SPC Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old intelligence analyst stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer in the vicinity of Baghdad, was arrested two weeks ago for having supposedly sent Wikileaks the “Collateral Damage” video of US troops shooting Iraqi civilians.Justin Raimondo has the full story here.
From Dan Froomkin:
George W. Bush's casual acknowledgment Wednesday that he had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed waterboarded -- and would do it again -- has horrified some former military and intelligence officials who argue that the former president doesn't seem to understand the gravity of what he is admitting.
Waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning, is "unequivocably torture", said retired Brigadier General David R. Irvine, a former strategic intelligence officer who taught prisoner of war interrogation and military law for 18 years.
"As a nation, we have historically prosecuted it as such, going back to the time of the Spanish-American War," Irvine said. "Moreover, it cannot be demonstrated that any use of waterboarding by U.S. personnel in recent years has saved a single American life."
More at the Huffington Post.
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. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. [A patently false statement. --sr] We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations' time, but for the moment there is no chance. So, it's simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise the Arabs will wipe us out. [Emphasis added. Nahum Goldmann, The Jewish Paradox, p. 99]Does this mean that anyone should "go back" to anywhere? No, it does not. Much time has passed. But it does give some perspective on who ultimately are the aggrieved parties. Before you can get perspective, however, you have to take your friggin' head out of the sand. You cannot do history a priori.
U.S. policy — no matter who’s in power — couldn’t be better tailored to recruit terrorists. We can keep pretending we are innocent victims. Or we can finally put the responsibility where it belongs: in Washington, D.C.The rest of my latest op-ed is here.
Paul Greenberg’s selective history of Israel left out something his readers might find interesting. From the start of the Zionist movement at the end of the nineteenth century, respected Reform and Orthodox Jews opposed the founding of an exclusive Jewish state in Palestine. Besides fearing that a political movement would distort Judaism, they pointed out that a Jewish state would threaten the indigenous Arab population as well as Jews living in other countries. As Judah Magnes, founder of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, put it in 1942, “The slogan ‘Jewish state’ (or commonwealth) is equivalent, in effect, to a declaration of war by the Jews on the Arabs.” The Grand Mufti notwithstanding, Jewish and Arab communities coexisted in Palestine until the Zionist movement was launched and Arabs began to be removed from land they had lived on and worked for generations.
As Israel ordered a slight easing of its blockade of the Gaza Strip Wednesday, McClatchy obtained an Israeli government document that describes the blockade not as a security measure but as "economic warfare" against the Islamist group Hamas, which rules the Palestinian territory.Read the rest.
Last week U.N. investigator Philip Alston delivered a report on "targeted killings" in which the U.S. government plays a starring role. Under a policy secretly initiated by George W. Bush and expanded by Obama, the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command track and kill people, including U.S. citizens, based on their alleged ties to Al Qaeda or its allies. The killings, typically carried out by missiles fired from drone aircraft, dangerously blur the line between warfare and summary execution.Read Jacob Sullum's piece here.
(Updated June 9) It may seem tribal to single out the one American among the nine killed by Israeli forces during the raid on the humanitarian flotilla headed toward Gaza. But nation-states usually make a big deal when someone holding one of their passports is harmed by a foreign government. So it's worth pointing out that, to date, the U.S. government has lodged no protest with the government of Israel. Of course the White House did have time to criticize journalist Helen Thomas's remarks about Israel as "offensive and reprehensible." How many people did Thomas murder?
Amateur global-warming skeptics can make me uncomfortable.... I sense that under the surface some of them are saying, “Global warming had better not be happening because if it is I see no way for the free market to fix it. Therefore I would have to accept major government intervention, and I don’t want to have to do that.”Read TGIF here.
I don't trust people who make bitter reflections about war, Mrs. Barham. It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a Hell it is. And it's always the widows who lead the Memorial Day parades . . . we shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on ministers and generals or warmongering imperialists or all the other banal bogies. It's the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers; the rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widows' weeds like nuns and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices....Enjoy the day. I'll spend some of it reading revisionist history and watching Emily.
