We’ve had so much freedom taken away from us in America, if only we could go back in time to when there was a lot more freedom. Even 1980 would be better than current times.
Paul Craig Roberts has a great article on America’s decline, and that 2014 will bring more social collapse. Well, I hope not. I’ve had enough social collapse already. Enough is enough.
Roberts referred to how people are constantly talking on their cell phones. it didn’t used to be that way. If you were just walking down the street, no one would have a phone in his hand and talking the nonsense drivel we are subjected to hearing every day.
And if they aren’t talking, they are texting. If they aren’t texting, they are staring into the phone like zombies. Are you a zombie out there? Constantly having to hold onto your phone like it’s a baby’s rattle? Remember now, when you go outside today and you’re compulsively holding onto your phone like a zombie, make sure you are conscious of the fact that you look like a moron, at least to me. (Probably not to all the other morons out there doing the same thing, however.)
And Roberts made reference to “party lines” on the phone. Do any of you remember that? I’m pretty sure that we initially had a party line at home while I was growing up, and then that changed to a private line. That was so long ago, I can hardly remember. A party line was when your house had to share the same telephone lines with others. There would be occasional eavedropping and goofing on others. That was in the “Old Days.”
Also, Roberts asserted that many Americans are “exhibitionists,” who actually don’t mind being spied on by government criminals. It actually makes them feel important. And he also mentioned the kinds of neighbors that exist now who actually call the police if they see their neighbor’s child outside playing alone in the yard. The nosy neighbor here is doing something which makes her feel important, in my opinion. But really, it is this neighbor who is engaging in an act of aggression and endangering the child by getting police over there to do God-knows-what and for no good reason, and endangering the parents as well. This rotten “If You See Something, Say Something” neighbor is the real danger and it is she who should be arrested and charged with endangerment, as far as I’m concerned. (Yes, it probably usually is a “she.”)
John Whitehead also writes about what could be in store for us in 2014, as far as what remains of our freedom is concerned. A lot of people are too brainwashed by 12-16 years of government-controlled schooling, indoctrinated to worship the State and be good little obedient sheeple, and they are too zombified and glued to their iPhones and so forth that I think that if a government police official grabbed them and just arrested them for no good reason and took them to jail for an anal strip-search etc., the victim probably would defer to the judgment of the cop. “Who am I to question the authority of our ‘men in blue’?” the sheeple would say.
Walter Williams has another insightful column, pointing out the logic and reason underlying our right to peacefully secede from a bad relationship, or a state seceding from the “union.” If you read the aforementioned articles, you can get a good taste as to what it is that common sense-thinking, decent people want to secede from.
And Jim Fedako writes that Christians who are employed by the State are doing not-particularly Christian things by doing the State‘s will, which certainly isn’t God’s will. And these Christian employees of the State need to resign. In fact, Skyler Collins explains why States are illegitimate in the first place.
Lew Rockwell has this list of important developments in 2013 that are good for liberty. For example, what is going on with ObamaCare, that is, ObamaCare’s fascist crimes are being revealed for the whole world to see. And the Edward Snowden leaks. However, in my view, Glenn Greenwald, who supposedly possesses all the remaining 99% of the unleaked material, ought to just release the entire stack of stuff that he has, and just let the chips fall where they may. Otherwise, Greenwald is protecting the State, not our freedom.
And in his article, Lew Rockwell mentions Tom Woods’s radio show, with Woods’s list of several shows he’s already done.
While Hornberger gets into the Alternet writer’s general misunderstandings of libertarianism, I want to focus on some specifics.
The Alternet writer, RJ Eskow, first states that today’s typical libertarian “abhors government, hates taxation, and is hostile to collective action on behalf of the less fortunate.”
No, I would say that most libertarians are hostile to government-compelled collective actions (on behalf of anyone). Individuals should have the freedom to voluntarily associate amongst themselves and start an organization and actively raise funds for voluntary contribution to help the needy, with no restrictions, no taxes, no “501(c)” etc. etc.
Does Eskow understand the difference between government-compelled action and voluntary action?
And then in his list of “prominent libertarians,” he includes Rand Paul and Paul Ryan. Talk about clueless.
To say that Paul Ryan is a “libertarian” shows no understanding of what libertarianism really is. Has Ryan called for the elimination of all confiscatory taxation? Has he called for the elimination of Medicare and Medicaid, and Social Security?
