The Party of Lincoln?

When Republicans who don't like Donald Trump want to show how much they don't like him, they say he is not worthy of the "party of Lincoln." But the party of Lincoln was the big-government party of protectionism, industrial policy, civil-liberties violations, and war. Lincoln was even ready to enforce slavery even though he knew it was wrong.

[Cross-posted at The Libertarian Institute.]

Regarding the Presidential Debates

I want to make sure I understand this: The nonpartisan commission created and run by the Republican and Democratic parties won't include anyone but the Republican and Democratic candidates in the debate because the other contenders, who theoretically could win 270 electoral votes, did not meet its arbitrary polling threshold, a gauge that is almost entirely in the hands of the corporate news media. Is that it?

What Were We Thinking?

What made any of us think that Republicans wouldn't go for Trump? I mean, what were we thinking?

TGIF: Trump's Creators

The Donald Trump phenomenon is indeed the creature of the Republican establishment, but there's more to it than that.

End, Don't Extend, Draft Registration

This past week demonstrated with blinding clarity that 1) Republicans, contrary to their rhetoric, oppose individual liberty, and 2) the establishment news media really couldn't care less about the presidential candidates' views.

After the last Republican debate, the media continued its obsession with the reality-TV and horse-race sides of the election. News readers, correspondents, and "analysts" droned on about Marco Rubio's robotic repetition during the debate and the insult swaps by Donald Trump and Jeb Bush. You had to read the cable channels' "news tickers" running right to left along the bottom of the screen to find out that at least some Republican candidates think young women should have to register with Selective Service in case the military draft is reinstituted. On CNN, at least, this story was not deemed worthy of further attention.

Which is more important? Rubio's short-term memory problem, the Trump-Bush mud-wrestling match, or registration for the draft?

Here's a clue: the draft is slavery. It is short-term slavery at best, but it's possibly debilitating and even fatal. Thus registration with Selective Service is -- surprise! -- registration for possible enslavement. Anyone who supports individual liberty against state power would oppose conscription. This is no close call.

The draft ended in 1973 during the Nixon administration. (Classical-liberal economist Milton Friedman played a key role in its demise.) In 1980, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter signed a proclamation requiring 18-26-year-old men -- but not women -- to register with Selective Service, supposedly as a signal to the Russians that Carter had noticed their invasion. But the draft was not revived. (We later learned that the Carter administration helped to provoke the invasion by aiding jihadis, hoping Afghanistan would be the Soviets' "Vietnam." The 9/11 attacks were blowback from Carter's operation, and Afghanistan would become America's second "Vietnam.")

Ronald Reagan, Carter's opponent in 1980, criticized draft registration on grounds that it "destroys the very values that our society is committed to defending," but in office Reagan changed his mind because "we live in a dangerous world."

According to Selective Service: "Failing to register ... is a felony punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 or a prison term of up to five years, or a combination of both." (Counseling "another to fail to comply ... is subject to the same penalties.") Failing to register can also result in loss of government benefits, such as student aid, federal jobs, and job training. 

With military combat roles now open to women, the question of extending compulsory draft registration to them has come up. The New York Times reports that "the Marine Corps commandant, the chief of staff of the Army and one of the top Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee [Claire McCaskill] said ... that women should be required to register. Two days later, two Republican members of the House who are military veterans -- Duncan Hunter of California and Ryan Zinke of Montana -- introduced legislation that would require women to register."

That set the stage for the question at the Republican debate. Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie endorsed compulsory registration of women. Christie, strangely, said not forcing women to register constituted discrimination against them. Bush said he did not expect the draft to be resumed, but hastened to add that he opposed ending registration.

The remaining candidates said nothing. No one objected to registering women. (Later Ted Cruz said the idea is "nuts." More revealing, no one called for ending draft registration for men. The candidates of the party that insists it alone favors liberty and limits on government power favor draft registration!