My brother died at Anzio – an everyday soldier’s death, no special heroism involved. They buried what pieces they found of him. But my mother insists he died a brave death and pretends to be very proud. . . . [N]ow my other brother can’t wait to reach enlistment age. That’ll be in September. May be ministers and generals who blunder us into wars, but the least the rest of us can do is to resist honoring the institution. What has my mother got for pretending bravery was admirable? She’s under constant sedation and terrified she may wake up one morning and find her last son has run off to be brave. [Emphasis added.]
Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs.
KABUL, Afghanistan — The American military on Saturday released a scathing report on the deaths of 23 Afghan civilians, saying that “inaccurate and unprofessional” reporting by Predator drone operators helped lead to an airstrike in February on a group of innocent men, women and children.
The report said that four American officers, including a brigade and battalion commander, had been reprimanded, and that two junior officers had also been disciplined. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who apologized to President Hamid Karzai after the attack, announced a series of training measures intended to reduce the chances of similar events.
The attack, in which three vehicles were destroyed, illustrated the extraordinary sensitivity to the inadvertent killing of noncombatants by NATO forces. Since taking command here last June, General McChrystal has made protection of civilians a high priority, and has sharply restricted airstrikes.
The overwhelming majority of civilian deaths in Afghanistan are caused by insurgents, but the growing intensity of the fighting this year has sent civilian casualties to their highest levels since 2001.
General McChrystal’s concern is that NATO forces, in their ninth year of operations in Afghanistan, are rapidly wearing out their welcome. Opinion polls here appear to reflect that.
“When we make a mistake, we must be forthright,” General McChrystal said in a statement. “And we must do everything in our power to correct that mistake.”
The civilian deaths highlighted the hazards in relying on remotely piloted aircraft to track people suspected of being insurgents. In this case, as in many others where drones are employed by the military, the people steering and spotting the targets sat at a console in Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.
The attack occurred on the morning of Feb. 21, near the village of Shahidi Hassas in Oruzgan Province, a Taliban-dominated area in southern Afghanistan. An American Special Operations team was tracking a group of insurgents when a pickup truck and two sport utility vehicles began heading their way.
The Predator operators reported seeing only military-age men in the truck, the report said. The ground commander concurred, the report said, and the Special Operations team asked for an airstrike. An OH-58D Kiowa helicopter fired Hellfire missiles and rockets, destroying the vehicles and killing 23 civilians. Twelve others were wounded.
The report, signed by Maj. Gen. Timothy P. McHale, found that the Predator operators in Nevada and “poorly functioning command posts” in the area failed to provide the ground commander with evidence that there were civilians in the trucks. Because of that, General McHale wrote, the commander wrongly believed that the vehicles, then seven miles away, contained insurgents who were moving to reinforce the fighters he and his men were tracking.
“The strike occurred because the ground force commander lacked a clear understanding of who was in the vehicles, the location, direction of travel, and the likely course of action of the vehicles,” General McHale wrote.
The “tragic loss of life,” General McHale found, was compounded by the failure of the ground commander and others to report in a timely manner that they might have killed civilians.
Predator drones and similar aircraft carry powerful cameras that beam real-time images to their operators, and some are armed with missiles, as well. The C.I.A. operates its own drone operation, mostly focused on Pakistan and separate from the military’s.
In this case, the military Predator operators in Nevada tracked the convoy for three and a half hours, but failed to notice any of the women who were riding along, the report said.
According to military officials in Washington and Afghanistan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters on the case, intelligence analysts who were monitoring the drone’s video feed sent computer messages twice, warning the drone operators and ground command posts that children were visible.
The report said that drone operators reported that the convoy contained only military-age men. “Information that the convoy was anything other than an attacking force was ignored or downplayed by the Predator crew,” General McHale wrote.
Immediately after the initial attack, the Kiowa helicopter’s crew spotted brightly colored clothing at the scene, and, suspecting that civilians might have been in the trucks, stopped firing.
After the attack, the Special Operations team turned over the bodies to local Afghans. Even so, General McHale said, officers on the ground failed to report the possibility of civilian casualties in a timely way.
On receiving the results of the investigation, General McChrystal recommended a battery of additional training exercises for military personnel coming to Afghanistan, and additional training for those already here.
In addition to reprimanding the four officers and admonishing the other two, General McChrystal asked Air Force commanders to open an investigation into the Predator operators.
