McCain's the One

All you need to know about John McCain:



One more thing you should know: he was bombing civilian infrastructure in Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, a country that had done nothing to him or his country, when he was shot down and taken prisoner in 1967.

There's a big difference between "hero" and "war hero."

The Whining Empire

My article "The Whining Empire" appears on Counterpunch today. Click here.

TGIF

I'm traveling today. Check out TGIF : Where Free-Market Economists Go Wrong.

Political Stimulus

Not understanding basic economics is dangerous because you’re vulnerable to political con games foisted by unscrupulous politicians.

Economics properly conceived is just common sense about human activity. An examination of the proposed economic stimulus will make this clear.

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

Catching Up

I've been on the road and Free Association is one of the things I've neglected. Here's an attempt to catch up:

"It's like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end. Funny thing -- the water in the shallow end doesn't get any deeper."

That's how George Mason University economist Russell Roberts describes the logic -- rather, illogic -- of the economic "stimulus" proposals that everyone and his uncle are proposing.

The rest of last week's TGIF, "An Unstimulating Idea," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

Republican presidential contender Ron Paul certainly deserves credit for putting the foreign policy of noninterventionism into the public debate. It’s about time. For decades U.S. presidents have sought to manage the world in behalf of what they call “American interests,” and all it has brought is death, mayhem, anti-Americanism, and a price tag that would blow the average citizen’s mind if he fully grasped it.

Yes, the time for this debate is long overdue. Unfortunately, the quality of the debate on the other side is pathetic.

The rest of my latest op-ed, "Pathetic Arguments for Foreign Intervention," is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Day

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany.

--Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"

Recent Writings

The writer Michael Kinsley is very intelligent. He is also very glib, and his glibness often gets in the way of his intelligence. The expression "too clever by half" seems to have been coined for him. This is most obvious when he writes about the libertarian philosophy, as he did recently for the Washington Post website.

The rest of the latest TGIF, "Those Too-Consistent Libertarians," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

Consistent advocates of individual liberty often point out that government restrictions on free immigration violate the rights of people not born in the United States. Not only are they denied their freedom to move and improve their lot in life, but if they make it into the United States, they are subjected to police-state raids and exploitation because their illegal status denies them access to justice.

While the immigrants themselves bear the brunt of U.S. immigration policy and will suffer even more regardless of who becomes president next year, they are not the only victims. Additional victims are to be found among American citizens.

The rest of my latest op-ed, "More Victims of Immigration Control," is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.

Ron Paul: The Lost Opportunity?

Ron Paul has done an immense amount of good in promoting the pro-freedom, anti-war, and anti-empire message. To be sure, it is not pure libertarianism. To get a sense of what he has accomplished, however, you should read Brian Doherty's cover story in the February Reason magazine. Here's a key part, describing an appearance in Iowa:

[I]t's all classic Ron Paul: Get rid of the income tax and replace it with nothing; find the money to support those dependent on Social Security and Medicare by shutting down the worldwide empire, while giving the young a path out of the programs; don't pass a draft; have a foreign policy of friendship and trade, not wars and subsidies. He attacks the drug war, condemning the idea of arresting people who have never harmed anyone else's person or property. He stresses [note well] the disproportionate and unfair treatment minorities get from drug law enforcement. One of his biggest applause lines, to my astonishment, involves getting rid of the Federal Reserve....

He wraps up the speech with three things he doesn't want to do that sum up the Ron Paul message First, "I don't want to run your life. We all have different values. I wouldn't know how to do it, I don't have the authority under the Constitution, and I don't have the moral right." Second: "I don't want to run the economy. People run the economy in a free society." And third: " I don't want to run the world.... We don't need to be imposing ourselves around the world."

Doherty goes on to note, "Paul does not mention abortion or immigration...."

(I am glad he stresses that the drug war is an atrocity, with members of minorities bearing the brunt. But even here there is ambiguity. Does he oppose only the federal drug war? Or would he oppose prohibition by the states too. He is not always clear. Often he says it's a state matter.)

I quote this at length because most of us have never heard Ron Paul's stump speech. It is clear to me that if you only see Ron Paul on cable news or in televised debates, you do not get the full picture of his campaign.

Having said this, there are obviously areas where Ron Paul does not take anything close to the libertarian position. Immigration is one example. (I'll leave aside the especially contentious abortion issue, except to say I disagree with Ron Paul.) My views on immigration are readily available on the web, so I won't rehash them here. It seems to me Ron Paul takes the position he does because of his attachment to national sovereignty, about which more below. Let me point out just one difficulty that his position creates for the rest of his pro-freedom philosophy. Ron Paul has promised to pardon everyone who has been convicted of nonviolent drug offenses. In other words, he doesn't think one should be punished for breaking the drug laws. I assume he believes that legislation which violates the natural law of liberty is illegitimate. That's a proper libertarian position. Logically, he should also promise to pardon anyone who has violated the immigration laws because, like the drug laws, they are state restrictions on behavior that violates no one's person or property. Moreover, he has praised the civil disobedience of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. Ron Paul needs to reconcile this contradiction. To his credit, he opposes a national ID and a wall on the border. I presume he would oppose eminent domain to force property owners on the Texas-Mexican border to let a wall be built.

Ron Paul has taken other positions, or at least implied other positions, that conflict with his overall message. If you look at the issues list at his campaign website you will find no section on international trade. Trade is mentioned only in the section on "American Independence and Sovereignty." In that section you find the words "I like free trade," both in print and in a video, but that is all he says in favor of free trade. They are overshadowed by his Lou Dobbs-style remarks condemning the the multinational organizations that threaten "our independence as a nation." On the site and in the debates he never explicitly distinguishes free trade and its undeniable benefits from those organizations. He never praises imports and open markets or points out that exports are the price we pay for goods from abroad. He never embraces the international division of labor. The overall message is one of suspicion of engagement with foreigners. Nowhere do you get a sense that NAFTA and WTO are bad because they may stand in the way of total free trade. You certainly don't hear calls for a unilateral and unconditional repeal of all U.S. trade restrictions.

