So what? Well, none of this could have happened 10 years ago. Not only that, you would probably wouldn’t have understood the paragraph in the slightest because it contains words and actions no one had heard of. Had I told you in 1992 that in 20 years, virtually anyone would be able to speak in wireless real-time video to anyone else on the planet, even to the point of sharing a real-time digital experience, you would not have believed it.

And if I had added that the technology was not outrageously expensive, but rather being carried around in the pockets of students and commuters everywhere, this would have seemed too outrageous for science fiction. What amazing force in the universe hath rained down such blessings on us mere mortals?

The truth is that we all live in a world today that would have been unimaginable to us only very recently. It is so much woven into our lives that we don’t think about it much anymore. And contrary to the rap on the digital age, that it is all about geekery and gadgetry, the real driving force behind this innovation is the flesh-and-blood human being and the oldest desires known to humankind (such as wanting to stay in touch with family).

Another quick example. I was emailing with a U.K. choir director two nights ago, and I mentioned a book of chanted music. He hadn’t heard of it, so I sent him a link, from which he downloaded the material (that magic click that creates a copy!). This morning, his choir sang the piece in church halfway around the world, and he let me know that it was fabulous.

Here we have it: digits flying over oceans in a matter of seconds, and then embodying themselves in beautiful music, sung now with the same human energy as music was sung in the ancient world, that transforms real lives. The person kneeling to prayer didn’t know and didn’t need to know how the music arrived there. The technology is just the means; the end is the improvement of human life.

Such cases like this are only a tiny snapshot of two things I can briefly recall. Just today so far, I’m sure I’ve read articles I never would have seen, talked with people I would have long ago lost touch with, found out about events that would have remained forever unknown to me, connected with someone who found something I said interesting enough to consider…and just now, I recall that I heard word that a friend with asthma is out of out a Shanghai hospital all safe and sound. None of this would I have known only a few years ago.

Again, ask the question: What is causing all of this amazing change? What is the driving force, the source of the manna, the wellspring of all this avalanche of human progress?

I’ll tell you what is not causing it: politics. It’s the great lie, the most-gigantic drain of valuable human energy ever conjured up in the mind of man. What is politics but a grand argument about how we should rule each other? Meanwhile, every step forward in history has come not from this task, but a completely different one.

American politicians are always running on a platform of change. They explain how their policies will make your life better. They map out timetables. They present a portrait of a future. Above all else, they presume that the future is theirs to control, and voters often go along with this idea. As an example, look no further than the history of the State of the Union address.

What if none of it is true? Just think about education. Everyone has a plan for how to improve what exists. So it has been for a hundred years. Meanwhile, the private sector, through physical and digital technology, is reinventing the entire enterprise from the ground up through every possible means. This decentralized, private-sector-driven, technologically sophisticated education reform is making it almost impossible not to be educated about something with each passing hour.

Online academies are opening by the day. Universities are putting their courses online for free. For-profit companies are distributing every manner of teaching tool one can imagine. For-profit learning centers are opening in every town, all making a buck from teaching kids what the public schools have failed to teach. For that matter, the History Channel alone offers more sweeping programs than any public school textbooks two generations ago.

Anyone in the world can be a teacher to the world today, with a laptop and an Internet connection, and so, too, anyone can be student.

It’s true in health care reform, too. For all the problems in the pricing system and terrible insurance system, health care is getting better, mainly due to private-sector innovations. The best radiologists in the world can examine your scans in minutes, no matter where they actually happen. Access to medical information is no longer trapped in a dusty book but flies all over the world from hand-held devices. Error is more likely to be corrected this way, saving and changing lives.

Society is not waiting for the politicians. When you listen to what they say, when you watch what the bureaucrats do, when you look at what the agencies are regulating, you suddenly realize that the political monstrosities that burden the world are hopelessly out of touch with the kind of progress that people are experiencing in their daily lives now.

Politicians can make the world a worse place, to be sure. But if you look at the actual trends that are driving change in a positive direction in our world today, none of them is inspired by political initiative. They take place outside the public sector, and even outside the purview of the politicians and bureaucrats. Sometimes it seems as if the political class is clueless that the world has long ago moved on.

What is driving the world in a forward direction? It is people connecting with people through free association, communication, money exchange, enterprise, risk taking, commercial aspirations and the practical arts. And from these forces, we are newly discovering the wonderful fruits of civilization: arts, music, philosophy, faith.

And truth. Truth above all. The truth that is all around us, the one that the public-sector machinery somehow cannot and will not see, is that global society is making a future for itself without the help of the world’s self-described public servants. The state in all its manifestations struts and preens — builds monuments to itself and waves its flags — but when it comes to really making change, we must look elsewhere.

Regards,

Jeffrey Tucker

How Change Happens was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

The about sums it up. The plus side of elections is that sometimes the debates, discussions, candidates and parties raise fundamental questions about what kind of society we want to live in. That’s the best we can hope for.

But there is a downside to all this hullabaloo: It gives the impression that the mere existence of the electoral process gives “we the people” a fundamental choice about the kind of state we want. This is not true. The politicians we elect are veneers or facades. They are bandits, but they do not constitute what is called the state. This goes for just about every developed state in the world for the last 200 years.

The whole election process leads people to believe that the state is in embedded in leaders. Not so. In France, this system ended with the execution of Louis XVI; in Germany, with the ascent of Bismarck; and in Russia, with the Bolshevik Revolution. The personal state died in the U.S. pretty early on, as even Thomas Jefferson discovered when he became president in 1801; he felt himself powerless to do anything.

The modern state lives outside the will of a particular leader or administration. Voting and elections only change the temporary managers, but do not touch the core of the problem.