If you read Laurence Vance’s articles (such as this one) on the Republicans’ budgets led by the welfare statist Paul Ryan, and Robert Wenzel’s articles, such as this one on Ryan’s slick health care plan and a whole list of articles, and you will see that Ryan is no libertarian.
And if you look at all these posts by Wenzel which discuss Rand Paul’s specific un-libertarian policies, from war and foreign policy to taxation and fiscal policy, you will see that Rand Paul is just as statist as the rest of them in Washington.
In recent years, the only “prominent libertarian” in Washington has been Ron Paul.
And then Eskow writes, “It never stops: Close down the homeless shelters. Shut down the Salvation Army. Make it illegal to throw a starving person a coin or toss a blanket over them as they lay on the sidewalk.”
Huh? Closing down homeless shelters and shutting down the Salvation Army is “libertarian”? As Hornberger pointed out in his critique, libertarians believe in freedom, unlike the so-called liberals and conservatives.
Let private charitable individuals and groups have the freedom to run homeless shelters, but keep the government out of it. And why would a libertarian want to shut down the Salvation Army? That’s something that those in the government who oppose private charity would do.
And it’s statists who would make it illegal to feed or clothe the homeless, not libertarians.
Eskow writes,
The free market is the best economic system in the world, we’re told, because private enterprises compete with one another for market share.
This is the thinking behind the movement to privatize government services. In fact, it’s the very same thinking which led the conservative American Enterprise Institute to design the set of policies the world now knows as “Obamacare.”
Sorry. actual libertarians wouldn’t write a “set of policies” in which the government still sticks its fat nose into people’s medical care.
In his previous remarks on conservative “reforms” of the government-inflicted medical care disasters, Jacob Hornberger pointed out,
And even if Congress were to adopt some conservative “free market” reform, it would still produce new crises and then new calls for reform. The situation would continue to get worse and worse.
One of the sad tragedies in all this is how conservatives have inculcated in conservative youth that their healthcare reform plans constitute “free enterprise” while those of liberals, such as Obamacare, constitute “socialism.” It’s sad because it’s just a lie and so these young people grow up and become adults honestly believing that America’s healthcare system would be “free enterprise” if only conservative reforms were adopted.
Fortunately, libertarianism provides an antidote to this life of the lie and to the reform syndrome, which is no doubt why so many young people are gravitating to libertarianism. The only way to achieve a genuine free-market healthcare system is to remove all governmental involvement in healthcare — i.e., a total separation of healthcare and the state, much as our American ancestors separated religion and the state. That necessarily means repeal, not reform, of Medicare, Medicaid, medical licensure, insurance regulation, and income-tax manipulation. Genuine freedom and the free market is the only way to restore health to America’s healthcare system.
And then Eskow made reference to Rand Paul’s criticism of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, referring to its encroachments into private property. But Eskow makes this, well, really wacky point: “If ‘private ownership’ is a barrier against these governmental prerogatives, where does it end? If you can’t outlaw discrimination on private property, what can you outlaw: Fraud? Theft? Murder?”
Obviously, this guy can’t distinguish between peaceful behaviors (voluntary association etc.) and aggression, trespassing and coercion. (I addressed the Rand Paul Civil Rights Act controversy here.)
Finally, Eskow concludes:
The entire country would be placed at the legal, economic and environmental mercy of property holders. The nation would be divided into Owners and Others, with the Others given no ability to enforce societal values—even matters of national security—over the Owners.
The unaided needy. Selfishness run riot. A North America dotted with Third World colonies. And a blighted landscape where Others are subjugated to Owners.
Sadly, it is these statists who want to impose so many government restrictions on what individuals may do with their own property, their persons and labor in which, without such restrictions (that is, the libertarian way of removing the State’s shackles off of everyone), anyone can be an “owner,” of property or businesses, if one wants to be.
Regarding “selfishness,” it is the restrictionists of the Left who are the selfish ones, as they restrict the opportunities of those at the bottom with union wage mandates, minimum wage, and regulations, licensure, fees and fines, as I wrote about the real selfishness a while back.
And Eskow refers to a “blighted landscape where Others are subjugated to Owners.” Actually if an “owner” attempted to literally “subjugate” another individual, that “owner” would be arrested.
The truth is, it is the government and all its bureaucrats, politicians, lawyers and special interests who, through their special interest laws, restrictions, surveillance and tax-confiscations, all enforced by the Orwellian police state, which subjugate the rest of us.