Ron Paul's position on trade is not helped by his alarm on the alleged NAFTA highway, which he describes as part of a government plan to dissolve the borders within North America. Suffice it say that there is no such plot. (See this.) It's great to oppose eminent domain, but it's damaging to hitch that cause to imagined blueprints for a super North American government. In other respects, however, dissolving the political borders would be a good thing because that would permit free trade and free movement.

Ron Paul is also doing a poor job of presenting the free-market position on medicine. His website has some generally good, if vague, statements, but how many people read them? When he's been asked about medical care on television, he sounds anything but libertarian. Mostly I've heard him say that if we weren't spending billions of dollars on the empire "we could take care of our people at home." That Dennis Kucinich's line. Maybe he means the money could be left in the taxpayers' pockets, but he never says that.

Look at the opportunity he's missing. He's a doctor! He should be pointing out that pervasive government regulation of medicine and insurance has virtually destroyed the medical marketplace. I've heard him say nothing to debunk the calls for a government-paid system, mandatory insurance, or the other unlibertarian positions the other candidates take.

He's missing another opportunity with energy. In response to the fascist central planning of energy proposed by the other GOP candidates, Ron Paul said ... nothing. There are great free-market lessons to be drawn. Why isn't he drawing them?

This reminds me a general point. Ron Paul's position on empire and the Fed are great. I'm glad he pounds away at them because they outrageously burden regular people. Moreover, he is right to point out that these issues affect many others. But he can go too far in doing that. The erosion of the dollar certainly is part of the explanation for why medical care and energy are more costly. But there are specific reasons as well, such as regulation. If all Ron Paul does is tie every issue back to empire and the Fed, people will think he knows nothing of other issues. They may even doubt his single-cause explanation for all the ills in the world.

I don't think I am nitpicking. Medical care, trade, and energy are issues people talk about. In the debate the other night, Mitt Romney promised to "protect every job in America." Where was Ron Paul? There is no reason not to clearly endorse free markets here. He should be channeling Henry Hazlitt. No one should mistake Ron Paul for Lou Dobbs or Pat Buchanan.

Ron Paul did not do well in what is regarded as the most libertarian state in the U.S., New Hampshire. That may signal the end of the campaign, although surprises could lie ahead, in Nevada possibly. If the campaign goes on, there is time to make adjustments so that the program is even more clearly pro-freedom. I don't fault him for his emphasis on constitutionalism. One cannot treat a presidential campaign as a seminar in the fundamentals of libertarianism. Ron Paul is using the Constitution as short hand for limiting government power. I have strong reservations about that approach, but I can understand it in an election appeal. It's for the rest of us to fill out the story for those newly interested in the libertarian philosophy.

I've left the newsletter scandal for last, and here things get difficult. I doubt that Ron Paul ever held the odious views expressed in those newsletters. No one has come forward to claim that Ron Paul has ever spoken that way. Those views are certainly not reflected in his platform. My hunch is that over the years he has put his confidence in the wrong people. He may have had a sense of what was going on, but did not want to know the details. This doesn't absolve him of responsibility, but it does mean that he is not to be put in the same category as the author(s) and anyone else who had a hand in putting out such garbage in his name.

That said, I wish Ron Paul would more fully explain what went on. When did he first learn of the offensive material and what did he do about it? Most important, are the people responsible still advising him? He wouldn't even have to name names to answer these questions.

I continue to think that Ron Paul's campaign can make a contribution to the cause of freedom. As I've written before, it helps if libertarians speak the language of the people around them. "Ron Paul" still means: End the war now and expand freedom by shrinking the government. Yet I remain concerned over the newsletter issue. This is not a matter of getting to the bottom of the episode or rendering judgment on Ron Paul. It's bigger than that. It's about protecting the libertarian philosophy and movement from association with bigotry. That is no small matter. Ron Paul has made himself a portal to libertarianism. His campaign has become a first contact with the movement for many people. It would be a disaster if just as people were discovering it they were given reason to associate it with racism and other bigotry. People make nonrational associations all the time. Most people don't have the time to systematically study the libertarian philosophy and its noble heritage. They will form impressions based on things that drift into their range of vision, not taking the time to go below the surface. Hopefully, the newcomers who hear about the newsletters and then hear Ron Paul's repudiation of the views expressed will believe him and not associate racism and anti-gay sentiment with libertarians. But we can't count on that. So the rest of us will have to find ways to explain that those views represent the opposite of libertarianism.

Ron Paul could help by giving a more complete explanation.

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

What Next for Ron Paul?

The New Republic article about Ron Paul that has the libertarian blogosphere abuzz is here. The campaign's response is here.

This is all very troubling. I don't know Ron Paul well, but the language in these newsletters does not sound like him, nor is it consistent with other things he has said over the years. He has condemned racism as collectivist (although admittedly, he has usually followed this statement with a condemnation only of affirmative action) and he has praised Rosa Parks and, I believe, Martin Luther King. He has condemned the "war on drugs" as mainly a war on minorities.

Ron Paul says that he did not write the offensive material, that he had in effect contracted the newsletter out to someone else. Apparently the identify of the ghost writer is well known to some people. See this. In this post Wendy McElroy appeals to the ghost writer: "Will you now do the decent thing for libertarianism and come forward to acknowledge responsibility for the material being used against your mentor?" Good question.

I have no trouble believing that the newsletter was ghost-written. But how could Ron Paul have let the author of this sewage get away with it for so long? He was so busy delivering babies that he never had a clue what was being said in a newsletter bearing his name? This does not speak well of him.

