, Power and Market: Government and the Economy) Excerpt:

It is all the more curious, incidentally, that while laissez-faireists should by the logic of their position, be ardent believers in a single, unified world government, so that no one will live in a state of “anarchy” in relation to anyone else, they almost never are. And once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary, then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as being in a state of impermissible “anarchy,” why may not the South secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighborhood? Each block? Each house? Each person? But, of course, if each person may secede from government, we have virtually arrived at the purely free society, where defense is supplied along with all other services by the free market and where the invasive State has ceased to exist.

* Updated in May, 2013 to reflect a 2012 merger.

Fight Back!

I have written before (such as here) how it is time that people start standing up for themselves and their rights as human beings, and withdraw their support and consent of the totalitarianism that we are currently facing. One way is through nullification, and another is through state secession, as I have mentioned repeatedly here. I have even suggested (especially here) that people need to use the very apparatus of the State against the State itself, by bringing criminal charges against those agents of the State whose actions are criminally intrusive against their fellow people. Albert Jay Nock had this great essay on the Criminality of the State.

Well, on the LRC Blog today there are two good examples of all that now. Thomas Woods blogs that the town of Sedgwick, Maine has passed an ordinance in which citizens may “nullify” agricultural regulations associated with milk production and purchasing, and Woods quotes the press release, “Patrons purchasing food for home consumption may enter into private agreements with those producers or processors of local foods to waive any liability for the consumption of that food. Producers or processors of local foods shall be exempt from licensure and inspection requirements for that food as long as those agreements are in effect.” If people do not understand how all that is a big plus for freedom, then they do not understand why America was founded.

And also on the LRC Blog, Lew Rockwell blogs about several hundred citizens in England making a citizens’ arrest of a tyrant judge. The “anti-government” protesters were themselves taken away by police and arrested. Lew Rockwell quotes from the group’s leaflets: “We, the British People have a right to govern ourselves. That right has been subjugated as a consequence of acts of treason having been committed by the collective political establishment, aided and abetted by corrupt segments of the judiciary, the police, the Church and the civil service.”

And how about that treasonous U.S. government?

You betchya!

How the Constitution Enabled Socialism and Fascism in America

March 4, 2011

(link to article at Strike the Root)

Even though Barack Obama is still president, the conservatives are already suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome, as they constantly label Obama a “socialist,” just as the left continue to label George W. Bush a “fascist.” This is strange, given that Bush is also a socialist and Obama is also a fascist. Go figure.

But the more I have thought about these issues, the more I have realized there is not much difference between socialism and fascism. And with essentially total government control over every aspect of our daily lives, while America is presumably a “capitalist” society, it is really more communist than capitalist.

Now, “capitalism” didn’t originally refer to free markets and voluntary trade and commerce, as The Freeman editor Sheldon Richman has noted. And both socialism and fascism involve a nasty relationship between the State and the society’s wealth, property and the means of production. One refers to State or “public” ownership of property, wealth and the means of production (socialism), and one refers to State control of property, wealth and the means of production (fascism).

When you get right down to it, there is no actual private ownership of something without the right to control what is privately owned, and the right to be free from outside intrusions against that which is privately owned. Such intrusions used to be called “theft” and “trespass.” In other words, without 100% authority and sovereignty over their businesses and property, and under the Rule of Law that forbids such theft or trespassing – including by agents of the State – owners don’t really own their businesses and property.

As Richman has pointed out, we have never really had any kind of “free market capitalism” in America that would include genuine private property ownership and control. But the “capitalism” that we have had since America’s founding has been State capitalism, the enmeshment between private businesses and the State. (“Crony capitalism” and “corporatism” are different terms, with aspects very similar to, if not the same as, State capitalism.)

But I see America’s State capitalism as consisting of two parts: socialism and fascism. The fascism is in which private ownership of wealth and property exists (at least in theory) but the State really has the final word on how the people may or may not use or trade such wealth or property. And the socialism is through the State’s claiming ownership of private wealth through seizure (taxation) for redistribution, either directly with welfare programs or indirectly through protectionism or regulatory measures on behalf of the corporate special interests of those currently in power, which is actually a good way to describe fascism: indirect redistribution of wealth via State compulsion.

The moral decay that is so pervasive in America is a direct result of the State capitalism, socialism and fascism that have been institutionalized throughout our society. When one institutionalizes theft and trespass, and allows one segment of society – the agents of the State – to be above the law, one has institutionalized immorality and criminality.

So how is the current system different from communism, which is total State ownership and control of the means of production (including the people)? Can we ever get America to be the principled, morally sound society of freedom under the Rule of Law that the Founders envisioned?