The first book that saw through the facade was by the great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer. It is called, appropriately, The State. It was written in 1908, just as the state had begun to entrench itself deeply into the social order — more so than at any point in the previous thousand years. He described the state as the one class that dominates all others, obeying a
different law and thriving off violence against person and property. He sums up this violence in a phrase: the “political means.” He contrasts this with the “economic means,” the essence of which is voluntary human association and trade. (His book came to have an amazing influence through Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State.)

Violence? That sounds like the opposite of elections, doesn’t it? Surely, we are exercising our free will in deciding who leads us. The truth is that the people who run for office specialize mostly in what they do best: running and getting elected as an end in itself. The real state is beneath the surface of this public theater. It is the vast army of professional bureaucrats and the mandates they carry out. It is the enforcement apparatus that oversees a gargantuan tax code. It is the Federal Register that is too large to print. It is the central bankers, their staffs, their machinery, their mandate to bail out the state no matter what. It is the hundreds and thousands of agencies that purport to control every aspect of life.

No voter ever approved any of this; no election puts any of this at risk. This is because the state itself is not subject to any plebiscite. Imagine if all the elected officials in the entire country and all those who work in their offices decided not to show up to work for an extended period. What would happen? New bills wouldn’t pass. The media wouldn’t have politics to cover. There would be a periodic scramble over superficial issues like the debt limit. But otherwise, the state would go on just as before. Nothing fundamental would change.

Nor is it the case that any of the elected officials have the power to do serious damage to this system. This goes for the president, too. They can often influence the way the state grows, but they can’t actually fundamentally threaten the apparatus itself. The longer they are in office, the less personal power they realize that they have. The reason is simple. The system is not structured to permit them to dismantle it, even if they wanted to. They are temporary managers of a ruling class, and the members of this class mostly scoff at these people, treating them like actors on a stage that the class itself owns.

The best source to gain a full grasp of the realities of the modern state apparatus is Robert Higgs’ amazing work , Against Leviathan. No contemporary author has so fully documented the vast expanse of the modern leviathan in all its permutations. He sees how welfare and warfare are not opposed to each other, but work together to form the main two activities of the modern state. He sees how central banking works to sustain the system. He understands the ways in which the state serves as a cash cow for every form of interest group, and how it works to trick
the population into believing that the state is doing good for people when it is really wrecking their lives.

Most of all, Higgs gets that the political system that so enraptures the public mind is not owned by us. It is owned and managed by the state itself and for a precise purpose: to perpetuate the idea that we have all chosen the regime that rules us. That is why there is so little difference between the political parties. As Higgs puts it, the U.S. has “two revolving factions of a one-party state farcically masquerade as authentic alternatives, the one specializing in crushing economic freedom and the other concentrating on crushing every other form of freedom.”

After the election is all over — in a grueling 10 months! — and our new managers take their seats, the talking heads will tell us once more: “The system worked.” Yes, it did work in exactly the way they want it to work. Nothing much will change. If you don’t like the results, there is something wrong with you. If you don’t like the rules, taxes, human suffering, wars, inflation, intrusions, confiscations and all the rest of the apparatus, you had better run for office, give to another candidate or otherwise throw yourself into the politics full time!

This is not choice. When we go to the grocery, we face a choice of what to buy. Or we can walk out without buying at all, keeping our money instead. Whatever the result, it is really in our hands. The electoral system is different. The store is the state. The products it offers are produced by the state. There is no real choice, only enough shadings of differences to keep us entertained. And we cannot really walk away. There is “no none of the above” and there is no keeping your own money.

Every once in a while, someone comes along who offers a fundamental challenge to the whole racket and somehow manages to attract public attention and even use the system to urge the dismantling of the system. This is what has happened with the candidacy of Ron Paul, and it is precisely why the media strains so hard to keep from reporting on him or letting others speak out for his views.

The elites are not so concerned that he can be elected. The system is fixed well enough to prevent that outcome. The real threat — and Dr. Paul understands this better than anyone — is the fundamental intellectual challenge that he offers. His book Liberty Defined contains enough radicalism and enough intellectual power to destabilize the entire structure that Oppenheimer and Higgs have so beautifully described.

The ideas in these books are far more powerful than any ballot box. They expose the illusion of choice for what it is and unmask the violence embedded in the state-dominated society, a system that no one chose but has been imposed on the population through propaganda, wars, payoffs and every manner of trickery. If there were a way to re-channel all the human energy that people put into politics into reading and thinking, the state would have finally meet its match.

Regards,

Jeffrey Tucker

Elections and the Illusions of Choice was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

The background: On Inauguration Day 2009, 2 million people converged on Washington, D.C.

“Two million people don’t gather in one place unless things are really good, or really bad,” we observed that day. There is a fine line between the two.

Almost three years later, on Oct. 11, 2011, we stepped in the proverbial crotte when we suggested in the 5 Min. Forecast that the disappointment of “the crowd” that had gathered on the National Mall that day had manifested itself in two ways: the Tea Party on the political right and Occupy Wall Street on the political left, suggesting there are “uncomfortable parallels” between the two movements.

“Absolutely not!” cried a representative sample from the Tea Party. “The Wall Street protesters are the virus. The Tea Party is the antidote. The stark and direct contrast between the two groups could not be more noticeable. We have one group demanding everything for nothing (Wall Street protesters). The other group is demanding the government stop taking, regulating and restricting everything.”

“Maybe you should spend more time finding libertarian values within the movement,” countered another voice, “which I strongly believe is our last hope. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is bringing the widespread outrage against crony capitalism and bought government into the headlines. Don’t assist in the mainstream media’s attempts to marginalize them.”

