Bottom Line on the "Fiscal Cliff"

The tax increases will be real. The spending cuts will be illusions, at best, a minor slowing of the rate of increase. We may not even see that. Word is that the two division of the uniparty are discussing postponing "sequestration," the automatic so-called across-the-board cuts in domestic and military discretionary scheduled to kick in at midnight. Republicans reportedly want a three-month postponement, Democrats a two-year postponement.

Business as usual. You can't make this stuff up.

Latest FFF Scribblings

Op-ed: "Gun-Control, Mental-Health Laws Won’t Make Us Safer."

TGIF: "The Year That Was."

More on Right to Work

My FFF op-ed this week is titled "The Fight Over Right-to-Work."

And if you haven't had enough on the subject, Gary Chartier and I respond to Shikha Dalmia's defense of right-to-work laws (at Reason.com) in our Center for a Stateless Society commentary, "Right-to-Work Legislation Is Not the 'Good.'"

TGIF: Intervention Begets Intervention

This week's TGIF looks at Ludwig von Mises's "critique of interventionism." Bottom line:

Is there a lesson to be drawn from Mises’s critique? I think so. Intervention tends to beget intervention. Therefore, when you see a public problem, don’t look to government intervention for a solution. Instead, look for the previous intervention that created it — and work to have the offending legislation repealed.

Read it here.

Taxpayers Aren't Stationary Targets

My latest piece at the Project to Restore America website is "Taxpayers Aren't Stationary Targets."

Actor Gérard Depardieu's decision to flee France for Belgium to avoid a 75 percent marginal tax rate on incomes above $1.3 million sends a message we here in America should heed: Those who are singled out for tax increases are not stationary targets. The means of avoiding and evading the taxman are legion.

Read it all here.

Government-Industry Revolving Door

Not that we thought it would be any different, but revolving door between government and industry spins just as fast in Obama's Washington. Read about it in my latest article at the Project to Restore America.

Shooting in Connecticut

I am deeply saddened by the shooting of children and adults at the school in Connecticut. My heart goes out to their loved ones and to the wounded.

TGIF: Right-To-Work Laws and the Modern Classical-Liberal Tradition

TGIF today ventures into the treacherous waters of "right-to-work" laws, noting that a previous generation of libertarians and Austrians opposed them, realizing full well that at least some people intended them to neutralize the Wagner Act's compulsory-union provisions.

Read it all here.

Other good reads on the subject are here, here, and here.

Individualist Collectivism

Is the free market an individualist or collectivist social arrangement? Don’t answer too quickly. It’s a trick question.

My latest TGIF is "Individualist Collectivism." Read it here.

Scott Horton and I Talk about "Individualist Collectivism"

Here's my latest interview with Scott Horton.

Romanticizing Taxation

My latest at the Project to Restore America website is titled "Romanticizing Taxation." It addresses the annoying attempt during the "fiscal cliff" controversy to portray taxation as something benign, you know, "the dues that we pay for the privileges of membership in an organized society," as FDR put it.  My take:

Far from some enlightened institution, taxation began when conquerors realized that formal and continuing appropriation of a subject population's wealth was preferable to hit-and-run pillaging. For this to work, however, the rulers needed to convince the peasants that the regime would protect them from predators in return for their regular remittances. That's right: It was a protection racket, from which the racketeers and their cronies profited handsomely. For the taxpayers, there was little choice in the matter. They weren't buying protection as people buy insurance in the market, and they weren't paying dues as they would later pay dues to mutual-aid societies. They paid or they were punished. The ideology of benevolent state protection reduced enforcement costs because the ruled outnumbered the rulers and widespread tax resistance would have doomed the regime. Things have changed little in our time.

Read it all.

That Pesky Debt Ceiling

The central government is again getting close to its debt ceiling. Fearing another game of chicken between the White House and congressional Republicans, the risk of default, and another downgrading of the U.S. credit rating, some people want President Obama to bypass Congress and raise the ceiling by executive order. Others would dispense with the ceiling altogether. Obama vaguely says he will not go through what he had to go through with Congress last year. I hope they don't raise the debt ceiling. In fact I favor repudiation of the government debt, since it is based on the immoral power to wield aggressive force. A voluntary government creditor takes his chances.

