What She May Be Thinking

I'm Hillary Clinton and I approved this message:

I could bomb a daycare center in Afghanistan or Syria and I wouldn't lose any support, okay?

Simple Lesson

Doing good with others people's money taken at gunpoint is no virtue.

"Stronger Together"

Does Trump Know Anything?

If Trump really wanted to run the government like a business, he'd have to abolish taxation and offer government's purported services in a competitive marketplace. Without competition and a true profit-and-loss test, government cannot be like a business. Prospective buyers must be free to say no to sellers and to go elsewhere if they wish -- and I don't mean to another country.

Wrong Woman.

Jeannette Rankin is weeping.

NATO's Broken Promise

If you want to understand the context in which the US demonization of Russia and Vladimir Putin is occurring, read Joshua Itzkowitz Shifrinson's excellent piece in the Los Angeles Times, "Russia's got a point: The U.S. broke a NATO promise."

In summary, U.S. presidents, Democratic and Republican, broke a 1990 promise to Russia not to extend NATO eastward to the Russian border, a promise made in return for Russia's pledge not to interfere with the reunification of Germany and its membership in NATO. (We may well ask why NATO continued after the Warsaw Pact and then the Soviet Union disappeared.) The US promise was broken when the members of the defunct Warsaw Pact and the Baltic states were incorporated into NATO, and two former Soviet Republics, Georgia and Ukraine, were widely discussed as future NATO members. (This has not happened yet, but the US government has intervened in both countries to keep them from being too close to Russia. In Ukraine this took the form of a coup, ousting an elected president, however objectionable he was.)

Since NATO was formed in opposition to the Soviet Union and its alliance, the expansion to the Russian border was reasonably interpreted as threatening. That a strong man--Putin--emerged to push back against American military provocation and economic intervention in the Russian economy should have been expected.

Shifrinson writes:

NATO’S widening umbrella doesn’t justify Putin’s bellicosity or his incursions in Ukraine or Georgia. Still, the evidence suggests that Russia’s protests have merit and that U.S. policy has contributed to current tensions in Europe.

Western provocation of Russia is dangerous. NATO holds military exercises close to the Russian border, and it wouldn't take much for an "incident" to lead to a crisis and worse. Instead of engaging in moves and counter-moves, the two powers should be talking about dismantling their nuclear arsenals.

Just Sit Back and Enjoy the Show

The feigned indignation about possible Russian meddling in the US election is entertaining.

No Good Deed Unrecorded

Is there not irony in Hillary Clinton's supporters recounting all the good deeds she performed away from the cameras without expectation of political gain?

Intentions versus Results

We can argue about a given politician's intentions from now until doomsday. What must not be forgotten is that without sound social-economic theory good intentions count for zilch. We know what the road to hell is paved with.

Trump Wrong Again

Trump still doesn't (want to) get it. ISIS is not the result of U.S. weakness, as he says, but of strength, i.e., power.

Trump, Russia, and Business

If Trump's business interests explain his nonbelligerence toward Russia, wouldn't that support the the pacifist case for free international trade? If goods don't cross borders NATO soldiers will.

Ironically, Bastiat, Cobden, and Bright could be vindicated by an ardent protectionist.

Trump Champioms Free Enterprise

"I am not going to let companies move to other countries, firing their employees along the way, without consequences," Trump said in his acceptance speech.

Is any comment necessary?

Trump's Plan for His First Day in Power?

In his acceptance speech Trump said, "Beginning on Jan. 20th, 2017, safety will be restored.”

Note that Trump does not say that beginning on inauguration day Americans will feel safe. He says "safety will be restored."

Is he promising -- or threatening -- martial law?

My Kind of Candidate...

...would support polycentric law and spontaneous order.

That would be a real law-and-order candidate.

Victimless-Crime Laws Breed Police Violence

As long as the police are charged with detecting and stopping consensual transactions -- concerning, for example, drugs, guns, gambling, sex, and untaxed cigarettes and CDs -- tension and violence will continue. Abolishing victimless-crime laws won't end institutional racism, but many opportunities for it will be eliminated.

The key feature of a victimless-"crime" transaction is that unlike, say, battery, it has no complaining participant -- the transaction is consensual. Because of this, police find they "need" to engage in surveillance, entrapment, cultivation of informants, stop-and-frisk, and other methods that breed distrust between the people and the system. This in turn gives rise to a view of the police as an occupying army, especially in poor minority neighborhoods, where for a variety of reasons -- occupational licensing and government schools, to name two -- the black market presents attractive alternatives to poverty.

Other measures to be taken: abolish all occupational licensing and minimum-wage laws, which impede people's efforts to prosper. (Providing goods and services without a license is a victimless crime if no deception is involved.)

Thus Dallas Chief David Brown's invitation to Black Lives Matter activists to join the police department and work for reform from within badly misses the point. This is not just about bad apples and community policing.

Another way to put it: if we didn't have cops, we wouldn't need them.

TGIF: Trump, Saddam, and the Presumption of Innocence

The horrifying thing about Trump's recent remarks about Saddam Hussein is not that he expressed admiration for the late Iraqi dictator -- in fact Trump called him a "bad guy" three times. What is horrifying is that Trump seemed envious that Saddam could "kill terrorists" without due process -- the most important element of which is the presumption of innocence, which places the burden of proof of guilt squarely on the government's shoulders. "He killed terrorists" Trump said of Saddam. "He did that so good. They didn't read them the rights. They didn't talk. They were a terrorist, it was over." (Emphasis added.)

Brexit, Scott Horton, and Me

Scott Horton and I discuss Brexit here.

Free Association Webinar

My latest webinar with sidekick Lucy Steigerwald discusses Clinton's emails, Gary Johnson, and Nazis.

Econ 101

Big difference -- YUGE -- between delivering bombs and delivering goods.

Brexit: Which Kind of Dependence Now?

Is Brexit a move toward British independence? Some Leave and Remain partisans may believe so, differing only over whether that's good or bad.

But, as usual, things are more complicated. We should hope that, in one respect, Britain's exit from the EU will create a kind of dependence that did not exist while it was still a member of the union. (But see Jacob T. Levy's well-argued opposition, as well as J.D. Tucille's rebuttal of the xenophobia explanation and Matt Ridley's defense of Leave.)