The debate broke out a week to the day after I had attended a meeting titled Conference on a Stable Dollar: Why We Need It and How to Achieve It, hosted by the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. One notable attendee I had the good fortune of meeting at the conference was a gentleman by the name of Ralph Benko. Mr. Benko, a Forbes contributor, has been in his capacity as fellow at the Lehrman Institute arguing for a new, improved gold standard for three decades.

“No contortions are needed,” Mr. Benko wrote the day after the conference, suggesting one idea unifies the popular protests, “to cross the bridge between the ‘profiteer-hating’ #OWS and the sober reformers gathered in monetary conclave by the Heritage Foundation. The official website of Occupy Wall Street contains an entire forum dedicated to the gold standard. While by no means unanimous, a theme emerges that elegantly is summarized by one of the activists there: ‘Gold and silver. Been honest money since the dawn of time. The only money that has ever worked….’”

Indeed, in the preface to The Case For Gold, the minority report from the presidential 1982 Gold Commission, Ron Paul provides for common ground between the Tea Party and those who would Occupy Wall Street. “Whenever governments are granted the power to purchase their own debt,” Dr. Paul writes, “they never fail to do so, eventually, destroying the value of the currency. Political money always fails because free people eventually reject it.

“For short periods, individual countries can tell their citizens to use paper, but only at the sacrifice of personal and economic liberty.”

The Case for Gold, Dr. Paul’s “Lost Gold Bible,” was written to demonstrate “as clearly as possible the choice available to us: political (paper) money or commodity (real) money… Making the wrong choice will jeopardize our political freedom and destroy the possibility of restoring a truly productive economy.” Never have those words wrung as true as they do today… whether you’re a curmudgeonly Tea Party conservative or a dirty Occupy “hippie.”

Ironically, the kerfuffle between the two groups arose while we were convening for our Agora Financial Reserve Safety & Survival Summit in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. We screened our new documentary, Risk! for the audience assembled there. Risk! follows a unique set of entrepreneurs as they wend their way through an increasingly regulated economy fraught with litigation and other onerous hurtles to success. As such, we’ve been ruminating on the role of the entrepreneur as the engine of the economy and sole creator of jobs for well on two years now.

The entrepreneur is the antithesis to the politician and benefits most from economic freedom. The society as a whole prospers as a consequence. (You’ll have to view the film and decide on your own if we got the premise right!)

“We have a melting place of ideas,” Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, says in an interview we conducted for Risk!

We have the desire, the know-how and the goods. But frankly, we often find ourselves fighting our own government.

What’s changing American society is that we used to be people who did things by ourselves. We were brave. We went out there and we fought for the next generation. We gave more to our government than we expected back. Now it’s shifted. Now there’s a large portion of society, about half of Americans, getting checks from the government. It’s entitlement.

You’re entitled to all these things, and if you don’t succeed, it’s not your fault, it’s the companies’ fault, and you’ll sue them or the government owes you this.

Today, we have a mind-set among a large portion of our population of entitlement, which is very, very different than our parents’ generation and their parents’ generation, where you come here with nothing, it’s a gift to be a citizen here and it’s such an opportunity.

The American dream is not a guarantee that you are going to succeed. It’s just a guarantee of equal opportunity to try to succeed. It’s not a guarantee of equal results.

The popular uprisings of both the “right” and the “left” — as onerous and misleading as those political wedge terms can be — would benefit from a return to a system of honest money in which, to quote Dr. Paul again, “the people are in charge, not the politicians and the bankers.”

“No reason why the Tea Party can’t unite with Wall Street protesters,” writes a third voice from the fracas in The 5, “and really sock it to those nervous suckers who occupy the Hill.

“2012 is already shaping up to be an especially dramatic year.”

Amen. Bring it on.

Regards,

Addison Wiggin

Politics, Paper Money, and the United States Entrepreneurial Culture was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

The article continues:

Such a move would help to stabilize the value of the dollar, restore confidence among foreign investors in U.S. government bonds, and discourage reckless federal spending, the media mogul and former presidential candidate said.

If the gold standard had been in place in recent years, the value of the U.S. dollar would not have weakened as it has and excessive federal spending would have been curbed, Forbes told HUMAN EVENTS.

[...] the idea “makes too much sense” not to gain popularity as the U.S. economy struggles to create jobs, recover from a housing bubble induced by the Federal Reserve’s easy-money policies, stop rising gasoline prices, and restore fiscal responsibility to U.S. government’s budget, Forbes insisted.

With a stable currency, it is “much harder” for governments to borrow excessively, Forbes said.

That’s all good stuff, Steve. But really? Are you kidding?

In politics, things generally don’t happen because they “help the nation” or “make too much sense”. If we lived in that kind of world, and the 19th century gold standard had so much going for it, then why was it abandoned in favor of the present system?

It was abandoned for political reasons. Factors leading to the demise of the gold standard were the desire of governments to spend in excess of politically tolerable levels of taxation, the desire to finance World War I and other wars, and the wishes for a lender of last resort to bail out over-leveraged banks when they had insufficient reserves to cover their losses.

$7.95

Political reasons have a logic of their own quite different from the kind of logic that Forbes is using in which good things happen for good reasons. In politics, interest groups organize to gain influence over the government and implement policies for their own benefit, at the expense of the rest of society.

But why does political logic defeat common sense? The public choice school of economics has given us an explanation of the insidious process by which the few exploit the many. They point out that concentrated benefits and dispersed costs lead to rational ignorance. Translating, “concentrated benefits” are the large returns earned by the privileged groups through subsidies or bailouts.