If segregation and discrimination in the Jim Crow South was simply a matter of law, federal legislation that would have overturned Jim Crow laws would have sufficed. But, in fact, it involved the equivalent of a white supremacist cartel, enforced not just by overt government regulation like segregation laws, but also by the implicit threat of private violence and harassment of anyone who challenged the racist status quo.There's a simple proof for this: In Greensboro, N.C., Nashville, Tenn., and other places, lunch counters were integrated by agreement between store managers and sit-in organizations after months of pressure. How could that have happened if segregation had been mandated by law? They would have had to lobby for repeal of the relevant Jim Crow statute.
In 1964, every major public accommodation that operated a nationwide business was in favor of being forced to admit minorities.Wanted to be forced? Sort of. Actually, they wanted others to be forced. In that way they couldn't be singled out for doing what they wanted to do: serve blacks. It's from game theory. X wants to do something, but only if everyone else does it, because if X does it alone, X will suffer some consequence X doesn't like. So X favors everyone's being forced to do it. (Do I have to say that I am not in favor of force?)
Rand Paul’s comments regarding the federal ban on racial discrimination in public accommodations have brought the libertarian position on civil rights to public attention.Read TGIF here.
She didn't get much wrong. From Wikipedia:(HT: David Beito [pdf])John McWhorter has called Hurston "America's favorite black conservative." [16] She was a Republican who was generally sympathetic to the Old Right and a fan of Booker T. Washington's self-help politics. She disagreed with the philosophies (including Communism and the New Deal) supported by many of her colleagues in the Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes, who was in the 1930s a supporter of the Soviet Union and praised it in several of his poems. Despite much common ground with the Old Right in domestic and foreign policy, Hurston was not a social conservative. Her writings show skepticism toward traditional religion and affinity for feminist individualism. In this respect, her views were similar to two libertarian novelists who were her contemporaries, Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson.[17]
In 1952, Hurston supported the presidential campaign of Senator Robert A. Taft. Like Taft, Hurston was against Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies. She also shared his opposition to Roosevelt's and Truman's interventionist foreign policy. In the original draft of her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston compared the United States government to a "fence" in stolen goods and to a Mafia-like protection racket. Hurston thought it ironic that the same “people who claim that it is a noble thing to die for freedom and democracy ... wax frothy if anyone points out the inconsistency of their morals. ... We, too, consider machine gun bullets good laxatives for heathens who get constipated with toxic ideas about a country of their own.” Roosevelt "can call names across an ocean" for his four freedoms, but he did not have “the courage to speak even softly at home.”[clarification needed] When Truman dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, she called him “the Butcher of Asia.”[17]
Hurston opposed the Supreme Court ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954. She felt that if separate schools were truly equal (and she believed that they were rapidly becoming so) educating black students in physical proximity to white students would not result in better education. In addition, she worried about the demise of black schools and black teachers as a way to pass on cultural tradition to future generations of African-Americans. She voiced this opposition in a letter, "Court Order Can't Make the Races Mix", that was published in the Orlando Sentinel in August 1955. Hurston had not reversed her long-time opposition to segregation. Rather, she feared that the Court's ruling could become a precedent for an all-powerful federal government to undermine individual liberty on a broad range of issues in the future
Wisdom from the New York Times editorial board:
It was only government power that ended slavery and abolished Jim Crow, neither of which would have been eliminated by a purely free market.
Did an intelligent, educated person actually type those words? Did an editor actually approve them for publication? Can anyone in that place think straight?
It was only government power that created and sustained the institutions of slavery and Jim Crow, um, LAWS. They were preemptions of the free market, so how could it have abolished them?
If the Antifederalists were still on the scene today, they might be saying — as they would have been saying right along — “Told you so.”The full TGIF is here.
A judge in Malawi has sentenced a gay couple to 14 years in prison with hard labour after they were convicted of gross indecency and unnatural acts.
The judge said he wanted to protect the public "from people like you".
Steven Monjeza, 26, and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, 20, have been in jail since they were arrested in December after holding an engagement ceremony....
"I will give you a scaring sentence so that the public be protected from people like you, so that we are not tempted to emulate this horrendous example," said Judge Nyakwawa Usiwa-Usiwa in the commercial capital, Blantyre.
With some 7,000 barrels of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico each day from BP’s exploded Deepwater Horizon well, offshore drilling and oil-industry regulation have returned to the front pages. The familiar old trap is set: Do you want unfettered markets and oil spills or government regulation and safety?Read the full TGIF.