Bravo for Brexit!

Excellent news out of the UK. The next step is for the anti-elites -- there, here, everywhere -- to see that the state itself is their enemy, no matter who sits on top. Only natutal-law market anarchism would fully dethrone the oppressors.

See Glenn Greenwald's discussion.

The Golden Thread

To see where we are, watch these two videos.
 

Any Banner Will Do

The Islamic State doesn't give people a reason to commit mass murder. It gives people disposed to commit mass murder a banner to hoist. Take one banner away and they'll select another -- religious, secular, whatever is at hand. There's always a banner to hoist.

Me Too

Slaves to Political Incorrectness

Why are Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio afraid to use the term "radical homophobic terrorism"? Are they slaves to political incorrectness?

Free Association Webinar: Gary Johnson's Prospects

Trump's New Surrogate

"We're just going to take your picture. Smile."

Oh Joy! With Hillary We Get Bill!

Hillary Clinton vows to draw on Bill Clinton's "wealth of experience." Let's see, that would include:

• starving Iraqi children through sanctions (helping to provoke 9/11) 
• mass murder via bombing (Bosnia, Kosovo, then Iraq -- helping to provoke 9/11) 
• promoting subprime mortgages and securitization (with the help of Andrew Cuomo -- setting the stage for the housing crash and Great Recession)
• mass incarceration
• capital punishment
• unleashing Attorney General Janet Reno, BATF, and the Delta Force on the Branch Davidians at Waco
• the coverup of the truth of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City (which was a neo-Nazi atrocity committed in response to Waco) 
• using cruise missiles to destroy pharmaceutical factories in Africa
• threatening Russia by incorporating into NATO former Soviet allies and republics up to Russia's doorstep in violation of GHWB's assurances to the contrary
• unflagging support for Israel's violations of Palestinians' rights (again, helping to provoke 9/11).

Gotta hand it to Bill. He accomplished a lot in eight short years -- all that while fooling around with an intern. How did the man do it?

How lucky are we to have all that experience to draw on?

If You Love Freedom, Thank an Anarchist

From Roderick Long's Austro-Athenian Empire:

It’s often said – particularly on holidays like Veterans Day and Memorial Day – that Americans owe their freedom (such as it is) to u.s. military veterans.

This claim has always puzzled me. In what war in living memory was the freedom of Americans at stake? Without u.s. military action, were Japanese or German troops – let alone Italian, Vietnamese, Korean, Panamanian, Afghani, or Iraqi ones – really going to be marching though Times Square? If anything, given the notorious ratchet effect whereby wars tend to produce permanent increases in government power, it seems more probable that u.s. military action has contributed to a diminution of our freedom.

Yet Americans do enjoy a greater degree of liberty, however inadequate, than citizens of many other countries around the world. To whom do we owe that fact?

Many people wear shirts that say, “If you love freedom, thank a veteran.” I wear a shirt that says “If you love freedom, thank an anarchist.”

So what have anarchists (and other fractious dissidents) done for the cause of freedom? In answer, I quote from two recent articles:

Anarchists have never taken power. We have resisted authoritarianism and oppression in every arena. From calling out Marxism long before its draconian aspirations became public record, to fighting and dying to resist Fascism, fighting Franco until he couldn’t afford to join Hitler and Mussolini and leading the resistance against the Nazis across Europe. We’ve fought the robber barons, the czars, the oligarchs, and the soviet bureaucrats. 

And we’ve been extraordinarily popular in different regions at different points in history, although we have not yet had sufficient critical mass to completely transform the world. In every instance where anarchism surged to localized popularity with a few million adherents, as in Spain but also Ukraine and Manchuria, every surrounding power immediately put their wars on hold to collaborate in snuffing out the examples we provided of a better world, of better ways of interacting and settling disputes with one another, that do not turn to control but build a tolerable consensus for all parties when agreement is needed. 

We’ve been at the forefront not just of technology like cryptocurrencies and the tor project, but we’ve also been at the forefront of struggles against patriarchy, racism, homophobia, ageism, ableism, etc., etc. Since long before there were popular coalitions like “feminism.” We smuggled guns to slaves and ran abolitionist journals. We’ve coursed through the veins of our existing society, pioneering myriad social technologies like credit unions and cooperatives. We’ve consistently served as the radical edge of the world’s conscience, and played a critical role in expanding what is possible while developing and field testing new insights and tools. 

Anarchism – as many commentators have noted – has served as the laboratory of the left, of social justice and resistance movements around the world. Even where we remain marginal, the tools we invent eventually become mainstream.

 — William Gillis, “Transhumanism Implies Anarchism” 

[The] claim that our rights are something “given to” us, handed down from above by the government and its soldiers, is a pernicious, authoritarian, damned lie. 

Who has given us our rights? Nobody. We have taken them. Every right we have, we have because we fought for it from below. We have these rights because we resisted violations of them, because we fought those who violated them &#150 sometimes fighting “the Soldier” – and compelled the state to recognize them. And the state recognizes them because it’s afraid that if it violates them we’ll damn well fight it – and its soldiers – again. 

Rights have never been granted by authority. They have always been asserted against authority, and won from it. We don’t have our rights because the government and its soldiers are nice – but because we’re not. It’s not the Soldier – it’s the dissidents, the hell-raisers, the dirty flag-burning hippies, the folks with bad attitudes towards authority in general, who have given us our rights throughout history, by fighting for them.

 — Kevin A. Carson, “No, It’s Not ‘The Soldier’”

To Persuade, Speak the Language

To persuade people to the freedom philosophy we must speak in the vernacular. In election seasons, that entails relating ideas to candidates -- not only unacceptable ones but also superior ones when they are present. The goal is freedom through persuasion, not merely the self-gratification of purity.

Gary Johnson: The Cost of War

Revisionist History Day, 2016

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

The state inculcates an unquestioning faith in its war-making by associating it with patriotism, heroism, and the defense of "our freedoms." This strategy builds in its own defense against any criticism of the government's policies. Anyone who questions the morality of a war is automatically suspected of being unpatriotic, unappreciative of the bravery that has "kept us free," and disrespectful of "our troops," in a word, un-American.