For each one of us tax payers, the cost of any individual bailout or welfare program is quite small, hence “dispersed costs”.  In looking at political action to fight the system, the individual taxpayer faces the following set of tradeoffs: the time and effort to understand even one piece of legislation or policy is substantial, and even if opposition to a particular program were effective, it would only save a few dollars per individual in taxes. This leads to “rational ignorance”, the decision by most taxpayers that the return to working harder at your job or just enjoying life is much greater than the return to political organizing.

Given outcomes that are dominated by public choice logic, the monetary system will not be reformed when “it makes too much sense” to do so. It will not be reformed because it would put government finances on a sound footing, nor to restrain war-making. Stabilizing the dollar won’t do it either. The current monetary system (or as James Grant calls it, non-system) will be replaced, eventually, because it will fail, catastrophically.

What will the alternative to the current regime of central banks, floating exchange rates, and unbacked fiat money look like? Here I must reject the wishful thinking that “things need to get worse so people will be really angry and insist on something better”. Things do not necessarily get better when there is a crisis. Things can get worse and stay worse, or get worse and then go even further downhill.

What exactly Steve Forbes has in mind is nebulous because the term “gold standard” is used differently by different people.  The most conventional definition is a system of national currencies exchanging at fixed rates, with central banks, each one having some gold as a reserve asset. In this world, central banks are obligated to provide a form of convertibility, though reserves held may be less than 100%. Individual nations may, under some conditions, be able to devalue their own national currency relative to the fixed rates and to gold.

For adherents to Murray Rothbard’s theory of banking, the gold standard means gold as money proper with banks holding 100% reserves against demand deposits. Under these conditions there is no necessity or even any purpose to having a central bank and devaluation is a form of default.

What does Forbes have in mind?  He has been associated with supply side economics, who have their own so-called “gold standard”. So-called because it is not much of a gold standard at all, only a rule that the central bank is supposed to manage the inflation of the fiat money system in line with the gold price.

Under this system, gold is not money proper, it is a good whose price is considered the best indicator of the looseness or tightness of monetary policy. As Frank Shostak points out, this system offers none of the advantages of using real gold as money. And why should anyone expect that when push comes to shove, the Fed will follow any rule when the situation seems to demand improvements?

As Murray Rothbard wrote in his critique of a similar money supply growth rule advocated by Milton Friedman, “Of course, Friedman would then advise the Fed to use that absolute power wisely, but no libertarian worth the name can have anything but contempt for the very idea of vesting coercive power in any group and then hoping that such group will not use its power to the utmost.”

When the current system fails, there are two primary barriers to the adoption of a better system. The first is the political actors who moved to abandon the gold standard the first time around haven’t gone away. The vested interest of powerful groups who wish to use the fiat money printing press are still around; if a new opening appears, the usual suspects will apply for their jobs back. That which has not killed them has made them stronger.

[You can read more about these political actors who tried to bury Ron Paul's "Gold Bible" by clicking here.--Ed.]

But the deeper obstacle is ideology. Most economists and central bankers actually believe that a) an economy cannot grow without an increasing quantity of money, b) the gold standard caused the Great Depression, c) The Fed determines monetary policy, a necessary and beneficial function and, d) the banking system needs a lender of last resort in the case of financial crises, you know, those crises that just sort of happen, that come out of no-where with no warning and hit us when we least expect.

None of the preceding propositions are true, but as long as they are accepted factoids, the next monetary system is likely to look a lot more like the current one with extra lipstick than anything that existed in the 19th century.

Regards,

Robert Blumen

Robert Blumen is an independent enterprise software consultant based in San Francisco.

The Gold Standard Cannot Survive Political Logic was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

~ H.L. Mencken

I give a good number of speeches each year. For some time I’ve asked audiences a question: “What useful purpose does the US government serve?” I do that not to be challenging or provocative, but to actually find out if anyone else can think of a useful purpose the government serves. The question at first shocks, then amuses and then perplexes almost everyone because it is both so obvious and outrageous that no one ever thinks of asking it. Most people accept the institution of government because it has always been there; they have always assumed it was essential. People do not question its existence, much less its right to exist.

Government sponsors untold waste, criminality and inequality in every sphere of life it touches, giving little or nothing in return. Its contributions to the commonweal are wars, pogroms, confiscations, persecutions, taxation, regulation and inflation. And it’s not just some governments of which that’s true, although some are clearly much worse than others. It’s an inherent characteristic of all government.

The essence of something is what makes the thing what it is. But surprisingly little study of government has been done by ontologists (who study the first principles of things) or epistemologists (who study the nature of human knowledge). The study of government almost never concerns itself with whether government should be, but only with how and what it should be. The existence of government is accepted without question.

What is the essence of government? After you cut through all the rhetoric, the doublethink and the smokescreen of altruism that surround the subject, you find that the essence of government is force. And the belief it has the right to initiate the use of force whenever expedient. Government is an organization with a monopoly, albeit with some fringe competition, on the use of force within a given territory. As Mao Zedong said, “The power of government comes out of the barrel of a gun.” There is no voluntarism about obeying laws. The consent of a majority of the governed may help a government put a nice face on things, but it is not essential and is, in fact, given with any enthusiasm.

A person’s attitude about government offers an excellent insight into their character. Political beliefs reflect how a person thinks men should relate to one another; they offer a practical insight into how he views humanity at large and himself in particular.

There are only two ways people can relate in any given situation: voluntarily or coercively. Almost everyone, except overt sociopaths, pays at least lip service to the idea of voluntarism, but government is viewed as somehow exempt. It’s widely believed that a group has prerogatives and rights unavailable to individuals. But if that is true, then the Ku Klux Klan, the Irish Republican Army, the PLO – or, for that matter, any group from a lynch mob to a government – all have rights that individuals do not. In fact, all these groups believe they have a right to initiate the use of force when they find it expedient. To the extent that they can get away with it, they all act like governments.