Paul Greenberg’s recent column on the government vs. Goldman Sachs was excellent. But he missed one important point.
He writes: “It happens with partners. So long as the business is growing, the money’s rolling in, and everything’s coming up green, they’re the best of friends. But when business sours and profits wither, the other partner becomes the cause of it all, a total incompetent and maybe a thief to boot.”
Very true. But the key partnership in this matter is Washington and Wall Street, which have always been cozy despite their differences. They’re fighting now only because things have gone sour. But the partnership will go on -- to the detriment of the American people. It’s state capitalism, not the free market, folks.
SHELDON RICHMAN Conway
In The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, the sixteenth-century French poet, judge, and political philosopher Étienne de La Boétie wondered "how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. Surely a striking situation!"Read the full TGIF here.
In one of his essays criticizing inflationary free-silver proposals in the late nineteenth century, the great laissez-faire champion William Graham Sumner wrote:The rest of TGIF is here.
"We hear fierce denunciations of what is called the 'money power.' It is spoken of as mighty, demoniacal, dangerous, and schemes are proposed for mastering it which are futile and ridiculous, if it is what it is said to be. Every one of these schemes only opens chances for money-jobbers and financial wreckers to operate upon brokerages and differences while making legitimate finance hazardous and expensive, thereby adding to the cost of commercial operations. The parasites on the industrial system flourish whenever the system is complicated. Confusion, disorder, irregularity, uncertainty are the conditions of their growth. The surest means to kill them is to make the currency absolutely simple and absolutely sound. Is it not childish for simple, honest people to set up a currency system which is full of subtleties and mysteries, and then to suppose that they, and not the men of craft and guile, will get the profits of it?"
It seems to me that this point is entirely applicable to the current debate over stepped-up financial regulation. In the end, it will best serve the insiders, the “money power.”
Corollary: Restrictions on shorting, etc., lock in error and magnify the damage.
Isn’t it funny that those who try to make hay out of the imperfection of markets are most enthusiastic about measures that would exacerbate the imperfections?
See addendum below.
Goldman Sachs is taking a beating in the press because a Senate committee and the SEC are investing whether it engaged in wrongdoing by betting against the shaky mortgages fueling the housing boom and allegedly failing to disclose that fact to buyers of its "synthetic collateralized debt obligations."
The allegation of wrongdoing is an empirical question, of course, but a few things occur to me at this point:
Financial firms have been roundly criticized for their "herd mentality," that is, their incentive to run headlong into too-risky mortgage-backed instruments because everyone else was doing it. No firm wanted to be on the sidelines having to explain to its clients why everyone was making tons of money but them. Yet here Goldman went against the herd and it's coming under fire precisely for that reason. By betting against the sustainability of the boom on the basis of hedge-fund trader John Paulson's analysis, it injected needed information into the market. More information is always better than less, and there would be no social good from restrictions on short selling. Whether fraud was in the picture, I can't say, but I am confident that Goldman's hedge strategy -- and its delight over making money when mortgage-backed securities started losing value -- would have drawn criticism in any event. It's a no-win situation.
Second, the absolutely worst place to get to the bottom of things is in Congress. Every member of the committee has an overriding incentive to engage in demagoguery. Goldman Sachs is not exactly a positive household name, so which congressman will resist the temptation to denounce the company in public? If there is evidence of criminal activity, there are agencies for such investigations. This is not to say that those agencies are above demagoguery -- politically ambitious U.S. attorneys are notorious for it -- but at least we should be spared the spectacle of self-righteous congressmen pontificating on matters for which the Congress itself is heavily responsible. We already must suffer the obscenity of Chris Dodd and Barney Frank rewriting the financial rules to prevent, so they say, a repeat of the debacle that they themselves did so much to bring about. These people are the systemic risk. Enough is enough.
Finally, we must not lose sight of the fact that whatever Goldman did, it was in the context of a corporatist State, a banking cartel, and loose fiat money, in which Big Finance exercises extra-market power derived from the rules written by Congress and the regulatory agencies. These are hardly free-market enterprises, and it is no coincidence that former Goldman principals have their fingerprints all over the government's bailout response to the meltdown and the firm was a major beneficiary.
