TGIF: The State of Obama's Union

Despite what some popular right-wing talk-show hosts claim, Barack Obama is not pushing Marxism, revolutionary or otherwise. He’s pushing good old American progressive-corporate elitism.

Read TGIF here.

About that Spending Freeze

"Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years." --Barack Obama

All spending? What about the military?

Okay, all spending, except the military.

What about the FBI?

Okay, all spending except the military and the FBI.

What about the CIA?

Okay, all spending except the military, the FBI, and the CIA.

What about the Department of Homeland Security?

Okay, all spending except the military, the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security.

What about the VA?

Okay, all spending except the military, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and the VA.

What about Medicare?

Okay, all spending except the military, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, the VA, and Medicare.

What about Medicaid?

Okay, all spending except the military, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, the VA, Medicare, and Medicaid.

What about Social Security?

Okay, all spending except the military, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, the VA, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

What about education?

Okay, all spending except the military, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, the VA, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and education.

With apologies to Monty Python.

Howard Zinn, RIP

The revisionist historian -- best known for A People’s History of the United States (1980) -- and antiwar activist died yesterday at age 87. Here's an obit.

The State of the Union Address

Sorry. I don't do theater reviews.

Funny Thing

Everyone understands the phrase "crony capitalism." But try using "crony free market" and watch the facial expressions.

"Capitalism" versus Communism

Stephen Kinzer provides a good reason not to use "capitalism" to mean "free market":

Visiting unhappy Cuba is especially thought-provoking for anyone familiar with its unhappy neighbours. Cubans live difficult lives and have much to complain about. So do Jamaicans, Dominicans, Haitians, Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, and others in the Caribbean basin who live under capitalist governments. Who is worse off? Does an ordinary person live better in Cuba or in a nearby capitalist country?

I take it Kinzer defines "capitalism" as "not Cuban-style Marxist state socialism."

HT: Jacob Hornberger

The "Pro-Capitalist" Mentality

You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.

--Ludwig von Mises to Ayn Rand (pdf)
regarding Atlas Shrugged

These two people have been big influences on me, and both have made important contributions to the cause of freedom. Nevertheless, I believe that "capitalism" can engender the attitude shown here. Often it is implicit in writing about capitalism, but it is there and people we might win over to libertarianism are alienated by it.

Scott Horton, Lysander Spooner, and Me

Scott Horton interviewed me on Antiwar Radio the other day. The subject: Lysander Spooner and his relevance to our times. Here it is.

Happy Birthday, Lysander Spooner

Lysander Spooner (1808-1887)

One of my heroes.

"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another,
this much is certain--
that it has either authorized such a government as we have had,
or has been powerless to prevent it.
In either case, it is unfit to exist. "

(More here.)

Remembering Murray

Apparently I forgot to post a link to last week's TGIF, "Murray Rothbard." Read it here.

Libertarians Against Capitalism

I've started a group by that name on Facebook. Thomas Hodgskin, mentor to Herbert Spencer, is the inspiration. Here's the official description:

We are a group of libertarians who understand that historically the word "capitalism" has meant, not the free market, but crony capitalism -- that is, collusion between business and State at the expense of consumers/workers. Thus we refuse to use the word "capitalism" to describe what we favor: individual liberty in all respects and free, competitive markets. We believe that what we have today IS capitalism -- and we oppose it.

I like what Brad Spangler said in a comment:

Which is more direct, a two-step process or a one-step process?

A: 1) Convince people the status quo is not capitalism & 2) Convince people that "capitalism" in the sense of a freed market is the remedy to the status quo?

-or-

B: 1) Convince people that a freed market is the remedy to the capitalist status quo?

No, that's not Thomas Hodgskin up there. Apparently there are no pictures of him. Instead, I've used Benjamin Tucker, who's a darned good stand-in.

Happy Birthday

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon!

Free association . . . the only true form of society.

To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place[d] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

TGIF: Opaque By Design

The phrase “transparent government” is just this side of a logical contradiction. A really transparent government would barely qualify as a government at all. Imagine if you could witness all the backroom dealing, logrolling, outright bribery, and the rest of the shenanigans that go on under the laughable rubric “governing.” It wouldn’t last a week.

Read TGIF here.

Have We Won?

Cheryl found this sign (click to enlarge) at a store called Intellectual Property in downtown Austin. She couldn't resist.

The sign says, "Store Closing." Write your own caption.

Ben Franklin on Patents

Governor Thomas was so pleased with the construction of this stove . . . that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declined it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, viz.: That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.

--Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography

HT: James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

TGIF: What Next?

Liberty always walks uphill.

Read the rest here.

Happy New Year!

May it be one in which we make notable progress toward peace, freedom, and prosperity for everyone. Oh, and statelessness too. Success to the Molinarians!