Congressman Ron Paul has been emphasizing, especially in a recent C-Span interview, the “moral hazard” of various federal government intrusions. Dr. Paul speaks mainly of the moral hazard of central economic planning through the Federal Reserve’s control over our monetary system, the dollar, which Americans are compelled by law to use for trade and commerce, as well as the moral hazard of the Fed’s inflationary policies. But he has also discussed the moral hazard of government’s entitlement programs such as the nearly bankrupt and bankrupting Medicare, and now ObamaCare, and the irresponsibility underlying Keynesian economic policies of deficit spending and debts.

Many critics of ObamaCare, a recent moral hazard to come out of Washington, have labeled such policies as “socialized medicine.” But in reality, while it is socialistically funded through redistribution of wealth schemes, ObamaCare is essentially a fascist scheme, in which medical and insurance providers remain privately owned, but much of their control is seized by the State. In the case of ObamaCare, as with previous socialist/fascist intrusions by the State into Americans’ private medical and economic matters, the State capitalism aspect is the revolving door between private medical and drug company executives and some of their board of director members, and federal government agencies such as HHS, FDA, etc. The wheeling and dealing between these companies’ lobbyists and powerful members of Congress is one big example of the moral decay that State capitalism, socialism and fascism have wrought.

But how did such immoral schemes actually develop in America?

Since America’s founding, the growing centralization of federal power over the states was a major influence, and became an established blueprint for Total Federal Government Rule with President Abe Lincoln. During that time, besides winning his war in which the inhabitants of the South were then compelled through armed force to rejoin association in a federal union to which they did not want to belong, Lincoln further enslaved the people of the South, and the North (and the West), by instituting federal legal tender laws and the National Bank Act. This was despite the Founders’ arguing against paper money and warning that such policies essentially effect in debasing the currency and would cause economic turmoil. With the exception of big government centralist Alexander Hamilton, the Founders opposed central banks as well.

In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson, and his adherents in Congress and their special interest supporters on Wall Street along with the national cartel of Big Banks, wanted to solidify the federal stronghold over the workers and producers’ income and savings. Of course, they didn’t exactly put it in those words, but their new income tax and the creation of the Federal Reserve were to be the two new institutions that would do the job.

Despite the Founders’ warnings against government theft of private property, the income tax was the way to employ coercion and threats of violence against the people and compel them to do extra labor in order to serve the government, and was the collectivists’ way to institutionalize covetousness and fund the dreams of State expansionism of those in power.

The Federal Reserve was the further strengthening of centralized control over the people’s wealth, savings and income well beyond Lincoln’s National Bank Act and legal tender laws. Through the Fed’s compulsory monopolization of currency, new valueless money is printed out of thin air and circulated into the entire economic system, first to the biggest banks, their executives and the politically connected elites, and then eventually to the rest of us (that is, what’s left of it). Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s quantitative easing is a perfect example of that.

The Federal Reserve is essentially fascist, in that its compulsory powers control the people’s allegedly privately-owned wealth, but it is also a socialist redistribution of wealth scheme. As Murray Rothbard put it, well before Bernanke’s QE:

New money injected into the economy has an inevitable ripple effect; early receivers of the new money spend more and bid up prices, while later receivers or those on fixed incomes find the prices of the goods they must buy unaccountably rising, while their own incomes lag behind or remain the same. Monetary inflation, in other words, not only raises prices and destroys the value of the currency unit; it also acts as a giant system of expropriation of the late receivers by the counterfeiters themselves and by the other early receivers. Monetary expansion is a massive scheme of hidden redistribution.

How can our society possibly avoid becoming so morally bankrupt when that society institutionalizes government theft of private property and blatant involuntary servitude, not just through the income tax and other forms of compulsory taxation but through the government’s invasive regulatory trespasses and legal restrictions, as well as through government-usurpation of the people’s right to free trade and commerce with competing currencies?

The Unconstitutional Constitution

Actually, the American Founding Fathers were themselves unwitting ministers of socialism, fascism and communism, in that the U.S. Constitution they had signed on to and ratified specifically gave the Congress and the President monopolistic powers, and restricted private citizens from entering such endeavors. For example, the Constitution gives the federal government a monopoly in territorial protection, or “defense.” This is a socialist (or communist) scheme, in which the State owns the means of production in territorial protection, and the entire population are compelled by law to patronize this “service,” and forbidden by the State to use any other competing protection firms. As with any other State-mandated or State-protected monopoly, there is no incentive on the part of State agents for efficiency and true fulfillment of provision of such services, and especially when the funding for such services is not through voluntary exchange but by forced wealth expropriation of the people.