It appears that the NSA has been intercepting computer equipment as it is being shipped to the buyers from online stores, and goons install tracking and spyware devices into the intercepted computer equipment. They are only going after specified “targets,” however. But when we know they are keeping a database of ALL Americans’ phone usage and “nearly everything a user does on the Internet,” then we are ALL “targets.” Some people are suggesting to get your new computer, laptop etc. at the nearby store rather than ordering something online and having it delivered. I’m sure that, in order to be able to blackmail anyone they want for any reason, these people will then probably get the computer makers to pre-install NSA spying and tracking devices already at the manufacturer. (Oh wait, they might already be doing that.)
Infowars wonders, could the Volgograd suicide bombings be originating from the Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan who allegedly threatened Vladimir Putin unless Putin withdrew his support of Assad in Syria?
I know it’s an old cliche, but to ask the question is to answer it.
Economist Walter Block recently had a discussion with libertarian blogger Stephan Molyneux on the subject of spanking children, and whether or not spanking violates the non-aggression principle. My first reaction was, “What are you, nuts?”
Walter Block said in his initial blog post that no, spanking doesn’t violate the non-aggression principle. But I tuned in to the video, posted a little way below, just to see what he had to say about it, as I was quite confident that nothing he could say would change my view on that.
(A few months ago, I wrote, “The Mommie Dearest Neocons,” in response to seeing a video of Michelle Malkin and Sean Hannity discussing various things and including their both proudly having been spanked as kids, and how proud they are that they currently spank their own kids. Now, I know that Walter Block is no neocon, and is very anti-war, but I still wanted to repost my post on the “Mommie Dearest Neocons,” which I will do below.)
But in their debate, first Molyneux began the debate by going on for several minutes with statistics regarding spanking behaviors, attitudes and polls.
At 9 minutes, Dr. Block asks, “Do parents have a right to spank” (their kids)? I assumed he meant when the kids are naughty. My answer: only if the kids have a right to spank their parents when they’re bad. And obviously we know the answer to that one.
And then, at 10 minutes Block says, “To me, children are not fully rights-bearing creatures. Children are sort of intermediate between animals and other adults.”
Doh! Sorry to sound like Felix Unger, but, “Walter, Walter, Walter …” No wonder a glitch occurred right after he said that. The gremlins in the computers were not happy about it either.
Block talks about “owning” the children not as slaves but as with “guardianship rights.” Well, sure, you can have guardianship rights, but initiating physical aggression against someone who hasn’t threatened you violates the “non-aggression principle.” And he goes on to assert various rationalizations for inflicting physical assaults against children.
Mind you, while I say that spanking violates the non-aggression principle, I will not discuss whether or not that should be considered a criminal assault by law.
In their debate, Block and Molyneux both go on for a while to discuss various forms of aggression, such as using aggression to save someone’s life (“without the victim’s consent”), but it still doesn’t seem to be relevant to the point of initiating aggression against children. Block does not seem to be seeing the difference between grabbing the kid to protect him from a suddenly dangerous situation (such as the kid’s going out into a busy street) and actually physically striking the child, which is what spanking is. In fact, they spend a lot of time talking about anything but the subject of actually spanking children. That was the most frustrating aspect of this video debate.
But I have a feeling that I’m just too simple-minded to understand these sophisticated debate guys. Oh, well.
Here is the video of their debate:
As I mentioned, after this discussion, below I will repost my post on the “Mommie Dearest Neocons,” whether it’s relevant or not. Actually, I think it’s very relevant.
Parents can’t own their offspring, regardless of their labor they exerted and “tools” they used, because their “product” happens to be another separate, individual human being.
Human beings inherently have natural, inalienable rights, among them the rights to life and liberty. Part of the right to life and liberty is the right of an individual to self-ownership. The right to self-ownership begins when the human being begins. But when does the human being’s life actually begin?
At the time of the Roe v. Wade decision, the concept of “personhood” was brought up by Justice Harry Blackmun:
“(If the) suggestion of personhood [of the preborn] is established, the [abortion rights] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment.”
I’ve seen references to “personhood,” “viability,” “sentience,” and “consciousness, “ and I have some questions.
What is the viability of a born baby? If baby is left alone for a particular amount of time, one cannot survive for very long, because at that early stage of development one is dependent on one’s caretakers for feeding. The same can be said of a 2-year-old, maybe even older children, although the older the child, the more able one is to go out and seek food, unless one is locked inside and can’t get out. Is there a difference between the viability of a born individual and an unborn individual (at whatever stage of development)?