What now? I was tempted to say that with Ron Paul's poor showing in New Hampshire, it doesn't much matter now. But that is wrong. Ron Paul has done a great service in bringing libertarianism (however watered down and distorted as constitutionalism) plus anti-imperialism to a new audience. It would be a catastrophe if these people were now put off by the material quoted in TNR. That is why the damage must be repaired at once. I second Wendy McElroy's appeal. Not for the sake of Ron Paul or the campaign, but for the sake of the libertarian movement.

I recommend Radley Balko's post here.

Nice Job, Ron!

Ron Paul did admirably well in the ABC presidential forum last night. He got some sure shots in against the empire, sharp enough that Rudy Giuliani felt he needed to respond. His response, of course, was absurd. For example he believes that evidence against Ron Paul's blowback explanation for 9/11 lies in the fact that Islamic radicals want to subvert "moderate" Arab regimes! What moderate Arab regimes? The Saudi monarchy? Egypt's dictatorship? Ron Paul quickly shot back that the U.S. has supported oppressive rulers in the Arab world for years.

He made good points about government's destruction of the dollar when answering questions about oil and medical prices. But he was badly ambiguous (at best) when he said that the medically uninsured would be better off if all that money wasn't being spent on empire. This could have left the impression that he favors government paying for medical care. He might have made other points on these subjects, such as that a truly free market will find alternatives to oil when necessary and that the medical and insurance industries are problems because they are already thoroughly dominated by government.

His worst moment was, of course, immigration. But at least he attacked the national ID card. He deserves much credit for that.

Not a bad night overall.

Naturally, ABC paid only as much attention to him as necessary. The network had a reporter assigned to each candidate's camp -- except, apparently, to Ron Paul's. After the debate, each reporter related his candidate's spin on the debate performance, but we heard nothing about the Paul camp.

Hands Off Pakistan

"The assassination of Benazir Bhutto was not an attack on this brave woman alone; it was an attack upon democracy, freedom and the United States." This statement by Asa Hutchinson, former undersecretary of homeland security, was typical of the reaction of the American political and media establishments.

The claim that the assassination was an attack on democracy and freedom is dubious because Bhutto’s two spells as prime minister of Pakistan were not notable for either one. Whether it was an attack on the United States depends on what that means. It certainly was not an attack on the American people. How could it be construed that way, unless one has such an imperialist notion of "our interests" that nothing can happen in the world without impinging on them?

But if by “United States” we mean the policies of the current administration, then indeed it was such an attack. Bhutto, after all, favored bringing U.S. military forces into Pakistan, according to Michael Scheuer, a former CIA analyst and region specialist. If that’s an option President Bush planned to exercise, the loss of Bhutto is a grave blow to his policy.

The rest of my op-ed "Hands Off Pakistan" is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.

Go, Obama!

Since the presidential campaign began, I have felt myself favoring Obama over Clinton. I wasn't exactly sure why. Yes, Obama has opposed the Iraq war all along, while Clinton voted for it and would keep troops there. But Obama's foreign policy is distinctly not noninterventionist. He's ready to invade Pakistan with or without Musharraf's permission. (I'm against it either way.) And he obviously does not plan to withdraw from the Middle East. Domestically, I can't see any important distinction between him and Clinton.

So it may come down to more ethereal things. Unlike Obama, Clinton acts like a woman driven by power lust. (Obama may lust for power too, but he doesn't come across that way.) Clinton displayed this the day after she humiliatingly lost Iowa. "I am ready to lead!" she shouted to her supporters.

Yes, that is the problem.

Paul Krugman, Doctor of (Bad) Economics

Paul Krugman, the New York Times op-ed writer, has a Ph.D. in economics. Those three magic letters give him an air of authority, as if they represent a valuable accomplishment, yet somehow he manages to consistently give bad economic advice in his twice-weekly column. Go figure.

The rest of this week's TGIF, "Paul Krugman, Doctor of (Bad) Economics," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

The Illegal-Immigration Issue in a Nutshell

Respect for the law is due only to laws that warrant respect -- namely, those that reflect the natural law of justice.

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

The Slippery Slope of Intellectual "Property" Law

"[T]he [recording] industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

"The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files [Jeffrey] Howell [of Scottsdale, Ariz.] made on his computer from legally bought CDs are 'unauthorized copies' of copyrighted recordings."

--Washington Post, Dec. 30, 2007

Hat tip: Jacob Hornberger

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

Happy New Year!

Let us hope, against the odds, that 2008 is a year of peace, happiness, good health, and prosperity.

On Amnesty

Ron Paul says he's against amnesty for migrants without government papers. I am too. Amnesty is a pardon for wrong-doing. Why would migrants without government papers need a pardon? They've done nothing wrong. But in the spirit of the season, the migrants might consider granting amnesty to the government thugs who have hounded them since they got here.

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

Ron Paul and Immigration

I still think there is value in Ron Paul's campaign, but this commercial sure doesn't make it easy. Note that he takes the Tancredo position that earlier immigrants "followed the rules" and came here legally. But back then you had to have an infectious disease to be denied entry. Virtually everyone else could come in. Illegal immigration was unnecessary since there were essentially open borders. I continue to be appalled that Ron Paul is parroting the line of the worst opponents of immigration.

By the way, where does the U.S. Constitution give Congress the power to control immigration? Or is that an implied power?

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

Ron Paul and David Schuster

Ron Paul's MSNBC appearance with David Schuster, in which Lincoln and the Civil War were discussed for seven minutes, was a disaster. Why Ron Paul let it go on, rather than insist that they should be discussing a war that he could actually do something about if elected, is beyond me. No one who was not already a Lincoln revisionist would have been impressed. Schuster and his producers wanted to convey the message that Ron Paul is not a serious candidate (a "crackpot," as Jack Jacobs called him to his "face") -- and Ron Paul played their shameful game. A very big mistake indeed. Who's calling the shots in that campaign?

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

More on Ron Paul and "Meet the Press"

Interesting that Tim Russert didn't ask Ron Paul about the Iraq war, but did ask him about the Civil War. Didn't that end about 140 years ago?