To counter this common outlook, which people are indoctrinated in from birth and which is shared by conservatives and Progressives alike, we should do what we can to teach others that the government's version of its wars is always self-serving and threatening to life, liberty, and decency.

In that spirit, I quote a passage from the great antiwar movie The Americanization of Emily. You'll find a video of the scene below. This AP photo is a perfect illustration of what "Charlie Madison" is talking about.

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....

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.]

Here's an all-too-incomplete list of books in no particular order (some of which I've read, some of which I intend to read):

• We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now, edited by Murray Polner and Thomas E. Woods Jr.
• The Failure of America's Foreign Wars, edited by Richard M. Ebeling and Jacob G. Hornberger
• America's Second Crusade, by William Henry Chamberlin
• Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal, by Ralph Raico
• Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism, by Jeff Riggenbach
• War Is a Lie, by David Swanson
• War Is a Racket, by Smedley D. Butler
• Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, by Paul Fussell
• Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War, by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
• The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, by William Appleman Williams
• Empire as a Way of Life, by William Appleman Williams
• The Civilian and the Military: A History of the American Antimilitarist Tradition, by Arthur Ekirch
• The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic, 1890-1920, by Walter Karp
• The Costs of War, edited by John Denson
• Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, by Stephen Kinzer
• All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, by Stephen Kinzer
• Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, by Chalmers Johnson
• The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, by Chalmers Johnson
• War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges
• A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, by David Fromkin (This book has serious flaws, but it nonetheless shows the cynicism of the European imperialists.)
• The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, by David Hirst
• Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001, by Ussama Makdisi
• Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, by Max Blumenthal
• Genesis: Truman, Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict, by John B. Judis
• The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination, by Jeremy R. Hammond
• The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappe
• The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine, by Miko Peled
• Assault on the Liberty, by James N. Ennes Jr.
• Wilson's War: How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II, by Jim Powell
• American Empire: Before the Fall, by Bruce Fein
• Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World, by Jonathan Kwitny
• The Emergency State: America's Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs, by David C. Unger
• The War State: The Cold War Origins Of The Military-Industrial Complex And The Power Elite, 1945-1963, by Michael Swanson
• Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, by Nicholson Baker
• Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy, by Percy Greaves
• Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath, by John Toland
• Day of Deceit: The Truth about  FDR and Pearl Harbor, by Robert Stinnett
• Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, by Daniel Ellsberg
• The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, by Nick Turse
• "War is the Health of the State," by Randolph Bourne
• “War, Peace, and the State,” by Murray Rothbard
• “‘Ancient History’: U.S. Conduct in the Middle East Since World War II and the Folly of Intervention,” by Sheldon Richman
• "War's Still a Racket," by Sheldon Richman

By the way, if you can't help but think of this day as "memorial day," then at least spend part of it remembering how the U.S. government has caused the deaths of so many people.

Patriot's Lament

On Saturday, Joshua Bennett interviewed me about America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited on his radio program, "Patriot's Lament." Here's the audio.

Ya Gotta Do What You Gotta Do

Since we can never make airports perfectly safe, I guess we'll just have to liquidate the empire and stop bombing Muslim countries. Oh well, ya gotta do what you gotta do.

Put This on Your Resume, Mrs. Clinton

Can you imagine Hillary Clinton sitting in judgment over who is and is not qualified to be president? 

Ponder this: in 2011 ISIS was not in Libya, first, because Libya was not an open war zone and, second, because ISIS did not exist. Then the US, at Clinton's insistence, bombed Libya, helping to overthrow the government, while fomenting a jihadist war against the Syrian government. Today the US is fighting ISIS in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere. 

Put that on your famous resume, Mrs. Clinton. 

The Constitution, Tom Woods, and I

I was the guest on The Tom Woods Show podcast yesterday. Our topic: America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited.

Nakba Day, 2016

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

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

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



Additional reading: "Why the Inconvenient Truths of the Nakba Must Be Recognized," by Tom Pessah; "The Anti-Semite's Best Friend," by Jonathan Cook;  "Israel Must Recognize Its Responsibility for the Nakba, the Palestinian Tragedy," by Saeb Erekat; and "The sacking of Jaffa during the Palestinian Nakba, as narrated by three Omars," by Allison Deger.

(Another version of this post appeared previously.)

Guess Who

At least one presidential candidate speaks favorably of printing money to pay the national debt and of taxing the rich. At least one candidate promises not to raise taxes on the middle class, although inflation (printing money) and tariffs are taxes on the middle class (and everyone else).

What Were We Thinking?

What made any of us think that Republicans wouldn't go for Trump? I mean, what were we thinking?

Obama's War

If the death of the Navy SEAL in Iraq prompts the US government to withdraw from the Middle East, he will have not died in vain.

First, Do No Harm

Much harm has come from conflating "isolationism" (better: noninterventionism) with unilateralism.

Yet More Praise

The Anti-Federalists were right: The pursuit of "national greatness" inevitably diminishes liberty and centralizes government. The U.S. Constitution did both, as Sheldon Richman demonstrates in this powerfully argued anarchist case against the blueprint for empire known as the U.S. Constitution. 

--Bill Kauffman, author, Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin

More Praise for America's Counter-Revolution

America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited

The libertarian movement has long suffered from a constitutional fetishism that embraces an ahistorical reverence for the U.S. Constitution. Far too many are unaware of the extent to which the framing and adoption of the Constitution was in fact a setback for the cause of liberty. Sheldon Richman, in a compilation of readable, well researched, and compelling essays, exposes the historical, theoretical, and strategic errors in the widespread reification of a purely political document. With no single correct interpretation, the Constitution has been predictably unable to halt the growth of the modern welfare-warfare American State. I urge all proponents of a free society to give his book their diligent attention.

--Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Professor, San Jose State University; author, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War

Latest Free Association Webinar: Voting, Democracy, and Other Ills

The Framers' Error

James Madison and the other framers thought cooperation could not be achieved without the state. They also thought that under their Constitution ambition would counteract ambition to limit state abuse. But they didn't foresee that ambitious parties would manage to cooperate, without state direction, in a conspiracy against the public. So the framers' double error is really the same error: cooperation does take place without state compulsion. That being so, we don't need the framers' system in which ambition counteracts ambition.

Two Tyrannies: State and Society

My review of Jacob T. Levy's Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom is now available at The American Conservative website: "Two Tyrannies: State and Society."

Jeff Tucker Interviews Me about "America's Counter-Revolution

Buy American Hurts Americans

Mike Lindell, president of My Pillow Inc., seems like a nice guy, and I like his product. But he says something in his commercial that bothers me:

"Every part of my product is made in the USA."

What could be wrong with that? Lots of things.

You're Invited!

Jeff Tucker and I will talk about my book at 7 pm EDT tonight at Liberty.me. Join us!

Income Tax Day

If you hate the income tax (among others), damn the Rats (Federalists) and praise the Anti-Rats (Anti-Federalists). Ignore those who blame someone else later in American history. Don't let the original bad buys off the hook.

As Lysander Spooner said,

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

For details see America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited.

Latest Webinar: America's Counter-Revolution

Here's the video of my latest webinar at Liberty.me:

A New Thought Crime

From the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) today denounced a subpoena from Attorney General Claude E. Walker of the U.S. Virgin Islands that attempts to unearth a decade of the organization’s materials and work on climate change policy. This is the latest effort in an intimidation campaign to criminalize speech and research on the climate debate, led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and former Vice President Al Gore.
“CEI will vigorously fight to quash this subpoena. It is an affront to our First Amendment rights of free speech and association for Attorney General Walker to bring such intimidating demands against a nonprofit group,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman. “If Walker and his allies succeed, the real victims will be all Americans, whose access to affordable energy will be hit by one costly regulation after another, while scientific and policy debates are wiped out one subpoena at a time.” 

The subpoena requests a decade’s worth of communications, emails, statements, drafts, and other documents regarding CEI’s work on climate change and energy policy, including private donor information. It demands that CEI produce these materials from 20 years ago, from 1997-2007, by April 30, 2016.

On March 30, 2016, Attorney General Schneiderman, former Vice President Al Gore, and attorneys general from Massachusetts, Virginia, Connecticut, Maryland, Vermont, as well as Attorney General Walker, held a press conference in New York City to announce “an unprecedented coalition of top law enforcement officials committed to aggressively protecting and building upon the recent progress the United States has made in combating climate change.” Schneiderman said that the group, calling itself “AGs United for Clean Power,” will address climate change by threatening criminal investigations and charges against companies, policy organizations, scientists, and others who disagree with its members’ climate policy agenda. 

CEI has long been a champion of sound climate change policy, and opposed previous attempts to use McCarthy-style tactics by officials aiming to limit discussions between nonprofit policy groups and the private sector regarding federal policies. CEI is being represented in this matter by attorneys Andrew M. Grossman and David B. Rivkin, Jr., who recently founded the Free Speech in Science Project to defend First Amendment rights against government abuses.

America's Counter-Revolution Now at Amazon!

America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited is now available at Amazon.com. A Kindle edition is also available. Check it out!

From the back cover:

This book challenges the assumption that the Constitution was a landmark in the struggle for liberty. Instead, Sheldon Richman argues, it was the product of a counter-revolution, a setback for the radicalism represented by America’s break with the British empire. Drawing on careful, credible historical scholarship and contemporary political analysis, Richman suggests that this counter-revolution was the work of conservatives who sought a nation of “power, consequence, and grandeur.” America’s Counter-Revolution makes a persuasive case that the Constitution was a victory not for liberty but for the agendas and interests of a militaristic, aristocratic, privilege-seeking ruling class. 

Praise for America's Counter-Revolution:

The libertarian movement has long suffered from a constitutional fetishism that embraces an ahistorical reverence for the U.S. Constitution. Far too many are unaware of the extent to which the framing and adoption of the Constitution was in fact a setback for the cause of liberty. Sheldon Richman, in a compilation of readable, well researched, and compelling essays, exposes the historical, theoretical, and strategic errors in the widespread reification of a purely political document. With no single correct interpretation, the Constitution has been predictably unable to halt the growth of the modern welfare-warfare American State. I urge all proponents of a free society to give his book their diligent attention.

--Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Professor, San Jose State University; author, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War 

"No state or government can limit itself through a written constitution, no matter how fine the words or how noble the sentiments they express. It is one of the many virtues of Sheldon Richman's book that it shows how this is true even of the American Constitution, which despite the promises of its designers and the insistence of its defenders down the years, made limited government less and not more likely."

 --Chandran Kukathas, London School of Economics

“This book is a milestone in real liberal history. Never to my knowledge has the liberal critique of constitutionalism been so acutely and concisely put. All those defending the heavy hand of statism will henceforth have to answer Richman’s assessment point by point. He sums up the issues deftly. This book is the best extant overview of the matter.”

—Walter E. Grinder, Institute for Civil Society

“Richman delivers an accessible, incisive, and well-grounded argument that the Constitution centralized power and undid some of the Revolution’s liberating gains. He rebuts patriotic platitudes but avoids the crude contrarianism so common in libertarian revisionism written for popular consumption. He does not romanticize America’s past or overstate his case. Radical and nuanced, deferential to freedom and historical truth, Richman rises above hagiography or demonization of either the Federalists or anti-Federalists to produce an unsurpassed libertarian exploration of the subject.”

— Anthony Gregory, Independent Institute

“[A]fter reading this book, you will never think about the U.S. Constitution and America’s founding the same way again. Sheldon Richman’s revealing and remarkably well-argued narrative will permanently change your outlook. . . . Richman . . . [is] one of this country’s most treasured thinkers and writers . . . . [H]e draws on the most contemporary and important scholarly research, while putting the evidence in prose that is accessible and compelling.”

