TGIF: The Choice Is between Government and Liberty

An article by George H. Smith from a few years ago makes a distinction about freedom that seems worth pursuing. In “Jack and Jill and Two Kinds of Freedom” (also a podcast), Smith distinguishes between (as the title indicates) two kinds of freedom, or between freedom and liberty. He tells the story of Jack, who wants to climb a hill to fetch a pail of water and needs Jill’s help to bring the heavy pail back down. Being a “moral nihilist,” Jack is just as willing to force Jill to help him as he is to persuade her. It all depends on his cost-benefit calculation at the time. In Smith’s story, Jack chooses persuasion and succeeds, so he does not need to resort to Plan B, compulsion. Jill, by the way, does not know that Jack would have forced her.

Jill, on the other hand, is a libertarian who believes in rights and justice. Had the tables been turned and she needed Jack’s help, her only acceptable course would have been persuasion.

Let the Clock Run Out on the NSA

Regarding the feverish effort either to reauthorize, “reform,” or abolish the National Security Agency’s collection of our phone and email data, two things need to be said:

First, thank you, Edward Snowden.

Second, isn’t it great to see the ruling elite panicking?

John Nash, RIP

Updated May 29, 2015
John Nash, the mathematician who won the Nobel Prize in economics and who was the subject of the 2001 Academy Award-winning biopic A Beautiful Mind, died last week along with his wife in a car crash. As editor of The Freeman, I published two articles on Nash and the movie based on the biography by Sylvia Nasar, in August 2002, one by Sandy Ikeda, "A Beautiful Movie, Lousy Economics," and one of my own, "Was the Beautiful Mind Sick?," which I reproduce below.

Revisionist History Day, 2015

Today is Revisionist History Day, what others call Memorial Day. Americans are supposed to remember the country's war dead while being thankful that they protected our freedom and served our country. However, reading revisionist history (see a sampling below) or alternative news sites (start with Antiwar.com and don't forget to listen to the Scott Horton Show) teaches that the fallen were doing no such thing. Rather they were and are today serving cynical politicians and the "private" component of the military-industrial complex in the service of the American Empire.

TGIF: Magna Carta and Libertarian Strategy

UPDATED June 2, 2015
The middle of next month will mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. My knowledge of the “great charter” is modest, to be sure, but lately I have been reading about it and its legacy. (See the “Liberty Matters” discussion, in which I have a small editorial role, going on this month at Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty. Also listen to Nicholas Vincent’s conversation with Russ Roberts on EconTalk. Vincent is the author of Magna Carta: A Very Short Introduction.)

Phone Surveillance Must End

You probably are not a terrorist. Chances are the government doesn’t even suspect you of knowing a terrorist. Even so, the National Security Agency (NSA) — without a warrant — collects information about your — and every other American’s — phone calls. Edward Snowden blew the whistle on this bulk-data-collection program.

Read the rest of my article "Phone Surveillance Must End," written for the Independent Institute, at The Daily Caller.

Who, Whom?

"Bill and I have been blessed," Hillary Clinton says about their big speaking fees. Yes, but blessed by whom?

Marco Rubio: Reactionary Big-Government Man

Republican presidential aspirant and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio gave a major foreign-policy speech recently, and the best that can be said is that he did not claim to favor small government and free markets. What he wants in a foreign policy couldn’t possibly be reconciled with any desire to limit government power. Rubio is for big government no matter what he might say on the campaign trail.

He acknowledged this when he said, correctly, “Foreign policy is domestic policy.”

Nakba Day, 2015

Today is Nakba Day, the day set aside to remember the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian Arabs in 1948 in connection with the creation of the “Jewish State” of Israel. Over 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and villages, and many massacred, in an ethnic-cleansing operation that should shock the conscience. Hundreds of villages were erased and replaced by Jewish towns. The Arabs who remained in the Israeli state that was imposed on them by the UN and Zionist military forces have been second-class citizens, at best, from that time.