Few people call for a new draft; military leaders reportedly oppose conscription because it fills the armed forces with people who prefer to be elsewhere. So why continue draft registration? The usual answer is that it would promote readiness in an emergency. But that is no reason to violate liberty. The practical value of a quickly dated list of registrants is also doubted.

Some misguided people will argue that if men must register, then fairness dictates that women must register too. It's an odd notion of fairness or justice, however. Compulsory draft registration is unfair because it violates young people's rights. Therefore, extending the unfairness cannot be fair. The only fair measure would be to abolish registration and never draft anyone again.

Sheldon Richman keeps the blog Free Association and is a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society, and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a patron today!

The Ominous Republican Hold on Congress

As we face the new year, the biggest concern for peace lovers is Republican control of the U.S. Senate. While Republican votes don’t reach the key number 60, members of the GOP will still be in a strong position to push their belligerent global agenda.

I don’t mean to overstate the danger. After all, the Democrats were hardly better. But those who abhor war will awaken each day knowing that hawkish Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and their ilk are in control.

Read it here.

Obama and the GOP

Republicans hate Obama. But, then, it's said that one most hates those like oneself.

Freedom Is at Hand!

Reported by ABC News, Dec. 30:

The Republican leadership presented a summary of the new rules [House] Wednesday morning, revealing a number of strict -- and in a few cases unprecedented -- changes to the way Congress will be run. To underscore their point, they will kick off their reign as the majority by doing something that remarkably has never been done before: They will read the Constitution, all 4,543 words of it, including all 27 amendments, aloud on the chamber floor....
Keeping with the theme, Republicans will also require every new bill presented on the House floor to cite which article in the Constitution authorizes the enacting of such legislation, a nod to the Tea Party, which made the Constitution a tenant of its movement throughout the midterm election cycle.

Antifederalists were reported to be spinning in their graves.

Op-ed: Republican Phonies

It’s time for some honesty from the Republicans. Either give up the empire and the conceit of “American exceptionalism” or give up the rhetoric of fiscal responsibility. Stop playing the American people for fools.

Read the full op-ed here.

TGIF: Budget Mice

Getting started on the task of dramatically shrinking government’s spending — that is, control of resources — will require much bigger thinking. Entitlements and “security” (which is far more likely to create insecurity) must be on the chopping block.

If not they are not on the block, then the opposition is just performing a vacuous pantomime aimed at only one thing: procuring political power.

The of TGIF: "Budget Mice" is here.

Don't Hold Your Breath for the Spending Cuts

Republicans last night made it clear that there will be no spending cuts to write home about. Various GOP members of Congress said they would like an across-the-board cut in "discretionary spending." This is spending that is explicitly authorized each year, as opposed to so-called mandatory (entitlement) spending that is on automatic pilot and whose level depends on how many people become eligible for Social Security, Medicare, and food stamps.

Discretionary spending constitutes just one-third of the federal budget, so the Republican sights are fixed on only that much spending ... except that the party vows not to touch military and "homeland security" spending.

With so much spending off limits, the potential for cuts is not great.

Therefore I ask: Except for those expecting new patronage and consulting jobs, why is anyone excited about last night's election results?

Op-Ed: Hypocrisy’s Coming Election-Day Triumph

By nearly all accounts, Republicans are poised for a big win, even by historical midterm standards, in the November 2 congressional elections. Many candidates backed by the Tea Party should have a big day.

But what will these victories mean for people who are alarmed by the growth of the welfare-warfare state? Not much, I’m sorry to say.

Read the rest of my op-ed here.

That's Politics for You

I found this interesting tidbit in Wikipedia's entry on the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act:

Democrats agreed to support the bill after Republicans agreed to strengthen provisions of the anti-redlining Community Reinvestment Act...

G-L-B, the last significant bank deregulation that occurred in the U.S., repealed the part of the New Deal's Glass-Steagall Act that forbade a single institution from engaging in both commercial and investment banking. G-L-B was passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in 1999 and signed by Democratic President Clinton. His treasury secretary at the time was Larry Summers, now President Obama's top economic adviser. It's important to remember this when people say that banking deregulation during the Bush years created the economic mess. The Bush administration didn't deregulate anything of importance. G-L-B in no way contributed to the financial turmoil.