And the defense contractors of the “military industrial complex” have benefited from the Constitution’s natural consequences of military socialism and fascism, in which these supposedly privately-owned businesses’ lobbyists join the government-expansionist neoconservative think tanks to “convince” high public officials to start or expand wars overseas, for the sake of these politically-connected businesses being on the receiving end of redistributed wealth confiscated from the paychecks of middle-class workers.

The Washington Post series on the entire government security monopoly scheme has revealed (in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4) the natural outcome of the current out-of-control expansion and inefficiency that such a compulsory, non-competitive system is destined to become. As with all State usurpations of any of life’s endeavors, whether it is the provision of security, health care, banking, etc., the outcome of this constitutionally-mandated government-run operation has been counter-productive and has turned the force of the State against Americans’ Liberty, as well as their prosperity and their security. We are less secure and less safe because of the federal government’s centralization of security.

Unfortunately, many people just don’t seem to realize how the socialist and fascist intrusions of official State policies are at the very core of the destruction of property rights, civil liberties and inalienable rights of all human beings. The State’s ownership and control of the means of production in security have resulted in not only provoking foreigners to act against us, but have enabled the Feds via the PATRIOT Act, TSA, IRS, etc. to directly violate our Liberty. So many police powers now intimately permeate our private lives, persons, property and homes, despite whatever protections the U.S. Constitution theoretically provides.

But why this obsession with the Constitution, primarily by the conservatives, who claim to believe in the Founders’ “original intent”? The Constitution is a document of positive law, and goes against the Founders’ original intent.

It was the Declaration of Independence that truly recognized individual Liberty and the authority of the People over their governments, while the Constitution compromised those principles, and did nothing but ensure the empowerment of what would be an always growing centralized armed bureaucracy. But rather than having a nation of voluntary associations and contracts amongst the population, the Founders abandoned the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and instead chose centralization of power and federal enslavement of the people.

Unfortunately, the blind faith that so many people have in the Leviathan, despite its criminality, and the faith that people have had in the Constitution, as though it will protect them from government’s abuses despite the bureaucrats’ ignoring of Constitutional restraints, is beyond comprehension.

Despite whatever protections of private property the Constitution allegedly provides, and despite its assertion of the people’s right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, given over 200 years of history, the Bill of Rights might as well state that “The government may take your property at whim,” and “There is no right to be secure in one’s person, papers, houses and effects.” Hence the recent passage in the House of the extension of the PATRIOT Act, in which everyone’s property, bank accounts, homes, and emails are fair game for any parasitic intruder.

Americans must recognize that the Constitution’s economic consequences of socialism and fascism are schemes that involve the direct violations of life, Liberty and property.

And culturally, Americans’ permitting such immoral acts of theft and trespass by the State has turned America into a country of widespread criminality ranging from street-level crimes to the Establishment crimes committed by Wall Street, the military-industrial complex and especially the government, as well as a country of dependence and discouragement of personal responsibility.

The Anti-Federalists instinctively knew that State monopoly and a compulsory federal government with armed power could never be restrained once such a regime was established. Alas, instead of the free and prosperous society of voluntary exchange and individual liberty under the Rule of Law that the Jeffersonians envisioned, the Hamiltonian statists and centralists triumphed. The end of America began at its beginning.

Let us have a society of genuine “free market capitalism,” one that protects voluntary associations and contracts, private ownership and control of wealth, property and the means of production, including a free market in competing currencies, and a society in which no one would be above the law – not police, not soldiers, no one. In such a society would be the removal of all socialist and fascist government intrusions and restrictions, removal of confiscatory taxation, monopoly of security and policing and all other State monopolies. In other words, a society of freedom.

In the News

I know, Christopher Glenn has passed away already, but that doesn’t mean we can’t say, “In the News.” In the news this week has been the Supreme Court decision regarding the Westboro Baptist Church “freedom of speech” controversy.

Mr. Phelps of the Westboro church and his fellow congregation members went to the funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq, and they picketed with signs mainly critical of U.S. government policies, but with the use of “vitriolic rhetoric,” including “Thank God for dead soldiers,” and “You’re going to Hell,” etc. The Supreme Court decided 8-1 that the picketers had a First Amendment right to picket with signs.