MR. RUSSERT: I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln. "According to Paul, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery."

REP. PAUL: Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn't have gone, gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. I mean, it was the--that iron, iron fist..

MR. RUSSERT: We'd still have slavery.

REP. PAUL: Oh, come on, Tim. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. And the way I'm advising that it should have been done is do like the British empire did. You, you buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where it lingered for 100 years? I mean, the hatred and all that existed. So every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. I mean, that doesn't sound too radical to me. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.

He might have emphasized that Lincoln did not forcibly prevent southern secession to end slavery but rather to preserve the Union and said that he would have maintained slavery had that been necessary to keep the Union intact.

But let his sink in. Russert didn't ask Ron Paul about Iraq but he asked him about the Civil War? What the hell is going on?

Here's the transcript.

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

Ron Paul and Me

Here's a 1990 televised panel discussion about the impending first Gulf War, with Ron Paul as host and guests Joseph Sobran and me.





Hat tip: Scott Horton

Is Ron Paul Inconsistent on Earmarks?

My local newspaper ran an item about Ron Paul's answer to Tim Russert's asking him how he can seek money for his congressional district while attacking big government. (See AP story here.) I believe there is no inconsistency here. Ron Paul says he votes against spending programs that in his view exceed the authority specified in the Constitution. (I'm taking him at his word, problems of constitutional interpretation aside.) If so, can he in good faith add earmarks to spending bills that would benefit his constituents?

Yes, he can. There is a difference between making choices at the rules-selection level and making choices within rules you are stuck with. In other words, it's one thing to try to channel flood-insurance money to your district, but quite another to vote to create or renew the program.

As Ron Paul pointed out on "Meet the Press," the government taxes people, then ladles out the money to particular groups. If one group of potential recipients doesn't get a particular appropriation, another one will. The result of not seeking or taking the money is not a cut in taxes and spending. So, as Ron Paul asked, why shouldn't people try to get some of their money back? Is it unlibertarian to accept a tax "refund" or Social Security? Must one tear up the checks (leaving the money in the U.S. Treasury)?

The hidden premise behind the criticism of Ron Paul on this matter is that taxation and spending would be lessened or eliminated if one refused the largess. Does anyone really believe that? The state taxes and borrows all it believes it can get away with. So any money that doesn't go into, say, disaster relief is available for the military or something else. Ron Paul's refusal to play the earmark game would make no difference to the size of government or its burden on the American people.

Thus, as a congressman, Ron Paul does not contradict himself when he tries to get some of his constituents' money back for them -- as long as he also opposes the spending programs and votes against them when he gets the chance. The moment he votes for the federal disaster-relief program he is caught in a contradiction.

A similar principle applies to Ron Paul's answer about term limits. He told Tim Russert that one who favors mandatory term limits is not in any way obliged to impose terms limits unilaterally on himself. Again, it involves picking rules versus acting within a rules system. I don't like the designated-hitter rule, but if the rule is in effect and I am manager of a baseball team, my position on the rule does not oblige me to put my pitcher in the batting lineup. Similarly, because I think all congressmen should be term-limited, it doesn't follow that I think I alone should be term-limited. If only congressmen who believe in term limits are term-limited, the most statist congressmen will tend to become entrenched, which is the opposite of what term limits is intended to accomplish.

I concede that under the pressure of a television interview, where the host is trying to throw the candidate on the defensive, it may be hard to be persuasive on these issues. But that doesn't mean the response is wrong. It may mean that television is not the venue for a serious political discussion.

Finally, what does this have to do with anarchism? Not much, I concede. Maybe the state can be dismantled completely from the outside. I don't know. My musings here assume that there is nothing intrinsically immoral in trying to dismantle the state from within. My hunch is that it will take work on both the inside and outside. I say this while inclined toward the view that the heaviest work will occur on the outside.

Ron Paul on "Meet the Press"

I just finished watching. I'm afraid I had my usual reaction. I felt let down, like something was missing. For one thing, Ron Paul talks too much about the Constitution and too little about liberty and justice. War in Korea would okay if Congress wanted it? When was the last time Congress voted for a declaration of war without the president asking for it?

He also sounded unprepared. If he is going to call for ending the income tax (why that one and not the others?) and for bringing all the troops home, he should know the numbers. He looks like he's winging it. No excuse for that.

The immigration answer was a disaster. He persists in speaking of an invasion. How offensive! He's lucky Russert wasn't better prepared. How does Ron Paul know we'd have fewer immigrants if the welfare state were abolished? I think we'd have more, considering how attractive the economic environment would be. But would he open the borders then? I'm not convinced he would. I am more and more suspicious of this welfare-state rationalization for immigration control. It has worn so thin there is virtually nothing left of whatever credibility it had.

I think I'll stop watching news of the campaign. I'm tired of being disappointed.

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

Anarchism, Limited Government, and the Surveillance State

The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.

--Washington Post, Dec. 22, 2007

This story raises a question for advocates of limited government. It's easy for an anarchist to oppose the construction of this Orwellian database. The state is illegitimate per se -- it cannot exist without violating the nonaggression principle -- and thus cannot be trusted with such power. Even if we assume the database could be used legitimately and confined to catching criminals, the state can be counted on to abuse it.

The libertarian advocate of limited government will agree that the state is likely to abuse the power, and he will therefore oppose the FBI's plan. But ... he also believes the state is necessary -- indeed, indispensable -- to protect individual freedom. That puts him in the awkward position of opposing the end but not a means. When his conservative opponents chide him for wanting to leave Americans vulnerable to terrorism or other crime, the minarchist will have little to argue in response except to say that the database won't be work as promised. But how does he know this? Even if the state uses the database against noncriminals, that doesn't rule out the chance that it will also be used to catch real rights violators.

