After shocking even myself one day several years ago, I decided I needed to settle on a word to use when referring to politicians, leaders, and the other special interest groups who work so hard to sell the sovereign countries of the world down the road for personal gain, all the while espousing their good intentions for the "general welfare" of the people. Not that there aren't innumerable choice terms for these treacherous busy-bodies already. However, vocalizing any of them in public usually results in a rapid change to my complexion – a facial state I've generally tried to avoid since middle school PE classes. Nevertheless, I admit to using most of them at one point or another in recent times and many of them quite often, albeit in private. I really just needed a word I could do more than mutter disgustedly under my breath in public. Ultimately, I settled upon the term "weasel". I'm not sure who first applied this word to humans as a descriptor for acting in a cunning and/or deceitful fashion to achieve desired ends, but I'm willing to bet a politician was involved somewhere.
Most of us know (or have known) a weasel or two in our lifetimes. Some of us know more than a few, and a few of us are unlucky enough to be surrounded by them. Escaping real life encounters with weasels is a fortunate state of affairs indeed. Nevertheless, you will undoubtedly be assaulted by proxy either through media or legislative mandates. Pick up any form of print media and their visages smile up at you with a plastic intensity matched only by the accompanying pontificating on their plans for maintaining and expanding the status-quo controls on your life. I challenge you to find a news channel where you won't hear those same plans (or worse ones) regurgitated through flashy, cutesy sound bytes on the hour by more (or the same) plasticine personas. Our nation's capital seethes with them. Their offices overflow with favored crony lobbyists, and their legislative droppings have spread over the land burying our Republic in the stink of rotten tyranny. Yes, weasels are rampant on the Hill. So much so that one might wonder whether D.C. suffered an invasion of the weasel-pod-people one fine night while the country slept. Of course we have been asleep for quite a long time, so perhaps it shouldn't surprise us to find that our house has been overrun by weasels, the clean up of which – to borrow a favored weasel phrase – is a "shovel ready job". This one, however, would actually be of more than temporary benefit to America.
The weasels would like us all to accept that their infestation is not only normal, but "just the way things are". At which point they expect us all to go back to sleep, so the merry-go-round of fraud and plunder can continue spinning money out of our pockets and into theirs. Since that proposed state of affairs has been a long-standing given, it's not surprising that they can't recognize the winds of change, even after the gusts carried a good number of them out of office this past November. Some are beginning to get a clue, but they have yet to realize that the people mean serious business this time. The dysphoria hanging over the land is not just a temporary phase easily placated with business as usual platitudes mouthed blithely out of one side of their faces or the other. Too many Americans caught a glimpse of the underlying decay exposed to sunlight during the 2008 debates by the sheer strength of honest words voiced by a man of impeccable integrity. If as Justice Louis Brandeis stated (and Obama so blithely quoted out of one side of his face) "sunlight is the greatest disinfectant," then Ron Paul – who simply wiped away years of grimy obfuscation with a few clarifying statements – is the mightiest cleaning agent since the advent of Clorox.
Multitudes of Americans immediately recognized the truth in Congressman Ron Paul's words. When they listened to past floor speeches and checked his voting record, they found a man whose foresight and consistency reins unmatched by any other in decades. And they went to work with a vengeance and energy that has become the envy of many. Although both he and the number of his supporters were repeatedly ridiculed and marginalized, neither let it affect their efforts. When Dr. Paul ended his campaign by saying that "victory is not available to us in the conventional sense," his supporters shifted gears and continued on in an unconventional sense. The campaign to elect Ron Paul as president has never ended for those whose apathy he cured and their numbers have continued to grow slowly and exponentially over the last four years. In Dr. Paul they had found, not a politician, but a statesman they could trust. One who not only talked the talk, but walked the walk – always. No other candidate could lay claim to that virtue in 2008, none can lay claim to it now in 2012. The grassroots will not be fooled by a substitute posing with a hastily procured copy of the Constitution and paying lip-service to liberty.
In 2009 the Tea Party exploded on the political scenes demonstrating just how large the disenchanted multitude has become. Despite his supporters being the first tea-partiers in 2007, it is often pointed out by media-weasels that most Americans don't, won't, and can't possibly back Ron Paul. Maybe not – yet – but an overwhelming majority of them are sick to death of the status-quo. Tired of being lied to about everything, disgusted by TSA gropings in the name of security, sick of their earnings being fleeced to bail out criminals, angered by endless curtailment of their freedoms, and done being told what they can buy, eat, drink and do, the vast majority of Americans have had – enough. They are hungry for real change and Ron Paul is still the only candidate offering anything but a continuation of the status-quo. A lone voice with backbone enough to speak the truth and damn the consequences, he has consistently stood his ground for the Constitution, maintained his stance on principle and refused to sell the people out for power or personal gain. Not only did he predict the economic quicksand threatening to suck us under (when no else had a clue) but he offers real solutions for recovery and a transition to prosperity. Thirty years of consistency is an indisputable testimony that puts to shame the wishy-washy, flip-flopping records of all the other candidates propelled into the ring by previously influential, but now desperate "king-makers". Meanwhile, Mr. Obama has proven himself a craven, treasonous liar. The American people will inevitably back Ron Paul in a resounding landslide, and it will happen sooner, rather than later.
The mad scramble to refute this predictable fact continues unabated through the previously tried and true tools of marginalization, manipulation, and obfuscation of facts. However, there are notable differences. Unlike 2008, the media can no longer ignore Ron Paul – they are too desperate for ratings. Neither can they actually ridicule him outright – the resulting blowback is legendary. So, quite refreshingly, we are treated to many instances of the actual reporting of truth by those in the media who have almost (but not quite) decided to forgo outright weaseling this election cycle. Respectful interviews posing relevant questions, in which Dr. Paul is not interrupted or talked over, and honest articles which report his rising popularity in the polls and explain his stances are pleasantly easy to find. It is highly unfortunate that so many of those hosts and writers then destroy their own credibility by including trite clichés about electability, snide asides about zealous supporters, and derogatory comments towards his sensible solutions. Refreshingly, a few in the media have courageously returned to an honorable reporting of truth and disseminating of unbiased information. I predict this trend will continue, quickly catching on and spreading like wildfire. I imagine most in the media have not enjoyed playing games of enable-the-weasel over the past decades.
In recent years it's probably been very distasteful. So much so that those able to, have retired or left the media field altogether. Those unable probably grit their teeth and nurse bad stomachs and battered consciences on a regular basis. I would argue that many in the mainstream media are just like the American people at large – they've had enough. They can't take any more. They are full to the rafters with deceitful trickery and fed-up with playing enable-the-weasel. Although it's certainly satisfying to point our fingers at someone else (the media) and say it's all their fault for misleading us, it isn't fair to do so. We – all of us – have enabled the weasels to infest our government, foul our land and wrest away from us our Republic. I truly believe that people are generally good. Oft times people find themselves pressured or cornered into supporting things they don't agree with, doing jobs they find demeaning, saying things they know are misleading, or carrying out actions they find distasteful. All of these actions are essential for enabling weasels and we have all contributed to or played the game to some extent by not speaking out and not standing up when we should have.
However, the time for games is over. We are down to the wire and, like it or not, we are going to go down. The weasels know it, but will never, ever admit it. In fact some may be counting on it and hoping to pick up the pieces at fire-sale prices. The question is – how will we go down? Will we go down with grace and direction or will it be a breath-snatching, spit-flying, eye-rolling, body slam to rival anything ever seen on the mats of professional wrestling? It's up to us – we the people – because the weasels will never choose the graceful exit. It's not profitable.
I propose we go down with grace, with the courage and steadfastness for which Americans are known. Stand up, step forward, admit our mistakes, and suffer the consequences. Stop enabling the weasels. Stop accepting the wrong solutions from the very same criminals who steered us into this mess. Stop asking those same criminals for advice, stop taking their suggestions and above all remove them from whatever office or position of power they hold. And for God's sake – LISTEN – to the one man who has – for decades – been telling us, loud and clear, what would happen if we didn't wake up. He has been proven correct time and time again. This is our last chance to pay attention. It behooves us to not only listen closely to Ron Paul this time, but if we care at all about restoring peace, prosperity, and justice to our Republic...we damn well better elect him as our President too.
Friday
WHAT I THINK.........DAVID KAPELIAN
Suppose you were so broke – I mean so hopelessly in debt – that in just a few days your money would run out and you'd find it difficult just to stay in your home and feed your family.
But then, miraculously, you discovered a large stash of money you had completely lost sight of, but which would easily take care of all your family's expenses for the rest of the year, giving you plenty of precious time to figure out how best to deal with your long-term financial situation?
Wouldn't that be cool?
Of course. And that's exactly the kind of overlooked money stash the United States government has at its disposal – right now. Stay with me.
Washington today is dominated by the daily melodrama, propaganda and brinksmanship of the debt-ceiling debate. The Republican House is operating in good faith, but is opposed by the modern federal government's other major branches – the Senate, the White House and the Propaganda Ministry (aka "mainstream media").
The city is approaching panic level. Minnesota congresswoman and GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann correctly notes that Obama, should he invoke a rogue interpretation of the 14th Amendment and bypass Congress to raise the debt ceiling on his own authority, "would effectively be a dictator." Likewise, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the Democratic National Committee, absurdly accuses House Republicans of the same thing, imposing "dictatorship" on the country while trying to "spark panic and chaos."
So here's the question: With this game of cosmic chicken currently being played with its myriad plans – "Cut, Cap and Balance," the "Gang of 6 plan," Harry Reid's plan, Boehner's latest plan and so on – what about the remarkably simple and painless plan offered by GOP presidential candidate and Texas congressman Ron Paul?
Oh. You never heard about that one?
Last chance to stop the debt limit hike with big push from “No More Red Ink” campaign.
Neither have most people – in fact, it seems to be entirely absent from the debate in Congress.
When I called Paul's D.C. office this morning to ask why his plan hadn't gotten more traction, communications director Rachel Mills told me, "It's too bad it wasn't taken more seriously than, say, dependent seniors not getting Social Security checks. We heard plenty about that."
Here's the plan in a nutshell: Out of the current $14.3 trillion federal debt we keep hearing is rapidly approaching the congressionally approved borrowing limit, over $1.6 trillion of that sum is money you and I "owe" to the Federal Reserve, in the form of bonds the Fed bought from the U.S. Treasury over the last couple of years in implementing its controversial "quantitative easing" policy.
Paul, chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and arguably more knowledgeable about monetary policy than any other member of Congress, says just don't pay it back, because it's not a real debt.
Here's how Time magazine senior writer Stephen Gandel explains the Paul plan you've never heard of:
Paul's plan starts with the Federal Reserve. In the last year or two the Fed has been buying up U.S. Treasury bonds in an effort to lower interest rates and boost the economy. The most recent round of that buying has been dubbed QE2, and has come under a good deal of criticism, though most economists agree that it was a generally helpful policy. The result is that the Fed now holds nearly $1.7 trillion in U.S. debt. But that is really phony debt. The Treasury pays the interest on the debt on behalf of the U.S. government to the Fed, which in turn returns 90 percent of the payments it gets back to the Treasury. Nonetheless, that $1.7 trillion in U.S. bonds that the Fed owns, despite the shell game of payments, is still counted in the debt ceiling number, which caps that amount of total federal debt at $14.3 trillion.
Paul's plan: Get the Fed and the Treasury to rip up that debt. It's fake debt anyway. And the Fed is legally allowed to return the debt to the Treasury to be destroyed. A trillion and a half dollars is currently about what spending is expected to exceed tax revenue in 2011.
So, dissolving the phony debt the government (remember, that means you and me) "owes" the Federal Reserve would cover all our government's expenses, when added to expected tax revenues, for the rest of the year.
Now, Ron Paul is a big opponent of the Federal Reserve; in fact he favors its abolition. So does his debt plan require the end of the Fed, and would it therefore be favored only by Fed critics?
Not at all. Even left-of-center economist Dean Baker, co-director of the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research, says it's a good idea. Here's how Baker explains it:
The basic story is that the Fed has bought roughly $1.6 trillion in government bonds through its various quantitative easing programs over the last two and a half years. This money is part of the $14.3 trillion debt that is subject to the debt ceiling. … Each year, the Fed refunds the interest earned on its assets in excess of the money needed to cover its operating expenses. Last year the Fed refunded almost $80 billion to the Treasury. In this sense, the bonds held by the Fed are literally money that the government owes to itself.
Unlike the debt held by Social Security, the debt held by the Fed is not tied to any specific obligations. The bonds held by the Fed are assets of the Fed. It has no obligations that it must use these assets to meet. There is no one who loses their retirement income if the Fed doesn't have its bonds. In fact, there is no direct loss of income to anyone associated with the Fed's destruction of its bonds. This means that if Congress told the Fed to burn the bonds, it would in effect just be destroying a liability that the government had to itself, but it would still reduce the debt subject to the debt ceiling by $1.6 trillion. This would buy the country considerable breathing room before the debt ceiling had to be raised again.
Judge Andrew Napolitano, on his excellent Fox Business show "Freedom Watch," plugged the Paul plan twice this week. "With respect to the Fed," intoned the judge, "Congressman Ron Paul has recently pointed out nearly $2 trillion of the $14.3 trillion in national debt is owed to the government's own bank – that would be the Federal Reserve. That should be defaulted first; it's money the government owes itself."
And as Paul himself commented recently: "We owe, like, $1.6 trillion because the Federal Reserve bought that debt, so we have to work hard to pay the interest to the Federal Reserve," Paul said. "We don't, I mean, they're nobody; why do we have to pay them off?"
In fact, last month, Paul told CNN that the world's investors would likely regain confidence in the U.S. were it to wipe out the debt owed to the Fed: "They'll say, 'Hey, they've just reduced the deficit by over a trillion dollars, now they can handle it. They can go back to meeting their other obligations,'" Paul said. "It might give some reassurance to the market."
OK, if this is such a great idea, doesn't require new taxes, doesn't require controversial spending cuts and buys us valuable breathing room, why is almost no one even talking about it?
Good question. Critics have grasped at anything and everything that could conceivably go wrong to discredit Paul's plan: "Ron Paul's plan is just an accounting gimmick." "Paul's plan to tear up T-notes would lead to inflation." "I would think that could indeed cause liquidity problems for banks for low excess reserves." And get this one: "There is no practical difference between raising the debt ceiling with this debt ostensibly outstanding and lowering the debt outstanding by canceling it in order to create space under the existing debt ceiling, except that the Fed loses some flexibility in managing the money supply."