However, the real issue here that I hadn’t heard discussed at all on the talk shows, or in the news articles, and that I had to spend too much time reading the actual decision to find out, is whether the picketers were on private or public property. According to the decision,

The church had notified the authorities in advance of its
intent to picket at the time of the funeral, and the picket-
ers complied with police instructions in staging  their
demonstration.  The picketing took place within a 10- by
25-foot plot of public  land adjacent to a public street,
behind a temporary fence.   App. to Brief for Appellants
in No. 08–1026 (CA4), pp. 2282–2285 (hereinafter App.).
That plot was approximately 1,000 feet from the church
where the funeral was held.  Several buildings separated
the picket site from the church.  Id., at 3758.  The West-
boro picketers displayed their signs for about 30 minutes
before the  funeral began and sang hymns and recited
Bible verses.  None of the picketers entered  church prop-
erty or went to the cemetery.   They did not yell or use
profanity, and there was no violence associated with the
picketing.

Now, if the picketers were on cemetery grounds and the cemetery were on private property, then no, the picketers do not have a First Amendment right to be on that property to protest or express hatred toward the family of the war’s latest victim. They would have to be considered trespassers. But if the picketers were on public property — which they were — then of course they have a First Amendment right to express themselves.

If property is publicly owned then that means everyone owns the property and has a right of access to it. Public is everyone, and everyone is part of the public. This is one of the many problems and confusions that have been wrought by collectivism, socialism and communism, or any kind of “public ownership” of anything. It is a scheme that just doesn’t work.

There shouldn’t be all these time-wasting arguments going on — Americans need to have a better understanding of the difference between private and public property. Mr. Snyder, the father of the killed soldier, should not have even filed suit in the first place, given that he had only seen the tops of the signs but not read the content at the time, and only became aware of the content later that day while watching the news. In other words, he therefore could not have been the victim of “intentionally provoked distress” (my words) during his son’s funeral, distress supposedly caused by the Westboro people. I can’t see how the funeral itself was made more difficult for him than it was by the Westboro people if he wasn’t aware of their messages. I don’t think the funeral itself could’ve been made a difficult situation later that night.

And I think that Justice Alito’s lone dissenting opinion shows a misunderstanding of the First Amendment. Justice Alito needs to remember the old phrase, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Now, it is true that words can hurt people emotionally, but the point of having a free society is that physical aggression may not be initiated against anyone else. No one has a right to be free from their emotions being hurt.

Our Choice: More Government Intrusions and Mob Violence, Riots and Looting; or Decentralization and Freedom

I don’t know how much more I can stand all this doom and gloom regarding the future, and the economic outlook. Americans’ foolish continued dependence on the centralized federal Leviathan is what’s going to cause actual economic collapse, rioting and looting, social unrest and violence. The answer as far as preventing all that is staring us right in the face, and that is freedom, particularly just getting rid of the federal government.

The Anti-Federalists were right in that not only does having a centralized bureaucracy not help the society in any way, but inevitably, it can and will lead to (and is leading to) totalitarianism. That is what we already have now, but there are too many people, most of whom spend too much time sitting in front of the TV continuing their hypnosis or playing with their little texting/gaming gadgets, who just have this blind faith in the State no matter how bad it is, no matter how criminal it is, regardless of the State’s increasingly severe abuse of the people’s liberty and property. But why must we in the minority, who recognize the true inherently evil destructive behaviors and history of the State, suffer and be abused and enslaved because so many in the majority amongst the population are masochists?

The Economic Collapse Blog had a post on the various incidents recently of “mob robberies” and rioting and looting, as well as brawls in restaurants and retail areas during the holiday season. It doesn’t even appear that these examples have anything to do with the economic recession/depression or unemployment, just that they are examples of the general moral decline and reduced respect for the rights of others in America. In my opinion, that is all thanks to the growth of government, the criminality of the government and how so many people have enriched themselves via the powers of the State, from the big banksters, the defense contractors of the military-industrial-complex, to the professional politicians and bureaucrats (such as Barney Frank, Dick Cheney, etc.) who have never produced anything of actual value to others and who could never actually survive in a world based on totally voluntary contracts and without being parasites of the State.

The Economic Collapse Blog notes that “Frustration and anger are rising from coast to coast and millions of Americans are losing faith in the system.  The thin veneer of civilization which we all take for granted is already starting to disappear.  So what is going to happen when the economy collapses?  As our economic system fails, mob robberies and rampant looting are only going to become more common.”

“Losing faith in the system”? What system? Do you mean faith in a system of freedom, private property and individual liberty? Well, we haven’t had that in America. We have had State control of everything. People have had faith in the government — the State — to do this, that, and the other thing. But because of its compulsory and monopolistic nature, government has done nothing but screw up this, that and the other thing, actually everything it gets its grubby paws on, everything! Especially the federal government. How stupid the Founders were to cave to those who wanted a centralized bureaucracy with actual power!