Anarchists are not subject to this criticism because they embrace a full free market in protective services. We know that entrepreneurs in a free market will devise innovative ways -- consistent with liberty -- to protect people from criminals, including terrorists. Comprehensive private property is an essential institution for preventing crime without violating rights. Considering John Robb's thesis in Brave New War, the state is increasingly unsuited to protect us because potential enemies are highly decentralized, flexible, and entrepreneurial. Only free-market protection is up to the task.

What say you, limited-government advocates?

Tucker Carlson on Ron Paul

In case anyone missed it, Tucker Carlson's sympathetic New Republic article about Ron Paul is here. Why doesn't Carlson know that anarcho-capitalists and acolytes of Murray Rothbard are the same thing?

Hat tip: Emily Richman

Immigration and Welfare

Libertarian-leaning folks who oppose free immigration often point to the welfare state as the reason for opposing what looks to me like the consistent libertarian on the borders question. But they also invoke national sovereignty as a reason for wanting the government to control "the borders." Question: if the welfare state went away, how many of these people would really favor open borders?

My guess: none to not many.

Torturing the Language of Torture

Is waterboarding, known during the Spanish Inquisition as tortura del agua, really torture or not? The question seems to answer itself, but the Bush administration says No. Its critics disagree, noting that the “interrogation technique,” which makes a subject physically and mentally react as though he is drowning, has long been regarded as torture by international agreements and outlawed in the United States.

The rest of this week's op-ed, "Torturing the Language of Torture," is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.

A Matter of Priorities

'Tis the political season, which means the season to bash immigrants. This goes especially for so-called illegal aliens, i.e., residents without government papers. (As if that's a big deal.) Candidates and others who are so set on securing the Mexican border -- the Canadian border seems of less concern -- and expelling those who had the audacity to come to the land of the free without permission mainly rely on two arguments: jobs and welfare. If those are the best arguments they've got, they haven't got much.

The rest of this week's TGIF, "A Matter of Priorities," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

Coming Soon

Prioritize!

Much anti-immigrant sentiment, even among some libertarians, appears fueled by resentment that non-citizens might get tax-financed welfare benefits. This gives a curious amount of offense, especially when it concerns so-called "illegals," whom I prefer to think of as residents without government papers. (Like that's a big deal.)

I can only say this: There are things that offend me far more than foreign-born people's going on welfare. Here are two in no particular order:

1. Native-born Americans' going on welfare. (They were born in the "land of the free" and are supposed to know better.)

2. State-police tactics, including the witch-hunting of employers who have the audacity to hire "illegals," designed to catch or prevent the migration of people who are merely exercising their natural liberty.

Let's get our priorities straight.

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

The Constitution or Liberty

If the foundation of our case for liberty is nothing more than the Constitution -- rather than natural-law justice -- we will continue to be trumped by our opponents. After all, the Constitution was in effect all during the time the national government expanded and liberty shrank. As Lysander Spooner wrote, the Constitution "has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it." Liberty's champions have to come to terms with that logic.

The rest of the newest TGIF, "The Constitution or Liberty," is at the Foundation for Economic Foundation website.

Virginia Primary Voters Won't Have to Pledge GOP Loyalty

The voter pledge referred to below has been canceled. See the story here.

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.

Atlas Shrugged and the Corporate State

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Ayn Rand's stunning novel, Atlas Shrugged. So many words have been written about the book that the task of saying something new is daunting. It is a celebration of the creativity that is required for the production of material goods no less than for the production of music, art, and literature. And it is an elaboration of the preconditions for that creativity: individual freedom, which necessarily includes property rights. In sum, Atlas Shrugged is a literary brief for the proposition that human beings can live fully as human beings only in a society founded on the freedom philosophy, i.e., on self-ownership, private property, privacy, consent, free trade, and peace -- in a phrase, laissez faire. What sometimes goes unappreciated by readers of the novel is the extent to which Rand targeted business people as potentially the most egregious saboteurs of freedom.

The rest of this week's TGIF, "Atlas Shrugged and the Corporate State," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

The Freeman, October 2007

There is lots of good stuff in this issue, but I particularly want to draw attention to Frank van Dun's article, "Can We Be Free If Reason Is the Slave of the Passions?" (pdf, html). Goodnight, Mr. Hume.

Ahmadinejad

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran is no one to admire, but when was the last time President Bush stood before a critical college audience and fielded tough questions? Bush appears only before handpicked friendly crowds. Even news conferences are barely adversarial because the media has the curious rule that the president -- any president -- deserves to be treated like royalty.

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

Government Failure

A popular academic rationalization for having government forcibly override people's economic decisions is the theory of market failure. Advocates of the free market have long emphasized that the countless self-regarding actions individuals perform daily in the marketplace generate a larger complex spontaneous, or undesigned, order -- that is, a high degree of interpersonal coordination that is remarkably pleasing to consumers. This is the social cooperation Ludwig von Mises placed at the center of his description of the market process. Critics of the market realize this is a powerfully appealing feature of the economists' case for what these critics deride as the unfettered marketplace. So this feature has been among the prime targets of those who would straitjacket or even abolish the market. Hence the attraction of market-failure theory.

The rest of my TGIF column, "Government Failure," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

A Chip Off Old Big Brother's Block

Late last month the California Senate and Assembly sent Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger a bill to prohibit employers from requiring workers to have RFID (radio-frequency identification) chips implanted under their skin. North Dakota and Wisconsin already have passed similar laws. Two other states are considering bans. VeriChip (motto, appropriately: "RFID for People") already has FDA permission to sell a device suitable for human implantation. Some people find this form of ID attractive because it can't be lost or, presumably, counterfeited easily. (We'll see about that.) But others, especially organizations dedicated to protecting privacy, object to treating other people like pets. What should an advocate of liberty think of all this?

The rest of last week's TGIF, "A Chip Off Old Big Brother's Block," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

Showing Respect

George II was asked at his news conference this morning if he is thinking about attacking Iran. He said he respects the Iranian people and hopes the two countries can work out their differences diplomatically. (Blah, blah, blah. He speaks fluent boilerplate.) Yet he threatened further economic sanctions, which would exacerbate the hardship on the Iranians.