German Physicists Reject Greenhouse Effect

I'm not a climate scientist. I don't even play one on TV. There do seem to be serious problems with the catastrophic anthropogenic global-warming (AGW) thesis, but I remain an agnostic, and I refuse to use political-economic criteria to judge scientific credibility.

Nevertheless, this interesting article about German physicists who insist that AGW is bunk is worth reading.

From the physicists' paper:

(a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees Celsius is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

HT: Brad Spangler

Hoist by His Own Petard

Tibor Machan takes John Stossel to task for not espousing the pure libertarian position during his recent Fox Business Network show on the health-insurance overhaul. A proponent of Obamacare, Russel Mokhiber, challenged Stossel, an opponent of government-run medicine, by asking if he also opposes government parks and schools. Machan is unhappy with how Stossel responded, because instead of invoking the libertarian principle against government parks and schools, Stossel said "the issue is big versus limited government."

[S]o that in the last analysis [Machan writes] John Stossel and [guest] John Mackey were trapped in a dilemma: they either embrace a pure libertarian position in which there is no room for any wealth redistribution and public works--everything must be privatized apart from the judicial system and the military--or they have to accept the socialist health-care proposals of the liberal Democrats, better known as Obamacare, as just another task the government can take over.

But hold on. Machan is stuck in his own dilemma. If he opposes socialist health care, why does he favor a socialist judicial system and military? As he says, "It isn't the size of government, really, that is of concern but its proper scope." He's right. But why does he want a government whose scope includes the judiciary and military?

He responds, "Matters pertaining to the protection of the basic and derivative rights of the citizenry are the government's purview but nothing else, including parks, forests, lakes, roads and so forth."

This seems wholly arbitrary. What does it mean to say that protecting rights is the government's purview? Historically that has not been the case; government has been the greater killer of liberty. Rulers may have claimed they were protecting people, but that doesn't make it true or proper, since it routinely coerced innocents in the process. More fundamentally, who says that rights protection is government's--and only government's--purview? Is that carved on a tablet somewhere?

Machan might say that everything but judicial and military (by which I presume he means bona fide defense) functions can be provided in the competitive market. But that's mere assertion, belied by theory and history.

Enforced monopoly is bad for everything--except the production of security? Why?

Gustave de Molinari thought this through more clearly:

It offends reason to believe that a well established natural law can admit of exceptions. A natural law must hold everywhere and always, or be invalid. I cannot believe, for example, that the universal law of gravitation, which governs the physical world, is ever suspended in any instance or at any point of the universe. Now I consider economic laws comparable to natural laws, and I have just as much faith in the principle of the division of labor as I have in the universal law of gravitation. I believe that while these principles can be disturbed, they admit of no exceptions.

But, if this is the case, the production of security should not be removed from the jurisdiction of free competition; and if it is removed, society as a whole suffers a loss.

Either this is logical and true, or else the principles on which economic science is based are invalid...

In the entire world, there is not a single establishment of the security industry that is not based on monopoly or on communism.

In this connection, we add, in passing, a simple remark.

Political economy has disapproved equally of monopoly and communism in the various branches of human activity, wherever it has found them. Is it not then strange and unreasonable that it accepts them in the security industry?

Kindle DRM Cracked

A blow for freedom...

From BBC News:

Hacker cracks Kindle's copyright

An Israeli hacker claims to have broken the copyright protection on Amazon's Kindle e-reader, reports say.

The hack will allow the ebooks stored on the reader to be transferred as pdf files to any other device.

The hacker, known as Labba, responded to a challenge posted on Israeli hacking forum, hacking.org.

It is the latest in a series of Digital Rights Management hacks, the most famous being the reverse engineering of iTunes.

The Kindle e-book reader has been very successful since it was launched in the US in 2007.

Amazon hopes to have sold a million devices by the end of the year.

It leaves it to individual publishers whether they want to apply DRM but books in its main proprietary format .azw, cannot be transferred to other devices.

It did not immediately respond to the news but it is likely it will attempt to patch its DRM software.

DRM has long divided opinion. While rights holders regard it as a crucial tool to protect copyright, consumers tend to hate it because it limits what can be done with content.

"DRM is not an effective way of preventing copying nor is it a good way of making sales. There isn't a customer out there saying 'what I need is an electronic book that does less," novelist and co-editor of the Boing Boing blog Cory Doctorow told the BBC when the Kindle was launched.

As soon as a new DRM system is active, hackers begin to try and break it.

Most famously Jon Lech Johansen, known as DVD Jon, cracked the copy protection on DVDs in 1999.

He went on to break the copyright protection on iTunes, leading Apple to offer DRM-free music.

DVD Jon now runs a company with an application to take the pain out of moving different types of content between devices.