Here's the one thing that I find amusing in this discussion: Pundits and others who favor limitless government insist that raising the debt ceiling won't permit the government to spend more money; it merely let's the government pay its current bills. If that is so, it's not very comforting. It means the government incurred obligations without knowing for sure that it would have the money to pay its bills. Why is it allowed to do that?

Oh, that's right. It's the government.

Israel's Hypocrisy Runs Thick

The Israeli leadership is about as interested in a two-state solution with the Palestinians as the U.S. leadership is in liquidating the American empire. That was clear even before the latest announced plan to build 3,000 Jewish-only homes in East Jerusalem and on the West Bank. The timing of the announcement, though surely not the plan itself, is related to the Palestinians' successful bid to upgrade their status at the UN. Israel seems to be quaking at the prospect of the Palestinians' going to the International Criminal Court with their grievances -- as well they should.

Listen carefully to what Israel's and America's leaders say. They admonish the Palestinians that their "unilateral" action undermines negotiations. What a laugh! Negotiations are supposed to be about land, but Israel insists on annexing Palestinians' land during negotiations! When the Palestinians insist that they will not talk until Israel stops building Jewish-only settlements on their land, which was seized in a war, Israel responds that there must be no preconditions to negotiations. That's as insult to everyone's intelligence. Yet Israel has gotten away with this for years.

Israel is simply doing what it has always done in its quest for the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. It is establishing irrevocable facts on the ground. The only peace it wants is the one that will result from wearing down and demoralizing the Palestinians. In light of its spectacular failure to prevail over Hamas last month in the Gaza Strip, the Israelis must attach a new urgency to their grand strategy.

More and more observers are concluding that the two-state solution is long dead. In light of the facts on the ground, it's hard to rebut this judgment. It certainly appears that there will be only one country between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. The only question is whether it will be racist or not.

The Obama administration will bluster a bit, but in the end we know where it will stand: in "lockstep" with Israel.

How the Rich Rule

My article by that name is now online at The American Conservative. One aspect of the article has been criticized by market monetarist Scott Sumner at his blog (and previously here and here). It has set off quite a debate over the Austrian position on "Cantillon effects" from government-created money; this is the idea that when the Fed creates money it enters at particular points in the economy and through the possession of particular individuals. It doesn't get evenly distributed throughout the economy with no real effects.

Another critic, Nick Rowe, weighs in too.

Molinari in La Jolla

I'm in La Jolla for a Liberty Fund colloquium on the thought of Gustave de Molinari. I'm honored to be participating with the likes of Roderick Long, Gary Chartier, Charles Johnson, Don Boudreaux, David Friedman, Eric Mack, David Hart, Matt Zwolinski, Shawn Wilbur, Bruce Benson, Jennifer McKitrick, Ed Stringham, Steven Wall, Elizabeth Brake, Paul Jankowski, and Peter Mentzel. The discussions have been fascinating!

Earth to Jewish Lobby: Are You There?

The Gazans are penned up like animals, easy targets for the powerful IDF, and people talk of Israel's adversity!

Israeli Assault on Gaza Has No Basis in Self-Defense

From Jerome Slater's heavily documented "Just War Moral Philosophy and the 2008–09 Israeli Campaign in Gaza" (pdf):

By 2004 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had become convinced that the economic and military costs of continuing to defend the settlements were too high—unlike the case of the West Bank and Jerusalem, Israel had little or no religious or nationalist claims on Gaza—so in August 2005 he ordered their withdrawal. Even after the withdrawal, Israel continued to wield overwhelming power over Gaza’s economy and external trade; it maintained control of Gaza’s water, electricity, and telecommunication networks; refused to allow Gaza a functioning airport, seaport, or commercial crossing on its border with Egypt, thus radically cutting Gazan trade and commerce with the outside world; restricted the movement of people and goods in and out of Gaza; prevented farmers from tending to and harvesting their fields and crops; placed severe restrictions on the importation of water for drinking as well as irrigation purposes; and re- served the “right” to launch military incursions at will, periodically bombing and shelling Gaza’s electrical generating system, roads, bridges, farms, and olive orchards. Consequently, even before Cast Lead, the Gazan economy was on the verge of collapse; nearly 95 percent of all factories operating in Gaza had closed down; unemployment ranged from 45 to 60 percent; and 80 percent of Gazans were estimated to be below international poverty lines. Outright starvation was averted by outside assistance, but malnutrition was rampant; the minimal imports of food supplies allowed by Israel were carefully calibrated to prevent a famine, but not more than that.