Like what?! You've got to be kidding.
You're telling me that my children and your children are going to have to slave for decades to earn $1.6 trillion to "pay back" a private banking cartel whose stockholders are the nation's best-kept secret, and all because you're worried about possibly causing "liquidity problems for banks for low excess reserves" or the Fed "los[ing] some flexibility in managing the money supply"?
Do you have any clue how much money a trillion dollars is? Let me help you out: If you had gone into business on the day Jesus Christ was born, and your business lost a million dollars every day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, it would take you until October of 2737 to lose $1 trillion.
Here's another way to think of it: Spending money at the rate of one dollar every single second, or $86,400 every day, it would take you nearly 32,000 years to spend $1 trillion.
But it takes the Fed only the time required for the requisite keystrokes to create this kind of money out of nothing. Seriously, even the proverbial printing press is no longer required to create what we call "printing press (fiat) money." It's just a computer entry. But it takes your children and grandchildren umpteen generations of blood, sweat and tears to earn this kind of money.
It's a phony debt. It should not be "repaid" – not now, not ever. So why is there no discernible debate in Congress over Rep. Ron Paul's plan?
The Federal Reserve has devalued our currency – once "as good as gold" – 95 percent since its founding a century ago. It has also caused many major economic downturns during that same period, including, as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke himself has admitted, the Great Depression. Here's a chance to finally get a little benefit from this troublesome institution.
Republicans in the House: Is anybody home?
But then, miraculously, you discovered a large stash of money you had completely lost sight of, but which would easily take care of all your family's expenses for the rest of the year, giving you plenty of precious time to figure out how best to deal with your long-term financial situation?
Wouldn't that be cool?
Of course. And that's exactly the kind of overlooked money stash the United States government has at its disposal – right now. Stay with me.
Washington today is dominated by the daily melodrama, propaganda and brinksmanship of the debt-ceiling debate. The Republican House is operating in good faith, but is opposed by the modern federal government's other major branches – the Senate, the White House and the Propaganda Ministry (aka "mainstream media").
The city is approaching panic level. Minnesota congresswoman and GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann correctly notes that Obama, should he invoke a rogue interpretation of the 14th Amendment and bypass Congress to raise the debt ceiling on his own authority, "would effectively be a dictator." Likewise, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the Democratic National Committee, absurdly accuses House Republicans of the same thing, imposing "dictatorship" on the country while trying to "spark panic and chaos."
So here's the question: With this game of cosmic chicken currently being played with its myriad plans – "Cut, Cap and Balance," the "Gang of 6 plan," Harry Reid's plan, Boehner's latest plan and so on – what about the remarkably simple and painless plan offered by GOP presidential candidate and Texas congressman Ron Paul?
Oh. You never heard about that one?
Last chance to stop the debt limit hike with big push from “No More Red Ink” campaign.
Neither have most people – in fact, it seems to be entirely absent from the debate in Congress.
When I called Paul's D.C. office this morning to ask why his plan hadn't gotten more traction, communications director Rachel Mills told me, "It's too bad it wasn't taken more seriously than, say, dependent seniors not getting Social Security checks. We heard plenty about that."
Here's the plan in a nutshell: Out of the current $14.3 trillion federal debt we keep hearing is rapidly approaching the congressionally approved borrowing limit, over $1.6 trillion of that sum is money you and I "owe" to the Federal Reserve, in the form of bonds the Fed bought from the U.S. Treasury over the last couple of years in implementing its controversial "quantitative easing" policy.
Paul, chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and arguably more knowledgeable about monetary policy than any other member of Congress, says just don't pay it back, because it's not a real debt.
Here's how Time magazine senior writer Stephen Gandel explains the Paul plan you've never heard of:
Paul's plan starts with the Federal Reserve. In the last year or two the Fed has been buying up U.S. Treasury bonds in an effort to lower interest rates and boost the economy. The most recent round of that buying has been dubbed QE2, and has come under a good deal of criticism, though most economists agree that it was a generally helpful policy. The result is that the Fed now holds nearly $1.7 trillion in U.S. debt. But that is really phony debt. The Treasury pays the interest on the debt on behalf of the U.S. government to the Fed, which in turn returns 90 percent of the payments it gets back to the Treasury. Nonetheless, that $1.7 trillion in U.S. bonds that the Fed owns, despite the shell game of payments, is still counted in the debt ceiling number, which caps that amount of total federal debt at $14.3 trillion.
Paul's plan: Get the Fed and the Treasury to rip up that debt. It's fake debt anyway. And the Fed is legally allowed to return the debt to the Treasury to be destroyed. A trillion and a half dollars is currently about what spending is expected to exceed tax revenue in 2011.
So, dissolving the phony debt the government (remember, that means you and me) "owes" the Federal Reserve would cover all our government's expenses, when added to expected tax revenues, for the rest of the year.
Now, Ron Paul is a big opponent of the Federal Reserve; in fact he favors its abolition. So does his debt plan require the end of the Fed, and would it therefore be favored only by Fed critics?
Not at all. Even left-of-center economist Dean Baker, co-director of the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research, says it's a good idea. Here's how Baker explains it:
The basic story is that the Fed has bought roughly $1.6 trillion in government bonds through its various quantitative easing programs over the last two and a half years. This money is part of the $14.3 trillion debt that is subject to the debt ceiling. … Each year, the Fed refunds the interest earned on its assets in excess of the money needed to cover its operating expenses. Last year the Fed refunded almost $80 billion to the Treasury. In this sense, the bonds held by the Fed are literally money that the government owes to itself.
Unlike the debt held by Social Security, the debt held by the Fed is not tied to any specific obligations. The bonds held by the Fed are assets of the Fed. It has no obligations that it must use these assets to meet. There is no one who loses their retirement income if the Fed doesn't have its bonds. In fact, there is no direct loss of income to anyone associated with the Fed's destruction of its bonds. This means that if Congress told the Fed to burn the bonds, it would in effect just be destroying a liability that the government had to itself, but it would still reduce the debt subject to the debt ceiling by $1.6 trillion. This would buy the country considerable breathing room before the debt ceiling had to be raised again.
Judge Andrew Napolitano, on his excellent Fox Business show "Freedom Watch," plugged the Paul plan twice this week. "With respect to the Fed," intoned the judge, "Congressman Ron Paul has recently pointed out nearly $2 trillion of the $14.3 trillion in national debt is owed to the government's own bank – that would be the Federal Reserve. That should be defaulted first; it's money the government owes itself."
And as Paul himself commented recently: "We owe, like, $1.6 trillion because the Federal Reserve bought that debt, so we have to work hard to pay the interest to the Federal Reserve," Paul said. "We don't, I mean, they're nobody; why do we have to pay them off?"
In fact, last month, Paul told CNN that the world's investors would likely regain confidence in the U.S. were it to wipe out the debt owed to the Fed: "They'll say, 'Hey, they've just reduced the deficit by over a trillion dollars, now they can handle it. They can go back to meeting their other obligations,'" Paul said. "It might give some reassurance to the market."
OK, if this is such a great idea, doesn't require new taxes, doesn't require controversial spending cuts and buys us valuable breathing room, why is almost no one even talking about it?
Good question. Critics have grasped at anything and everything that could conceivably go wrong to discredit Paul's plan: "Ron Paul's plan is just an accounting gimmick." "Paul's plan to tear up T-notes would lead to inflation." "I would think that could indeed cause liquidity problems for banks for low excess reserves." And get this one: "There is no practical difference between raising the debt ceiling with this debt ostensibly outstanding and lowering the debt outstanding by canceling it in order to create space under the existing debt ceiling, except that the Fed loses some flexibility in managing the money supply."
Like what?! You've got to be kidding.
You're telling me that my children and your children are going to have to slave for decades to earn $1.6 trillion to "pay back" a private banking cartel whose stockholders are the nation's best-kept secret, and all because you're worried about possibly causing "liquidity problems for banks for low excess reserves" or the Fed "los[ing] some flexibility in managing the money supply"?
Do you have any clue how much money a trillion dollars is? Let me help you out: If you had gone into business on the day Jesus Christ was born, and your business lost a million dollars every day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, it would take you until October of 2737 to lose $1 trillion.
Here's another way to think of it: Spending money at the rate of one dollar every single second, or $86,400 every day, it would take you nearly 32,000 years to spend $1 trillion.
But it takes the Fed only the time required for the requisite keystrokes to create this kind of money out of nothing. Seriously, even the proverbial printing press is no longer required to create what we call "printing press (fiat) money." It's just a computer entry. But it takes your children and grandchildren umpteen generations of blood, sweat and tears to earn this kind of money.
It's a phony debt. It should not be "repaid" – not now, not ever. So why is there no discernible debate in Congress over Rep. Ron Paul's plan?
The Federal Reserve has devalued our currency – once "as good as gold" – 95 percent since its founding a century ago. It has also caused many major economic downturns during that same period, including, as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke himself has admitted, the Great Depression. Here's a chance to finally get a little benefit from this troublesome institution.
Republicans in the House: Is anybody home?
Tuesday
WHAT I THINK.......CHARLES BURRIS
As there are ages of cultural renaissance and enlightenment, so are there, on the critical evidence of history, ages of cultural sterility and degeneration.
Today’s mass youth Rock/Rap culture, with its consecration of the trivial, the sexually perverse, and the infantile, is characterized by the debasement and corruption of language.
In his book, The Second Sin, Thomas Szasz observes:
To concepts like suicide, homicide, and genocide, we should add 'semanticide' – the murder of language. The deliberate (or quasi-deliberate) misuse of language through hidden metaphor and professional mystification breaks the basic contract between people, namely the tacit agreement on the proper use of words. Thus it is that the 'great' philosophers and politicians whose aim was to control man, from Rousseau to Stalin and Hitler, have preached and practiced semanticide; whereas those who have tried to set man free to be his own master, from Emerson to Kraus and Orwell, have preached and practiced respect for language.
Social Media and the Internet, hailed by some as visionary tools of liberation and empowerment, are the new digital Platonic caves of false reality and noble lies. They are the vehicles where vulgar manipulation of a generation formed linguistically around the primitivism of tribal Rock music by atavistic poseurs and the monotonous dirge of Rap by nihilistic gangsters, will not be a difficult generation to enslave politically, socially and culturally.
Imagine willfully ignorant cybervultures (digital progeny of O’Reilly, Olbermann, Hannity, Maddow, Coulter, Uygur, or Savage) leading thuggish illiterate mobs via Facebook and Twitter.
For four decades my mentor in political and culture matters has been the magnificent Albert Jay Nock, while Nock himself turned to the high Tory essayist Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy as his seminal guide.
But Nock and Arnold did not always see eye-to-eye.
Arnold, as a second generation educational bureaucrat, believed that in order to move his sterile Victorian culture towards "sweetness and light," the defining civilizational appreciation of the best cultural achievements that the West had produced, a vast network of state-sponsored schools must be created to educate the "barbarians," "philistines," and "populace," (his famous labels for the aristocracy, the middle class, and the toiling masses of his day).
Nock was adamantly opposed to this compulsory imposition of coercive egalitarianism and regimentation. He believed (gleefully standing Karl Marx upon his head) the much-heralded ‘universal literacy’ of the statists would bring further immiseration of Arnold’s "populace," while lowering the cultural common denominator of the hapless bourgeoisie and the predatory "barbarians."
As a state-controlled enterprise maintained by taxation, virtually a part of the civil service (like organized Christianity in England and in certain European countries) the system had become an association de propaganda fide for the extreme of a hidebound nationalism and of a superstitious servile reverence for a sacrosanct State. In another view one saw it functioning as a sort of sanhedrim, a leveling agency, prescribing uniform modes of thought, belief, conduct, social deportment, diet, recreation, hygiene; and as an inquisitional body for the enforcement of these prescriptions, for nosing out heresies and irregularities and suppressing them. In still another view one saw it functioning as a trade-union body, intent on maintaining and augmenting a set of vested interests; and one noticed that in this capacity it occasionally took shape as an extremely well-disciplined and powerful pressure group. (The Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, pages 263-264)
In this day of the triumph of the Idiocracy, Nock has the last haughty and disdainful laugh at the naiveté of Arnold and the progressive educational reformers who followed in his wake.
In the Arts, the modernist and postmodernist projects are exhausted. No more tiresome Épater la bourgeoisie (Shock the middle classes). The avant-garde novelty of Rimbaud, Klimt, Schoenberg, Joyce, Dada, Ligeti, Pollock, Sartre, and Mapplethorpe has degenerated into boorish louts such as Eminem, Lady Gaga, and Kanye West.
Yet in a measured bow towards the underclass lumpenproletariat, mainstream media moguls market this filth as the authentic, spontaneous outpouring from "the streets." But then, so is dog excrement.
Good music should be an elevating celebration of the human spirit. It is an affirmation of life, of the richness and texture of being.
Much contemporary literature and music is an unintelligible exercise in the pathetic and the phallic performed by "trousered apes" (to use Duncan William’s excellent descriptive title from his now woefully archaic exposition on related cultural and literary subject matters.)
Weaken, corrupt, dissolve the cohesive authority of language in a society and the rest follows rather easily – a life nasty, brutish, meaningless; an existence void of beauty or purpose.
Perhaps this old curmudgeon could be tragically wrong in my baneful prognostications. I hope I am so.
Our future may indeed be vastly freer and more just, as brilliantly sketched by libertarian visionary Stefan Molyneux, in his powerful, inspirational remarks delivered recently before the Free State Project’s PorcFest 2011.
Let us hope that the optimistic brave new world he describes will also be characterized by more civility and simple decency and respect towards one another.
Pioneer communications analyst Marshall McLuhan famously observed, "The medium is the message." McLuhan's most celebrated work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, was a revolutionary study in media theory. He said that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the primary focus of analysis.
McLuhan's brilliant insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself.
And in today's world of Social Media and the Internet, erudite, principled, strait-laced, grandfatherly, wonderfully middle class Ron Paul is that medium towards the brighter future outlined by Molyneux.
Such are the humble confessions of a cultural reactionary.
Today’s mass youth Rock/Rap culture, with its consecration of the trivial, the sexually perverse, and the infantile, is characterized by the debasement and corruption of language.
In his book, The Second Sin, Thomas Szasz observes:
To concepts like suicide, homicide, and genocide, we should add 'semanticide' – the murder of language. The deliberate (or quasi-deliberate) misuse of language through hidden metaphor and professional mystification breaks the basic contract between people, namely the tacit agreement on the proper use of words. Thus it is that the 'great' philosophers and politicians whose aim was to control man, from Rousseau to Stalin and Hitler, have preached and practiced semanticide; whereas those who have tried to set man free to be his own master, from Emerson to Kraus and Orwell, have preached and practiced respect for language.