In an actual free market—without inflationary fiat money, implicit guarantees behind underwriters of dubious mortgages, and regulatory protection against open competition—a financial debacle such as we’ve seen is unlikely to have occurred. Even so, that doesn’t mean that everything that went on constitutes a crime.
Addendum, April 29: Rather than have the SEC or a criminal-justice agency pursue this case, the alleged victims -- if that's how they see themselves -- ought to sue Goldman Sachs and John Paulson and at least front the costs of adjudication, saving the taxpayers the money. It is noteworthy that at the Senate hearing, no "victim" testified. Do they not see themselves as victims? Perhaps not. These are sophisticated institutional investors, one of which had a hand in creating the bundle of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that underlay the synthetic CDO. (It rejected some MBS in favor of others.) The other investor would have been able to examine the contents. Clearly, they knew they had a different outlook on the future of those MBS from those who bet against them. For every buyer, there's a seller, for every bull, a bear. One does not become a victim simply because one's outlook proved to be wrong.
Nevertheless, this is worth reading. Other links worth following that case doubt on the SEC case:
Richard EpsteinThere’s something eerily ritualistic about the current occupant of the White House berating Wall Street for its irresponsibility and proposing new regulations, while his targets send a swarm of lobbyists to Washington to keep the regulatory overhaul from getting out of hand. (History says they’ll be on good terms with the regulators in any case.)
I’m reminded of journalist and historian Walter Karp’s book Indispensable Enemies. These apparent adversaries need each other.
The rest of TGIF is here.
I'm happy to say that Counterpunch has reposted the article.
The rest is here.The question concerning the relationship (if any) between the free market and capitalism can be addressed at many levels. Let’s start with history. The word capitalist was indeed first used disparagingly by opponents of “capitalism.” But it is important to realize that among those opponents were advocates of property rights and free markets, such as Thomas Hodgskin and later Benjamin Tucker. Why?
The reason is this: In the periods regarded as classic “capitalist” eras, government intervention on behalf of capital was commonplace. Moreover, it was integral not incidental.
George Bush's decision merely to eavesdrop on American citizens without oversight, or to detain without due process Americans such as Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi, provoked years of vehement, vocal and intense complaints from Democrats and progressives. All of that was disparaged as Bush claiming the powers of a King, a vicious attack on the Constitution, a violation of Our Values, the trampling on the Rule of Law. Yet here you have Barack Obama not merely eavesdropping on or detaining Americans without oversight, but ordering them killed with no oversight and no due process of any kind. And the reaction among leading Democrats and progressives is largely non-existent.... Just imagine what the reaction would have been among progressive editorial pages, liberal opinion-makers and Democratic politicians if this story had been about George Bush and Dick Cheney targeting American citizens for due-process-free and oversight-less CIA assassinations.Are we witnessing George W. Bush's third term -- or Richard Nixon's?
I believe that property is a problem solver, a useful tool for achieving social peace and economic efficiency that benefits society enormously. However, it is a useful social convention, not a an absolute right derivable from self-ownership: there is no reason that a person born in the year 2100 should have fewer rights than a person born in the year 2000, but if all the world becomes private property, and property owners can establish all the rules for their property, then every person born after that date will be born a slave, and self-ownership will become a joke....
All anarchy requires is that we accept the idea that other people are not our property. With that alone, we’ll create whatever order and organization is needed in an environment of mutual respect. When we have disputes we can’t resolve, we’ll create tools for resolving them. History tells us that private property is one of those tools, but we shouldn’t raise it to the level of a fetish that overrides our common sense and our humanity.
A standard charge against opponents of the medical insurance overhaul is that the dire predictions are nothing but alarmism. The argument is something like this: “You said the same thing when Medicare passed in 1965.”
This is actually a very funny contention. One of the arguments against Medicare was that it would pave the way to greater government control of the medical system.
Does anyone now think that was a bad prediction?
Medicare has made $37 trillion in promises (over the next 75 years) for which there is no money. Even Barack Obama acknowledges that Medicare is responsible for a major part of the federal deficit, which is creating the huge national debt. To deal with the out-of-control budget, coverage for some services is being denied. The bureaucratic burden is prompting doctors to stop accepting new Medicare patients.
By paying for the medical care for retirees, the government program has stimulated the demand for products and services, pushing up prices for everyone. More expensive medical care means more expensive medical insurance. As the price of insurance goes up, many people are priced out of that market, adding to the number uninsured. (This is not the only factor in price inflation, but it is a big one.)