What about “sentience” and “consciousness?” How do we know whether or not a two-month-old “fetus” or a 2-day-old “fetus” can have any physical sensation or conscious awareness? If it is important whether or not that individual has sentience or consciousness in considering whether that individual has any right to life and liberty, and self-ownership, then, what about a born human being or a grown adult who has a neurological disorder and has no “sentience” or who is in a “persistent vegetative state” and has no consciousness, but is still “alive” (or can be kept alive via artificial means)?
However, more recently I’ve seen in Murray Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty, his comments on the abortion issue. Rothbard asks this question:
….when, or in what way, does a growing child acquire his natural right to liberty and self-ownership?
If one has a natural right to liberty and self-ownership, and “natural rights,” as far as I know, means “inherent” in us as human beings (i.e. from conception onward, or just a part of the human being’s “nature”), then how can you “acquire” a natural right to liberty and self-ownership?
Now, whether you believe that a human being’s life begins at conception, at some point during pregnancy, or after the child is born, my point is, if human beings have “natural,” inherent rights, among them the rights to life, liberty, and self-ownership, then all human beings have self-ownership rights, and have a right to be free from physical aggression being initiated against them.
But the issue of spanking is a related but different issue. Spanking is the act of the parents initiating physical aggression against the child. Spanking is striking the child with force. I don’t think it can or should be compared to grabbing the child to save him from danger. You can rationalize it all you want, but spanking definitely violates the “non-aggression” principle, in my view.
________________________
Anyway, here is my post from April of this year, The “Mommie Dearest” Neocons (By the way, this reposting and the points I made here are in no way referring to or responding to the points the aforementioned debaters made. This older post was addressing Michelle Malkin and Sean Hannity, and their fellow warmongering neocons, and the relationship between their having been physically abused — which is my interpretation of “spanking,” especially with a “belt” or other similar weapon — and their authoritarian brute force mentality):
Do you remember Mommie Dearest? That was a memoir written by Christiana Crawford, daughter of the control freak actress Joan Crawford. The book was made into a film by the same name, starring Faye Dunaway as the dreaded Joan. Well, we sadly have some self-proclaimed “Mommy Dearests” amongst the neocon pundit crowd: Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin.
Hannity and Malkin chatted about the Rutgers basketball coach who was recently fired over his verbal and physical abuse of players. Hannity and Malkin defended the coach’s abuse. Hannity stated that we need more “discipline” in society, and should stop being such “wimps.”
Get this — Both Hannity and Malkin claimed that they had received that kind of physical abuse as kids — Hannity with a “belt” and Malkin with “more than a belt,” and they “turned out okay.” Further, Malkin admitted to being “much better at administering spankings now than receiving them.”
First of all, some might argue that, no, they did NOT “turn out okay”! They both became very devoted followers of centralized government in Washington, acting as blindly obedient media propagandists for the Bush Regime’s criminal actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Bush-Cheney police state that goes totally against what the early Americans stood for, including and especially due process and the right of the people to their security.
The two child abuse supporters have also defended the Bush-Cheney torture-Gitmo regime, in which totally innocent human beings were abducted by CIA or U.S. military personnel, or turned in by CIA-paid informants in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and have been defending a torture regime in which the true purposes of torture are to extract false confessions and to satisfy the sadist lust of the torturers. (If you didn’t know those particular facts about this charade of a “war on terror,” see this article and the links I provided.)
These damn conservatives talking about “leftists,” when they themselves are not really that different! Both sides, Left and neocon, support authoritarian government controls, coercion and force. Certainly not peace, liberty, private property, Christian moral values, the rule of law, and the rights of individuals.
Hannity asked, regarding the issue of toughness and discipline versus being “wimps” in the military, if we then have to fire the military’s drill sergeants because they get “in the face” of cadets. I wonder what Hannity would say about all the sexual assaults in the military now. Are they deserved? And it’s not just assaults againstfemale military personnel but male against male sexual assaults, as I noted here.
And what about all the murders of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan committed by U.S. soldiers? I’m sure that Hannity and Malkin do not believe that those murderer soldiers should be held accountable — because “there’s a war going on” — regardless of the victims being innocent civilians. (However, being of the self-centered nationalist-exceptionalist crowd, they probably would think otherwise if foreign government soldiers came over here to the U.S. and murdered American innocent civilians.)