If he really wants to show his respect, he can formally apologize for the U.S. government's helping to overthrow an elected prime minister in 1953 and the restoration to power of the brutal Shah and his Savak secret police. Then he can promise not to bomb Iran under any circumstances. That would be a start.

On a related matter, Bush refused to comment on whether he approved of Israel's airstrike on a building in Syria allegedly holding nuclear equipment September 6. (The Syrian government says only an airspace violation occurred and no nuclear weapons were involved.) Why don't the American people have a right to know if Bush was complicit in the attack in any way, including the issuing of a green light, as U.S. presidents have done so many times in the past for Israel?

On the history of U.S. intervention in the Middle East, see this.

A Fine Example

From McClatchey news service this morning:

The Senate on Wednesday rejected legislation that would have allowed terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to petition federal courts claiming that they’re being held in error.

The 56-43 vote in favor of the bill fell short of the 60 votes needed under Senate rules to cut off debate, blocking the legislation.

The measure, sponsored by Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., would have given military detainees the right of habeas corpus — the right to challenge one’s detention in court, rooted in English common law dating from before the Magna Carta of 1215 — which serves as a check on arbitrary government power.

The Bush administration opposed giving the right to terror suspects. Most Republican senators backed the administration. Besides Specter, the other Republicans who voted with the Democrats were Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Richard Lugar of Indiana, Gordon Smith of Oregon, Olympia Snowe of Maine and John Sununu of New Hampshire.

The change in law would have applied to the roughly 340 men held at Guantanamo. Many of them have been held for more than five years without charge. The Bush administration has said that indefinite detention of enemy combatants who threaten the United States is necessary in an age of terrorism.

Congress passed a law last year that establishes combatant status review tribunals, made up of three military officials, to review such petitions. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a military lawyer who helped write the law, said the military is best able to determine who’s an unlawful enemy combatant. [Emphasis added.]

So all an American president has to do is invade a country, round up anyone he wants, and hold him forever without charge or access to the courts.

A beacon of liberty for the rest of the world.

The Freeman, September 2007

Constitution Day?

I know I'm a day late, but this immortal quote from Lysander Spooner must be posted:

[W]hether 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.

It's the closing line of "No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority."

More Illumination

George II and his war cheerleaders insist that U.S. troops must remain in Iraq for as far as the eye can see if a genocidal bloodbath is to be averted. Very interesting in light of this from Sidney Blumenthal of Salon.com

Two years ago the Sunni sheiks leading the insurgency in Iraq's Anbar province approached the United States, offering to end the violence in exchange for a timetable establishing that U.S. forces would withdraw from the country, a senior official at the highest level of the British government told me. Without some sort of negotiated deal that the Sunni leaders could brandish, they explained, they would not have the essential political justification for quelling the conflict. The British believed that the Sunni offer was being made in good faith and urged that it be accepted. But according to the senior British source, President Bush rejected it out of hand, still certain that he could achieve a military victory. He saw any agreement with the Sunnis as tantamount to defeat, the British official said. And yet, even as the Sunnis were rebuffed, Bush continued to invest trust in the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government to forge a political conciliation.

Everything Is Illuminated

From John Nichols at the blog of The Nation:

[Gen. David] Petraeus has apparently been so open in expressing his "long-term interest in running for the US presidency" that Sabah Khadim, a former senior adviser at Iraq's Interior Ministry who worked closely with the general in Baghdad, recalls, "I asked him if he was planning to run in 2008 and he said, 'No, that would be too soon'."

Such are the political calculations of the man whose embrace of President Bush's war has become so complete that he and his aides have radically altered the manner in which statistics are gathered on violence in Iraq in order to foster the fantasy that the fight has taken a turn for the better....

It is Petraeus's willingness to apply the optimistic gloss that marks him as a worthy successor to George Bush, who in Thursday night speech to the nation pronounced himself well and truly pleased with his general's recitation of the administration's talking points. Based on general's testimony, Bush is claiming "success in meeting (our) objectives."

The president's "return on success" is an empty promise that a small number of troops already scheduled for withdrawal from Iraq may, in fact, be withdrawn. At the same time, however, Bush acknowledges that this "success will require U.S. political, economic, and security engagement that extends beyond my Presidency."

Translation: For all the window-dressing talk about drawing down troop levels, Bush continues to peddle the " stay-the-course" message that has been his theme since the occupation of oil-rich Iraq went awry more than four years ago. And, once more, the president is asking Congress to provide him with more money for more war....

For their own reasons, the president and Petraeus feel they can afford to maintain the war until they figure out how to rearrange the letters of the word "quagmire" to spell "victory."

That will not happen. Bush's will be a failed presidency. And Petraeus's will be not be a presidency at all.

Unfortunately, on the way to their shared fate, the commander-in-chief and his general will preside over thousands of additional American deaths, tens of thousands of additional Iraqi deaths, the continued collapse of this country's global reputation and the emptying from our treasury of the resources that might have made America and the world more secure, more functional and more humane.

As Nichols points out, whatever illusions he may harbor, Petraeus is no Eisenhower.

Hat tip: Robert Higgs

Do They Really Think We're Morons?

This past week, with General Petraeus's appearances in Congress and George II's televised remarks, has been one shameless PR campaign to get us to trust the administration when it insists that what it is doing in Iraq is in the best interests of the American people as well as the Iraqis. Is there anyone around who still believes anything these con men say? How many times do they have to lie before we catch on to the game? They are contradicted by studies coming from various agencies and the administration itself. And the so-called drawdown could leave the troop level higher than the pre-surge level. At any rate, the troops have to be taken out regardless of what's going on Iraq, as explained here by Alex Koppelman at Salon.com.