Higher prices and the growing number of uninsured — in large part a product of Medicare — fueled the effort to increase government power over the medical system.
So: Q.E.D. The predictions about Medicare were valid. It has led to deeper government control of medicine, which is to say, us.
Are we alarmists or realists?
Supporters of Barack Obama’s pro-industry health insurance overhaul are absolutely right to condemn the threats and acts of violence that followed the House vote on Sunday. All decent people should join in that condemnation. It is immoral on its face, not to mention the taint it leaves on the cause of diminishing government power.
By the same token, the advocates of ObamaCare should also have forsworn violence. Unfortunately their plan embraces it. Failure to comply with any of the countless forthcoming regulations and mandates will bring fines to the violator, that is, deprivation of his or her property. Failure to pay the fines will bring further sanctions including, eventually, arrest and imprisonment. Resistance to arrest and imprisonment will bring … you know what it will bring — the mighty wrath of the State. All because a peaceful individual abstained from complying with a mandate.
If universally accessible and affordable medical care is worth achieving — and it most certainly is — then it is worth achieving exclusively through peaceful cooperative methods. That means without the use of government, which, as George Washington reminded us, is not reason or eloquence but force. Although they could have done otherwise, those responsible for ObamaCare chose to rely on threats of violence to get their way on the grounds that the end justifies the means. They have surely set a bad example.
Advocates of freedom must not sink to their level.
If U.S. Presidents such as George Bush (41st or 43rd), Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan are widely considered capitalist supporters, and they are, then I, along with Libertarians Against Capitalism [my Facebook group], want no part of this moniker.Then after naming a slew of conservatives and neoconservatives who use the word capitalism in ways he does not like, Block says:
If they support capitalism, and they are widely seen to do so, then I, too, along with called Libertarians Against Capitalism, oppose it. For the "capitalism" of these people includes as a central tenet war, militarism and imperialism. They may call it "American Greatness," but what it amounts to is the U.S. tossing its military weight all around the world, in a totally unjustified manner.
My main reason is not etymological but rather linguistic. I readily admit that "capitalism" has a bad press, and its historical use is none too salutary either. But, the enemies of libertarianism are always trying to take words away from us. ...Some have recently [!] had the audacity to try to take away the word "libertarian." I refer, here, to Noam Chomsky, who has the temerity to characterize himself as a libertarian.Whoa! Block needs to read some history. If anything, we took it from them (to make up for the loss of liberal) ! Libertarian was used by left-wing Spanish anarchists during the 1930s civil war; they were no friends of private property and free trade. Going back further, the word was used by anarcho-socialists after the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871 because the word anarchist could land them in a heap of trouble. I doubt Block would regard those libertarians as comrades. The French word Libertaire appears to be the origin of our word libertarian, and it seems to have had nothing to do with what Block wants to call capitalism. Quite the opposite.
A member of the [National Press Club] audience passed a question to the moderator, who read it to [Freedom Works chief Dick] Armey: How can the Federalist Papers be an inspiration for the tea party, when their principal author, Alexander Hamilton, "was widely regarded then and now as an advocate of a strong central government"?
Historian Armey was flummoxed by this new information. "Widely regarded by whom?" he challenged, suspiciously. "Today's modern ill-informed political science professors? ... I just doubt that was the case in fact about Hamilton."
Alas, for Armey, it was the case. Hamilton favored a national bank, presidents and senators who served for life and state governors appointed by the president.
Nowhere and at no time has the large scale ownership of land come into being through the working of economic forces in the market. It is the result of military and political effort. Founded by violence, it has been upheld by violence and by that alone.... The great landed fortunes did not arise through the economic superiority of large scale ownership, but through violent annexation outside the area of trade.According to this story in the Observer (Guardian, UK), this still goes on today, in Africa:
Ethiopia is one of the hungriest countries in the world with more than 13-million people needing food aid, but paradoxically the government is offering at least 7.5 million acres of its most fertile land to rich countries and some of the world's most wealthy individuals to export food for their own populations....
But Ethiopia is only one of 20 or more African countries where land is being bought or leased for intensive agriculture on an immense scale in what may be the greatest change of ownership since the colonial era.