Since 1967 the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, many of whom were refugees from the 1948 catastrophe, have lived under the boot of the Israeli government. Their day-to-day lives are under the arbitrary control of the Israeli government. Gaza is an open-air blockaded prison camp subject to periodic military onslaughts (the latest was last year), while the West Bank is relentlessly gobbled up by Jewish-only settlements and violated by a wall that surrounds Palestinian towns and cuts people’s homes off from their farms. For the Israeli ruling elite, the so-called peace process is a sham. Benjamin Netanyahu, who is now embarking on an unprecedented fourth term as prime minister, rejects any realistic plan to let the Palestinians go -- that is, have their own country on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. He insists that they must recognize Israel as the Jewish state, that is, as the state of Jews everywhere, even though it sits largely on stolen property (PDF) -- which raises an interesting question: Is subjugation of the Palestinians an instantiation of Jewish values or is it not? If it is (as apparently most of its supporters believe), then what does that say for Jewish values? If it is not, then what does that say for Israel's purported status as the Jewish State?

Again, I note that the best short introduction to the catastrophe is Jeremy Hammond’s The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination: The Struggle for Palestine and the Roots of the Israeli-Arab Conflict. Further, Hammond debunks the myth that the United Nations created the state of Israel.



Additional reading: "Why the Inconvenient Truths of the Nakba Must Be Recognized," by Tom Pessah

The Emperor Lies

Four years ago the late great journalist Alexander Cockburn wrote, “Alas, the actual story of ‘our history’ is an unrelenting ability to lie about everything, while simultaneously claiming America’s superior moral worth.”

It so happens he wrote that sentence in closing a column on President Obama’s elaborate story about the Navy SEALs’ May 2, 2011, assassination of Osama bin Laden.

TGIF: Clinton v. Bush in 2016

The more I think about the coming presidential election -- it’s not unreasonable to ask why I think about it at all -- the more I am convinced that the best contest for libertarians would be Hillary Clinton versus Jeb Bush.

Why? Because all we libertarians would need to do is point to the ballot and ask, “Here’s our argument against politics. Need we add anything?”

Fiorina Is Not the Anti-Hillary

As an advocate of a stateless society, I don’t want anyone to be president. Nevertheless, someone will be chosen to live in the White House next year. Will it be a woman?

Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina hope so. But these two women are essentially indistinguishable from each other and from their male rivals. Style must not overshadow substance. Really, what’s the point?

"Cowardice Will Save the World"

I discovered I was a coward. That's my new religion. I'm a big believer in it. Cowardice will save the world. War isn't hell at all. It's man at his best; the highest morality he's capable of. It's not war that's insane, you see. It's the morality of it. It's not greed or ambition that makes war: it's goodness. Wars are always fought for the best of reasons: for liberation or manifest destiny. Always against tyranny and always in the interest of humanity. So far this war [WWII], we've managed to butcher some ten million humans in the interest of humanity. Next war it seems we'll have to destroy all of man in order to preserve his damn dignity. It's not war that's unnatural to us, it's virtue. As long as valor remains a virtue, we shall have soldiers. So, I preach cowardice. Through cowardice, we shall all be saved.

--Paddy Chayefsky, The Americanization of Emily 

A Layman’s Early Guide to the Presidential Election

My article "A Layman’s Early Guide to the Presidential Election," written for the Independent Institute, appears at Inside Sources.

TGIF: Avoiding Vietnam Without Regrets

Hard to believe that 40 years ago the U.S. war in Vietnam ended. Actually, the war was against Indochina: remember Cambodia and Laos. (With previously unexploded ordnance from American cluster bombs killing people in those countries to this day, did the U.S. war really end?)

It’s hard to believe because I can remember when I and the people around me thought the war would never end. It seemed like a permanent part of life. Night after night we’d turn on the network news and watch the reports of body counts -- always more of “theirs” than of “ours” -- yet we had no sense it would ever really end, despite talk of “victory.”

Power to the Individual, Not to the State

How can you tell an American progressive from an American radical? A progressive laments the condition of working people and proposes to further empower the government. A radical laments the condition of working people and proposes to empower individuals by diminishing the power of government.

TGIF: A Freed Society Would Not Be Problem-Free

Modified April 28, 2015

In 1970 country singer Lynn Anderson had a hit recording of a Joe South song that opened with the line:

I beg your pardon. I never promised you a rose garden.

I often think of that song in connection with the libertarian philosophy. You may be asking: for heaven’s sake, why?

More Equal

For leaking classified documents to his mistress/biographer, former general and CIA director David Petraeus gets two years' probation  -- because some animals are more equal than others.