Social Media and the Internet, hailed by some as visionary tools of liberation and empowerment, are the new digital Platonic caves of false reality and noble lies. They are the vehicles where vulgar manipulation of a generation formed linguistically around the primitivism of tribal Rock music by atavistic poseurs and the monotonous dirge of Rap by nihilistic gangsters, will not be a difficult generation to enslave politically, socially and culturally.
Imagine willfully ignorant cybervultures (digital progeny of O’Reilly, Olbermann, Hannity, Maddow, Coulter, Uygur, or Savage) leading thuggish illiterate mobs via Facebook and Twitter.
For four decades my mentor in political and culture matters has been the magnificent Albert Jay Nock, while Nock himself turned to the high Tory essayist Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy as his seminal guide.
But Nock and Arnold did not always see eye-to-eye.
Arnold, as a second generation educational bureaucrat, believed that in order to move his sterile Victorian culture towards "sweetness and light," the defining civilizational appreciation of the best cultural achievements that the West had produced, a vast network of state-sponsored schools must be created to educate the "barbarians," "philistines," and "populace," (his famous labels for the aristocracy, the middle class, and the toiling masses of his day).
Nock was adamantly opposed to this compulsory imposition of coercive egalitarianism and regimentation. He believed (gleefully standing Karl Marx upon his head) the much-heralded ‘universal literacy’ of the statists would bring further immiseration of Arnold’s "populace," while lowering the cultural common denominator of the hapless bourgeoisie and the predatory "barbarians."
As a state-controlled enterprise maintained by taxation, virtually a part of the civil service (like organized Christianity in England and in certain European countries) the system had become an association de propaganda fide for the extreme of a hidebound nationalism and of a superstitious servile reverence for a sacrosanct State. In another view one saw it functioning as a sort of sanhedrim, a leveling agency, prescribing uniform modes of thought, belief, conduct, social deportment, diet, recreation, hygiene; and as an inquisitional body for the enforcement of these prescriptions, for nosing out heresies and irregularities and suppressing them. In still another view one saw it functioning as a trade-union body, intent on maintaining and augmenting a set of vested interests; and one noticed that in this capacity it occasionally took shape as an extremely well-disciplined and powerful pressure group. (The Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, pages 263-264)
In this day of the triumph of the Idiocracy, Nock has the last haughty and disdainful laugh at the naiveté of Arnold and the progressive educational reformers who followed in his wake.
In the Arts, the modernist and postmodernist projects are exhausted. No more tiresome Épater la bourgeoisie (Shock the middle classes). The avant-garde novelty of Rimbaud, Klimt, Schoenberg, Joyce, Dada, Ligeti, Pollock, Sartre, and Mapplethorpe has degenerated into boorish louts such as Eminem, Lady Gaga, and Kanye West.
Yet in a measured bow towards the underclass lumpenproletariat, mainstream media moguls market this filth as the authentic, spontaneous outpouring from "the streets." But then, so is dog excrement.
Good music should be an elevating celebration of the human spirit. It is an affirmation of life, of the richness and texture of being.
Much contemporary literature and music is an unintelligible exercise in the pathetic and the phallic performed by "trousered apes" (to use Duncan William’s excellent descriptive title from his now woefully archaic exposition on related cultural and literary subject matters.)
Weaken, corrupt, dissolve the cohesive authority of language in a society and the rest follows rather easily – a life nasty, brutish, meaningless; an existence void of beauty or purpose.
Perhaps this old curmudgeon could be tragically wrong in my baneful prognostications. I hope I am so.
Our future may indeed be vastly freer and more just, as brilliantly sketched by libertarian visionary Stefan Molyneux, in his powerful, inspirational remarks delivered recently before the Free State Project’s PorcFest 2011.
Let us hope that the optimistic brave new world he describes will also be characterized by more civility and simple decency and respect towards one another.
Pioneer communications analyst Marshall McLuhan famously observed, "The medium is the message." McLuhan's most celebrated work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, was a revolutionary study in media theory. He said that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the primary focus of analysis.
McLuhan's brilliant insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself.
And in today's world of Social Media and the Internet, erudite, principled, strait-laced, grandfatherly, wonderfully middle class Ron Paul is that medium towards the brighter future outlined by Molyneux.
Such are the humble confessions of a cultural reactionary.
THE PESKY NEIGHBOR AND THE DEBT CEILING
Imagine you had a pesky neighbor who somehow took out a mortgage on his house in your name and by some legal trickery you were obligated to pay for it. Imagine watching this neighbor throw drunken parties, buy expensive cars, add more rooms to the house, and hire dozens of people to wait on him hand and foot. Imagine that he also managed to take out several credit cards in your name. One by one, he would max them out and then use your good name and credit to obtain another credit card, then another and then another. Each time, this neighbor would claim that he needed the new credit card to pay interest on the other maxed out credit cards. If he defaulted on those cards, your credit score would be hurt and when you wanted to buy something for yourself, it would be more difficult to get a loan and the interest you paid would be higher. Imagine that you mulled this over, and time after time, said nothing as he filled out more credit applications so he would not have to default on the other debt taken out in your name. Meanwhile, another shiny new Mercedes appears in his driveway. At what point do you think you might get tired of this game? And, even though you are left with no really good options, do you think you might eventually tell him to go ahead and default, just stop spending your money!
This analogy demonstrates the position we are in with our government and the debt ceiling. The government has run up a huge debt in the name of the American people, who are sick and tired of being on the hook for it. There are no really good options left. Defaulting on a portion of the debt may not be without costs, but it is better than handing the government yet another credit card.
The government is using the usual scare tactics to strong-arm the people into going along with more spending. Remember the rhetoric surrounding the big bailout of October 2008? We were told, not that this would be calamitous for the banks, but for the people, who would continue to experience massive job losses and foreclosures. We were told that the economy would sink into a deep recession if this money was not handed out to too-big-to-fail corporate cronies. So, after much hand-wringing, leaders from both parties, against unprecedented public outcry, agreed to shower money on the banks and increase the debt. The banks learned nothing, except that Washington will come to their rescue, no matter what. The people, however, continued to lose their jobs and houses anyway, and here we are, still in a deep recession.
When you read the above example, your first reaction might have been to dismiss the neighbor's debt as illegitimate and in no way your responsibility or your problem. You would be right. No fair-minded legal system would hold you responsible for such a debt, and would instead cart your thieving neighbor off to jail. Yet Congress can impose liabilities on you, your children, and grandchildren without your consent, and even without your knowledge. This is another example of government holding itself above the law. Much like the TSA claims the right to molest us, yet arrested a woman who turned the tables last week, stealing somehow becomes legitimate when the government does it.
We supposedly live in a nation of laws. For once, government needs to heed the law regarding the debt ceiling.
This analogy demonstrates the position we are in with our government and the debt ceiling. The government has run up a huge debt in the name of the American people, who are sick and tired of being on the hook for it. There are no really good options left. Defaulting on a portion of the debt may not be without costs, but it is better than handing the government yet another credit card.
The government is using the usual scare tactics to strong-arm the people into going along with more spending. Remember the rhetoric surrounding the big bailout of October 2008? We were told, not that this would be calamitous for the banks, but for the people, who would continue to experience massive job losses and foreclosures. We were told that the economy would sink into a deep recession if this money was not handed out to too-big-to-fail corporate cronies. So, after much hand-wringing, leaders from both parties, against unprecedented public outcry, agreed to shower money on the banks and increase the debt. The banks learned nothing, except that Washington will come to their rescue, no matter what. The people, however, continued to lose their jobs and houses anyway, and here we are, still in a deep recession.
When you read the above example, your first reaction might have been to dismiss the neighbor's debt as illegitimate and in no way your responsibility or your problem. You would be right. No fair-minded legal system would hold you responsible for such a debt, and would instead cart your thieving neighbor off to jail. Yet Congress can impose liabilities on you, your children, and grandchildren without your consent, and even without your knowledge. This is another example of government holding itself above the law. Much like the TSA claims the right to molest us, yet arrested a woman who turned the tables last week, stealing somehow becomes legitimate when the government does it.
We supposedly live in a nation of laws. For once, government needs to heed the law regarding the debt ceiling.
Saturday
WHAT I THINK......ANTHONY GREGORY
This is not an exhaustive list of everyone who is running for the GOP nomination, or everyone who might. It is a sample of potential candidates comprehensive enough to demonstrate the utter futility of relying on the so-called Republican frontrunners or their carbon copies to pose any sort of principled opposition to Obama. This article is also not thorough on all the problems with each of these men and women, but rather just gives a taste.
I do not include Ron Paul here, and it almost pains me to mention his name in the same article. I also am not including Gary Johnson, a candidate whose positions on some important issues are not as libertarian as Ron’s but who is nevertheless far better than anyone explored below. Johnson has been marginalized out of the debates, and I feel bad for that. They would do the same to Ron if they could get away with it.
I think there is at least a strong possibility one of the forthcoming names will be at the top of the ticket in 2012, and if that is the case, there will probably be no reason a fan of liberty should care much about who wins.
Romney the Health Care Commie
Mitt Romney frightened me in 2008 when he suggested we might want to "double Guantánamo." On all the issues where Republicans are bad, he is bad. On some issues where Republicans are not always horrible, like gun control, Romney’s record is spotty at best.
Most conspicuous is his failure to have a principled critique of Obama’s most significant policy achievement that the GOP opposed fairly consistently. Romney is on constitutionally legitimate ground when he mounts the federalism defense of Romneycare while still criticizing Obamacare. His point that in a free republic, the states should be laboratories of democracy and the federal government should butt out, is valid. American socialism is indeed more constitutionally sound and less damaging this way.
But socialized medicine is still bad policy, morally and economically, even if done on the state level. American conservatives deride "Taxachussetts" for its state-level government interventions all the time. What’s more, the constitutional argument carries no weight coming from a big-government Republican. Does Romney oppose Medicare, Social Security, national education standards, plenary federal regulation of industry, the Federal Reserve, the FDA, and the war on drugs? None of these programs are any more constitutionally sound than Obamacare.
This inconsistency will probably not hurt him in the long run, since most Republicans are equally hypocritical. Most American conservatives have become snookered by the mild socialism of both parties. The New Deal/Great Society/Compassionate Conservative agenda of entitlement guarantees, cascading deficit spending, and federal support for the old, sick, needy, and indeed most of the middle class is a fixture of every political program to be advanced in a Republican presidential bid in a general election since the 1960s. Goldwater was the last one who didn’t always sound like he was talking out of both sides of his mouth and much of his party was uncomfortable with him. Unfortunately, Romney’s weak critique of Democratic statism is par for the course.
This is fiscal conservatism today. This is the Republican Party: Medicare D, No Child Left Behind, new national bureaucracies, endless unfunded wars, deficit spending to finance the welfare-warfare state of FDR, LBJ and George W. Bush. Romney is not a RINO (Republican in Name Only). He is in fact a quintessential modern Republican, and that is the great tragedy. He thus has a decent shot at the White House, but no one who loves liberty should help him get there.
Rudy Giuliani’s Handcuffed Entrepreneurs and Nightstick to the Knee
Rudy might throw his hat in or not, but he is worth at least passing mention. Religious conservatives warmed up to this pro-choice social liberal for one major reason: On 9/11, he was able to profit politically more than any politician not in the Bush administration. As was revealed later, it was his decision as mayor of New York to put the emergency response center inside the World Trade Center, despite its known vulnerability, having been attacked in 1993, that exacerbated the situation when the Twin Towers fell. Other problems with the response have also been pinned on him. Such critiques might be hitting below the belt if not for his long record of running on the platform of having been mayor on 9/11.
Giuliani still gets credit for "cleaning up" the Big Apple, although some have noted the mysterious nature of the reduced vagrant and street criminal populations. He has been accused of simply sweeping them into New Jersey. Surely his draconian drug war and other "tough on crime" developments – cracking down on people with dime bags and jailing homeless people for the most minor transgressions – should give us pause about the prospect of Rudy with the nuclear button.
Giuliani also has a record of anti-capitalist witch-hunting that easily compares to the socialistic biases of Obama’s crew of pinkos. As the great, late Burt Blumert reminded us on why he hated the man with a passion, Rudy’s oppressive takedown of the heroic capitalist Michael Milken was such a stark act of persecution that it alone should dissuade anyone with any respect at all for the market economy or the rule of law from the notion of ever, under any circumstances, voting for this megalomaniacal monster.
Rick Perry, Totalitarian from Texas
On Groundhog Day, 2007, Rick Perry climbed out of a hole and cast a shadow upon the land. It was on that February 2 that Perry issued an executive decree forcing adolescent Texas girls to get the HPV vaccine, an inoculation that is seemingly effective against a fraction of the human papillomavirus, one of the causes of cervical cancer. There was an opt-out option, but it was still an edict so sickening and invasive we could only expect how social conservatives would react if President Obama attempted such a measure. The presumption of universal sexual conduct among teen girls, the pretentious intervention into every household, the health risks disregarded, the neglected fact that many if not most cases of the very disease being targeted wouldn’t be addressed – the full insidiousness of Perry’s measure escaped most commentators’ notice, including on the right that is today up in arms, correctly, about Obamacare and TSA.
It didn’t hurt Perry’s motivations, probably, that the only FDA-approved vaccine for HPV was produced by Merck, a company that had contributed to Perry’s campaign and had other lobbying connections to his administration associates. The cynical corporatism and predatory statism of this one executive order tell you all you need to know about current frontrunner Rick Perry.
It was no surprise recently that Perry betrayed and derailed the efforts within Texas to hold TSA accountable. For once, there was a proposal to protect the liberty of citizens, in this case against the federal government, and of course Perry sided with the Obama administration against his own subjects. Why challenge the national groping apparatus you are seeking to inherit?
Perry stabbed fiscal conservatives in the back when he supported a rise in the state franchise tax and a controversial property tax reform bill. Like the other Texas Republican governor George W. Bush, Perry would make a terrible president.
Michelle Bachmann: Theocon Israel-Firster
Presidential candidate and Tea Party heroine Michelle Bachmann sure knows how to rile up the red-state base. Talk up the threat of socialism. Praise the Constitution. Even criticize the Federal Reserve a little bit. And this is all well and good, although her consistency even on fiscal issues is quite questionable, given her support for Cap, Cut, and Balance and other such Republican frauds.