Read this important article to understand the background of what's going on today. Gaza has has been under Israeli oppression since 1967. One can disapprove of the Gazans' particular tactics (lobbing rockets at civilian areas) while acknowledging that resistance to occupation is legitimate both morally and in international law. When you place people in a desperate position, you can't be surprised when they use any weapons they can get their hands on. The disparity in power and casualties between the Israelis and Gazans (and Palestinians in general) is too obvious to require elaboration.

Slater's paper is also crucial to understanding Israel's long-executed policy of targeting noncombatants and civilian infrastructure, not only  Palestinians, but also Egyptians and Lebanese too. When Israel's Labor Party criticized Menachem Begin's Likud government for targeting noncombatants in Lebanon in 1981, Begin responded by documenting similar conduct by Labor governments. No one denied Begin's counterclaim.

This is what we're dealing with--and Americans are forced to pay for it.

TGIF Is Back!

Now at The Future of Freedom Foundation's new website!

What's Going On

From Jerry Haber at The Magnes Zionist:

I spoke with an expert on the Israeli military shortly after "Operation Cast Lead," and when I told him that many argued that the operation was a reaction to Hamas rocket-fire, he laughed. He said that Hamas rocket-fire was deliberately provoked when Israel broke the cease-fire so that Israel could do a little "spring cleaning," deplete Hamas's arsenal of weapons. He told me that this happens every few years, and that I should expect it to happen in another few years. Israel will assassinate a Hamas leader, Hamas will have to respond (wouldn't Israel, under those circumstances?) and Israel will perform a "clean up" operation.

Also from Haber: "And That's Why Israel Doesn't Want A Cease-Fire."

The Attack on Gaza

Two points to keep in mind as this latest Israeli aggression unfolds:

First, Hamas did not start the last flare-up in violence. See John Glaser's "Israel’s Latest Assault on Gaza: The Lie of Who Started It."

Second, the just-assassinated Hamas leader, Ahmed Jabari, was in the process of negotiating a permanent truce with Israel. See the Haaretz report "Israeli peace activist: Hamas leader Jabari killed amid talks on long-term truce." According to the daily  newspaper, "[Israeli peace activist Gershon]

Baskin told Haaretz on Thursday that senior officials in Israel knew about his contacts with Hamas and Egyptian intelligence aimed at formulating the permanent truce, but nevertheless approved the assassination."

I submit that Jabari's willingness to talk true and his assassination are no coincidence. Israel does not want to see Hamas evolve. It needs an enemy.

More things to keep in mind:

Gaza has been under an Israeli blockade for years. Needed goods are kept out.

Israel helped to make Hamas what it is today. Years ago it promoted the organization as an alternative to the secular Fatah. Why? To splinter the Palestinians. If Israel now considers Hamas a mortal threat, it has only itself to blame. This is a case of blowback.

Israel's partisans refer to Hamas's declaration of war on Jews in its charter as a reason for scoffing at the idea that real negotiations are possible with the organization. That charter may be put in perspective by noting the words of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister:

‎Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country.... We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?

All Zionist leaders were aware of that fact.

Nevertheless, Hamas has distanced itself from the charter and has shown a willingness to talk, as we've seen.The Israeli response has been assassination, bombing, and ground invasion. It is not Hamas that has consistently violated cease-fires.

Finally, one need not condone the shooting of rockets into southern Israel to care about the context. In 1948 Zionist paramilitary forces drove Palestinians out of their villages in the south and pushed them into the Gaza Strip. Many Gazans are refugees or descendants of refugees of the Nakba. The violence may be inexcusable, but it is not unprovoked.

See this roundup of the violence from Mondoweiss.