These arrogant militarists think we're too stupid to notice. They assume the American people will hear the words "troop reduction" and figure everything is fine now.

When will we say a resounding "Enough" to these mis-leaders and public self-servants? Before they attack Iran, I hope.

Force Fetishists

Why is it that every few years some prominent newspaper or magazine publishes a critical article about the freedom philosophy (libertarianism) that rests on the same confusion over two key but simple concepts? Such confusion should have been dispelled by 1875 when Lysander Spooner, the colorful individualist anarchist and abolitionist, wrote his great essay "Vices Are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty." In that essay Spooner took pains to distinguish actions that harm the actor (vices) and actions that harm others by invading their persons or property (crimes).

Read the rest of this week's TGIF, "Force Fetishists," at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

Libertarianism: Left or Right?

Is libertarianism of the Left or of the Right? We often avoid this question with a resounding “Neither!” Given how these terms are used today, this response is understandable. But it is unsatisfying when viewed historically.

In fact, libertarianism is planted squarely on the Left, as I will try to demonstrate here.

The rest of my article "Libertarianism: Left or Right?" is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.

A Moment of Reflection

The official position apparently is that we should all take time to think about 9/11 today. But what should the content of that thinking be? No contest: we should be thinking about how for more than 50 years U.S. presidents and their foreign-policy advisers created the conditions in which 9/11 would eventually happen. We should be reflecting on foreign intervention and its inevitable consequences. All empires are targets of terrorists. What's the surprise?

Here's something else we can think about. In this day of relatively easy, free-lance terrorism, the state is exposed as useless as a means of security. No lumbering, bureaucratic, centralized government can hope to have the flexibility, innovation, and entrepreneurship required to produce security under the current circumstances. Replacing the state with a stateless free-market society is more practical and important than ever. (See more here.)

The Nation as an Object of Service

Today's TGIF, "The Nation as an Object of Service," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website here.

The Freeman

Selected articles from the July-August Freeman are now online.

I Wasn't Kidding

Photo credit: Cheryl Richman. See more of her photos here.

Are We to Be Spared Nothing?

The New York Times reports that George II told the author of a forthcoming book that after his presidency,

"We’ll have a nice place in Dallas," where he will be running what he called "a fantastic Freedom Institute" promoting democracy around the world.

Some things just require no comment.

Recent Writings

If you were reading with only one eye open or only two hours' sleep you might have thought Paul Krugman had finally stumbled onto the truth. In his Monday New York Times op-ed, "A Socialist Plot," he wrote: "[L]et's end this un-American system and make education what it should be -- a matter of individual responsibility and private enterprise. Oh, and we shouldn't have any government mandates that force children to get educated, either.... The truth is that there's no difference in principle between saying that every American child is entitled to an education and saying that every American child is entitled to adequate health care."

The rest of last week's TGIF, "Counterfeit Rights, Cold Bureaucracies," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website. By the way, some people missed the point of this column, thinking it is primarily an attack on Krugman. Let me know what you think.

President Bush, one of the two most famous pro-Vietnam War members of his generation to avoid fighting in that war, has finally accepted what he previously rejected: that there are parallels between the war he ducked out of and his violent occupation of Iraq. (The other best-known famous pro-war war avoider is Vice President Dick “I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service” Cheney.) Unfortunately, Bush has learned a far different lesson from Vietnam than many others have.

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

A Better Way to Safety

Assuming everything the Bush administration says about al Qaeda is true, what's a better way for us to keep safe: a plodding, bumbling, centralized monster bureaucracy led by devious unaccountable politicians, or a decentralized, entrepreneurial network of organizations whose existence depends on satisfying customers who can take their business elsewhere anytime?

Meet The Rockingham Whigs

This is the first known photograph of the new band The Rockingham Whigs. The band is shown here playing at a clandestine studio somewhere in the south-central U.S. As you can tell, this picture was taken with a hidden cellphone camera and is not an official release. This is exclusive to Free Association. Check back here for news of more sightings.

Photo credit: Jennifer Richman

Autocracy Comes to America

We appear to live in a republic. But look closely; it’s clearer every day that we live in a de facto autocracy. President Bush has managed to amass an astounding amount of power simply by scaring the American people and Congress into thinking that our continued existence as a society depends on giving him carte blanche.

The rest of my op-ed, Autocracy Comes to America," is at The Future of Freedom website.

Bad Policy Drives Out Good

All public policies are related. Okay, that may be a slight overstatement, but there's a point here. A politician's credibility on one public issue -- and thus the disposition of that issue -- will often be determined by his or her position on other issues. People will look at a politician's full program as a way of judging good faith. Case in point: the Bush administration's announcement that it will limit the states' ability to extend medical coverage through the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to families that do not qualify for poverty programs because they make too much money.

The rest of this week's "TGIF, Bad Policy Drives Out Good," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

Such Are the People Who "Govern" Us

From today's New York Times:

Broad new surveillance powers approved by Congress this month could allow the Bush administration to conduct spy operations that go well beyond wiretapping to include — without court approval — certain types of physical searches on American soil and the collection of Americans’ business records, Democratic Congressional officials and other experts said.

Administration officials acknowledged that they had heard such concerns from Democrats in Congress recently, and that there was a continuing debate over the meaning of the legislative language. But they said the Democrats were simply raising theoretical questions based on a harsh interpretation of the legislation....

The dispute illustrates how lawmakers, in a frenetic, end-of-session scramble, passed legislation they may not have fully understood and may have given the administration more surveillance powers than it sought. [Emphasis added.]

They were rushing off to vacation, by the way. Remember this the next time someone rhapsodizes about democracy public service, and all the other "of the people, by the people, for the people" shit.

What About the Iraqi and Afghan Dead?

The Washington Post yesterday devoted some of its pages to photos of the 4,100 U.S. troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. I suppose it was some kind of statement.

A better statement would have been pictures of the Iraqi and Afghan dead. But there are well over half a million of them and pictures aren't readily available. So we can just forget about them.