— Jeffrey A. Tucker, Liberty.me and Foundation for Economic Education

“Several years ago, in just a few short blog posts and exchanges, Sheldon Richman changed my mind—he challenged my naïve view of the Constitution as an imperfect but basically libertarian blueprint for a minimalist state. No, the Interstate Commerce clause was not really just about free trade. No, the taxing authority is not as limited as we would like to argue. In America’s Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, Richman demonstrates that the purpose of the Constitutional project was to expand and centralize the new federal government’s powers. This is a much-needed antidote to US-centric Constitution worship common among libertarians and conservatives.

— N. Stephan Kinsella, Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom

Bernie Sanders's Short Memory

During his interview with the New York Daily News, Bernie Sanders was asked to specify the fraud committed by Wall Street banks. He replied:

What kind of fraudulent activity? Fraudulent activity that brought this country into the worst economic decline in its history by selling packages of fraudulent, fraudulent, worthless subprime mortgages. How's that for a start? 

Selling products to people who you knew could not repay them. Lying to people without allowing them to know that in a year, their interest rates would be off the charts. They would not repay that. Bundling these things. Putting them into packages with good mortgages. That's fraudulent activity.

Does Sanders really forget that it was progressives like him who demanded that banks lower lending standards so that low-income people with no, weak, or bad credit histories could get mortgages with low teaser interest rates that would later balloon? Is he ignorant of the fact that these banks had every reason to believe the government would bail them out if they failed? Does he not recall Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises championed by Barney Frank and other progressives, that were right in the middle of this action, knowing they'd be saved if they failed? Has Sanders no memory of mortgage lenders like Countrywide, which were celebrated by progressives for aggressively pushing mortgages on people who could not afford them? Is he unaware that HUD, under Bill Clinton (and Secretary Andrew Cuomo) as well as George W. Bush, enabled people with poor credit and low incomes to "buy" houses with little or no down payment? And finally, is he oblivious of the fact that it was all these government-pushed shaky mortgages that were bundled into the exotic investment instruments Sanders now decries?

I'm pretty sure Sanders is aware of all this. But it doesn't fit his narrative that the Great Recession was entirely the result of private-sector greed, so he can't acknowledge it. Wall Street is properly viewed with suspicion, but what makes that reasonable is that it has long been in cahoots with the national government, notably with federal deposit insurance, which rewards irresponsibility by relieving depositors of the need to judge banks' sobriety or lack thereof.

In other words, Sen. Sanders, Wall Street couldn't have done it alone. It needed people like you.

(For details see Peter Boettke and Steven Horwitz, "The House that Uncle Sam Built.")

Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society, and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a Free Association patron today!

Man's Inhumanity to Man

Customer: Hello, Home Warranty Co.? My A/C system broke down. I'd like coverage for it.
Home Warranty person: Do you have a policy with our company?
Customer: No. That's why I'd like one now.
Home Warranty person: But your A/C is already broken?
Customer: Yes.
Home Warranty person: I'm sorry but we don't cover breakdowns that occur before you buy a policy.
Customer: You don't cover preexisting conditions? How cruel! Does the government know about this?

Now You Know Why

Market competition is the proven best way to keep suppliers honest. Government forbids competition with itself. The dots are so close they connect themselves. Elections are ersatz competition, homage via superficial imitation. The moral/epistemic value of competition is sadly unappreciated unrecognized.

What Do Terrorists Want?

After the terrorist violence in Brussels many people, including Barack Obama, said we should not change our way of life and live in fear because that is what terrorists want. Maybe, but is that all they want? It seems that something important is left out of the story. In the classical model of terrorism, instilling fear (along with causing death and injury) is not an end in itself. It's a means to an end.

Help Support America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited

You can support my efforts to promote this book through PayPal -- see the link to the right -- or by becoming a patron at Patreon. I hope you'll consider it. Thanks!

Watch This Space

This morning I put the finishing touches on my book America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited. Details to follow...

It's Not Impossible

Maybe Trump's secret mission is to rehabilitate establishment politicians in the eyes of the people.

Tibor Machan, RIP

Tibor R. Machan, the indefatigably prolific libertarian philosopher, died March 24 at the age of 77. He was a founding editor of Reason and the author or editor of many -- many -- books, scholarly papers, articles, and letters to editors. Having first seen him speak in 1970 (as I recall), I worked with Tibor in several capacities and always found him interesting and challenging. I had disagreements with him, and he could be difficult at times. But he was, in my experience, a good person with an oversized love of life. Reason's obituary is here.

As Usual, Adam Smith Had It Largely Right

I'm an anarchist, but I still like this from Adam Smith (1755), a lovely man, indeed:

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.

By comparison with today, how nice does "peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice" sound? 

Trump's Toxic Aggrieved-Nation Shtick

The key to Donald Trump's presidential campaign -- the feature that explains nearly everything else about that toxic dump -- is his aggrieved-nation shtick. Just about everything Trump says (when he's not adoring himself or belittling others) is about how the once-great American nation has been humbled by the rest of the world. To hear him tell it, the United States is a 99-pound weakling who repeatedly has had sand kicked in his face by everyone. "We don't win anymore," he says. "We don't win with trade. We don't win with the military. We don't win."

It's Pi Day!

Happy Pi Day, and Einstein's birthday! I'm gonna party likes it's 1592.

TGIF: Conceived in Tyranny

If the American Revolution was in some large measure a tax rebellion, we should appreciate the bitter irony that the U.S. Constitution was in some large measure a reaction to a tax rebellion. It's another reason we can reasonably view the move toward the Constitution -- toward, that is, the concentration of power in a national government -- as a counter-revolution and something for libertarians to abhor.

On Trade, Sanders and Trump Are Peas in a Rotten Pod

Neither Bernie Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist, nor Donald Trump, the self-described terrific businessman, knows squat about economics. If their polices were enacted, regular working people would be harmed.

Trump Loses Debate to Dead Economist

HT: Mark Perry

TGIF: Trump's Creators

The Donald Trump phenomenon is indeed the creature of the Republican establishment, but there's more to it than that.

Webinar: FBI versus Apple

My latest webinar at Liberty.me covered the FBI-v-Apple case.

How Well Does the Constitution Protect Liberty?

I was a recent guest on Libertarianism.org's podcast series Free Thoughts with Aaron Powell and Trevor Burrus. Have a listen: "How Well Does the Constitution Protect Liberty?"

