Whom Is This Intended to Thwart?

From the Associated Press:

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) -- If you're planning to vote in Virginia's February Republican presidential primary, be prepared to sign an oath swearing your Republican loyalty.

The State Board of Elections on Monday approved a state Republican Party request to require all who apply for a GOP primary ballot first vow in writing that they'll vote for the party's presidential nominee next fall.

There's no practical way to enforce the oath. Virginia doesn't require voters to register by party, and for years the state's Republicans have fretted that Democrats might meddle in their open primaries.

Virginia Democrats aren't seeking such an oath for their presidential primary, which is held the same day -- February 12th.

Hat tip: Jacob Hornberger

Isolationism versus Noninterventionism

I saw most of the debate. Here was Ron Paul's best moment, coming after John McCain accused him of being an isolationist (transcript here):

He doesn't even understand the difference between non-intervention and isolationism. I'm not an isolationism, (shakes head) em, isolationist. I want to trade with people, talk with people, travel. But I don't want to send troops overseas using force to tell them how to live. We would object to it here and they're going to object to us over there.

Iraq 3.0

One gets the feeling that even the White House realizes the mess it’s made of Iraq. The other day the newspapers reported that the Bush administration has scaled back its objectives rather substantially. We might call it Iraq 3.0. First the plan was to create a democratic paradise which, domino-like, would spread freedom throughout the Middle East. When that didn’t work, the administration shifted to simply bringing some kind of order to Iraq, reconciling the three largest groups — Shi’a, Sunni, and Kurd.

That hasn’t gone too well either. The nearly two dozen political objectives that the military “surge” was intended to accomplish have largely gone unachieved. The violence level may have fallen (one never knows how temporary such things are), but there are many possible explanations for that. One horrifying explanation is that enough ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods and emigration have occurred that less violence is “necessary” in the eyes of the various militias. That presumably is not the sort of peace President Bush had in mind.

So now the strategists in Washington have retooled.

The rest of my op-ed, "Iraq 3.0," is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.

The article has also been posted at Counterpunch.

Anarchists for Ron Paul?

Well, this one anyway. More to come.

Should the State License People?

Democratic presidential candidates are tripping over the driver’s-licenses-for-illegal-aliens issue like a bunch of old slapstick vaudevillians. What’s so comical about their antics is that the issue demonstrates that politicians are locked into bad assumptions from top to bottom. Start with driver’s licenses. In one debate Sen. Chris Dodd said driving “is a privilege not a right.” That’s a common belief. But it’s incoherent.

The rest of this week's op-ed, "Should the State License People?," is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.

Individualism, Collectivism, and Other Murky Labels

Imagine the following person. He believes all individuals should be free to do "anything that's peaceful" and therefore favors private property, free global markets, freedom of contract, civil liberties, and all the related ideas that come under the label "libertarianism" (or liberalism). Obviously he is not a statist. But is he an individualist and a capitalist or a socialist and a collectivist? It sounds like an easy question, but on closer inspection it's not.

The rest of this week's TGIF, "Individualism, Collectivism, and Other Murky Labels," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

Ersatz School Choice

"Vouchers go down in crushing defeat"

That headline thundered from Wednesday's Salt Lake City Tribune, as it announced that more than 60 percent of Utahans who voted on whether to uphold the statewide school-voucher program said no. It was a big setback for the voucher movement. The Utah legislature had approved the program by one vote. But the teachers' union, which opposes vouchers, gathered enough signatures to put the question to the voters. It poured a ton of money into its successful effort to have the people veto the law. This was the tenth time in over 30 years that voters have defeated school vouchers or education tax credits, says the National School Boards Association.

It may not look like a win for the cause of educational freedom, but in the long run it might be. That depends on what we do about it.

The rest of my latest TGIF, "Ersatz School Choice," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

Woodstock May Have Saved Sen. McCain’s Life

John McCain scored a standing ovation at the last Republican presidential debate when he attacked Sen. Hillary Clinton for proposing — unsuccessfully — to spend a million taxpayer dollars on a museum commemorating the 1969 Woodstock festival, saying, “Now, my friends, I wasn’t there. I’m sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was tied up at the time. But the fact is, my friends, no one can be president of the United States that supports projects such as these.” It would be easy to criticize McCain for politically exploiting his five-and-half years of suffering as a captive of the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam war. But there’s a more important point to be made.

The rest of my op-ed, "Woodstock May Have Saved Sen. McCain’s Life," is at the website of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

Robertson Endorses Giuliani

So let me get this straight: Rudy Giuliani denounces Ron Paul for saying that U.S. foreign intervention in the Middle East created the conditions for the 9/11 attacks, but he accepts the endorsement of a man -- Pat Robertson -- who said that his god may have allowed the attacks to occur in order to punish Americans for homosexuality, abortion, and other moral decline. Okay, I think I have it now.

While we're at this, let's note that Robertson has also attributed killer hurricanes to his god's wrath.

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

Happy Guy Fawkes Day!

Remember, Remember the Fifth of November
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot
I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot

Can it be treason to defend the liberty of your fellow men and women?