But Bachmann holds at least one position that is at complete odds with the more admirable principles on which the United States was founded. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington warned about the danger of permanent and entangling alliances. The United States, as John Quincy Adams put it, "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
In her recent video, Bachmann takes a very different position. She says that America’s "alliance with Israel is critical for both nations at all times."
This is a deeply unAmerican sentiment, and you don’t have to be the least bit anti-Israeli to recognize this. She is saying the alliance with Israel is permanent and unmoving, that what is in Israel’s interests is the same as what is in the United States’s interests. Even more troubling, she explicitly conflates the two countries in terms of their national identities:
"Israelis and Americans are two sides of the same coin. We share the same values and the same aspirations. We even share the same exceptional mission – to be a light to the nations. After all, the image of America as the Shining City on the Hill is taken from the Book of Isiah."
This is bizarre, at the very least. Could you imagine a prominent politician getting away with saying this about another country, even one as culturally similar as Great Britain? "Two sides of the same coin"? This video, an attack on Obama for being insufficiently pro-Israel, is essentially arguing that most Americans, unlike the president, recognize that the Israeli nation and the American nation are one and the same.
Indeed, the next line, about how Americans and Israelis supposedly have "the same values and the same aspirations," is also troubling for anyone who thinks the U.S. should look after its own interests. But aside from the objections on America-First grounds, consider the collectivism here, as well as the strange notion that Israelis in particular have the same values. We need not be the slightest bit disparaging of Israelis to see this is not the case – but it is especially ironic coming from someone who claims to defend limited government and free enterprise. After all, Israel is not a capitalist paradise. It is a welfare state. It is more domestically socialist, probably, than the Democrats in the United States. Its militarism and police state might inspire confidence in the Republicans who typically but inconsistently want to defend economic liberty but champion an interventionist military and law enforcement regime. But even by confused Republican standards, Israel is not some sort of paragon of Reagan conservatism, however defined.
And this doesn’t touch on the religious implications of her video. Of course, Christians have long been attacked for speaking their faith in the political and public spheres, and this is a disgrace. Religious conservatives have been demonized by the secular media. Yet when it comes to foreign policy and the actual governmental agenda of the U.S. executive branch, Jefferson was right that there should be a wall of separation between church and state. Madison, the author of the Constitution, was right when he said that religion and government "will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together." The whole notion of determining the proper stance of the United States in international affairs on some lines from the Old Testament should frighten even the most devoutly Christian or Jewish, for war and government are not the proper means of salvation. Those who oppose theocracy as well as those who want America to pursue a foreign policy free of permanent, entangling alliances – both groups of whom should include all sane Americans – can’t help but cringe at the sight of Bachmann’s video.
Will she at least stand up for all Christians? Maybe now, but it is at least potentially troubling that the church that she quit only this month held the position that the Pope was the anti-Christ.
Herman Cain, Overrated Modal Conservative
Jon Stewart, in mocking Herman Cain’s proposal that all federal legislation only be a few pages, drew fire from the politically correct right for having mimicked Cain’s voice as well, presumably because it was racist to do so. Stewart shot back with footage of his doing dozens of voices over the years, clearly with an equal-opportunity approach that spared no ethnic or regional group. Yet the same conservatives denouncing all leftist accusations against the Tea Party for being racist are now claiming that the only reason anyone would dislike Cain is because he’s black.
What is confusing to me, however, is why so many have become enamored of Cain. Perhaps it is just his modal conservatism – his willingness to spout old Republican talking points in favor of business but without much substance behind them, and then go off on some culture warring point about the sanctity of marriage or whatever.
Tom Woods has a great video explaining many of the particular problems with Cain. As Tom notes, Cain endorsed Romney in 2008, favored TARP against the "free market purists," defends the bulk of the Patriot Act, has a despicable record on the Federal Reserve, and has no real understanding of economics.
There is one reason, however, that Cain stands up for being particularly dangerous. He has no conception at all of religious liberty in a time when it is under attack. He believes Americans have a right to prohibit mosques from being built, out of the hysterical paranoia that Sharia law will take hold and wipe away all out freedoms and Christian identity as a nation. For similar reasons Cain says appointing Muslims to government would be a big problem for him, as you never know which of them is a terrorist. This ugly anti-Islamism should all by itself should be a deal-breaker for anyone every remotely interested in liberty. Cain is targeting the group most likely to be rounded up and interned should another terrorist incident occur, a group that is already the subject of warmongering hatred, and he is legitimizing this through his candidacy. The bigotry Cain espouses helps foment the aggressive wars that have done more to undermine American freedom in recent decades than anything else.
Rick Santorum’s Crusade Against Freedom
Rick Santorum says he’s in the presidential race to win. In typical campaign-season Republican fashion, he has condemned Obama for having "wrecked our economy, and centralized power in Washington, DC, and robbed people of their freedom."
Of course it is true that Obama has been a disaster for American liberty. It doesn’t take a genius to see this. But one might wonder, what is the alternative Santorum represents?
Santorum’s War Against Contractual Liberty: Central to a free society is the concept of freedom of association. People should be free to disassociate from others as well, for any reason. One application of this principle would be the right of employers (and employees) to end their employment relationship at will – only with the caveat that premature termination in violation of an employment contract be remedied through damages. Certainly, no boss should be forced to hire anyone against his will.
This principle has been eroded severely through Civil Rights and anti-discrimination laws. This is a tragic abandonment of the cornerstone of a free society. But Santorum has proposed, with the support of such Democratic stalwarts as John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Ted Kennedy, to gut this principle even further, by forcing employers to accommodate the religious practices of their workers. This is an egregious attack on economic liberty. It means that a boss would have to make "reasonable" provisions for his employees’ prayers and religious rituals, even if these are at odds with his own values. In a society of religious and contractual liberty, employers wouldn’t have to hire people of any religious persuasion that they didn’t want to, much less subsidize religious practices they did not support. Of course, customers could boycott companies if they found the discrimination or lack of accommodation unfair. But this should be up to free individuals working in the market, never the state.
Santorum’s Attack on the Constitution: Santorum has argued that the federal government should build a wall and use national guards to enforce border security – a usurpation of the proper authority of the states under the Tenth Amendment. He has been an enthusiastic defender of torture, despite the Eighth Amendment, due process rights, and every single standard of human decency. He also voted in support of making warrantless wiretapping easier, in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment; the flag-burning amendment – not actually in violation of the Constitution, but with the opinion, apparently, that the First Amendment needs changing; harsher penalties for drugs, when there is absolutely no authority in the Constitution for the feds to be involved in this at all; draconian penalties for gun violations so long as drugs are involved; federal abstinence education programs, when in fact education is the proper province of the states; a presidential line-item veto, when this is clearly an unconstitutional deprivation of Congress’s legislative authority; the Patriot Act and the evisceration of habeas corpus for detainees in the war on terror. And if you think he only supports cruel measures against those deemed by the government to be "terrorists," keep in mind that this is the man who callously said that victims who didn’t successfully flee New Orleans in the midst of Hurricane Katrina should have been burdened by "tougher penalties."
Santorum’s Battle Against Rationality in Foreign Affairs: Santorum has voted to expand NATO, an outdated Cold War relic; supported stronger sanctions against Syria, Cuba, Iran and even Japan in direct tension with the human right to free trade and the interests of the United States; and backed Clinton’s unconstitutional and unnecessary war with Kosovo, despite the better judgment of many other Republicans. But what else is to be expected from a man so deluded he thought as late as 2006 that Weapons of Mass Destruction were found in Iraq – even as the Bush administration insisted this was not so – and has seriously argued, even in a time when political correctness threatens freedom of inquiry and academic liberty at our universities, that criticism of Israel on college campuses should be federally punished?
Is He Good on Anything? Some will insist that at least Santorum is a fiscal conservative, but he voted for Bush’s deficit-enlarging budgets and does not support abolition of the huge unconstitutional, wasteful and counterproductive federal programs that are drowning this nation in debt – the empire, Social Security, Medicare, and all the rest. He might be marginally less spendthrift than Obama, but wait until you see him in power. He has no compunctions about using the force of the federal government and tax dollars to impose his vision on America – a vision in which employers have to accommodate workers’ religions against their will, a vision in which Washington teaches kids what kind of sexual values to embrace, a vision in which campus criticism of America’s closest Middle East ally is socially engineered out of existence, a vision of social conservatism not nurtured in a humane and virtuous manner by families, churches, and communities, but by the largest political body in the history of the world – the U.S. government. He has no respect for free speech, the Fourth Amendment, or Constitutional limits on the federal police power. Like so many other politicians, he thinks Americans have all too much liberty in many areas, and yet has the temerity to criticize his ideological mirror image, Barack Obama.
Obama has been a nightmare for liberty across the board. So was Bush. If Americans want to finally awake to a future of liberty, they will reject the authoritarian right-wing socialism of Rick Santorum.
Oh No. Another Reagan Republican: Jon Huntsman
Jon Huntsman announced his presidential bid in front of the Statue of Liberty, evoking images of Reagan’s announcement of his own run over three decades ago standing at the same spot. Huntsman, a former Reagan official, reminded his audience that Reagan had "assured us we could ‘make America great again,’ and under his leadership we did."
In 2007, Jon Huntsman openly favored an individual health care mandate – the most directly anti-liberty element to Obamacare. Also as governor of Utah, he signed a global warming initiative agreeing to cut greenhouse gases. Under his stewardship, state spending increased by about 10% a year.
Some will say this means Huntsman is clearly not a real Reagan conservative. Yet Reagan is the president who:
About doubled the size of the federal government
Increased Social Security taxes and the overall tax bite from the American economy
Promised to abolish the Selective Service, the Department of Education, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau, and did nothing of the sort
As governor, Reagan:
Signed the Mulford Act, banning the carrying of firearms in general terms, setting the stage for California’s modern anti-gun atmosphere
Increased taxes more than any previous governor, including his $1 billion hike in his first year – the largest tax increase in CA history
Immensely expanded the welfare bureaucracy and added over 30,000 employees to the state government payroll
Created 73 new state government councils and commissions, including the horrible California Energy Commission
Oversaw a 122% increase in the state budget
This is the reality of the Reagan legacy. Even as a governor, with no military enemy as an excuse, he acted even worse than the Democratic governors before and after him. And why not? Reagan was a unionist, a Hollywood New Deal Democrat who took on the role of touting free enterprise because he was hired by General Electric to do so. He was a performer who acted his way into the White House, and to this day the Republicans all jump over themselves to claim his mantle, all competing to be described as the most Reaganesque.
Huntsman is indeed a Reagan Republican: a defender of big government who stands in front of the Statue of Liberty without any credibility on what that statue represents.
Tim Pawlenty, Second-Rate Bore for More Government and War
Poor guy. Even given his close relationship to the 2008 John McCain presidential run, Pawlenty has been unable to turn that experience into the credentials needed to run another losing presidential campaign in 2012. He is not the most frightening of the bunch, however, although his dedication to smaller government is par for the course among Republicans. That is to say, he doesn’t have any.
Pawlenty as governor of Minnesota was an enthusiast for public works projects, rail lines, and Target Field, two-thirds of the funding for which was billed to the taxpayers. He is well known for his bill raising the ethanol requirement for gasoline up to 20%. In environmentalist California, the figure is closer to 6%.
Back in March, before Obama committed the United States to yet another anti-Muslim war of aggression, Pawlenty scathingly attacked the administration for being soft on Libya. Condemning the president for caring what other nations thought about American wars, Pawlenty intoned: "What's most important is our nation is secure and respected." Ah. "Respected." So that is the point of these foreign adventures – being treated like the international mob boss. While the other Republicans in the field are now toying with America-First rhetoric concerning this war, Pawlenty has not taken off his campaign website the numerous examples of his being a visionary ahead of the curve, goading the emperor to flex his muscles before Obama himself felt inclined finally to let the bombs drop.
Newt Gingrich the Career Political Outsider
If there is a great silver lining in this election it is that Gingrich is doing so poorly. What a joy to watch him get nowhere, to watch his ego take a beating every day.
Gingrich has boasted that he is not a "Washington figure" and claims that he "will clearly be the most change-oriented, the most fundamental reform candidate in the race." Yes, this from the guy who was recently taken to the woodshed for his comments that Paul Ryan’s ridiculously moderate budget cut proposal was an example of dangerous "right-wing social engineering."
This only demonstrates what is meant these days when someone is called a "Washington outsider." Obama was supposed to be such a candidate, despite his record-busting campaign donations from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street powerhouses, his unequivocal support for the agenda of AIPAC and other establishment lobbying groups. But even Obama was a better example of an outsider than lifetime government employee John McCain, who laughably ran as a maverick in 2008, defending virtually every element of the Bush regime – the wars, the bailouts, the compassionate conservative welfare statism.
There was a time long before his stint as Speaker of the House when Gingrich was a little bit interesting. In 1982, Newt Gingrich wrote to the Journal of the American Medical Association in defense of medical marijuana. He noted that "Federal law. . . continues to define marijuana as a drug ‘with no accepted medical use,’ and federal agencies continue to prohibit physician-patient access to marijuana. This outdated federal prohibition is corrupting the intent of the state laws and depriving thousands of glaucoma and cancer patients of the medical care promised them by their state legislatures."
Almost 30 years later, is he still asking for a liberalization of federal marijuana law? Quite the reverse. He strongly suggests we need to look at such countries as Singapore for our inspiration on drug policy and does not flinch when it is pointed out that that nation executes drug dealers and issues mandatory drug tests to the general population. These are totalitarian proposals, and Gingrich seems to endorse them emphatically.
Newt’s Contract with America – the Republicans’ literature offering hope and change to the American people – was filled with reforms supposedly aimed at limiting the power of Washington, but much of it had to do with expanding government to crack down on crime or uphold family values. One thing is for certain: the Republican Congress in the 1990s did not cut back government overall. To the contrary, in the 1990s the last federal budget passed by the Republicans was hundreds of billions higher than the last one passed by the Democratic Congress. In some areas, like farm subsidies, spending went up substantially.
The ringleader of the 1990s Republican non-revolution has no hopes, and for this at least we can be grateful.
Sarah Palin: Will the Bulldog with Lipstick Run?
Many have long argued that she would have no chance at the presidency. Only half the Republican voters like her, and none of the Democrats do. Obama is polled to easily defeat her in her own state of Alaska.