Terrorists, Mobs and Governments

You might object that the important difference between the KKK, IRA, PLO or a simple mob and a government is that they aren’t “official” or “legal.” Apart from common law concepts, legality is arbitrary. Once you leave the ken of common law, the only distinction between the “laws” of governments and the ad hoc proceedings of an informal assemblage such as a mob, or of a more formal group like the KKK, boils down to the force the group can muster to impose its will on others. The laws of Nazi Germany and the USSR are now widely recognized as criminal fantasies that gained reality on a grand scale. But at the time those regimes had power, they were treated with the respect granted to any legal system. Governments become legal or official by gaining power. The fact that every government was founded on gross illegalities – war or revolt – against its predecessor is rarely an issue.

Force is the essence of government. But the possession of a monopoly on force almost inevitably requires a territory, and maintaining control of territory is considered the test of a “successful” government. Would any “terrorist” organization be more “legitimate” if it had its own country? Absolutely. Would it be any less vicious or predatory by that fact? No, just as most governments today (the ex-Communist countries and the kleptocracies of the Third World being the best examples), demonstrate. Governments can be much more dangerous than the mobs that give them birth. The Jacobin regime of the French Revolution is a prime example.

Is the State Necessary?

The violent and corrupt nature of government is widely acknowledged by almost everyone. That’s been true since time immemorial, as have political satire and grousing about politicians. Yet almost everyone turns a blind eye; most not only put up with it, but actively support the charade. That’s because although many may believe government to be an evil, they believe it is a necessary evil. (The larger question of whether anything that is evil is necessary, or whether anything that is necessary can be evil, is worth discussing – perhaps in another forum.)

What, arguably, makes government necessary is the need for protection from other, even more dangerous, governments. I believe a case can be made that modern technology obviates this function.

One of the most perversely misleading myths about government is that it promotes order within its own bailiwick, keeps groups from constantly warring with each other and somehow creates togetherness and harmony. In fact, that’s the exact opposite of the truth. There’s no cosmic imperative for different people to rise up against one another – unless they’re organized into political groups. The Middle East, now the world’s most fertile breeding ground for hatred, provides an excellent example.

Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together peaceably in Palestine, Lebanon and North Africa for centuries, until the situation became politicized after WWI. Until then an individual’s background and beliefs were just personal attributes, not a casus belli. Government was at its most benign, an ineffectual nuisance that concerned itself mostly with extorting taxes. People were busy with that most harmless of activities, making money.

But politics does not deal with people as individuals. It scoops them up into parties and nations. And some group inevitably winds up using the power of the state (however innocently or “justly” at first) to impose its values and wishes on others, with predictably destructive results. What would otherwise be an interesting kaleidoscope of humanity then sorts itself out according to the lowest common denominator peculiar to the time and place.

Sometimes that means along religious lines, as with the Muslims and Hindus in India, or the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland; or ethnic lines, like the Kurds and Iraqis in the Middle East or the Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka; sometimes its mostly racial, as whites and East Indians found out throughout Africa in the 70s, or Argentines, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and other Latins discovered more recently. Sometimes it amounts to no more than personal beliefs, as the McCarthy era in the 1950s and the Salem trials in the 1690s proved.

Throughout history government has served as a vehicle for the organization of hatred and oppression, benefiting no one except those who are ambitious and ruthless enough to gain control of it.

Regards,
Doug Casey

December 30, 2009

Governments Are Just Monopolies on Force was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Doug: Global warming. People like my fanatical neighbors here in Aspen seem perfectly willing to undo centuries of progress because they are completely delusional about global warming. The People’s Republic of Aspen is an epicenter of political correctness.

L: Don’t hold back, Doug, tell me what you really think.

Doug: [Chuckles] Global warming is the most prominent form of mass hysteria raging across the world today. Kids in school these days are almost afraid to breathe, because it will “increase their carbon footprint.” It’s quite amazing, the way carbon, the element all life is based on, has replaced plutonium as the enemy-element. It’s as if the chattering classes are making war on the periodic table of the elements.

Meanwhile, they’ve been changing the cry from “global warming” to “climate change” because there’s so little evidence there’s actually any warming going on. I believe that as little as a decade from now, global warming will be recognized as one of the greatest swindles in world history. It has so little scientific basis, it can only rationally be considered a political scam.

L: If that’s true, will the scam ever be revealed? There was a silly movie – I believe it was called “The Day After Tomorrow” – in which global warming caused the world to suddenly freeze over. If people are willing to think that’s possible, and the only thing certain is that things will change, and any change can be blamed on people, perhaps the con job can be maintained indefinitely. It could become a perpetual guilt trip aimed at the population, just as useful as the one certain churches used for centuries to control people.

Doug: Yes. I think Roseanne Rosannadanna of Saturday Night Live said it best: If it’s not one thing, it’s another. It’s always something.

There’s a professional class of hysterics in the world. They are the same type of people who were walking around in the Middle Ages in sack-cloth, throwing ashes on themselves, saying that the world was going to come to an end.

The world will come to an end, of course, maybe even before the sun dies in about five billion years. But these people have no perspective at all. They don’t realize that the earth is just an insignificant ball of dirt, in a nothing/nowhere star system, in a nothing/nowhere galaxy – of which there are billions, each containing billions and billions of stars. And that’s just in this universe. There’s reason to believe that there’s an almost infinite number of universes like ours, with new ones being created virtually every second.