And, being authoritarian government-worshiping nationalists, are these two among the neocons who have called Army Private Bradley Manning a “traitor” for releasing overly-classified documents to WikiLeaks? As I wrote in the article linked above, Manning wanted the American people – not jihadists or al-Qaeda, mind you, but the American people – to know about the crimes, incompetence and corruption of our rulers. The real traitors are the central planners who use U.S. government apparatus and personnel to intentionally provoke foreigners as an excuse to expand the size and power of the centralized federal government, for the sake of non-productive bureaucrat tax-eaters and their military-security-industrial complex minions.
But I don’t think that someone “turned out okay” if one would condone the cover-ups of the military crimes and bureaucratic bumblings that Manning and WikiLeaks revealed. Siding with the criminals of the government is really taking the side of the abuser. That’s not “okay.”
And what about the police state that we have now, and the government police neanderthals and their brutality against innocent civilians here in America? Do Hannity and Malkin approve of them, too? Just look through any one of William Grigg’s articles, or material by Radley Balko, the Cop Block blog, and especially this post by attorney Rick Horowitz on the police of today. As I indicated in my article, No More Police Socialism, the reason that we have neanderthals drawn to the apparatus of the socialist government police monopoly is that it provides the bullies, brutes and primitives with an excuse and a means to assault, beat and abuse innocents and get away with it with impunity.
So, if Hannity and Malkin approve of letting police continue to get away with their tyrannical and Nazi-like abusive treatment of others, then no, they did not “turn out okay.”
And also, I wonder if these supposedly “pro-2nd Amendment” conservatives who presumably believe in the individual’s God-given right of self-defense against aggression, believe that the individual’s right to self-defense also applies to when one’s assailants are wearing official uniforms and badges of the government. Many authoritarians, alas, do not believe in such a right of an individual to that much self-defense. But yes, we do have that right, as Judge Andrew Napolitano observed here, and as I wrote here.
People don’t mind when you point out the tyranny that has happened in other countries, but most have a hard time viewing their OWN “country,” their OWN “government,” and their OWN “law enforcers,” in any sort of objective way. Having been trained to feel a blind loyalty to the ruling class of the particular piece of dirt they live on (a.k.a. “patriotism”), and having been trained to believe that obedience is a virtue, the idea of forcibly resisting “law enforcement” is simply unthinkable to many. Literally, they can’t even THINK about it. And humanity has suffered horribly because of it. It is a testament to the effectiveness of authoritarian indoctrination that literally billions of people throughout history have begged and screamed and cried in the face of authoritarian injustice and oppression, but only a tiny fraction have ever lifted a finger to actually try to STOP it.
But back to being abused as kids. I can see how Ms. Malkin brags about her “spankings” of her own little children, which goes with her defense of government agents abusing and torturing totally innocent human beings. In the case of a child, I don’t think that physically striking a child can ever be a just action — or are you saying that the child was such a threat to you physically that you had to use physical force to protect yourself? I don’t think so.
In other words, children who are not a physical threat have a right to not be physically struck. Even “misbehaving” children do not deserve to be physically struck by someone who is bigger, stronger and more powerful than they. I am referring to striking a more vulnerable human being who can’t fight back. Only cowards and primitives do that.
And I’m not talking about the more sophisticated parents who administer non-violent punishments such as withholding toys or games or “grounding” the child for a period of time. Those techniques of discipline are used by more civilized parents, not the violent ones like the Hannitys and the Malkins of the world. I don’t think that the fascists and authoritarians who love and identify with power figures understand the difference.
Children who are given love, respect, understanding, kindness, and warmth will naturally develop different characteristics from those who experience neglect, contempt, violence or abuse, and never have anyone they can turn to for kindness and affection. Such absence of trust and love is a common denominator in the formative years of all the dictators I have studied. The result is that these children will tend to glorify the violence inflicted upon them and later to take advantage of every possible opportunity to exercise such violence, possibly on a gigantic scale. Children learn by imitation. Their bodies do not learn what we try to instill in them by words but what they have experienced physically. Battered, injured children will learn to batter and injure others; sheltered, respected children will learn to respect and protect those weaker than themselves. Children have nothing else to go on but their own experiences. …
… Every dictator torments his people in the same way he was tormented as a child. The humiliations inflicted on these dictators in adult life had nothing like the same influence on their actions as the emotional experiences they went through in their early years. Those years are “formative” in the truest sense: in this period the brain records or “encodes” emotions without (usually) being able to recall them at will. As almost every dictator denies his sufferings (his former total helplessness in the face of brutality) there is no way that he can truly come to terms with them. Instead he will have a limitless craving for scapegoats on whom he can avenge himself for the fears and anxieties of childhood without having to re-experience those fears.
