TGIF: Police-State Progressives

Progressives see themselves as, well, progressive. But they aren't. Even at their best, in opposing the national security state, they support massive government power in other realms of life. At heart they are social engineers. They seek a "moral equivalent of war," that is, regimentation without bloodshed. They are even anti-democratic when it suits them.

We can see all of this through the eyes of Ludwig von Mises. This is from his book Planned Chaos (1947; free audiobook here). Mises, of course, championed the unhampered market economy, or laissez-faire capitalism. He wrote:

In the market economy the consumers are supreme. Their buying and their abstention from buying ultimately determine what the entrepreneurs produce and in what quantity and quality. It determines directly the prices of the consumers' goods and indirectly the prices of all producers' goods, viz., labour and material factors of production. It determines the emergence of profits and losses and the formation of the rate of interest. It determines every individual's income. The focal point of the market economy is the market, i.e., the process of the formation of commodity prices, wage rates and interest rates and their derivatives, profits and losses. It makes all men in their capacity as producers responsible to the consumers. This dependence is direct with entrepreneurs, capitalists, farmers and professional men, and indirect with people working for salaries and wages. The market adjusts the efforts of all those engaged in supplying the needs of the consumers to the wishes of those for whom they produce, the consumers. It subjects production to consumption.

TGIF: What the Left Should Like about Public Choice

Although the public choice school of political economy has been demonized in a new work of putatively progressive fiction masquerading as intellectual history, good-faith leftists (if they don’t already regard themselves as libertarians) may be surprised by how their cause could benefit from the insights of James Buchanan et al.
Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a Free Association patron today!

He Bombed the Poorest People on Earth

John Pilger has some choice words for those who worship Barack Obama and now fear the end of civilization with the coming of Trump.

Obama "bombed the poorest people on earth, in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan," Pilger writes.

Where was the progressives' indignation the last eight years?

Read Pilger's article here.

Glenn Greenwald Shows What Progressives Fear Most of All in the Election

It’s themselves.

Paul’s candidacy forces progressives to face the hideous positions and actions of their candidate, of the person they want to empower for another four years. If [Ron] Paul were not in the race or were not receiving attention, none of these issues would receive any attention because all the other major GOP candidates either agree with Obama on these matters or hold even worse views….

Paul scrambles the comfortable ideological and partisan categories and forces progressives to confront and account for the policies they are working to protect. His nomination would mean that it is the Republican candidate — not the Democrat — who would be the anti-war, pro-due-process, pro-transparency, anti-Fed, anti-Wall-Street-bailout, anti-Drug-War advocate (which is why some neocons are expressly arguing they’d vote for Obama over Paul). Is it really hard to see why Democrats hate his candidacy and anyone who touts its benefits?

Read it all here.

Latest Writings

TGIF: “Indefinite Detention and the Free Society” (TheFreemanOnline.org)
“Obama’s War Record Should Appall Progressives” (FFF), also at Reason.com

TGIF: Putting Bureaucracy First: Rachel Maddow’s Progressivism

Today’s TGIF examines the political thought of the likes of Rachel Maddow:

Progressives today say people should come before profits. Now in a privilege-ridden corporate state, that’s a worthy goal, though Progressives have no clue how to achieve it. How nice it would be if they were equally committed to putting people before bureaucracy. Here they fall down rather badly because their signature ideas would subordinate regular people to the dictates of the power structure.

Read it here. Reason.com is now posting TGIF. You can see the latest here.
Some other recent writings:
TGIF: “Back to Basics” – No volition, no discourse. No discourse, no denying volition. Ergo volition.
Op-ed: “What Immigration Problem?”

Op-Ed: Ron Paul and Ralph Nader on Corporatism and War

What is American politics coming to? I just watched a joint interview with Ralph Nader and Rep. Ron Paul — and they were mostly on the same side! Nader has spent his life promoting government intervention in the economy. Paul has spent his life promoting the free market and minimal government. For the two of them to discuss making common cause is something extraordinary.

And yet it makes total sense. What’s so exciting is that their common cause shines the spotlight right where it’s needed: on corporatism — the constellation of government policies that primarily benefit wealthy and well-connected business and banking interests at the expense of the rest of us.

Here's the op-ed.

Progressives Against Free Speech?

I have no desire to take Glenn Beck's side, but there's something noteworthy here nonetheless. Last night on "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post suggested that Glenn Beck might properly be silenced by the State. She claimed that an exception to the free-speech doctrine is yelling "fire" in a crowded theater and that Beck every day commits the political equivalent of yelling "fire." A few minutes later she sort of backed off, saying that while he may not be legally liable if his viewers commit violence, he would be morally liable. Olbermann ate this stuff up.

Of course, Huffington got it wrong. The "fire in the crowded theater" matter is not an exception to free speech but a recognition of property rights, of which free speech is but a derivative. There's no right to "free speech" on someone else's property. If you buy a theater ticket and then endanger the audience by falsely yelling "fire," you have (among other things) violated the terms of your being in the theater. There's no need to claim an exception to the free-speech doctrine. Properly conceived, free speech is ultimately a property right.

What's with the progressives? Now that their guy is in power, are they ready to throw out civil liberties so flagrantly?