And these people are worried about changes in the biosphere of this one, tiny little planet. To me, it makes no sense.
But dropping from the sublime, cosmic scale down to the local level, it’s still completely ridiculous.

L: Okay, let’s talk about that. What are the facts? How ridiculous is fear of climate change?

Doug: Contrary to the blatantly untrue statements these people make about the science being “settled,” if the science indicates anything at all, it indicates that anthropogenic global warming is not significant. Remember, the question is not so much whether there is any warming – which is another question – but whether human activity is a major, or even significant, contributing factor to global warming.

Of course men can have an effect on the planet. We have wiped out numerous species that we know about, just in historic times, like the dodo, the passenger pigeon. And we almost did in the North American bison. Of course we have an impact, and people do make mistakes. It’s unfortunate. And because of the butterfly effect (because of quantum effects, tiny changes can have huge consequences, such as a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world resulting in a hurricane on the other side), humans could have a big effect on climate change – but so could everything else. The point is that there are other factors that have orders of magnitude greater impacts on the earth’s climate, things that are tens, hundreds, and thousands of times more important to the climate than anything mankind can do – perhaps even including a major nuclear war.

Fear is being used by the political class as an excuse to accumulate more power and self-importance – and collect a lot more taxes to support their agenda. Instead of being stampeded into the dark fantasy, we should focus on increasing our wealth and our knowledge. Eventually, mankind’s fate will depend on our technological advancement. Nature teaches us – not that many environmentalists listen – that we need to colonize the rest of the solar system, and beyond. Mankind must diversify, so all our eggs aren’t in one planetary basket.

But as an aside, I have to say I’m not sure I care if mankind is going to survive – I’m not sure why anyone should care, since most of us aren’t going to live more than three score and ten years anyway. Perhaps the world ends when we end… Mankind’s future seems beyond any individual’s concern, at least beyond the lifespan of your immediate friends and family. Too much worrying about things beyond your control can turn you into a busybody.

L: You’re speaking as one with no children. Having children, I have a different view on that.

Doug: How about your great-great-grandchildren, whom you’ll probably never meet?

L: I’m not so sure about that. Life is already longer than it has ever been in history, and medical technology keeps advancing. And that’s not even getting into nanotechnology. I believe my generation may live for centuries, aside from violent death and acute, fatal illnesses.

Doug: Well, I’m sympathetic to that view. But the morality of caring for one’s posterity is a philosophical issue we can perhaps discuss another day. For now, I’ll say that I don’t like to think of myself as a survival machine for my genes – so I don’t give a damn what happens to my genes. I have my own plans. The consideration I would have for my children, if I did have any, would be reserved for those who earned it as individuals, not just because they’re my children.

L: I recall your Roman attitude about that, but that’s also a conversation for another day. Back to global warming… it’s been a while since I’ve researched this, but I seem to recall that the latest actual science is that there has, in fact, been some warming recorded in the Northern Hemisphere over the 20th century, but there’s insufficient data on the Southern Hemisphere, and the warming has been less than the global-warming models predicted.

Doug: Well, as I understand it, for the last five years or so, it’s been getting cooler, not warmer, and that’s entirely apart from the fact that back in the 1970s, all the magazines were showing pictures of glaciers toppling over the buildings of New York, because we were going into a new ice age. Even measuring the temperature is problematical, since many historical sites that were once isolated are now surrounded by civilization. It’s impossible to cover all the bases in a brief conversation like this, because there have been volumes and volumes and volumes written on this.

But look, the climate on this planet has been changing since Day One. When the solar system was formed, our best guess is about 4.2 billion years ago, things were very, very cold – as cold as deep space. Then, after the sun ignited, things got very, very hot. And, in essence, things have been cooling ever since.

Remember, there have been numerous ice ages, starting with a first period of glaciation thought to have occurred about 2.3 billion years ago, during the early Proterozoic eon, after the appearance of oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere. There was one that lasted over 200 million years, from about 850 to 630 million years ago, called the Cryogenian period, in which the ice caps may have met at the earth’s equator, covering the planet completely. Geologists actually define the earth as being in an interglacial period of the most recent ice age (the Quaternary glaciation), which started about 2.6 million years ago, during the late Pliocene. Ice sheets have advanced and retreated every 40,000 to 100,000 years or so, with the last glacial period, which covered North America and Europe with glaciers thousands of feet thick, having ended only about 10,000 years ago. So it’s no surprise that the climate has been generally warming since then.

So, the climate has gotten hotter, then cooler, hotter, cooler… And for the last 10,000 years or so, it’s gotten warmer. That’s the fact of the matter – and generally, warmer is better. The whole of the earth’s existence is marked by changes in climate. It happens naturally.

L: Why?

Doug: There are lots of reasons. One is cosmic rays, which is to say, radiation coming from billions of stars, light-years away. Cosmic rays have a huge impact on cloud formation. And cloud formation has a huge impact on the climate.

A second reason is changes in the ocean and its currents. The ocean has vastly greater mass than the atmosphere, so it’s a far greater heat-sink, and its currents have a major influence on climate.

Another is volcanism. Just in historic times we’ve seen major climate impact from volcanism. For example, there was Mt. Tambora, the most powerful volcanic eruption in history, which happened in April of 1815, killing thousands of people directly and tens of thousands indirectly through starvation. The eruption altered global climate so dramatically, 1816 became known as The Year Without a Summer, as crops and livestock around the planet were wiped out. Just one of these big eruptions, by the way, can dump more toxic pollutants into the atmosphere than man has created in the entire industrial age.