Shame on You, Donald Trump

He hates the media. But aren't you supposed to worship your creator?

TGIF: The Constitution and the Standing Army

The U.S. Constitution can reasonably be seen as a massive tax and mercantilist trade-promotion program. However, there's a third leg to this stool. It was a national-security program as well -- almost a proto-PATRIOT Act. Indeed, these three elements formed an integrated project: it gave the new central government independent power to raise revenue by taxing individuals directly and to establish an army and navy in order to advance, by force if necessary, American trade. This, I submit, was not exactly a libertarian project. It let a terrifying genie out of the bottle ostensibly in order to contain it. Or, as James Madison put it, "You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."

Sanders and Trump Are Too Establishment on Syria

Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton both want the U.S. government to set up a "safe zone" in Syria to care for refugees from the raging civil war. You may assess their judgment by noting that Secretary of State Clinton and Sen. Rubio also pushed for bombing and regime change in Libya, which was crucial in spreading bin Ladenite mayhem far and wide, and that Rubio thinks knocking out the Sunni Islamic State would hurt Shi'ite Iran.

Madison on Government and Force

While we have no evidence that George Washington said, "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force. Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master," we can report that James Madison did say this:

[There] never was a Government without force. What is the meaning of Government? An institution to make people do their duty. A Government leaving it to a man to do his duty, or not, as he pleases, would be a new species of Government, or rather no Government at all. 

Quoted in Max M. Edling's A Revolution in Favor of Government, and attributed to the Virginia ratifying convention, Doc. Hist. v. 10, I 302.

Thus Madison would have understood that libertarian minarchism without taxation is incoherent.

Hey, Trump

Let's not make America great. Let's make Americans free. Greatness will take care of itself.

Infamy

FDR, progressive hero, locked up the Japanese Americans this day 74 years ago. Donald Trump would have approved.

TGIF: Trump Backs Off Iraq Charge; Admits He Favored the War

Alas, Donald Trump has backed off from his charge that the Bush administration lied the country into war against Iraq, telling a CNN town-hall broadcast Thursday night that he doesn't know why Bush invaded. "I'm not talking about lying. I'm not talking about not lying," he said. "No one knows why we went into Iraq." But Trump restated the obvious: that Saddam Hussein and Iraq did not fly planes into the World Trade Center. And he again, to his credit, said the war "may have been the worst decision any president has made in the history of this country.... Whether [George W. Bush] lied or not, it was a horrible decision." (See video.)

Can We Finally Understand the Three-Fifths Clause?

Considering how often the original Constitution's three-fifths clause is invoked in the fight against racism, you'd think people would look it up. Its point was not that African-American slaves were three-fifths human. How could it be? The slaveholders wanted them counted as five-fifths human! The clause related to apportionment for determining the states' representation in the new House of Representatives. Naturally, the slaveholders wanted slaves counted as whole persons because that would maximize the slave states' political power. But because of push-back by the Northern states, the slaveholders had to settle for three-fifths. It was a compromise from their demand for five-fifths. Zero, which the abolitionists would have wanted, was not a live option.

The flaw in the slaveholders' position was that they wanted captive African Americans to be counted as whole persons only for representation purposes. The abolitionists wanted them counted as whole persons in every respect; that is, they wanted them freed.

Sanders Over the Others

If I had the energy for writing about electoral politics, I might have written something like Will Wilkinson has written. (I might still manage to do it.) So read his "Thinking through Your Libertarian Vote." And watch for his Chris Sciabarra-style dialectical analysis. A sample:

I am fairly confident that if I unpacked all of my assumptions in a treatise on the nature of liberty and the dynamics of political economy and democratic public administration, laid out all of my theories of the candidates’ genuine priorities, modeled the likely course of public policy under each contender’s presidency, then ranked all of the candidate’s platforms on my carefully calibrated freedom index, Bernie Sanders would come in first place.

Bush, 9/11, and Iraq: Trump Gets It Right

Donald Trump, for all his obnoxious demagoguery, is adding value to the presidential campaign by calling former President George W. Bush to account for 9/11 and the Iraq war, which set in motion the growth and spread of al-Qaeda and the rise of the Islamic State. Former U.S. rulers rarely face consequences for the horrible things they do in office. Condemnation is considered impolite.

Privacy as Property Right

In 1993, while working at the Cato Institute, I published an article in the institute's Policy Report that is relevant to discussions occasioned by the death of Antonin Scalia. "Dissolving the Inkblot: Privacy as Property Right" attempts to show that the conservative and progressive constitutional approaches to the right of privacy are both flawed and proposes an alternative approach rooted in the right to property, beginning with self-ownership.

Enjoy!

TGIF: Obama Suspends TV Coverage of Middle East

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security announced today that the government will forbid the television news media from covering the conflict in the Middle East because "displays of U.S. military operations there have the potential to radicalize Americans against the Obama administration's foreign policy and provoke terrorism in the United States."

End, Don't Extend, Draft Registration

This past week demonstrated with blinding clarity that 1) Republicans, contrary to their rhetoric, oppose individual liberty, and 2) the establishment news media really couldn't care less about the presidential candidates' views.

After the last Republican debate, the media continued its obsession with the reality-TV and horse-race sides of the election. News readers, correspondents, and "analysts" droned on about Marco Rubio's robotic repetition during the debate and the insult swaps by Donald Trump and Jeb Bush. You had to read the cable channels' "news tickers" running right to left along the bottom of the screen to find out that at least some Republican candidates think young women should have to register with Selective Service in case the military draft is reinstituted. On CNN, at least, this story was not deemed worthy of further attention.

Which is more important? Rubio's short-term memory problem, the Trump-Bush mud-wrestling match, or registration for the draft?

Here's a clue: the draft is slavery. It is short-term slavery at best, but it's possibly debilitating and even fatal. Thus registration with Selective Service is -- surprise! -- registration for possible enslavement. Anyone who supports individual liberty against state power would oppose conscription. This is no close call.