Miller cites Hitler, Stalin and Mao. I would add the Bushes in their bloodthirsty aggression against Iraq since 1991 as I noted in this recent article, and the 1 to 2 million innocent Iraqis slaughtered in the past 22 years by the Bush wars that neocons supported. I would also add Barack Obama, the current Dictator-in Chief, who wants to have the power to murder presumably innocent human beings without bringing evidence against the accused, apprehend, abduct and incarcerate innocent human beings (mostly protesters, critics of Obama and other government imbeciles) without charge and the power to detain them indefinitely, and Obama’s insatiable craving to confiscate all the guns and ammunition away from the people amongst the civilian population so that he can implement his dream of full socialist government control over and enslavement of the workers and producers of society, and without any possible resistance whatsoever.
In their obedient and blind support of the Bush-Cheney regime and its pre-planned “war on terror” following 9/11, and acting as some of the Regime’s most loyal media propagandists, Malkin and Hannity unwittingly supported the most unlawful, unconstitutional and immoral policies that would then be later used by Obama and others of his ilk against the people.
In my opinion, Hannity and Malkin are severely disturbed individuals, obviously self-admitted products of an abusive upbringing, and no they did NOT turn out “okay.” Even Malkin openly admitted that she herself hits (a.k.a. “spanks”) her kids, and she seems very proud of it, and I’m sure her kids will grow up to support the same kind of socialist authoritarianism and fascist police state that she herself supports.
Historian Charles Burris has this comparison of the current defenders of the national security state (such as the evil Judge Pauley this week) to the Nazis’ defense at Nuremberg. A compelling argument.
Here are some interesting articles to keep the mind working (if you don’t mind my putting it that way):
Jacob Hornberger asks if drug-war victims should pardon the drug warriors. Instead of only pardoning a few of those who have been unjustly prosecuted and imprisoned, shouldn’t Obama pardon all of them?
Trevor Timm says that if Edward Snowden returned to face trial, all whistleblower evidence would likely be inadmissible.
John Glaser says that Fusion Centers are expensive and dangerous to liberty.
Sheldon Richman says that the moral case for freedom is the practical case for freedom.
U.K. Guardian has an article on the rise in Nazi-like book bannings in U.S. schools. (Common sense dictates that separation of education and State will solve the problem, no?)
Lew Rockwell writes about the Mises Institute’s 30th year this year, and includes a little bit of its history and some information regarding Austrian economics which the Mises Institute promotes. Also, he spends some part of the article on Keynesian economics.
While I am hardly an expert on Austrian economics, I do have a better general understanding of the Keynesian school of thought. I recently wrote an article on Keynesianism, mainly emphasizing my own particular sociological and psychological analysis of it and its followers. And I also wrote a somewhat humorous piece on “Keynesian Clunkers” (read at your own risk). If you want a good understanding of Austrian economics, go to my Recommended Books page and read the books listed there by Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. Many of the links on the list go to a free online edition of the books, so you can read them right away.
But in his article at the Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell writes,
The return of Keynesianism is one area in which conditions have worsened since Mises’s death, when it seemed Keynes had been defeated. But there is ample reason for hope. The word “Keynesian” is now used as a term of abuse by a great many informed people, and the rising generation of young scholars are looking with skepticism at the Keynesianism of their professors.
Moreover, Keynesianism is visibly failing. The unprecedented fiscal and monetary expansion that has taken place around the world should have been followed by rapid and robust recovery. It wasn’t. Unemployment remains high across the Western world. If the Keynesians are right, this should not be happening.
They have their excuses, to be sure. The stimulus hasn’t been big enough, they say. But as time goes on and recovery remains elusive, who will believe them? More and more voices will be heard suggesting that an inadequate dose of the proposed medicine is not the problem. The problem is the medicine itself.
The Keynesian school of thought includes the promoting of deficit-spending, piling on more government debts, and central banking monetary controls. This school of thought exists on short-sightedness and selfishness, frankly — let me have my stuff now, and to hell with future generations. The reason so many people amongst the population especially the ruling political class, the media’s punditry and the academics, favor the Keynesian lifestyle so much is that it glorifies immediate gratification and irresponsibility at the expense of others. “Easy money,” “if it feels good, do it,” etc. etc. etc.