Perhaps I am playing into the media zeitgeist by not being a lot more substantive in this discussion. What about Palin’s political positions? Well, she has flip-flopped and equivocated on quite a few questions. But it would be fair to say that she is slightly more fiscally conservative than Obama, in the same ballpark in terms of foreign policy (although with the distinct possibility of surprising us in either direction), and otherwise comfortable with the status quo of bailouts, corporatism, entitlements, huge government, and central management of the economy, with some perfunctory areas where she mildly dissents from the Washington consensus. In other words, she is a typical Republican politician, who might sound a little better than the Democrats when she is out of power, but who always has the potential to prove a neocon in the White House.
Yet it is a mistake to assume the above is the most substantive thing to be said of her. Palin was primarily always a culture-war figure: a rallying point for the heartland to unify and cry out that it had enough of the coastal elitism of the central state and media giants. Yet what were they rebelling against in 2008? Was it the Bush legacy they had voted for? He was, after all, a counterfeit middle American, a Connecticut transplant in the heart of Texas who always advocated big government. The biggest issue to unify the proto-Tea Party uprising of 2008 was, of course, the gigantic Wall Street bailouts, which were advocated and supported by Palin, as well as McCain and Obama. Palin had the problem of running on a ticket calling for hope and change when the Democratic opposition had already trademarked those slogans and was running against the sorry record of her own party’s mismanagement of the economy and two wars. Now the setting is ripe for a run against Obama-style elitist liberalism. The problem is, Palin is a TV star and her own very red state backs the incumbent over her.
There’s lots of talk about whether she can beat Michelle Bachmann. Maybe not. Nevertheless, I still don’t think it’s impossible for her to be president one day, if not in 2013 then down the line. Palin is still very young. She could run every election cycle until 2028 – five elections, inclusive – before she’s any older than Hillary Clinton was in 2008. Think of that. Even if she’s decisively defeated this time, she has plenty of opportunities to make a comeback like Richard Nixon, or Peewee Herman, or Freddy Kreuger, depending on how you regard her.
I for one welcome Palin into the race, as I find her entertaining and somewhat refreshing. My appreciation is nuanced, as I do not think she is any sort of champion of freedom but rather an establishment politician, but it can be fun watching the liberal media stumble over themselves to attack her for cultural reasons, perennially and invincibly clueless that much of the country is on board with her social values. Part of me even wants her to win the White House, not because she will be any better than Obama, necessarily, but because it would serve to educate at least some people. Either the liberals will learn that she is not the devilish threat to their social democracy as they’ve been fearing, or some conservatives will learn that the problem wasn’t Obama but leviathan, or some feminists will learn that a woman in the White House doesn’t mean a more peaceful or less corrupt executive branch any more than a black president means a less predatory criminal justice system. The problem is political power itself, and no modification to the cultural lipstick worn by the empress will mean a damn thing. Perhaps Palin will help bring us closer to the day when Americans recognize that.
The Grand Old Party: A Circus of Fascists, Clowns, and Creeps
As I’ve noted repeatedly here and elsewhere, the Republican Party has always been a party of big government. The exceptions only prove the rule. If any of the above people get the presidential nomination we will again face a contest between two candidates with no reliable respect for the liberal tradition, free trade, peace, freedom of association, civil liberties or free-market capitalism. The bright side is we’ll only be closer to the day when Americans give up on electoral politics as a means to achieve freedom.
I do not include Ron Paul here, and it almost pains me to mention his name in the same article. I also am not including Gary Johnson, a candidate whose positions on some important issues are not as libertarian as Ron’s but who is nevertheless far better than anyone explored below. Johnson has been marginalized out of the debates, and I feel bad for that. They would do the same to Ron if they could get away with it.
I think there is at least a strong possibility one of the forthcoming names will be at the top of the ticket in 2012, and if that is the case, there will probably be no reason a fan of liberty should care much about who wins.
Romney the Health Care Commie
Mitt Romney frightened me in 2008 when he suggested we might want to "double Guantánamo." On all the issues where Republicans are bad, he is bad. On some issues where Republicans are not always horrible, like gun control, Romney’s record is spotty at best.
Most conspicuous is his failure to have a principled critique of Obama’s most significant policy achievement that the GOP opposed fairly consistently. Romney is on constitutionally legitimate ground when he mounts the federalism defense of Romneycare while still criticizing Obamacare. His point that in a free republic, the states should be laboratories of democracy and the federal government should butt out, is valid. American socialism is indeed more constitutionally sound and less damaging this way.
But socialized medicine is still bad policy, morally and economically, even if done on the state level. American conservatives deride "Taxachussetts" for its state-level government interventions all the time. What’s more, the constitutional argument carries no weight coming from a big-government Republican. Does Romney oppose Medicare, Social Security, national education standards, plenary federal regulation of industry, the Federal Reserve, the FDA, and the war on drugs? None of these programs are any more constitutionally sound than Obamacare.
This inconsistency will probably not hurt him in the long run, since most Republicans are equally hypocritical. Most American conservatives have become snookered by the mild socialism of both parties. The New Deal/Great Society/Compassionate Conservative agenda of entitlement guarantees, cascading deficit spending, and federal support for the old, sick, needy, and indeed most of the middle class is a fixture of every political program to be advanced in a Republican presidential bid in a general election since the 1960s. Goldwater was the last one who didn’t always sound like he was talking out of both sides of his mouth and much of his party was uncomfortable with him. Unfortunately, Romney’s weak critique of Democratic statism is par for the course.
This is fiscal conservatism today. This is the Republican Party: Medicare D, No Child Left Behind, new national bureaucracies, endless unfunded wars, deficit spending to finance the welfare-warfare state of FDR, LBJ and George W. Bush. Romney is not a RINO (Republican in Name Only). He is in fact a quintessential modern Republican, and that is the great tragedy. He thus has a decent shot at the White House, but no one who loves liberty should help him get there.
Rudy Giuliani’s Handcuffed Entrepreneurs and Nightstick to the Knee
Rudy might throw his hat in or not, but he is worth at least passing mention. Religious conservatives warmed up to this pro-choice social liberal for one major reason: On 9/11, he was able to profit politically more than any politician not in the Bush administration. As was revealed later, it was his decision as mayor of New York to put the emergency response center inside the World Trade Center, despite its known vulnerability, having been attacked in 1993, that exacerbated the situation when the Twin Towers fell. Other problems with the response have also been pinned on him. Such critiques might be hitting below the belt if not for his long record of running on the platform of having been mayor on 9/11.
Giuliani still gets credit for "cleaning up" the Big Apple, although some have noted the mysterious nature of the reduced vagrant and street criminal populations. He has been accused of simply sweeping them into New Jersey. Surely his draconian drug war and other "tough on crime" developments – cracking down on people with dime bags and jailing homeless people for the most minor transgressions – should give us pause about the prospect of Rudy with the nuclear button.
Giuliani also has a record of anti-capitalist witch-hunting that easily compares to the socialistic biases of Obama’s crew of pinkos. As the great, late Burt Blumert reminded us on why he hated the man with a passion, Rudy’s oppressive takedown of the heroic capitalist Michael Milken was such a stark act of persecution that it alone should dissuade anyone with any respect at all for the market economy or the rule of law from the notion of ever, under any circumstances, voting for this megalomaniacal monster.
Rick Perry, Totalitarian from Texas
On Groundhog Day, 2007, Rick Perry climbed out of a hole and cast a shadow upon the land. It was on that February 2 that Perry issued an executive decree forcing adolescent Texas girls to get the HPV vaccine, an inoculation that is seemingly effective against a fraction of the human papillomavirus, one of the causes of cervical cancer. There was an opt-out option, but it was still an edict so sickening and invasive we could only expect how social conservatives would react if President Obama attempted such a measure. The presumption of universal sexual conduct among teen girls, the pretentious intervention into every household, the health risks disregarded, the neglected fact that many if not most cases of the very disease being targeted wouldn’t be addressed – the full insidiousness of Perry’s measure escaped most commentators’ notice, including on the right that is today up in arms, correctly, about Obamacare and TSA.
It didn’t hurt Perry’s motivations, probably, that the only FDA-approved vaccine for HPV was produced by Merck, a company that had contributed to Perry’s campaign and had other lobbying connections to his administration associates. The cynical corporatism and predatory statism of this one executive order tell you all you need to know about current frontrunner Rick Perry.
It was no surprise recently that Perry betrayed and derailed the efforts within Texas to hold TSA accountable. For once, there was a proposal to protect the liberty of citizens, in this case against the federal government, and of course Perry sided with the Obama administration against his own subjects. Why challenge the national groping apparatus you are seeking to inherit?
Perry stabbed fiscal conservatives in the back when he supported a rise in the state franchise tax and a controversial property tax reform bill. Like the other Texas Republican governor George W. Bush, Perry would make a terrible president.
Michelle Bachmann: Theocon Israel-Firster
Presidential candidate and Tea Party heroine Michelle Bachmann sure knows how to rile up the red-state base. Talk up the threat of socialism. Praise the Constitution. Even criticize the Federal Reserve a little bit. And this is all well and good, although her consistency even on fiscal issues is quite questionable, given her support for Cap, Cut, and Balance and other such Republican frauds.
But Bachmann holds at least one position that is at complete odds with the more admirable principles on which the United States was founded. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington warned about the danger of permanent and entangling alliances. The United States, as John Quincy Adams put it, "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
In her recent video, Bachmann takes a very different position. She says that America’s "alliance with Israel is critical for both nations at all times."
This is a deeply unAmerican sentiment, and you don’t have to be the least bit anti-Israeli to recognize this. She is saying the alliance with Israel is permanent and unmoving, that what is in Israel’s interests is the same as what is in the United States’s interests. Even more troubling, she explicitly conflates the two countries in terms of their national identities:
"Israelis and Americans are two sides of the same coin. We share the same values and the same aspirations. We even share the same exceptional mission – to be a light to the nations. After all, the image of America as the Shining City on the Hill is taken from the Book of Isiah."
This is bizarre, at the very least. Could you imagine a prominent politician getting away with saying this about another country, even one as culturally similar as Great Britain? "Two sides of the same coin"? This video, an attack on Obama for being insufficiently pro-Israel, is essentially arguing that most Americans, unlike the president, recognize that the Israeli nation and the American nation are one and the same.
Indeed, the next line, about how Americans and Israelis supposedly have "the same values and the same aspirations," is also troubling for anyone who thinks the U.S. should look after its own interests. But aside from the objections on America-First grounds, consider the collectivism here, as well as the strange notion that Israelis in particular have the same values. We need not be the slightest bit disparaging of Israelis to see this is not the case – but it is especially ironic coming from someone who claims to defend limited government and free enterprise. After all, Israel is not a capitalist paradise. It is a welfare state. It is more domestically socialist, probably, than the Democrats in the United States. Its militarism and police state might inspire confidence in the Republicans who typically but inconsistently want to defend economic liberty but champion an interventionist military and law enforcement regime. But even by confused Republican standards, Israel is not some sort of paragon of Reagan conservatism, however defined.
And this doesn’t touch on the religious implications of her video. Of course, Christians have long been attacked for speaking their faith in the political and public spheres, and this is a disgrace. Religious conservatives have been demonized by the secular media. Yet when it comes to foreign policy and the actual governmental agenda of the U.S. executive branch, Jefferson was right that there should be a wall of separation between church and state. Madison, the author of the Constitution, was right when he said that religion and government "will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together." The whole notion of determining the proper stance of the United States in international affairs on some lines from the Old Testament should frighten even the most devoutly Christian or Jewish, for war and government are not the proper means of salvation. Those who oppose theocracy as well as those who want America to pursue a foreign policy free of permanent, entangling alliances – both groups of whom should include all sane Americans – can’t help but cringe at the sight of Bachmann’s video.
Will she at least stand up for all Christians? Maybe now, but it is at least potentially troubling that the church that she quit only this month held the position that the Pope was the anti-Christ.
Herman Cain, Overrated Modal Conservative
Jon Stewart, in mocking Herman Cain’s proposal that all federal legislation only be a few pages, drew fire from the politically correct right for having mimicked Cain’s voice as well, presumably because it was racist to do so. Stewart shot back with footage of his doing dozens of voices over the years, clearly with an equal-opportunity approach that spared no ethnic or regional group. Yet the same conservatives denouncing all leftist accusations against the Tea Party for being racist are now claiming that the only reason anyone would dislike Cain is because he’s black.
What is confusing to me, however, is why so many have become enamored of Cain. Perhaps it is just his modal conservatism – his willingness to spout old Republican talking points in favor of business but without much substance behind them, and then go off on some culture warring point about the sanctity of marriage or whatever.
Tom Woods has a great video explaining many of the particular problems with Cain. As Tom notes, Cain endorsed Romney in 2008, favored TARP against the "free market purists," defends the bulk of the Patriot Act, has a despicable record on the Federal Reserve, and has no real understanding of economics.
There is one reason, however, that Cain stands up for being particularly dangerous. He has no conception at all of religious liberty in a time when it is under attack. He believes Americans have a right to prohibit mosques from being built, out of the hysterical paranoia that Sharia law will take hold and wipe away all out freedoms and Christian identity as a nation. For similar reasons Cain says appointing Muslims to government would be a big problem for him, as you never know which of them is a terrorist. This ugly anti-Islamism should all by itself should be a deal-breaker for anyone every remotely interested in liberty. Cain is targeting the group most likely to be rounded up and interned should another terrorist incident occur, a group that is already the subject of warmongering hatred, and he is legitimizing this through his candidacy. The bigotry Cain espouses helps foment the aggressive wars that have done more to undermine American freedom in recent decades than anything else.
Rick Santorum’s Crusade Against Freedom
Rick Santorum says he’s in the presidential race to win. In typical campaign-season Republican fashion, he has condemned Obama for having "wrecked our economy, and centralized power in Washington, DC, and robbed people of their freedom."
Of course it is true that Obama has been a disaster for American liberty. It doesn’t take a genius to see this. But one might wonder, what is the alternative Santorum represents?
Santorum’s War Against Contractual Liberty: Central to a free society is the concept of freedom of association. People should be free to disassociate from others as well, for any reason. One application of this principle would be the right of employers (and employees) to end their employment relationship at will – only with the caveat that premature termination in violation of an employment contract be remedied through damages. Certainly, no boss should be forced to hire anyone against his will.