An Observer investigation estimates that up to 50m hectares of land – an area more than double the size of the UK – has been acquired in the last few years or is in the process of being negotiated by governments and wealthy investors working with state subsidies.
The land rush, which is still accelerating, has been triggered by the worldwide food shortages which followed the sharp oil price rises in 2008, growing water shortages and the European Union's insistence that 10% of all transport fuel must come from plant-based biofuels by 2015.
In many areas the deals have led to evictions, civil unrest and complaints of "land grabbing"....
Leading the rush are international agribusinesses, investment banks, hedge funds, commodity traders, sovereign wealth funds as well as UK pension funds, foundations and individuals attracted by some of the world's cheapest land.
Together they are scouring Sudan, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Malawi, Ethiopia, Congo, Zambia, Uganda, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Mali, Sierra Leone, Ghana and elsewhere. Ethiopia alone has approved 815 foreign-financed agricultural projects since 2007. Any land there, which investors have not been able to buy, is being leased for approximately $1 per year per hectare.According to an Ethiopian living in England:
The foreign companies are arriving in large numbers, depriving people of land they have used for centuries. There is no consultation with the indigenous population. The deals are done secretly. The only thing the local people see is people coming with lots of tractors to invade their lands.
All the land round my family village of Illia has been taken over and is being cleared. People now have to work for an Indian company. Their land has been compulsorily taken and they have been given no compensation. People cannot believe what is happening. Thousands of people will be affected and people will go hungry.This is eminent domain and Kelo writ very large. Some, seeing the involvement of corporations, will conclude this is privatization and modernization. But true champions of liberty and property will be appalled and will condemn it loudly for the theft and usurpation it is.
It may be possible to look into America’s future. How? Watch what’s going on in Greece.My latest op-ed is here.
In many ways it is misleading to speak of "capitalism" as though this had been a new and altogether different system which suddenly came into being toward the end of the eighteenth century; we use this term here because it is the most familiar name, but only with great reluctance, since with its modern connotations it is itself largely a creation of that socialist interpretation of economic history with which we are concerned.I also recommend Kevin Carson's comment on Chris's post.
In 1817 the Frenchman the Count Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) published his Treatise on the Will and Its Effects. Thomas Jefferson, who several decades earlier had been the U.S. representative in France, was so enthusiastic about Tracy’s book that he had it translated, then edited and revised the translation himself. He renamed itA Treatise on Political Economy.
Economic Liberty Lecture Series: Sheldon Richman from The Future of Freedom Foundation on Vimeo.
To our ancestors not only for those few centuries during which we have record of their actions, but apparently during an illimitable past, the division of society into those who must work under compulsion and those who would benefit by their labour was the very plan of the State—apart from which they could hardly think of society as existing at all.
The proposal increases penalties on business that fail to insure their workers and individuals who fail to get health insurance, as would be required under the new law. [Emphasis added.]
This is important because the insurers have been concerned that in earlier bills, the penalty for individuals who don't obey the government order to buy insurance would is so low that people would find it cheaper to pay the fine than to pay the premium. How are the companies to get all those new captive customers with a weak penalty? they wanted to know.
Apparently they won't have to worry about that anymore.
Next time Obama publicly demonizes Big Insurance, don't fall for the show. They are all in bed together when it comes to fundamentals.
I'd like to condemn CPAC for bringing GOPride [sic] to this event. Civil rights are grounded in natural rights. Natural rights are grounded in human nature. Human nature is a rational substance in relationship. The intelligible end of the reproductive act is reproduction. Do you understand that?Actually, no I don't. Let's go to the videotape.
Broken or not, government at the moment is not inspiring confidence in the majority of people. That’s good news for those who look to government for neither inspiration nor solutions (to problems it itself has created). There’s no more urgent task that to fan the flames of political cynicism, emphasizing that what’s wrong with health care, finance, and energy won’t be fixed by electing the “right” person or party next time around but rather by removing the obstacles to bottom-up, decentralized solutions.
Read TGIF here.
[Hilaire] Belloc's distrust of the new liberal positive state was motivated more by a fear of what the state would do to the poorer classes, which he believed would be relegated to a permanent servile status, than by any Manchesterian laissez-faire solicitude for the property rights of capitalists, whom he thought were using the new liberalism to perpetuate their plutocratic position.