Let’s spend money we don’t have, and go into debt in which other people (especially other people’s children and grandchildren) will pay off our debts and irresponsible spending habits. That’s Keynesianism in a nutshell.
In my view, Keynesian central banking controls are also fascist in nature. Some central planner in Washington (The Bernank, The Yellen, etc.) determines what the money supply should be for the whole population of 300 million? And this one bureaucrat decides on interest rates? It’s nuts. What this Keynesian statism stuff consists of really is a small ruling elite controlling the money and banking matters of the whole country, while the Rulers and their minions and followers fantasize that “This will stimulate the economy,” and so forth.
But the Keynesian fascists are really just manipulating the masses’ needs to feel good, as the Rulers feed off their hard labor. In fact, once again the United States Congress –led by Mitch McConjob and John Boehner Keynes — has passed a new budget with “cuts in spending” which are really spending increases but with cuts in the rate of projected spending. In other words, they’re continuing “business as usual,” increasing spending with deficits and piling on more debt to fund their own selfish projects and paying off campaign supporters.
So, as these criminals steal more of your hard-earned money they are saying right to your face, “F*** You!” (And what are you going to do about it? You’ll continue to vote for them, because of being a brainwashed zombie sheeple, and yes, that is what most of the people will do.)
The bottom line for me here is that this is no “free country,” that’s for sure. YOU are a slave to these criminal government bureaucrats. Remember that next November if you actually go to waste time at the polls.
So anyway, in his new book, Fascism versus Capitalism, Lew Rockwell refers to the traditional view of capitalism, that is, free market capitalism. So by “capitalism” he is not referring to the more modern usage of the term which now tends to mean state-capitalism or corporatism, the enmeshment between business and the State (which is really a main part of what fascism is). Robert Wenzel posted the Introduction to the new Rockwell book recently. In my view, free market capitalism is what Keynesianism has the State intrude itself into, and yes, everything that particular point of view, Keynesianism, advocates, is an intrusion into markets, contracts, property, and freedom.
But regarding the ideas of statism and Keynesianism versus freedom and free markets, Jacob Hornberger wrote this post in 2012, Separate Banking and the State. And Murray Rothbard had the same suggestion in his book, The Mystery of Banking.
Readers — A study discussed in yesterday’s SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle’s website) suggests that kids growing up with dogs may be a little more protected against allergies and asthma, thanks to early exposure to the bacteria the dogs bring in. The bacteria seem to sort of “immunize” the kids. What’s Free-Range about that?
Dirt.
And imperfection. And an old-fashioned childhood. Since time began, kids and dirt have gone together like mud and pie. They tracked dirt in. They tracked it out. It is only our modern day, Purell-soaked society that is keeping kids cleaner than clean — perhaps cleaner than makes sense.
To me, the fetch-home message, then, is not only don’t worry about having a dog or dogs in the home. It’s to embrace the interaction of our children with animals, with the world, with germs, the outdoors, and with strangers of both the bacterial and human kind. They will be the stronger for it. – L.
Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi writes about his recent get-togethers with former CIA colleagues, and Giraldi has a very compelling analysis of the mentality which motivates such drone-operators, spies, and so forth, and their covert and clandestine activities on behalf of the military industrial complexIsrael U.S. government.
Among other things, Giraldi writes,
This Christmas I was informed that drones are the only good mechanism for offing those terrorists hiding in the mountains of Pakistan and I heard no less than three times that “We are the good guys,” which must be the latest last line of defense when all other arguments have failed. When I commented that it is hard to be a good guy when you are killing American citizens without any trial and wiping out wedding parties the response was vague, as if I were suggesting something that has not really been established or for which there is some other back story that might explain the activity. When I asked the Sarah Palinesque wife of a former case officer how a guy in a beard and turban hiding in a cave along the Pakistan frontier could conceivably threaten the United States the response was something like a shrug.
. . .
(Professor Michael Brenner) describes the core value of imperialism as being “permissive of actions directed at taking charge of others without their approval.” He identifies a number of features of the imperialist mindset, to include “a strong sense of superiority,” “a predisposition for intervention” that is largely unrelated to the cause of the intervention, comfort “with taking charge of other people,” “an absence of empathy,” and an inability to accept resistance or rebellion by someone being dominated as anything but “ingratitude.” He also notes an inability to put oneself in anyone else’s shoes and cites the example of Iraq, where the involvement of coreligionist and neighbor Iran was denounced as destabilizing while the US dominance was considered somehow both acceptable and appropriate.