Virtue versus Legal Obligation

Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter and policy adviser to President George W. Bush, is the latest in a long line of political writers who fail to see the distinction between a virtue and an enforceable legal obligation. Missing that difference leads to all sorts of mischief and undermines a writer's insistence that he favors liberty. Some people may find it an unpleasant choice, but choose they must: freedom or compulsion? There is no third way.

The rest of my TGIF column, "Virtue versus Legal Obligation," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

Regarding the "Founding Fathers"

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

--Samuel Johnson, "Taxation No Tyranny," 1775

In this connection, see Rad Geek's post here.

Paul W. Tibbits Jr. Is Dead

Paul W. Tibbits Jr. died yesterday. He was 92. Tibbits lived 62 years and nearly three months longer than the 140,000 Japanese he helped murder when he piloted the Enola Gay, the American B-29 Superfortress from which the first atomic bomb was dropped in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

Deep Philosophical Question of the Day

Is waterboarding torture?

Bush Has Time to Run the World

President Bush has been a busy man. Even though the quagmire in Iraq threatens to worsen as Turkey prepares to invade the Kurdish north, Bush has time to undertake the arduous task of preventing World War III and begin the transition to democracy in Cuba. How does he do it?!

My latest op-ed, "Bush Has Time to Run the World," distributed by The Future of Freedom Foundation, appears today on Counterpunch. Read the rest here.

Liberty and Political Obedience

Last week I discussed Anthony de Jasay's claim that the freedom philosophy -- liberalism -- is precarious because it "has always been rather loose, tolerant of heterogeneous components, easy to influence, open to infiltration by alien ideas that are in fact inconsistent with any coherent version of it." He specifically criticized the utilitarianism of Bentham and the Mills. In light of the deficiency he has identified, Mr. de Jasay attempts no less than a reconstruction of liberalism.

The rest of this week's TGIF, "Liberty and Political Obedience," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

Blackwater and Bush's War

Blackwater’s involvement in Iraq has been ugly but misunderstood. The presence of security contractors in Iraq does not signify that the war has been privatized. Unfortunately, the word “privatization” has been corrupted over the years.

The rest of my op-ed, "Blackwater and Bush's War" is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.

What Nearly Killed Liberalism

The shifting meaning of the word liberal in the direction of statism has been analyzed often. But a few years ago Anthony de Jasay wrote a short comment on the matter that deserves attention. For Mr. de Jasay, the problem is not merely terminological. As he wrote in "Liberalism, Loose or Strict" (Independent Review, Winter 2005), while political ideas such as nationalism and socialism have had core principles, "Liberalism, I maintain, has never had such an irreducible and unalterable core element. As a doctrine, it has always been rather loose, tolerant of heterogeneous components, easy to influence, open to infiltration by alien ideas that are in fact inconsistent with any coherent version of it. One is tempted to say that liberalism cannot protect itself because its 'immune system' is too weak." His statement does seem to explain why liberalism has taken many forms over the centuries.

The rest of this week's TGIF, "What Nearly Killed Liberalism," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

Naomi Klein: Free-Market Ally?

I haven't read Naomi Klein's book The Shock Treatment: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (or her other books). But based on what I've read about it, she's probably going to be misunderstood by some libertarians and free-market economists. Although apparently an attack on corporatism (fascism), the book is bound to be seen as a criticism of the free market. I assumed that Klein would promote such understanding by an imprecise use of terms -- and to some extent she apparently does so. But perhaps I've underestimated her. I caught her appearance on Bill Maher's program the other night, and during her interview she explicitly said that practitioners of crony capitalism have hijacked the rhetoric of the free market to advance their self-serving cause. She drew a sharp distinction between the two systems. "[I]t's certainly not the free market. ...Ironically, it's the free-market ideology that gets used to propel this [corporatist] vision forward. It's not free for anybody but the contractors." (The interview is here.)

Her thesis is that crony capitalists use crises to foist their "reforms" on otherwise unwilling people. Sounds like it should be read in conjunction with Robert Higgs's Crisis and Leviathan.

Although Klein is not an advocate of a true free market, she seems to be an ally in struggle against corporatism. We should cultivate that alliance in public statements about her book and reinforce her inchoate view that being for the market is far from the same thing as being for capitalism.

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

America's Anti-Militarist Tradition

The right wing went apoplectic at the skepticism that greeted Gen. David Petraeus’s recent testimony about the alleged success of the military escalation in Iraq. It was as though a member of the military was incapable of engaging in spin to support his commander in chief’s war policy. President Bush summed up this attitude revealingly when he said it was one thing to attack him, but quite another to question General Petraeus. War, Clausewitz noted, is politics by other means. That makes high-ranking generals a species of politician. Not a few have harbored presidential thoughts, and some have made it. It is said that Petraeus would like to be another. These are the people the pro-war conservatives are willing to trust implicitly? (Anti-war members of the armed forces, on the other hand, are, in Rush Limbaugh’s words, “phony soldiers.”)

It is unappreciated today that an earlier American culture was anti-militarist. In his classic study The Civilian and the Military: A History of the American Antimilitarist Tradition (1956), historian Arthur A. Ekirch Jr. wrote, “The tradition of antimilitarism has been an important factor in the shaping of some two hundred years of American history.”

The rest of my op-ed, "America's Anti-Militarist Tradition," is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.