Megalomaniacs

My article "US Foreign Policymakers Can't Be Trusted," written for the Independent Institute, is in today's spotlight at Antiwar.com.

Obama Wades Further into Yemen

“The U.S. Navy … has dispatched the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt toward the waters off Yemen to join other American ships prepared to intercept any Iranian vessels carrying weapons to the rebels, U.S. officials said,” the Chicago Tribune reported on Monday.

Thus does the Obama administration risk war with Iran while embracing the mischievous agendas of Wahhabi Saudi Arabia and Israel. 

Iran has not been found shipping arms, but you won’t learn that from mainstream news accounts. Nor do the media ask why the United States and its allies -- but not Iran -- may intervene in Yemen.

The Tribune, like all mainstream news outlets, refers to “Iran-backed Shiite rebels,” that is, the autonomy-minded and long-burdened Houthis, who are portrayed without evidence as agents of the Islamic Republic. The media are mere conduits for Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab Gulf states, which have an interest in falsely portraying the turmoil in Yemen, long racked by civil war, as an instance of Iranian expansion. The Sunni Arab states don’t want Shiite Persians playing a prominent role in the region and becoming friendlier with the United States, while Israel uses Iran to take the world’s mind off the Jewish State’s brutality against the Palestinians. All this goes on while the United States negotiates curbs on a nonexistent Iranian nuclear-weapons program -- to Saudi and Israeli consternation.

While the media fill American minds with almost nonstop propaganda about Iran’s ambitions, the U.S. intelligence agencies have their doubts. Why don’t the media report this, considering that Obama has facilitated the Saudis’ naval blockade against Yemen and its off-again/on-again bombing campaign? As a result of this war, Yemen suffers a humanitarian catastrophe, complete with refugees, food shortages, and the slaughter of civilians.

Fortifying doubts about Iranian backing of the Houthis, the Huffington Post, citing “American officials familiar with intelligence around the insurgent takeover,” reports that “Iranian representatives discouraged Houthi rebels from taking the Yemeni capital of Sanaa last year” (emphasis added).

This conflicts with the popular belief that the Houthis, who practice a Shiite offshoot that differs significantly from Iranian Shiism, moved on the capital under orders from Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

“The newly disclosed information casts further doubt on claims that the rebels are a proxy group fighting on behalf of Iran,” continue the authors, Ali Watkins, Ryan Grim, and Akbar Shahid Ahmed, “suggesting that the link between Iran and the Yemeni Shiite group may not be as strong as congressional hawks and foreign powers urging U.S. intervention in Yemen have asserted.”

Do congressional hawks and foreign powers, that is, Israel and Saudi Arabia, care what the facts show? Facts have nothing to do with this. Iran is the bogeyman, so all troubles must be traced to its door. Nothing -- especially the truth -- can be allowed to stand in the way.

The article adds that “the revelation that the Houthis directly disobeyed Iran gives credibility to the White House's argument that Iran is not directing the rebels” (emphasis added). It quotes Bernadette Meehan, a National Security Council spokeswoman, who says, “It remains our assessment that Iran does not exert command and control over the Houthis in Yemen.”

To drive the point home, the authors quote a U.S. intelligence official: “It is wrong to think of the Houthis as a proxy force for Iran.”

So why does Obama help the Saudis murder Yemenis?

Directing the Houthis and aiding them are two different things, of course, but Iranian support in the face of long-standing Saudi and U.S. intervention hardly seems remarkable. Reuters reported in December 2014 that “exactly how much support Iran has given the Houthis … has never been clear.” Moreover, the ships “suspected” of carrying arms are probably part of Iran’s anti-piracy patrol. (See Gareth Porter's "Houthi arms bonanza came from Saleh, not Iran.")

And let’s face it: the U.S.-backed Saudi war creates opportunities for al-Qaeda in the Iraqi Peninsula (AQIP) and ISIS, which the Houthis oppose.

The United States risks unlimited war with Iran by interfering in a civil war on behalf of malign outsider objectives. (It’s been droning Yemen since 2001.) By seeing the conflict through the Saudi and Israeli lens, Obama magnifies the human catastrophe.

Sheldon Richman keeps the blog "Free Association" and is a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society.