I think a lot of people are really out of touch with reality.
Walter Block writes about feminists in India apparently believing that “leering” at someone violates the non-aggression principle, and how it seems that some gay and lesbian people do not seem to understand the ideas of voluntary association and choice. Related to that post is Robert Wenzel’s post about Bob Newhart cancelling an appearance with a Catholic organization because of pressure from GLAAD. Militant intolerance seems to be the way of the 21st Century.
Jordan Bruneau writes about the many negative side-effects of Obama’s DeathCare, comparing that to the “unintended” consequences of the drug war, the war on terrorism, and rent control.
Charles Burris writes about the culture war, and Jesse Jackson Sr. getting on the anti-Phil Robertson bandwagon. Burris mentions Jackson’s 1984 slur against Jews, referring to New York City as “Hymietown.” (But Burris didn’t mention the 1969 Life Magazine article that quoted Jackson as saying that, as a hotel waiter, spitting into white people’s food gave him “psychological gratification.” Perhaps we shouldn’t mention that. Oops, I just did.)
And here is a video montage of some really weird and extreme weather events over the past month, December of 2013:
Jacob Hornberger has a great article listing several “national security”-related conspiracies which actually existed and occurred. He lists 22 of them in the 10 years before and 10 years after the JFK assassination. There are still people who just refuse to accept the possibility that the assassination of JFK was indeed a “conspiracy,” and involved a lot more people than just a single gunman.
However, according to the Guardian, the NSA’s XKeyscore racket allows the NSA to collect “nearly everything a user does on the Internet,” “including the content of emails, websites visited and searches.”
If my understanding of XKeyscore is correct, that it is a currently-operating program, then the former CIA spook and the National Journal article are erroneous in their stating that the program was discontinued in 2011. But they are probably referring to a different criminal email-spy program, it seems.
The Guardian notes,
A slide entitled “plug-ins” in a December 2012 document describes the various fields of information that can be searched. It includes “every email address seen in a session by both username and domain”, “every phone number seen in a session (eg address book entries or signature block)” and user activity – “the webmail and chat activity to include username, buddylist, machine specific cookies etc”.
In a second Guardian interview in June, Snowden elaborated on his statement about being able to read any individual’s email if he had their email address. He said the claim was based in part on the email search capabilities of XKeyscore, which Snowden says he was authorized to use while working as a Booz Allen contractor for the NSA.
One top-secret document describes how the program “searches within bodies of emails, webpages and documents”, including the “To, From, CC, BCC lines” and the ‘Contact Us’ pages on websites”.
To search for emails, an analyst using XKS enters the individual’s email address into a simple online search form, along with the “justification” for the search and the time period for which the emails are sought.
But this former CIA deputy director says the NSA should read and criminally spy on people’s emails. Looks like the CIA isn’t quite up to speed on what the NSA is doing. (Perhaps the CIA never heard of Edward Snowden either?)
And also in that National Journal interview that former CIA deputy director said that “if you added emails in there it would make it even more effective. Had it been in place in 2000 and 2001, I think that probably 9/11 would not have happened.” (Yes, it sure prevented the Boston Marathon bombings, didn’t it?)
Russ Baker has some comments on the two congressmen who want Obama to de-classify the 9/11 Commission report. It appears as though Saudi Arabia’s regime may have in some way assisted the 9/11 hijackers. Hmmm. One wonders what the Saudis’ motivation would be, given all the financial gain they receive from the U.S. in oil revenue. (However, more recently some Saudis are worried that the U.S. “energy boom” could doom the Saudi economy.) But given the occurrence of religious fanaticism, extremism and authoritarianism in Saudi Arabia, that would explain some motivation there, if there was Saudi government involvement in 9/11. But then, we have been hearing recently about a relatively new and surprising relationship between the Saudis and another country out there, not sure if that’s relevant.
Zero Hedge has some comments on some U.S. sailors suing Japan’s TEPCO for radiation-related illnesses including cancer, apparently because of Fukushima. What is wrong with government bureaucrats in their having to constantly lie about everything? And their responses to major problems seem to always make things worse! Doh!
Larken Rose has another video, this one discussing the concept of “the market,” and the difference between people acting voluntarily and people using force against others. He uses the setting of a prison as an example. No, not the public schools, but actual prisons. (I wonder what kind of car that is in the background?)
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