L: I happen to have been kicking rocks recently in a caldera in Idaho that was the location of the last eruption of the Yellowstone hot spot, before it blew the current Yellowstone caldera into existence. By way of comparison, Mt. St. Helens blew 0.7 cubic kilometers of rock into the air, covering half of Washington with four inches of ash. The eruption that created the caldera I was standing on blew about 1,000 cubic kilometers of rock into the air. Such an eruption, today, I was told, would kill everything as far away as Chicago.

Doug: Right, and imagine all the gases that would go with that. Sulfur compounds and the like – you want to talk about ecological disasters! And these ninnies are bicycling and recycling to save the planet from our puny little smoke-stacks. When something like the potential volcano under Long Valley caldera at Mammoth Lake in California or the Yellowstone caldera blows – and that could be two years from now, or two thousand years from now, nobody knows – it’s anticipated that these will be among the largest volcanic eruptions ever. And that’s just picking two in North America.

L: I remember a park ranger in Yellowstone telling my family that, in geological terms, the next Yellowstone eruption is overdue.

Doug: Yes, and there are other situations like that. Consider the near statistical certainty of the earth encountering a piece of space debris large enough to have an impact on the earth’s climate. The last one we know of was the Tunguska event in 1908, which is thought to have been caused by a meteor only a few tens of meters across and still leveled almost a thousand square miles of trees.

Worse than sticking their heads in the sand about this, these people are trying to stop science from progressing, ruining everyone’s lives in the here and now in the process. They think they are saving the planet, but in the end, the planet’s fate is out of our hands, and their obstruction could keep people from getting off this planet while they can.

But we haven’t talked about the main thing – and really, ultimately, the only climate change variable that really matters – which is the sun. Relative to the sun, everything else is totally trivial. Which, much as deluded believers in the omnipotence of the state might not believe, is beyond the power of human governments to regulate. To me, this is really the proof that the whole climate change thing is just a scam perpetrated by the ill-informed and ill-intentioned on the ignorant and the credulous.

L: What, specifically, does the sun do that swamps other effects?

Doug: The sun has a number of cycles it goes through, the sunspot cycle, for example, that have a huge impact on the earth’s climate. The sun is essentially all that keeps the earth from being an iceball a few degrees above absolute zero, so any change in it has major consequences for the earth.

The climate change people forget that within this pattern of warming and cooling, modern man only really came on the scene in the warming period after the last period of glaciation ended 10,000 years ago, and civilization has only been around for less than 5,000 years – which has generally been a period of global warming. Interestingly enough, the collapse of the Han Dynasty and the Roman Empire coincide with a period of global cooling, resulting in what’s commonly called the Dark Ages. And then we had the medieval warm period – when wine was grown in England and crops in Greenland – that ended with the Renaissance. Fortunately, technology had enough momentum by then that we kept advancing through the Little Ice Age, which ended only about 150 years ago. Things have been warming up since then.

Global warming hysterics generally have limited scientific knowledge, and of geology and meteorology in particular. Their belief is not science; it’s more akin to religion. The main epicenter of hysteria is not the scientific community but seems to be Hollywood. The charge is being led by actors and celebrities given free access to the pulpit by the talking heads on the various entertainment media – and you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think news shows are primarily entertainment. Through the intellectual lightweights that populate most of our classrooms, their ideas spread to our kids, and they filter up from the kids to their parents, who end up feeling guilty about something they don’t understand.

One of the worst things about all this is that it may in the future discredit science itself in the eyes of the common man. When it becomes clear to everyone that the whole global-warming scare is as silly as the tin-foil hats of the 1970s, people could mistakenly think that science itself is silly, because of all these people claiming science proves that anthropogenic global warming is real.

L: Well, maybe. But people don’t believe the sun revolves around the Earth anymore either. Lots of “scientific” notions change without damaging science itself.

Doug: True enough. But unfortunately, anthropogenic global warming has become the scientific issue. And worse, today most funding for science comes through government. That means that you have to be known to be sympathetic to conclusions that are acceptable to the political classes. It’s a shameful thing, and many scientists will deny it, but a lot of today’s research is politically biased. They like to think they are unbiased, but they all know what’s more and what’s less likely to get funded – and what politically incorrect words at conferences and budget meetings can get funding cut. It’s only human for such opinions to have an effect – which is why scientists use double-blind experiments when the beliefs of the researchers themselves can sway the outcome of experiments.

If you don’t robotically accept and parrot the “fact” of anthropogenic global warming, you’re looked upon as the moral equivalent of a holocaust denier. I’ve heard members of the chattering class actually come out and say things like this.

L: But this is science. In spite of the peer pressure and such, shouldn’t the facts lead to correct conclusions?

Doug: They should, but science is no longer the province of individual researchers. A rich amateur could be, and often was, a scientist back in Ben Franklin’s day, simply because it amused him. That afforded a great degree of independence. Today it seems to take billions of dollars to study almost anything, and the state is the center of big money these days. The result is that science is no longer run by scientists; it’s run by politicians – or to be more precise, by bureaucratic administrators who dispense money according to their own agendas.

L: So, would you say that in this environment, the peer-review process has become counter-productive, and now, instead of assuring standards, it assures desired answers?

Doug: I believe the peer review process has probably been corrupted. People are afraid to say things, to consider hypotheses unbiased research might support, because it’s become such a politically charged atmosphere.

L: They could lose their funding.

Doug: Exactly. So anything and everything you listen to on this subject of climate change – including what I’m saying today – is something you should investigate and analyze for yourself. Draw your own independent conclusions. But if you draw the conclusion that anthropogenic global warming is a fraud, you may find yourself reluctant to say it in public, for fear of being hunted down as a heretic and ridiculed by the hoi polloi.