The draft ended in 1973 during the Nixon administration. (Classical-liberal economist Milton Friedman played a key role in its demise.) In 1980, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter signed a proclamation requiring 18-26-year-old men -- but not women -- to register with Selective Service, supposedly as a signal to the Russians that Carter had noticed their invasion. But the draft was not revived. (We later learned that the Carter administration helped to provoke the invasion by aiding jihadis, hoping Afghanistan would be the Soviets' "Vietnam." The 9/11 attacks were blowback from Carter's operation, and Afghanistan would become America's second "Vietnam.")

Ronald Reagan, Carter's opponent in 1980, criticized draft registration on grounds that it "destroys the very values that our society is committed to defending," but in office Reagan changed his mind because "we live in a dangerous world."

According to Selective Service: "Failing to register ... is a felony punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 or a prison term of up to five years, or a combination of both." (Counseling "another to fail to comply ... is subject to the same penalties.") Failing to register can also result in loss of government benefits, such as student aid, federal jobs, and job training. 

With military combat roles now open to women, the question of extending compulsory draft registration to them has come up. The New York Times reports that "the Marine Corps commandant, the chief of staff of the Army and one of the top Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee [Claire McCaskill] said ... that women should be required to register. Two days later, two Republican members of the House who are military veterans -- Duncan Hunter of California and Ryan Zinke of Montana -- introduced legislation that would require women to register."

That set the stage for the question at the Republican debate. Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie endorsed compulsory registration of women. Christie, strangely, said not forcing women to register constituted discrimination against them. Bush said he did not expect the draft to be resumed, but hastened to add that he opposed ending registration.

The remaining candidates said nothing. No one objected to registering women. (Later Ted Cruz said the idea is "nuts." More revealing, no one called for ending draft registration for men. The candidates of the party that insists it alone favors liberty and limits on government power favor draft registration!

Few people call for a new draft; military leaders reportedly oppose conscription because it fills the armed forces with people who prefer to be elsewhere. So why continue draft registration? The usual answer is that it would promote readiness in an emergency. But that is no reason to violate liberty. The practical value of a quickly dated list of registrants is also doubted.

Some misguided people will argue that if men must register, then fairness dictates that women must register too. It's an odd notion of fairness or justice, however. Compulsory draft registration is unfair because it violates young people's rights. Therefore, extending the unfairness cannot be fair. The only fair measure would be to abolish registration and never draft anyone again.

Sheldon Richman keeps the blog Free Association and is a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society, and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a patron today!

Again?

The Distinguished Woman Stumping for Hillary Clinton

President Bill Clinton later promoted Madeleine Albright from ambassador to the UN to secretary of state, the first women to hold the office. While speaking on behalf of Hillary Clinton recently, she said "there's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other."

Clinton's Wall Street Red Herring

In response to Bernie Sanders's stigmatizing her as an establishment candidate who takes big bucks from Wall Street, Hillary Clinton challenged Sanders to show that she ever changed a vote or a position because of a campaign donation or speaker's fee.

That's a red herring.

Sanders's concern presumably is not that she was or is for sale, but that Wall Street operators see her as already friendly to their interests. If so, they did not need her to change her position or disposition. Rather, they like what they see and want her in charge.

For some reason, Sanders is reluctant to go in for the kill. Maybe he's not very sharp on his feet.

TGIF: Justice, Not Amnesty, for "Illegal" Immigrants

It speaks volumes that the dirtiest word in the Republican and conservative lexicon is amnesty. At a minimum, it exposes as a flagrant lie the claim that Republicans and conservatives want to expand liberty and limit government power. One cannot consistently praise the principle, central to the supposedly beloved Declaration of Independence, that "all men [that is, persons, not only Americans] are created equal" while also demanding that the government control some people's freedom to move.

Cruz and Rubio: Heirs to Bush-Obama Militarism

I see no point splitting hairs over whether Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio is the more egregious warmonger. Both love the bloody and costly U.S. empire. Both believe in American exceptionalism. (Rubio arrogantly calls for a "New American Century.") Both want to make war in the Middle East (and beyond) and "stand behind Israel," though such policies provoked the 9/11 attacks. Both want to pour money into the military, as though America were militarily threatened. (The U.S. military budget equals the budgets of the next seven highest spending nations.) Both want to prevent detente with Iran, which poses no danger. Both hype terrorism as an existential threat. Both want the government to spy on Americans, especially Muslim Americans. Both want to "control the border," code for violating the natural right of people to move freely and make better lives without government permission.

TGIF: The Bill of Rights Revisited

Drawing on work by historian Gordon S. Wood, I recently suggested that we see the U.S. Constitution not as a landmark in the struggle for liberty, but rather as a move to introduce elements of monarchy and aristocracy into an American political system that had become too democratic -- among white males with property -- for America's upper crust. As Wood wrote in Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic: 1789-1815, "Benjamin Rush [a signer of the Declaration of Independence] described the new government in 1790 as one 'which unites with the vigor of monarchy and the stability of aristocracy all the freedom of a simple republic.'" But is that union actually coherent?

Trump & the Conservative Establishment Deserve Each Other

No one should need National Review's advice to steer clear of Donald Trump. For one thing, the messenger is a curious one indeed. Although Trump doesn't talk like a neoconservative Wilsonian, he has not cleanly separated himself from that faction either.

Make America Grate!

TGIF: The Constitution Revisited

I am mystified that so many libertarians still see the U.S. Constitution as a landmark achievement in the struggle for liberty. On principle alone, they should have become wary in time. A document that is adored at virtually every position in the political firmament should arouse suspicion among libertarians.

Why Won't Iran Act Like Our Enemy?

What a bad week for the war party. Darn you, Iran! The country that the armchair warriors most love to hate refuses to play the villain's role assigned by the neoconservatives, "humanitarian" interventionists, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the establishment media.

MLK Day

"Visiting Martin Luther King, Jr. at the peak of the civil rights movement, the journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. 'Just for self-defense,' King assured him. One of King’s advisors remembered the reverend’s home as 'an arsenal.' Like King, many nonviolent activists embraced their constitutional right to self-protection—yet this crucial dimension of the civil rights struggle has been long ignored."

--Charles Cobb, That Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible

Shamefully but unsurprisingly, Cobb's book has been ignored by the establishment media. But see this.(Also see my earlier article here.)