What's important about the quote is that it shows that the Republicans acquiesced in the strengthening of the Community Reinvestment Act, which is partially at fault for the mortgage meltdown. This is the law that compelled banks to increase their mortgage lending to people with low incomes and poor credit histories.

As we've long noted, both parties are guilty of creating the house of cards that has fallen.

Cross-posted at Anything Peaceful.

Republican Albatross II

Why does every Republican in Congress (with the obvious exception) begin his or her statement about the pending "stimulus" bill by saying, "Of course we need a stimulus bill..."?

Republican Albatross

I'm glad the House Republicans voted unanimously against Obama's spending bill, but still, I'm slightly embarrassed to be agreeing with them. After the last eight years of government expansion, the Republicans are rightly perceived as hypocrites, which discredits anything they say about reducing government power, spending, borrowing, etc. Their opposition looks like pure politics (not to mention protection of their wing of the corporate state), enabling economist Brad DeLong to dismiss even academic economists who oppose the bogus stimulus spending as "ethics-free Republican hacks."

As I've said before, the Republican Party is a massive negative externality for the radical free-market movement.

Governmental Logic

Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, had this to say in connection with the auto bailout:

We will not let the taxpayers spend their hard-earned money on ailing carmakers unless these companies are forced to reform their bad habits -- either inside or outside bankruptcy.

So the way McConnell sees it, we taxpayers want to spend our hard-earned money to save the Big Three, but he is going to stop us -- for our own good -- if the companies aren't compelled to reform themselves.

I guess that's Republican paternalism. As a libertarian, I object. If I want to spend my tax money on GM, Chrysler, and Ford, I'm going to do it whether some presumptuous senator from Kentucky wants me to or not. This is a free country!

Cross-posted at Anthing Peaceful.

Capitalism or Freedom

"These measures are not intended to take over the free market, but to preserve it," George W. Bush said in Orwellian tones Tuesday as he announced the partial nationalization of nine major American banks.

He was partly right, though not in the way he meant his words. There is no free financial market to take over. But that means there is no free market to preserve either. The moves he announced, which include government part-ownership of smaller banks too, were just more, albeit big, steps along the corporatist route the country has been following for generations.

The rest of this week's TGIF, "Capitalism or Freedom," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

The Republican Albatross

At lunch I watched Jonathan Alter of Newsweek interviewed on MSNBC about his latest column in which he writes a near-obituary for the McCain campaign. He attributes the state of the campaign to McCain's failure to "break not just from Bush, but from the rotting corpse of his party." Instead, Alter says, he's fighting the last war, which won't work because, among other reasons, "the free-market party of Reagan is dead (thanks to the financial crisis)."

Free-market party? A free-market party would have abolished Fannie and Freddie. It would have renounced the "too big to fail" doctrine. It would have ended all business privileges, along with the regulations (which the GOP left untouched). It would have at least begun to cut spending and borrowing. It would have stopped the deep economic distortion wrought by the military-industrial complex and its war-based imperial foreign policy. Has there been even a tiny movement in these directions?

This is why radical free-market advocates must hope that a Republican never is elected president. The party is an albatross for any champion of individual liberty because no matter what it does to increase the size of the state, its occasional mild lip-service to freedom is all that counts for most people. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton did some deregulating, but they are never called laissez-faire advocates.

The bigger the loss for McCain-Palin, the better.

Barack Harold Obama

I don't think Republicans would be using Obama's middle name if it weren't Middle Eastern-sounding. Do you?

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

The Scariest Thing I've Ever Seen

It's Sarah Palin's ABC interview here. It really is all about winning (power), isn't it?

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Update: This link now goes to the segment of the interview in which she discusses domestic policy. It originally went to the foreign-policy segment, which I cannot find now on the ABC site.