But something bothers me about this. Oh, yes, the Americans could have refused to go to Iraq. They might have gone to the brig as a result of their choice--life's a bitch sometimes--but it was a choice. The Iraqis had little choice in the matter. The U.S. invaded them. (Many have fled their country, but that's a big step to take.)

The Natural Right of Property

Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869), the English economics writer I discussed last week, is an enigma -- until his philosophy is seen in its entirety. He was an editor at The Economist of London from 1846 to 1855, during the period author Scott Gordon called "the high tide of laissez faire," yet he is considered a Ricardian socialist, was "quoted and deferred to by Marx [and] described by Sidney and Beatrice Webb as Marx's master." How could any libertarian claim Hodgskin as a mentor?

The rest of this week's TGIF, "The Natural Right of Property," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

Blogtalk Radio Interview

I was interviewed by Todd Andrew Barnett's Liberty Cap Talk Live on BlogTalkRadio. The topic is foreign policy. You can listen to it here.

Casual Talk of War

The opponents of the Bush wars and the accompanying expansion of government power have been disappointed countless times before. Just the other day the Democrats in Congress acquiesced in the Bush administration’s heavy-handed bid for the power to conduct warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens and residents in the name of fighting terrorism.

We’ve come to expect Democratic cave-ins by now, but I confess I was disheartened to hear the presidential aspirant Sen. Barack Obama say he would invade Pakistan if he knew Osama bin Laden was there and President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan did nothing. Although Obama opposed the invasion of Iraq from the start, he evidently missed a key argument against that folly, for it would apply to the invasion of Pakistan too, namely: the U.S. government cannot throw its military might around the Muslim world without making things far worse than they are.

The rest of my op-ed, "Casual Talk of War," is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.

Real Liberalism and the Law of Nature; Winning Is Losing

This week's TGIF, "Real Liberalism and the Law of Nature," is online at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

My op-ed "Winning Is Losing" is now online at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.

Addendum: If anyone has any doubt regarding the worthlessness of the O'Hanlon/Pollack analysis of the Iraq "surge" (discussed in "Winning Is Losing"), see the account of Glenn Greenwald's interview with O'Hanlon here. A sample:

[I]t is very difficult to credit him and Pollack with good faith, as though they are guilty of nothing more than sloppy "scholarship."

A failure to disclose obviously critical facts that bear on the credibility of their "findings" and a willingness to ground their conclusions in patently one-sided and highly controlled data are far more serious sins than mere sloppiness. It is difficult to avoid reaching any conclusion other than that they willfully served as propaganda tools in order to bolster the perception of success for a war and a "Surge" strategy which they prominently supported and on which their professional reputations rest....

Moreover, they not only acquiesced to the fraud that they are "critics of the administration," they actively propagated it in order to lend their claims credibility they did not deserve.

This was clearly a propaganda trip arranged by the U.S. Department of Defense, and O'Hanlon and Pollack, hawks and Bush boosters all along, played their lackey roles well. No one should be fooled by the apparently detached organizational affiliations of these so-called scholars. They are partisans pure and simple.

Hat tip: Ralph Raico

First Things First

If your notion of physics and chemistry obliges you to deny the undeniable -- viz., your volitional, rational faculty -- you should revise your notion of physics and chemistry.

Hiroshima 62 Years Ago

Today is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, one of President Harry Truman's two acts of butchery against Japan in August 1945. There isn't much to be said about those unspeakable atrocities that hasn't been said many times before. The U.S. government never needed atomic bombs to commit mass murder. It's "conventional" weapons have been potent enough. But considering how the "leaders" saw The Bomb, its two uses against Japan stand out as especially heinous acts. The U.S. government may not have used atomic weapons since 1945, but it has not yet given up mass murder as a political/military tactic. Presidential candidates are still expected to say that, with respect to nuclear weapons, that "no options are off the table."

The anniversary of the Nagaski bombing is Thursday.

Rad Geek People's Daily has a poignant post here. Rad says: "As far as I am aware, the atomic bombing of the Hiroshima city center, which deliberately targeted a civilian center and killed over half of the people living in the city, remains the deadliest act of terrorism in the history of the world."

A Diversion

To change the subject, I've taken up the electric bass. Some guys my age buy sports cars, motorcycles, or sailboats. Here's my far-less-dangerous new toy, a Fender Squier Jazz Bass.

Hat tip: Ben Richman

National Defense

If we didn't have it, we wouldn't need it. Think about it.

Interviewed on Antiwar Radio

Scott Horton interviewed me on Antiwar Radio yesterday. You can listen here.

No Substitute for History

The great economist Ludwig von Mises showed that economics can be deduced from the axiom that human beings act: individuals consciously select ends and apply scarce means to achieve them. By examining the logical implications of that undeniable fact, one can come to understand the concepts value, cost, time preference, supply, demand, money, price, profit, interest, and so on. In light of this, it is noteworthy that Mises was also an accomplished historian. And more than that, he was an important historiographer; that is, he was interested in the why and how of history. This theorist who is so identified with the a priori method in economics also believed that a knowledge of history and its methods was indispensable to understanding the world.

The rest of this week's TGIF column, "No Substitute for History," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

The Letter the Wall Street Journal Didn't Print

The Wall Street Journal published a few letters responding to Randy Barnett's article about libertarians and the Iraq war, including excellent, though cut-down, letters by Robert Higgs and Mario Rizzo. Alas, mine was not among them. So here it is:

While Randy Barnett ("Libertarians and the War," July 17) was at it, why didn't he also attempt a libertarian justification of state torture, extraordinary rendition, suspension of habeas corpus, secret CIA prisons, warrantless eavesdropping, secret searches and seizures, destruction of financial privacy, a national ID card, and the president's autocratic Unitary Executive Theory. I'm sure he would have been no more successful than he was at trying to provide a libertarian defense for imperial wars.