Someone Saw the Neocons and Trump Coming

 

A nation which makes greatness its polestar 

can never be free.

--Abraham Bishop (of Connecticut), 1800

TGIF: The Pernicious State

Government is more than a territorial monopoly on aggressive force. It's also the heir to a centuries-old manufactured mystique, reinforced through its schools and other institutions, regarding its sanctity and sacrosanctity. The mystique is generated by and tends to manifest itself in the dogma that one's State is uniquely virtuous and deserves to be judged by standards applicable to no one and nothing else. This is hardly less true of secular states than it was during the time of the divine right of kings. In some important ways, people have not gotten over that principle.

Hillary Clinton: Least Fit of All

Even considering that no one is fit to be president -- in that no one should be able to command a state, which rules by threatening and committing violence against innocents -- Hillary Clinton is especially unfit. No one who has done what she has done as a government official should be rewarded with power.

Clinton or Sanders?

If we have to have a president, whom would you prefer: someone who voted for the Iraq war or someone who voted against holding gun manufacturers and gun dealers liable per se for criminal shootings?

Will Grigg on Northern Paiute Claims in Oregon

As to be expected, Will Grigg sheds needed light on the Northern Paiute claim to the government-held land now occupied by the so-called Citizens for Constitutional Freedom. Be sure to read Grigg's "'This Is Government Land': The Eternal Refrain of the Federal Occupiers."

General Crook, the U.S Army’s most accomplished Indian fighter, candidly admitted that the Bannock War was provoked by the government he had served with such distinction.

"It cannot be expected that they will stay on reservations where there is no possible way to get food, and see their wives and children starve and die around them,” Crook wrote of the Paiutes and Shoshones. “We have taken their lands, deprived them of every means of living…. Our Indian policy has resolved itself into a question of warpath or starvation; and, merely being human, many of them will choose the former alternative where death shall be at least glorious.”

Whatever's Going on in Oregon, It's Not Terrorism

A key to understanding the political world lies in realizing that the words terrorism and terrorist are inherently political terms. This has been clear in international affairs, but we now see this in domestic matters, specifically the case involving ranchers Dwight and Steve Hammond and the takeover of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service building in Harney County, Oregon.

The Hammonds have been imprisoned under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, an ostentatiously get-tough bill -- passed after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building -- favored by congressional Republicans and signed by triangulating Democratic President Bill Clinton, who was seeking reelection that year and whose wife, the hawkish Hillary Clinton, is seeking the presidency today. Among other things, the Act limits habeas corpus relief in federal courts for those claiming to have been unlawfully imprisoned.

The words terrorism and terrorist are also used to describe the people now occupying the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in sympathy with the Hammonds. CNN reports that "progressive" opponents of the occupiers refer to them as "YallQaeda" and "vanilla ISIS." Some urge government violence against them.

Is this description fair? One can answer this question regardless of what one thinks of the Hammonds and the occupiers. If terrorism has any reasonable referent, it is the use of violence against noncombatants for a political purpose. The point is to terrorize by killing or injuring noncombatants, or destroying their property, in an effort to effect change.

Nowhere do we see such violence in either the Hammonds' case or the occupation of the government building. The actions that brought criminal charges against the Hammonds consisted in setting two fires on their own land in 2001 and 2006, the first to destroy invasive vegetation, the second ostensibly to protect against a wildfire on adjacent land controlled by the central government. On both occasions the fires unintentionally spread to the government-controlled land. The Hammonds put out the first fire; the second fire reportedly endangered government firefighters, whom the Hammonds knew were in the vicinity.

Even if we grant the worst allegations -- that the Hammonds wrongfully declined to inform the government that it would be setting the fires and that one fire was allegedly set to cover up poaching -- the actions look nothing like terrorism. No one was intentionally threatened, and no one was injured or killed. So why were the cases prosecuted under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of five years? (The trial judge refused to impose the mandatory minimum, but the government appealed after the Hammonds had served their terms and they were returned to prison, sparking the protest.) Even if we make the dubious concession that the Act was a good-faith attempt to fight bona fide terrorism, what does it have to do with the Hammonds?

As for the occupiers of the government building, who now call themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, again, where's the terrorism? Yes, some occupiers are armed. But the building was unoccupied when they entered it, and no one was threatened, much less harmed or killed. It's reported that roads around the building are open. The news media come and go at will.

In neither case was anyone terrorized. To be sure, the occupiers have a political objective, to pressure the central government into giving up control of its massive land holdings. Terrorism, however, requires a particular kind of violence along with a political motive. Critics describe the occupiers as white supremacists. I don't know if they are, although John Ritzheimer, a spokesman for the occupiers, is an anti-Muslim activist. But regardless, their conduct in Burns, Ore., does not constitute terrorism, and no constructive purpose is served by promiscuously throwing that inflammatory word around.

I'll leave for another time the controversy surrounding the government's landholdings except to say that one need not regard all governments as illegitimate (as I do) to see something wrong in the U.S. government's control of so much land, especially in the West, holdings acquired through forcible preemption. While white ranchers and anti-U.S. government activists claim that their rights and the state of Oregon's "rights" have been usurped by the central government, largely overlooked is the solid claim of the Northern Paiute.

According to the Indian Country Today Media Network, "Ironically, the 'legal' basis for [the occupiers'] starting a fight with the federal government is that sovereignty 'really' belongs to Oregon rather than the Paiutes, who have seen their federal trust land shrink from over one and a half million acres to a tiny remnant of 760 acres in Burns, Oregon, where this current armed standoff began." It adds, "President U.S. Grant established the Malheur Indian Reservation for the Northern Paiute in 1872.... White settlement nibbled at the Malheur Indian Reservation until the Bannock War in 1878, which ended with surrendered Paiutes and Bannocks on the reservation being removed, officially to the Yakama Reservation in Washington Territory." (See more on the Northern Paiute claim here, here,  here, and especially here.)

Citizens for Constitutional Freedom is right that the national government should vacate the land. But it's wrong about who should have it. It was stolen from the Northern Paiute, and therefore it should be returned.

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