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Liberty and Power

  • Jan 1, 2012

    A Tremendous Lost Opportunity

    by Liberty and Power

     When Barack Obama wanted to get rid of Osama Bin Laden, arguably the largest victory in the War on Terror to date, he handled the situation the same way Adolf Hitler or Joe Stalin would have, he just went out and killed him. Obama gave up the golden chance to show that we were still different, to prove to our enemies, our friends, and the whole world that no matter how provoked we continued to be a nation of laws, not a nation of men.  My cousin was a firefighter in Queens New York and he died on September 11th when one of the towers collapsed on his headso I do not mourn the death of Osama Bin Laden with even a single tear. I do however regret the passing of an American exceptionalism that has kept us free and safer for hundreds of years. We are told that we had to do this and that our sons and daughters have to experience a bloody death in some field in Afghanistan in order to protect American lives, yet on the day that Osama Bin Laden died our government informed us oh by the way you our all less safe today then you were yesterday. If you believe as I do that American freedom and safety are worth preserving then vote for Ron Paul.

  • Dec 31, 2011

    Glenn Greenwald Shows What Progressives Fear Most of All in the Election

    by Liberty and Power

     

    It’s themselves.

    Paul’s candidacy forces progressives to face the hideous positions and actions of their candidate, of the person they want to empower for another four years. If [Ron] Paul were not in the race or were not receiving attention, none of these issues would receive any attention because all the other major GOP candidates either agree with Obama on these matters or hold even worse views….

    Paul scrambles the comfortable ideological and partisan categories and forces progressives to confront and account for the policies they are working to protect. His nomination would mean that it is the Republican candidate — not the Democrat — who would be the anti-war, pro-due-process, pro-transparency, anti-Fed, anti-Wall-Street-bailout, anti-Drug-War advocate (which is why some neocons are expressly arguing they’d vote for Obama over Paul).

  • Dec 29, 2011

    Government Officials Want You to Know that Your Earnings Belong to Them

    by Liberty and Power

    Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, recently created a media flap when she said:

    There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you!

    But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea—God bless.

  • Dec 27, 2011

    Dissolving the State

    by Liberty and Power

    I'm dissolving in the economic organism!

    I'm dissolving in the economic organism!

    Newly translated and added to the Molinari Institute online library: an excerpt from chapter 10 of Gustave de Molinari’s 1888 Political Evolution and the Revolution. This extract includes the following passage, whose wording – despite its dismissive reference to “anarchists” – is clearly inspired by Proudhon’s call for the “absorption” and “dissolution” of the state “in the economic organism”:

    Thus it is that, instead of absorbing the organism of society according to the revolutionary and communist conception, the municipality and the State are dissolved into this organism.

  • Dec 25, 2011

    Obama and the End of the War in Iraq

    by Liberty and Power

     

    I hope to say more about this, but I wanted to draw attention to this passage in Barack Obama’s remarks to troops regarding the end of the war in Iraq.

    The war in Iraq will soon belong to history.  Your service belongs to the ages.  Never forget that you are part of an unbroken line of heroes spanning two centuries –- from the colonists who overthrew an empire, to your grandparents and parents who faced down fascism and communism, to you –- men and women who fought for the same principles in Fallujah and Kandahar, and delivered justice to those who attacked us on 9/11.

    You’d never know that a signature of Obama’s 2008 campaign was his assertion that the invasion/occupation of Iraq was a bad mistake.

  • Dec 20, 2011

    A Land Without People?

    by Liberty and Power

    Someone posted this on Facebook. I thought it was worth passing along.
     

  • Dec 20, 2011

    A Land Without People?

    by Liberty and Power

    Someone posted this on Facebook. I thought it was worth passing along.
     

  • Dec 16, 2011

    Iraq

    by Liberty and Power

    Anyone who thinks there's anything to celebrate about the U.S. involvement in Iraq hasn't been paying attention. Even the "exit" is essentially a lie. The Pentagon calls it "reposturing."

     
  • Dec 14, 2011

    Some Distinctions and Clarifications

    by Liberty and Power

    I want to talk a bit a bit some of the ways in which left-libertarian claims are susceptible of misinterpretation. (Note: when I use the term “right-libertarian” below, I mean “libertarians who deviate rightward from the C4SS/ALL plumbline”!)

    1. Right-libertarians sometimes accuse left-libertarians of misrepresenting right-libertarians’ relation to corporatism. “They say we support government favouritism toward big business,” they complain, “yet no libertarian supports any such thing.”

    To answer this, I need to invoke the de re / de dicto distinction.

    Ozma of Oz

    Suppose I’m reading Ozma of Oz, and I think, “hey, this guy Baum is a good author.” Assume I don’t know that Baum also wrote a novel (a lousy one, in fact, though that doesn’t matter for the example) called The Master Key. Would it be true or false to say, “Roderick thinks the author of The Master Key is a good author”?

  • Dec 12, 2011

    Newt Gingrich: Demagogue, Pseudointellectual

    by Liberty and Power

    Newt Gingrich says the Palestinian people were invented. That’s very funny coming from a man who has reinvented himself a few times in his life. We didn’t need more evidence of Gingrich’s status as a rank demagogue and pseudointellectual, but he’s furnished it anyway.

    Gingrich, in his typically arrogant manner, says this:
     

    And I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places.

    By “chance to go many places” he means that while being expelled from their homes by Zionist/Israeli forces in 1947-48, they were free to relocate in any Arab country they chose. If I were to mimic Gingrich’s style, I’d say that’s a pro-FOUND-ly racist statement. Since these people are generic Arabs, why should it matter that someone else decides that they may no longer remain in Palestine where they and their families have lived and worked for a thousand or more years?

  • Dec 9, 2011

    TGIF: Fearing Hayek

    by Liberty and Power

     

    I’m sensing some panic in the air. Certain people seem mighty concerned that other people are . . . discovering Hayek. As a W. S. Gilbert character might say, Oh horror!

    Read the full TGIF here.

  • Dec 8, 2011

    Why Do So Many People Automatically and Angrily Condemn Historical Revisionism?

    by Liberty and Power

    Over the years, especially in writing for the general public, as opposed to my professional peers, I have been struck repeatedly by the frequency with which certain conclusions or even entire classes of conclusions elicit not merely skepticism, but angry denunciation. Again and again, I have been called a fool, a traitor, or an America-hater because of my commentaries on history and public affairs. Although I take no pleasure in these denunciations, I find myself not so much depressed by them as curious about them. I wonder why people react as they do, especially when my commentary rests—as I hope it generally does—on well-documented facts and correct logic.

    I surely do not consider myself immune to errors, of course. But if my facts are incorrect, the critic has an obligation to say why my facts are incorrect and to state, or at least to point toward, the correct facts. If my logic has run off the rails, the critic has an obligation to state how I fell into fallacious reasoning. More often than not, however, the critic resorts immediately to name-calling and to wild characterizations of my statements and my person.

  • Dec 6, 2011

    What I Learned from Climategate

    by Liberty and Power

     
    I am still struck by how many intelligent people, some of whom I respect, say that the Climategate emails are a ho-hum matter. They apparently know a lot more about how "mainstream" climatologists work than I do. I actually learned four things that I did not know before. Apparently, they did know these things. At the risk of boring someone, and in the spirit of getting on the same page, let me list these things:
     
    1. I had thought the the famous hockey stick graph and other global temperature information represented in some direct way readings of actual thermometers in the real world. In fact, these results do not directly report such raw data. Rather, climatologists nudge and tweak the raw data in various ways. This is understandable, in and of itself.