This principle has been eroded severely through Civil Rights and anti-discrimination laws. This is a tragic abandonment of the cornerstone of a free society. But Santorum has proposed, with the support of such Democratic stalwarts as John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Ted Kennedy, to gut this principle even further, by forcing employers to accommodate the religious practices of their workers. This is an egregious attack on economic liberty. It means that a boss would have to make "reasonable" provisions for his employees’ prayers and religious rituals, even if these are at odds with his own values. In a society of religious and contractual liberty, employers wouldn’t have to hire people of any religious persuasion that they didn’t want to, much less subsidize religious practices they did not support. Of course, customers could boycott companies if they found the discrimination or lack of accommodation unfair. But this should be up to free individuals working in the market, never the state.
Santorum’s Attack on the Constitution: Santorum has argued that the federal government should build a wall and use national guards to enforce border security – a usurpation of the proper authority of the states under the Tenth Amendment. He has been an enthusiastic defender of torture, despite the Eighth Amendment, due process rights, and every single standard of human decency. He also voted in support of making warrantless wiretapping easier, in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment; the flag-burning amendment – not actually in violation of the Constitution, but with the opinion, apparently, that the First Amendment needs changing; harsher penalties for drugs, when there is absolutely no authority in the Constitution for the feds to be involved in this at all; draconian penalties for gun violations so long as drugs are involved; federal abstinence education programs, when in fact education is the proper province of the states; a presidential line-item veto, when this is clearly an unconstitutional deprivation of Congress’s legislative authority; the Patriot Act and the evisceration of habeas corpus for detainees in the war on terror. And if you think he only supports cruel measures against those deemed by the government to be "terrorists," keep in mind that this is the man who callously said that victims who didn’t successfully flee New Orleans in the midst of Hurricane Katrina should have been burdened by "tougher penalties."
Santorum’s Battle Against Rationality in Foreign Affairs: Santorum has voted to expand NATO, an outdated Cold War relic; supported stronger sanctions against Syria, Cuba, Iran and even Japan in direct tension with the human right to free trade and the interests of the United States; and backed Clinton’s unconstitutional and unnecessary war with Kosovo, despite the better judgment of many other Republicans. But what else is to be expected from a man so deluded he thought as late as 2006 that Weapons of Mass Destruction were found in Iraq – even as the Bush administration insisted this was not so – and has seriously argued, even in a time when political correctness threatens freedom of inquiry and academic liberty at our universities, that criticism of Israel on college campuses should be federally punished?
Is He Good on Anything? Some will insist that at least Santorum is a fiscal conservative, but he voted for Bush’s deficit-enlarging budgets and does not support abolition of the huge unconstitutional, wasteful and counterproductive federal programs that are drowning this nation in debt – the empire, Social Security, Medicare, and all the rest. He might be marginally less spendthrift than Obama, but wait until you see him in power. He has no compunctions about using the force of the federal government and tax dollars to impose his vision on America – a vision in which employers have to accommodate workers’ religions against their will, a vision in which Washington teaches kids what kind of sexual values to embrace, a vision in which campus criticism of America’s closest Middle East ally is socially engineered out of existence, a vision of social conservatism not nurtured in a humane and virtuous manner by families, churches, and communities, but by the largest political body in the history of the world – the U.S. government. He has no respect for free speech, the Fourth Amendment, or Constitutional limits on the federal police power. Like so many other politicians, he thinks Americans have all too much liberty in many areas, and yet has the temerity to criticize his ideological mirror image, Barack Obama.
Obama has been a nightmare for liberty across the board. So was Bush. If Americans want to finally awake to a future of liberty, they will reject the authoritarian right-wing socialism of Rick Santorum.
Oh No. Another Reagan Republican: Jon Huntsman
Jon Huntsman announced his presidential bid in front of the Statue of Liberty, evoking images of Reagan’s announcement of his own run over three decades ago standing at the same spot. Huntsman, a former Reagan official, reminded his audience that Reagan had "assured us we could ‘make America great again,’ and under his leadership we did."
In 2007, Jon Huntsman openly favored an individual health care mandate – the most directly anti-liberty element to Obamacare. Also as governor of Utah, he signed a global warming initiative agreeing to cut greenhouse gases. Under his stewardship, state spending increased by about 10% a year.
Some will say this means Huntsman is clearly not a real Reagan conservative. Yet Reagan is the president who:
About doubled the size of the federal government
Increased Social Security taxes and the overall tax bite from the American economy
Promised to abolish the Selective Service, the Department of Education, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau, and did nothing of the sort
As governor, Reagan:
Signed the Mulford Act, banning the carrying of firearms in general terms, setting the stage for California’s modern anti-gun atmosphere
Increased taxes more than any previous governor, including his $1 billion hike in his first year – the largest tax increase in CA history
Immensely expanded the welfare bureaucracy and added over 30,000 employees to the state government payroll
Created 73 new state government councils and commissions, including the horrible California Energy Commission
Oversaw a 122% increase in the state budget
This is the reality of the Reagan legacy. Even as a governor, with no military enemy as an excuse, he acted even worse than the Democratic governors before and after him. And why not? Reagan was a unionist, a Hollywood New Deal Democrat who took on the role of touting free enterprise because he was hired by General Electric to do so. He was a performer who acted his way into the White House, and to this day the Republicans all jump over themselves to claim his mantle, all competing to be described as the most Reaganesque.
Huntsman is indeed a Reagan Republican: a defender of big government who stands in front of the Statue of Liberty without any credibility on what that statue represents.
Tim Pawlenty, Second-Rate Bore for More Government and War
Poor guy. Even given his close relationship to the 2008 John McCain presidential run, Pawlenty has been unable to turn that experience into the credentials needed to run another losing presidential campaign in 2012. He is not the most frightening of the bunch, however, although his dedication to smaller government is par for the course among Republicans. That is to say, he doesn’t have any.
Pawlenty as governor of Minnesota was an enthusiast for public works projects, rail lines, and Target Field, two-thirds of the funding for which was billed to the taxpayers. He is well known for his bill raising the ethanol requirement for gasoline up to 20%. In environmentalist California, the figure is closer to 6%.
Back in March, before Obama committed the United States to yet another anti-Muslim war of aggression, Pawlenty scathingly attacked the administration for being soft on Libya. Condemning the president for caring what other nations thought about American wars, Pawlenty intoned: "What's most important is our nation is secure and respected." Ah. "Respected." So that is the point of these foreign adventures – being treated like the international mob boss. While the other Republicans in the field are now toying with America-First rhetoric concerning this war, Pawlenty has not taken off his campaign website the numerous examples of his being a visionary ahead of the curve, goading the emperor to flex his muscles before Obama himself felt inclined finally to let the bombs drop.
Newt Gingrich the Career Political Outsider
If there is a great silver lining in this election it is that Gingrich is doing so poorly. What a joy to watch him get nowhere, to watch his ego take a beating every day.
Gingrich has boasted that he is not a "Washington figure" and claims that he "will clearly be the most change-oriented, the most fundamental reform candidate in the race." Yes, this from the guy who was recently taken to the woodshed for his comments that Paul Ryan’s ridiculously moderate budget cut proposal was an example of dangerous "right-wing social engineering."
This only demonstrates what is meant these days when someone is called a "Washington outsider." Obama was supposed to be such a candidate, despite his record-busting campaign donations from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street powerhouses, his unequivocal support for the agenda of AIPAC and other establishment lobbying groups. But even Obama was a better example of an outsider than lifetime government employee John McCain, who laughably ran as a maverick in 2008, defending virtually every element of the Bush regime – the wars, the bailouts, the compassionate conservative welfare statism.
There was a time long before his stint as Speaker of the House when Gingrich was a little bit interesting. In 1982, Newt Gingrich wrote to the Journal of the American Medical Association in defense of medical marijuana. He noted that "Federal law. . . continues to define marijuana as a drug ‘with no accepted medical use,’ and federal agencies continue to prohibit physician-patient access to marijuana. This outdated federal prohibition is corrupting the intent of the state laws and depriving thousands of glaucoma and cancer patients of the medical care promised them by their state legislatures."
Almost 30 years later, is he still asking for a liberalization of federal marijuana law? Quite the reverse. He strongly suggests we need to look at such countries as Singapore for our inspiration on drug policy and does not flinch when it is pointed out that that nation executes drug dealers and issues mandatory drug tests to the general population. These are totalitarian proposals, and Gingrich seems to endorse them emphatically.
Newt’s Contract with America – the Republicans’ literature offering hope and change to the American people – was filled with reforms supposedly aimed at limiting the power of Washington, but much of it had to do with expanding government to crack down on crime or uphold family values. One thing is for certain: the Republican Congress in the 1990s did not cut back government overall. To the contrary, in the 1990s the last federal budget passed by the Republicans was hundreds of billions higher than the last one passed by the Democratic Congress. In some areas, like farm subsidies, spending went up substantially.
The ringleader of the 1990s Republican non-revolution has no hopes, and for this at least we can be grateful.
Sarah Palin: Will the Bulldog with Lipstick Run?
Many have long argued that she would have no chance at the presidency. Only half the Republican voters like her, and none of the Democrats do. Obama is polled to easily defeat her in her own state of Alaska.
Perhaps I am playing into the media zeitgeist by not being a lot more substantive in this discussion. What about Palin’s political positions? Well, she has flip-flopped and equivocated on quite a few questions. But it would be fair to say that she is slightly more fiscally conservative than Obama, in the same ballpark in terms of foreign policy (although with the distinct possibility of surprising us in either direction), and otherwise comfortable with the status quo of bailouts, corporatism, entitlements, huge government, and central management of the economy, with some perfunctory areas where she mildly dissents from the Washington consensus. In other words, she is a typical Republican politician, who might sound a little better than the Democrats when she is out of power, but who always has the potential to prove a neocon in the White House.
Yet it is a mistake to assume the above is the most substantive thing to be said of her. Palin was primarily always a culture-war figure: a rallying point for the heartland to unify and cry out that it had enough of the coastal elitism of the central state and media giants. Yet what were they rebelling against in 2008? Was it the Bush legacy they had voted for? He was, after all, a counterfeit middle American, a Connecticut transplant in the heart of Texas who always advocated big government. The biggest issue to unify the proto-Tea Party uprising of 2008 was, of course, the gigantic Wall Street bailouts, which were advocated and supported by Palin, as well as McCain and Obama. Palin had the problem of running on a ticket calling for hope and change when the Democratic opposition had already trademarked those slogans and was running against the sorry record of her own party’s mismanagement of the economy and two wars. Now the setting is ripe for a run against Obama-style elitist liberalism. The problem is, Palin is a TV star and her own very red state backs the incumbent over her.
There’s lots of talk about whether she can beat Michelle Bachmann. Maybe not. Nevertheless, I still don’t think it’s impossible for her to be president one day, if not in 2013 then down the line. Palin is still very young. She could run every election cycle until 2028 – five elections, inclusive – before she’s any older than Hillary Clinton was in 2008. Think of that. Even if she’s decisively defeated this time, she has plenty of opportunities to make a comeback like Richard Nixon, or Peewee Herman, or Freddy Kreuger, depending on how you regard her.
I for one welcome Palin into the race, as I find her entertaining and somewhat refreshing. My appreciation is nuanced, as I do not think she is any sort of champion of freedom but rather an establishment politician, but it can be fun watching the liberal media stumble over themselves to attack her for cultural reasons, perennially and invincibly clueless that much of the country is on board with her social values. Part of me even wants her to win the White House, not because she will be any better than Obama, necessarily, but because it would serve to educate at least some people. Either the liberals will learn that she is not the devilish threat to their social democracy as they’ve been fearing, or some conservatives will learn that the problem wasn’t Obama but leviathan, or some feminists will learn that a woman in the White House doesn’t mean a more peaceful or less corrupt executive branch any more than a black president means a less predatory criminal justice system. The problem is political power itself, and no modification to the cultural lipstick worn by the empress will mean a damn thing. Perhaps Palin will help bring us closer to the day when Americans recognize that.
The Grand Old Party: A Circus of Fascists, Clowns, and Creeps
As I’ve noted repeatedly here and elsewhere, the Republican Party has always been a party of big government. The exceptions only prove the rule. If any of the above people get the presidential nomination we will again face a contest between two candidates with no reliable respect for the liberal tradition, free trade, peace, freedom of association, civil liberties or free-market capitalism. The bright side is we’ll only be closer to the day when Americans give up on electoral politics as a means to achieve freedom.
Wednesday
DEBT CEILING DRAMA
The debt ceiling debate is providing plenty of opportunity for political theater in Washington. Proponents of raising the debt ceiling are throwing around the usual scare tactics and misinformation in order to intimidate opponents into accepting more debt and taxes. It is important to distinguish the truth from the propaganda.
First of all, politicians need to understand that without real change default is inevitable. In fact, default happens every day through monetary policy tricks. Every time the Federal Reserve engages in more quantitative easing and devalues the dollar, it is defaulting on the American people by eroding their purchasing power and inflating their savings away. The dollar has lost nearly 50% of its value against gold since 2008. The Fed claims inflation is 2% or less over the past few years; however economists who compile alternate data show a 9% inflation rate if calculated more traditionally. Alarmingly, the administration is talking about changing the methodology of the CPI calculation yet again to hide the damage of the government's policies. Changing the CPI will also enable the government to avoid giving seniors a COLA (cost of living adjustment) on their social security checks, and raise taxes via the hidden means of "bracket creep." This is a default. Just because it is a default on the people and not the banks and foreign holders of our debt does not mean it doesn't count.
Politicians also need to acknowledge that our debt is unsustainable. For decades our government has been spending and promising far more than it collects in taxes. But the problem is not that the people are not taxed enough. The government has managed to run up $61.6 trillion in unfunded liabilities, which works out to $528,000 per household. A tax policy that would aim to extract even half that amount of money from American families would be unimaginably draconian, and not unlike attempting to squeeze blood from a turnip. This is, unequivocally, a spending problem brought about by a dramatically inflated view of the proper role of government in a free society.
Perhaps the most abhorrent bit of chicanery has been the threat that if a deal is not reached to increase the debt by August 2nd, social security checks may not go out. In reality, the Chief Actuary of Social Security confirmed last week that current Social Security tax receipts are more than enough to cover current outlays. The only reason those checks would not go out would be if the administration decided to spend those designated funds elsewhere. It is very telling that the administration would rather frighten seniors dependent on social security checks than alarm their big banking friends, who have already received $5.3 trillion in bailouts, stimulus and quantitative easing. This instance of trying to blackmail Congress into tax increases by threatening social security demonstrates how scary it is to be completely dependent on government promises and why many young people today would jump at the chance to opt out of Social Security altogether.