One of the videos the Economic Collapse Blog included on that post was from the Rodney King riots, nearly 20 years ago. And that wasn’t really even to do with economic troubles, only racial troubles, in which the racist white police department got away with beating a black man. That in and of itself is disgusting, but nothing justifies going and destroying other people’s property, robbing people and looting stores and injuring and murdering people.

Of course, if neighborhood policing were not an activity monopolized by the State, and there were competing policing firms all held accountable under the Rule of Law, then none of that kind of crap would happen, and security agents would not get away with beating presumably innocent people. Only under a system of monopoly can that happen, because monopoly is inherently corrupting.

Now, regarding the economic collapse that the doom-and-gloomers are predicting, the Activist Post blog has this post on how the economic collapse is deliberately designed and is so designed in order to “reduce the population.” I think that’s a bit much, and that the current economic recession/depression is not designed by any one individual, group or organization, but, like the Great Depression, it is occurring through various situations including mostly the incompetence and the “fatal conceit” of government officials. Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke are control freaks, and they have been given huge compulsory powers as agents of a State-run bureaucracy, the Federal Reserve. But as with the usual results of other compulsory State bureaucracies, everything they do results in the opposite of what they intend. They and their fellow statist nincompoops in Washington live in a total fantasy world. “They’re out there,” as Jerry Williams used to say.

The real answer, and how to prevent further economic collapse and to reverse what is happening, is freedom. Even just decentralizing America by abolishing the federal government completely, abolishing all its monopolies especially in territorial protection and the production and issuance of currency, will free up the country a great deal. If each state had its individual independence and sovereignty as is the inherent right of any people within any given territory (the right to not be compelled to be dependent on any centralized federal bureaucracy), then, if the people of any given state did not like the intrusions of their own individual state government, then they can abolish the state government as well, and let each city and town have its own independence and sovereignty as well.

The more decentralized a territory, the more free and independent the people are.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe addressed these ideas in his great book, Democracy: The God That Failed. Prof. Hoppe noted in that book that, given the choice (not that we have the choice right now), a society with many smaller states is preferable — and certainly freer and more prosperous — than a society of one centralized State, i.e. the federal authoritarian government dictatorship that we have now. Prof. Hoppe made this point in this interview.

It is said, for example by the bureaucrats of the European Union in Brussels, that economic prosperity has increased dramatically with increased political unification. In reality, however, political integration (centralisation) and economic (market) integration are two completely different phenomena. Political integration involves the territorial expansion of a state’s powers of taxation and property regulation. Economic integration is the extension of the interpersonal and interregional division of labour and market participation. In general, the smaller a country and its internal markets the more likely it is that it will opt for free trade.

I think that a world consisting of tens of thousands of distinct countries, regions and cantons, and hundreds of thousands of independent free cities such as the present-day “oddities” of Monaco, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Hong Kong, and Singapore, would be a world of unprecedented prosperity, economic growth, and cultural advancement.

One of the economically most prosperous nations however is the United States, which is a big country.

Yes, in fact there is no direct relationship between territorial size and economic prosperity. Switzerland and Albania are both small countries, while the U.S. and the former Soviet Union are large. However, there is a highly important indirect relationship. Smallness contributes to moderation. In principle, all governments are counterproductive in taxing and regulating private property owners and market income earners. A small government, however, has many close neighbours. If it taxes and regulates its own subjects visibly more than its neighbours it is bound to suffer because people will “vote with their feet”: they will leave to live and work elsewhere. And they need not go far to do so….

It is assumed that larger political units – and ultimately a single world government – imply wider markets and hence increased wealth. However, this is untrue. The larger the territories the lower a government’s incentive to continue its domestic liberalism will be because people will lose the possibility of voting with their feet. Throughout the entire period of European and, indeed, global unification we have witnessed a steady and dramatic growth of government power, taxation and regulatory expropriation. In the light of social and economic theory and history a very strong case can be made for secession…

Here is a link to the introduction to Hans Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed.

In a decentralized U.S. sans federal government, if some people of a particular state don’t like the intrusions and rules of that state, they can vote with their feet, certainly much more easily than Americans can do presently if we don’t like the way our federal totalitarian regime is ruining our whole country. For most people, it is difficult or impossible to vote with our feet and leave America.

But why should anyone have to leave America because they don’t like State violence and trespassing into their private lives and property, and because they don’t like their labor being enslaved by parasitic, professional politicians and their flunkies who don’t want to make their own way in life? Why should anyone have to leave America because the federal government is destroying the country?

And why must we endure the abuse and tyranny that the federal government has been causing us, either directly by its intrusive and invasive policies, or by the increasing violence that its policies have wrought in America? That shouldn’t be the case, so, let’s get rid of the federal government before its intrusions kill us all.