We are headed for rough economic times either way, but the longer we put it off, the greater the pain will be when the system implodes. We need to stop adding more programs and entitlements to the problem. We need to stop expensive bombing campaigns against people on the other side of the globe and bring our troops home. We need to stop allowing secretive banking cartels to endlessly enslave us through monetary policy trickery. And we need to drastically rethink government's role in our lives so we can get it out of the way and get back to work.
First of all, politicians need to understand that without real change default is inevitable. In fact, default happens every day through monetary policy tricks. Every time the Federal Reserve engages in more quantitative easing and devalues the dollar, it is defaulting on the American people by eroding their purchasing power and inflating their savings away. The dollar has lost nearly 50% of its value against gold since 2008. The Fed claims inflation is 2% or less over the past few years; however economists who compile alternate data show a 9% inflation rate if calculated more traditionally. Alarmingly, the administration is talking about changing the methodology of the CPI calculation yet again to hide the damage of the government's policies. Changing the CPI will also enable the government to avoid giving seniors a COLA (cost of living adjustment) on their social security checks, and raise taxes via the hidden means of "bracket creep." This is a default. Just because it is a default on the people and not the banks and foreign holders of our debt does not mean it doesn't count.
Politicians also need to acknowledge that our debt is unsustainable. For decades our government has been spending and promising far more than it collects in taxes. But the problem is not that the people are not taxed enough. The government has managed to run up $61.6 trillion in unfunded liabilities, which works out to $528,000 per household. A tax policy that would aim to extract even half that amount of money from American families would be unimaginably draconian, and not unlike attempting to squeeze blood from a turnip. This is, unequivocally, a spending problem brought about by a dramatically inflated view of the proper role of government in a free society.
Perhaps the most abhorrent bit of chicanery has been the threat that if a deal is not reached to increase the debt by August 2nd, social security checks may not go out. In reality, the Chief Actuary of Social Security confirmed last week that current Social Security tax receipts are more than enough to cover current outlays. The only reason those checks would not go out would be if the administration decided to spend those designated funds elsewhere. It is very telling that the administration would rather frighten seniors dependent on social security checks than alarm their big banking friends, who have already received $5.3 trillion in bailouts, stimulus and quantitative easing. This instance of trying to blackmail Congress into tax increases by threatening social security demonstrates how scary it is to be completely dependent on government promises and why many young people today would jump at the chance to opt out of Social Security altogether.
We are headed for rough economic times either way, but the longer we put it off, the greater the pain will be when the system implodes. We need to stop adding more programs and entitlements to the problem. We need to stop expensive bombing campaigns against people on the other side of the globe and bring our troops home. We need to stop allowing secretive banking cartels to endlessly enslave us through monetary policy trickery. And we need to drastically rethink government's role in our lives so we can get it out of the way and get back to work.
Monday
WHAT I THINK......ROBERT BONOMO
Bankers, War Mongers, Drug Dealers, The New York Times, The Military Industrial Complex, the Neo-Cons, The Wall Street Journal, The DEA, Organized Crime, The CIA, the FBI, The FDA, The Department of Education, The Federal Reserve and the IRS.
“With politicians like these, who needs terrorists?” ~ Ron Paul
Ron Paul is neither a big man nor a loud one and his polite demeanor effectively disguises a vicious fighting spirit. No other politician in recent history has been the been lone dissenter on so many congressional votes. From Mother Teresa to Gaza, only one man dissented: Ron Paul. He transcends party lines, confusing the mass media who are not sure whether he is a radical left wing peace nick or a John Birch Manchurian candidate.
Right or Left?
“We can achieve much more in peace than we can ever achieve in these needless, unconstitutional, undeclared wars.” ~ Ron Paul
As shocking as it may seem to The New York Times, Fox, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN, The Constitution and The Declaration of Independence actually call for a peaceful, free Republic unencumbered by Government.
What other member of Congress is for ending the war on drugs, phasing out Medicare and Medicaid, making Social Security optional, legalizing prostitution, ending The Fed, halting all aid to Israel, lowering taxes, and closing all American military bases abroad? How do you define Ron Paul within the current political spectrum? You can’t. He simply doesn't fit into any of the convenient labels available for the two party charade. The Ivy Leagued Wall Street/Washington nexus doesn't know what to make of man who is against two of the most dreaded things in life: war and taxes.
Is Ron Paul a Radical?
“I am just absolutely convinced that the best formula for giving us peace and preserving the American way of life is freedom, limited government, and minding our own business overseas.” Ron Paul
This is probably the most vexing question regarding Ron Paul. He is so sensible that he is considered radical. Take for example his foreign policy. He believes Europe, Israel and South Korea are all wealthy and capable enough to defend themselves and considering the enormous US budget deficits, he thinks we should close our foreign bases and bring our soldiers home. This is called radical.
On the other hand, jumping into the fray with Libya while we are engaged in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen is considered mainstream. How many politicians could even articulate, for example, why we fought the war in Iraq?
What is fascinating about the Ron Paul phenomena is that even in mainstream newspapers there is not one columnist as "radical" as Ron Paul. From The Wall Street Journal, to The New York Times, and The Washington Post, there is no one who consistently calls for an end to all foreign wars and a peaceful, mind your own business foreign policy.
The Great One
The war in Iraq had to be the biggest lie ever told to the American people, until Barack Obama was elected President. Tax cuts for the rich and more wars for the weary. Never again should the American people allow themselves to be sold a "brand" instead of an agenda.
Paul Newman was a fine actor, but he couldn’t hold a candle to The Great One. Jackie Gleason had something unmistakably, unabashedly real about him. We should have listened to him in 2008; we didn’t. Will we listen to him in 2012?
The Challenge
Ron Paul is 75 years old and this is certainly his last shot at being president. Before the 2008 financial crisis he was a voice in the wilderness, but that voice has come of age. Many members of the Republican party became Ron Paul followers after the eight long years of war and bailouts under George W. Now, many liberal Democrats completely disillusioned with both Party and Obama are becoming supporters of Dr. Paul.
The essence of his philosophy is peace, prosperity and a strictly Constitutional Government that minds its own business at home and abroad. Is it so shocking that this message resonates with both Republicans and Democrats? People are "waking" up at an accelerated rate and flocking to Dr. Paul. His sound money policies could be the catalyst that sends him to the White Houses if we experience another financial shock event between now and November 2012.
Ron Paul believes in people's liberty, in their innate intelligence, ingenuity, and capacity to fend for themselves. Both the condescension of the Ivy Leagued and the corporate fascism of those who want us to all speak and eat the same garbage has become repellent. They have lied, plundered and war mongered long enough.
Ron Paul as Rocky
Can he win? The author could give two hoots. All we ask of Dr. Paul is that he stay on his feet and land a few good punches. The rest will take care of itself.
“With politicians like these, who needs terrorists?” ~ Ron Paul
Ron Paul is neither a big man nor a loud one and his polite demeanor effectively disguises a vicious fighting spirit. No other politician in recent history has been the been lone dissenter on so many congressional votes. From Mother Teresa to Gaza, only one man dissented: Ron Paul. He transcends party lines, confusing the mass media who are not sure whether he is a radical left wing peace nick or a John Birch Manchurian candidate.
Right or Left?
“We can achieve much more in peace than we can ever achieve in these needless, unconstitutional, undeclared wars.” ~ Ron Paul
As shocking as it may seem to The New York Times, Fox, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN, The Constitution and The Declaration of Independence actually call for a peaceful, free Republic unencumbered by Government.
What other member of Congress is for ending the war on drugs, phasing out Medicare and Medicaid, making Social Security optional, legalizing prostitution, ending The Fed, halting all aid to Israel, lowering taxes, and closing all American military bases abroad? How do you define Ron Paul within the current political spectrum? You can’t. He simply doesn't fit into any of the convenient labels available for the two party charade. The Ivy Leagued Wall Street/Washington nexus doesn't know what to make of man who is against two of the most dreaded things in life: war and taxes.
Is Ron Paul a Radical?
“I am just absolutely convinced that the best formula for giving us peace and preserving the American way of life is freedom, limited government, and minding our own business overseas.” Ron Paul
This is probably the most vexing question regarding Ron Paul. He is so sensible that he is considered radical. Take for example his foreign policy. He believes Europe, Israel and South Korea are all wealthy and capable enough to defend themselves and considering the enormous US budget deficits, he thinks we should close our foreign bases and bring our soldiers home. This is called radical.
On the other hand, jumping into the fray with Libya while we are engaged in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen is considered mainstream. How many politicians could even articulate, for example, why we fought the war in Iraq?
What is fascinating about the Ron Paul phenomena is that even in mainstream newspapers there is not one columnist as "radical" as Ron Paul. From The Wall Street Journal, to The New York Times, and The Washington Post, there is no one who consistently calls for an end to all foreign wars and a peaceful, mind your own business foreign policy.
The Great One
The war in Iraq had to be the biggest lie ever told to the American people, until Barack Obama was elected President. Tax cuts for the rich and more wars for the weary. Never again should the American people allow themselves to be sold a "brand" instead of an agenda.
Paul Newman was a fine actor, but he couldn’t hold a candle to The Great One. Jackie Gleason had something unmistakably, unabashedly real about him. We should have listened to him in 2008; we didn’t. Will we listen to him in 2012?
The Challenge
Ron Paul is 75 years old and this is certainly his last shot at being president. Before the 2008 financial crisis he was a voice in the wilderness, but that voice has come of age. Many members of the Republican party became Ron Paul followers after the eight long years of war and bailouts under George W. Now, many liberal Democrats completely disillusioned with both Party and Obama are becoming supporters of Dr. Paul.
The essence of his philosophy is peace, prosperity and a strictly Constitutional Government that minds its own business at home and abroad. Is it so shocking that this message resonates with both Republicans and Democrats? People are "waking" up at an accelerated rate and flocking to Dr. Paul. His sound money policies could be the catalyst that sends him to the White Houses if we experience another financial shock event between now and November 2012.
Ron Paul believes in people's liberty, in their innate intelligence, ingenuity, and capacity to fend for themselves. Both the condescension of the Ivy Leagued and the corporate fascism of those who want us to all speak and eat the same garbage has become repellent. They have lied, plundered and war mongered long enough.
Ron Paul as Rocky
Can he win? The author could give two hoots. All we ask of Dr. Paul is that he stay on his feet and land a few good punches. The rest will take care of itself.
Thursday
Monday
COMPETING CURRENCIES - A DEFENSE AGAINST PROFLIGATE GOVERNMENT SPENDING
The end of June marked what is hopefully the end of the Federal Reserve's policy of quantitative easing. For months the Fed has purchased hundreds of billions of dollars of Treasury debt, enabling the government to fund its profligate deficit spending, push the national debt to its limit, and further devalue the dollar. Confidence in the dollar is plummeting, confidence in the euro has been shattered by the European bond crisis, and beleaguered consumers and investors are slowly but surely awakening to the fact that government-issued currencies do not hold their value.
Currency is sound only when it is recognized and accepted as such by individuals, through the actions of the market, without coercion. Throughout history, gold and silver have been the two commodities that have most fully satisfied the requirements of sound money. This is why people around the world are flocking once again to gold and silver as a store of value to replace their rapidly depreciating paper currencies. Even central banks have come to their senses and have begun to stock up on gold once again.
But in our country today, attempting to use gold and silver as money is severely punished, regardless of the fact that it is the only constitutionally-allowed legal tender! In one recent instance, entrepreneurs who attempted to create their own gold and silver currency were convicted by the federal government of "counterfeiting". Also, consider another case of an individual who was convicted of tax evasion for paying his employees with silver and gold coins rather than fiat paper dollars. The federal government acknowledges that such coins are legal tender at their face value, as they were issued by the U.S. government. But when it comes to income taxes owed by the employees who received them, the IRS suddenly deems the coins to be worth their full market value as precious metals.
These cases highlight the fact that a government monopoly on the issuance of money is purely a method of central control over the economy. If you can be forced to accept the government's increasingly devalued dollar, there is no limit to how far the government will go to debauch the currency. Anyone who attempts to create a market based currency-- meaning a currency with real value as determined by markets-- threatens to embarrass the federal government and expose the folly of our fiat monetary system. So the government destroys competition through its usual tools of arrest, confiscation, and incarceration.
This is why I have taken steps to restore the constitutional monetary system envisioned and practiced by our Founding Fathers. I recently introduced HR 1098, the Free Competition in Currency Act. This bill eliminates three of the major obstacles to the circulation of sound money: federal legal tender laws that force acceptance of Federal Reserve Notes; "counterfeiting" laws that serve no purpose other than to ban the creation of private commodity currencies; and tax laws that penalize the use of gold and silver coins as money. During this Congress I hope to hold hearings on this bill in order to highlight the importance of returning to a sound monetary system.
Allowing market participants to choose a sound currency will ensure that individuals' needs are met, rather than the needs of the government. Restoring sound money will restrict the ability of the government to reduce the citizenry's purchasing power and burden future generations with debt. Unlike the current system which benefits the Fed and its banking cartel, all Americans are better off with a sound currency.
Currency is sound only when it is recognized and accepted as such by individuals, through the actions of the market, without coercion. Throughout history, gold and silver have been the two commodities that have most fully satisfied the requirements of sound money. This is why people around the world are flocking once again to gold and silver as a store of value to replace their rapidly depreciating paper currencies. Even central banks have come to their senses and have begun to stock up on gold once again.
But in our country today, attempting to use gold and silver as money is severely punished, regardless of the fact that it is the only constitutionally-allowed legal tender! In one recent instance, entrepreneurs who attempted to create their own gold and silver currency were convicted by the federal government of "counterfeiting". Also, consider another case of an individual who was convicted of tax evasion for paying his employees with silver and gold coins rather than fiat paper dollars. The federal government acknowledges that such coins are legal tender at their face value, as they were issued by the U.S. government. But when it comes to income taxes owed by the employees who received them, the IRS suddenly deems the coins to be worth their full market value as precious metals.
These cases highlight the fact that a government monopoly on the issuance of money is purely a method of central control over the economy. If you can be forced to accept the government's increasingly devalued dollar, there is no limit to how far the government will go to debauch the currency. Anyone who attempts to create a market based currency-- meaning a currency with real value as determined by markets-- threatens to embarrass the federal government and expose the folly of our fiat monetary system. So the government destroys competition through its usual tools of arrest, confiscation, and incarceration.
This is why I have taken steps to restore the constitutional monetary system envisioned and practiced by our Founding Fathers. I recently introduced HR 1098, the Free Competition in Currency Act. This bill eliminates three of the major obstacles to the circulation of sound money: federal legal tender laws that force acceptance of Federal Reserve Notes; "counterfeiting" laws that serve no purpose other than to ban the creation of private commodity currencies; and tax laws that penalize the use of gold and silver coins as money. During this Congress I hope to hold hearings on this bill in order to highlight the importance of returning to a sound monetary system.
Allowing market participants to choose a sound currency will ensure that individuals' needs are met, rather than the needs of the government. Restoring sound money will restrict the ability of the government to reduce the citizenry's purchasing power and burden future generations with debt. Unlike the current system which benefits the Fed and its banking cartel, all Americans are better off with a sound currency.
Tuesday
TSA ABUSES AND FAILURES
The press reports are horrifying: 95 year-old women humiliated; children molested; disabled people abused; men and women subjected to unwarranted groping and touching of their most private areas; involuntary radiation exposure. If the perpetrators were a gang of criminals, their headquarters would be raided by SWAT teams and armed federal agents. Unfortunately, in this case the perpetrators are armed federal agents. This is the sorry situation ten years after the creation of the Transportation Security Administration.
The requirement that Americans be forced to undergo this appalling treatment simply for the "privilege" of traveling in their own country reveals much about how the federal government feels about our liberties. The unfortunate fact that we put up with this does not speak well for our willingness to stand up to an abusive government.
Many Americans continue to fool themselves into accepting TSA abuse by saying "I don't mind giving up my freedoms for security." In fact, they are giving up their liberties and not receiving security in return. Last week, for example, just days after an elderly cancer victim was forced to submit to a cruel and pointless TSA search, including removal of an adult diaper, a Nigerian immigrant somehow managed stroll through TSA security checks and board a flight from New York to LA -- with a stolen, expired boarding pass and an out-of-date student ID as his sole identification! He was detained and questioned, only to be released to do it again 5 days later! We should not be surprised to find government ineptitude and indifference at the TSA.
At the time the TSA was being created I strongly opposed federalization of airline security. As I wrote in an article back in 2001:
"Congress should be privatizing rather than nationalizing airport security. The free market can and does produce excellent security in many industries. Many security-intensive industries do an outstanding job of maintaining safety without depending on federal agencies. Nuclear power plants, chemical plants, oil refineries, and armored money transport companies all employ private security forces that operate very effectively. No government agency will ever care about the bottom-line security and profitability of the airlines more than the airlines themselves. Airlines cannot make money if travelers and flight crews are afraid to fly, and in a free market they would drastically change security measures to prevent future tragedies. In the current regulatory environment, however, the airlines prefer to relinquish all responsibility for security to the government, so that they cannot be held accountable for lapses in the future."
What we need is real privatization of security, but not phony privatization with the same TSA screeners in private security firm uniforms still operating under the "guidance" of the federal government. Real security will be achieved when the airlines are once again in charge of protecting their property and their passengers.
In the meantime, this week I am introducing the American Traveler Dignity Act, which establishes that airport security screeners are not immune from any US law regarding physical contact with another person, making images of another person, or causing physical harm through the use of radiation-emitting machinery on another person. It means they are not above laws the rest of us must obey. As we continue to see more and more outrageous stories of TSA abuses and failures, I hope that my colleagues in the House will listen to their constituents and join with me to support this legislation.
The requirement that Americans be forced to undergo this appalling treatment simply for the "privilege" of traveling in their own country reveals much about how the federal government feels about our liberties. The unfortunate fact that we put up with this does not speak well for our willingness to stand up to an abusive government.
Many Americans continue to fool themselves into accepting TSA abuse by saying "I don't mind giving up my freedoms for security." In fact, they are giving up their liberties and not receiving security in return. Last week, for example, just days after an elderly cancer victim was forced to submit to a cruel and pointless TSA search, including removal of an adult diaper, a Nigerian immigrant somehow managed stroll through TSA security checks and board a flight from New York to LA -- with a stolen, expired boarding pass and an out-of-date student ID as his sole identification! He was detained and questioned, only to be released to do it again 5 days later! We should not be surprised to find government ineptitude and indifference at the TSA.
At the time the TSA was being created I strongly opposed federalization of airline security. As I wrote in an article back in 2001:
"Congress should be privatizing rather than nationalizing airport security. The free market can and does produce excellent security in many industries. Many security-intensive industries do an outstanding job of maintaining safety without depending on federal agencies. Nuclear power plants, chemical plants, oil refineries, and armored money transport companies all employ private security forces that operate very effectively. No government agency will ever care about the bottom-line security and profitability of the airlines more than the airlines themselves. Airlines cannot make money if travelers and flight crews are afraid to fly, and in a free market they would drastically change security measures to prevent future tragedies. In the current regulatory environment, however, the airlines prefer to relinquish all responsibility for security to the government, so that they cannot be held accountable for lapses in the future."
What we need is real privatization of security, but not phony privatization with the same TSA screeners in private security firm uniforms still operating under the "guidance" of the federal government. Real security will be achieved when the airlines are once again in charge of protecting their property and their passengers.
In the meantime, this week I am introducing the American Traveler Dignity Act, which establishes that airport security screeners are not immune from any US law regarding physical contact with another person, making images of another person, or causing physical harm through the use of radiation-emitting machinery on another person. It means they are not above laws the rest of us must obey. As we continue to see more and more outrageous stories of TSA abuses and failures, I hope that my colleagues in the House will listen to their constituents and join with me to support this legislation.
Saturday
WHAT I THINK....TOM THORNTON
Suddenly the world is abuzz with talk about legalizing marijuana and other drugs. Political candidates, politicians, former presidents, interest groups, and even the Global Commission on Drug Policy are all calling for drug-policy reform. Given that we are in a worldwide economic and fiscal crisis, why is everyone interested in drug policy? Have we all suddenly regained our senses and realized that prohibition is irrational?
No, the more important reason for the interest in this issue is economic sense. Drug prohibition is a burden on taxpayers. It is a burden on government budgets. It is a burden on the criminal-justice system. It is a burden on the healthcare system. The economic crisis has intensified the pain from all these burdens. Legalization reduces or eliminates all of these burdens. It should be no surprise that alcohol prohibition was repealed at the deepest depths of the Great Depression.
Two Republican presidential candidates, former governor Gary Johnson and Congressman Ron Paul, support legalization. Ron Paul and Barney Frank have introduced legislation that would allow the states to legalize marijuana without federal interference. Former president Jimmy Carter recently published an editorial in the New York Times calling for an end of the global war on drugs, a position he has held since he was president.
The organization LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, has recently released a report entitled "Ending the Drug War: A Dream Deferred" on the 40th anniversary of the War on Drugs. They are critical of the war and point out that President Obama is actually making things worse. Finally, and maybe most importantly, the Global Commission on Drug Policy has issued a report that declares the war on drugs a failure and provides recommendations for reform.
The economic crisis is speeding up the realization that the war on drugs has failed and cannot be won. Taxpayers have long been slow to recognize the economic burden of drug prohibition. They have been told for decades that we only need to spend a little more and remove a few more constitutional protections of our rights to win the war against drugs. With decades of broken promises, busted budgets with trillion-dollar holes, and a teetering economy in crisis, more and more people are saying no to the war on drugs.
Drug prohibition is the single biggest burden on the criminal-justice budget. It is also a large burden for more than a dozen budgets within the federal government, and it is a growing burden on state and local budgets. The incarceration of hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders often leads to the breakup of families and the loss of breadwinners, placing additional burdens on social services.
The criminal-justice system is overwhelmed, and the prisons are filled far beyond capacity. As a result, violent criminals are receiving early release from their sentences. Other measures of crime and violence are also disturbing. Street gangs use the illegal-drug business to finance and expand their activities. It has been estimated that the United States now has nearly 800,000 gang members. Organized crime continues to grow in numbers and sophistication – as well as the level of violence. The Mexican Army has replaced local police along the border in order to restore order and reduce the more than 10,000 prohibition-related murders last year. From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, the war on drugs is undermining civilization.
People are also realizing that fighting the war on drugs (i.e., prohibition) only makes social problems worse. The number of drug-related emergency-room visits in the United States now exceeds 2 million per year for illegal drugs and nonmedical use of prescription drugs. The progression of drug use from marijuana to cocaine, heroin, and crystal meth is clearly negative for health; and that progression is increasingly and correctly seen to be the result of prohibition, not addiction.
As I demonstrated, the failure of California's Proposition 19 legalizing marijuana should not be seen as a discouraging sign. Rather, it should be seen as a sign of things to come. All over the world, drug prohibition and its repeal or reform is now a matter of debate. In many areas of the world, the drug war has been rolled back.
Portugal is a good case in point. They were not winning the war; they were losing it. They were also losing the more general war for prosperity. In desperation, they de facto legalized all drugs. The result was not rampant, widespread drug abuse. Drug use and addiction actually declined, as did violence and disease.
Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, DC, libertarian think tank.
Most Americans have been told that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a great president and one of the most popular presidents of all time. However, most people – even most historians – do not know that the reason for his popularity was the repeal of Prohibition. He won the Democratic nomination for president at the 1932 convention by switching from being a Dry to a Wet (that is, by siding with repeal). The repeal of Prohibition was the most popular plank in the Democratic Party platform, and it was FDR's number-one issue and campaign promise. He made it his number-one priority when he was in office. (He also cut federal worker pay by 25 percent).
"From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, the war on drugs is undermining civilization."
The results from repeal were both immediate and amazing. Taverns, restaurants, breweries, distilleries, and wineries reopened for business. Jobs were suddenly and noticeably available for the first time in years. The unemployment rate plunged from its historic high level of 25 percent. Crime and corruption sank, with the murder rate falling to its pre-Prohibition level in a manner of a few years. For politicians and government employees, repeal meant a new source of tax revenue and an end to budget cuts. Tax revolts, which had sprung up all across the country in opposition to government, sadly faded away. The people rejoiced that "Happy Days Are Here Again."
A similar opportunity lies in our future as the economic crisis continues to widen and worsen. We need to continue to learn and teach the real lessons of prohibition, some of which can be found in this free book. To unmask the true nature of government control and to demonstrate the superiority of individualism within a classical-liberal environment, we must make ending the war on drugs a priority.
No, the more important reason for the interest in this issue is economic sense. Drug prohibition is a burden on taxpayers. It is a burden on government budgets. It is a burden on the criminal-justice system. It is a burden on the healthcare system. The economic crisis has intensified the pain from all these burdens. Legalization reduces or eliminates all of these burdens. It should be no surprise that alcohol prohibition was repealed at the deepest depths of the Great Depression.
Two Republican presidential candidates, former governor Gary Johnson and Congressman Ron Paul, support legalization. Ron Paul and Barney Frank have introduced legislation that would allow the states to legalize marijuana without federal interference. Former president Jimmy Carter recently published an editorial in the New York Times calling for an end of the global war on drugs, a position he has held since he was president.
The organization LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, has recently released a report entitled "Ending the Drug War: A Dream Deferred" on the 40th anniversary of the War on Drugs. They are critical of the war and point out that President Obama is actually making things worse. Finally, and maybe most importantly, the Global Commission on Drug Policy has issued a report that declares the war on drugs a failure and provides recommendations for reform.
The economic crisis is speeding up the realization that the war on drugs has failed and cannot be won. Taxpayers have long been slow to recognize the economic burden of drug prohibition. They have been told for decades that we only need to spend a little more and remove a few more constitutional protections of our rights to win the war against drugs. With decades of broken promises, busted budgets with trillion-dollar holes, and a teetering economy in crisis, more and more people are saying no to the war on drugs.
Drug prohibition is the single biggest burden on the criminal-justice budget. It is also a large burden for more than a dozen budgets within the federal government, and it is a growing burden on state and local budgets. The incarceration of hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders often leads to the breakup of families and the loss of breadwinners, placing additional burdens on social services.
The criminal-justice system is overwhelmed, and the prisons are filled far beyond capacity. As a result, violent criminals are receiving early release from their sentences. Other measures of crime and violence are also disturbing. Street gangs use the illegal-drug business to finance and expand their activities. It has been estimated that the United States now has nearly 800,000 gang members. Organized crime continues to grow in numbers and sophistication – as well as the level of violence. The Mexican Army has replaced local police along the border in order to restore order and reduce the more than 10,000 prohibition-related murders last year. From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, the war on drugs is undermining civilization.
People are also realizing that fighting the war on drugs (i.e., prohibition) only makes social problems worse. The number of drug-related emergency-room visits in the United States now exceeds 2 million per year for illegal drugs and nonmedical use of prescription drugs. The progression of drug use from marijuana to cocaine, heroin, and crystal meth is clearly negative for health; and that progression is increasingly and correctly seen to be the result of prohibition, not addiction.
As I demonstrated, the failure of California's Proposition 19 legalizing marijuana should not be seen as a discouraging sign. Rather, it should be seen as a sign of things to come. All over the world, drug prohibition and its repeal or reform is now a matter of debate. In many areas of the world, the drug war has been rolled back.
Portugal is a good case in point. They were not winning the war; they were losing it. They were also losing the more general war for prosperity. In desperation, they de facto legalized all drugs. The result was not rampant, widespread drug abuse. Drug use and addiction actually declined, as did violence and disease.
Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, DC, libertarian think tank.
Most Americans have been told that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a great president and one of the most popular presidents of all time. However, most people – even most historians – do not know that the reason for his popularity was the repeal of Prohibition. He won the Democratic nomination for president at the 1932 convention by switching from being a Dry to a Wet (that is, by siding with repeal). The repeal of Prohibition was the most popular plank in the Democratic Party platform, and it was FDR's number-one issue and campaign promise. He made it his number-one priority when he was in office. (He also cut federal worker pay by 25 percent).
"From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, the war on drugs is undermining civilization."
The results from repeal were both immediate and amazing. Taverns, restaurants, breweries, distilleries, and wineries reopened for business. Jobs were suddenly and noticeably available for the first time in years. The unemployment rate plunged from its historic high level of 25 percent. Crime and corruption sank, with the murder rate falling to its pre-Prohibition level in a manner of a few years. For politicians and government employees, repeal meant a new source of tax revenue and an end to budget cuts. Tax revolts, which had sprung up all across the country in opposition to government, sadly faded away. The people rejoiced that "Happy Days Are Here Again."
A similar opportunity lies in our future as the economic crisis continues to widen and worsen. We need to continue to learn and teach the real lessons of prohibition, some of which can be found in this free book. To unmask the true nature of government control and to demonstrate the superiority of individualism within a classical-liberal environment, we must make ending the war on drugs a priority.
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