L: Perish the thought that they might come to the conclusion that a little global warming might be a good thing. Coasts might change a bit, but you’d have longer growing seasons and more food for everyone…

Doug: Right. And – gasp! – people might not need to burn so much fossil fuel to keep warm in the winter, cutting back on pollution. Who knows? Look, no one can predict whether the earth will be cooler or hotter next year, let alone do anything to change it. If you’re afraid of global warming, turn off the lights when you leave the room – but don’t participate in the corruption of science, don’t scare our kids with unproven cataclysmic theories, and don’t try to ban economic energy sources that people living on this planet depend upon today. And don’t try to stop progress; it’s the only hope the earth has of seeing clean industry, short of exterminating mankind.

L: Well, I did ask you to tell us what you really think…

Doug: You know I would have anyway.

December 28, 2009

Climate and the Fate of Humanity was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Some 9,000 homes and lots went up for tax foreclosure auction in the American symbol of industrial urban failure…yet 80% of them remain unsold despite a minimum bid of $500.

How the world turns.

Once Detroit was a dynamic city, the urban equivalent perhaps of a can-do, modern woman, the kind who could have easily attracted money and devotion from deep-pocketed suitors.

But now the ol’ gal just ain’t what she used to be. “Motor City” must sting like an accusation. Her industries are gone and the political props have only prevented the sort of changes that she needed to retain her vitality.

Now she’s lost her looks…and her dignity…and the only ones willing to touch her aren’t willing to pay very much. But apparently a few banks are hoping to buy claims to pimp Detroit out, while making absolutely no investment in improving her lot.

“Critics say the poor showing at the auction underscores the limits of using a market-based system to clean up property tax problems.”

No kidding!

Critics are always blaming a market-based system…even when it was politics fighting the market that made things so bad in the first place. And God forbid that the market tries to clean things up.

There are plenty of people who would love to buy Motor City’s properties cheap and actually move into the city…but the banks keep outbidding them for the decent properties.

The banks, of course, are hoping to make a quick profit…but property prices improve only when the right kind of productive, mindful people move in and form strong local economies.

By buying up the properties, banks are pricing out precisely the kind of people who would make their investments pay off!

I suspect the banks believe that they can simply count on the government kicking off another real estate bubble with the old bag of tricks: by manipulating interest rates and the cost of money and debt. And who can blame them?

We’ve all been conditioned to believe that politics will trump markets forever, that the universe runs on votes instead of physics. Things will–predictably–get worse until this belief is temporarily wrung out of our collective consciousness.

In the meantime, consider homesteading in Detroit. In a little while, the banks will have lost their taste for speculation…along with another chunk of taxpayer money.

Living in Detroit would be rough at first, like living on the frontier full of hostile natives: Mad Max meets the Ol’ West. And it may not pay off. Cities do die occasionally, you know.

But that’s what smart investment is all about. The gains are puny when the chances of success are high. If risk has its rewards, then Detroit’s abandoned streets may be hiding gold under the grit.

Regards,
Gary Gibson
Managing Editor, Whiskey & Gunpowder

October 26, 2009

Detroit Real Estate: Down and Out at Market Value was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

“Politics is about what works,” someone once said. Someone said it…someone who is an imbecile. Politics is not about what works, it’s about what you can get away with. And what you can get away with is often exactly what doesn’t work at all.

What the United States is getting away with, from a financial point of view, in addition to counterfeiting, is grand larceny on a Super-Madoff scale. It is borrowing trillions of dollars even though it has no way to honestly pay back the money.

Still, so eager are the lenders to part with their money that the 10-year T-note yields a miserly 3.46%. The more the feds borrow, apparently, the more lenders are willing to lend. But this is a story that will end badly.

Warren Buffett described the America of the bubble years as “Squanderville.” Private citizens were living beyond their means, he pointed out. But he hadn’t seen nothin’. Now, government does the squandering. The politicians are spending trillions they don’t have on projects nobody was willing to pay for even when they had some money in their pockets.

What the government can get away with now – under cover of a financial crisis – is a big grab for money and power. It ‘works’ in the sense the feds are able to get away with it. But it will prove fatal to the dollar…and to the US economy.

The Fed is intervening in markets as no Fed ever has. Its balance sheet – a measure of how much intervention it has done – has shot up in a way that is not only unprecedented, but also almost unbelievable. In an effort to provide liquidity, the Fed has bought up the contents of every neglected refrigerator on Wall Street. This smelly, furry stuff enters the Fed’s books as an asset, along with various not-so-pungent assets like US Treasury bonds. Altogether, the Fed’s balance sheet shows more than $2.7 trillion worth of this unappetizing hodgepodge.

“It’s not sound economics – nor is it ethical – to trash the US dollar and bail out incompetent investors who poured billions into CMBS at the peak of the bubble,” says Strategic Short Report’s Dan Amoss. “There is no longer a ‘systemic risk’ argument for The Fed to be propping up the price of such securities.

What happens next?

We don’t know. But it is far too early to expect the Fed to withdraw its easy-money policy. The Fed will have to stay on this road for much, much longer. Why? Because the “green shoots” are shriveling up. There is no real economic revival. And there can’t be one until the underlying problems are corrected.

One of the big problems is too much capacity. During the Bubble Epoque the squanderers would buy anything. So, you could make an almost unlimited amount of money by providing them with things to buy. This meant building factories…buying trucks…and renting retail space. Now, however, the squanderers have come to their senses…or maybe they’ve just come to the limit of their credit lines. The squanderers now want to save their money. So, no need for so much retail space in the malls, so many trucks on the highways or so much retail space.

There are a number of sit-down restaurant chains that cater to the middle class – Applebee’s…Chili’s…Ruby Tuesday and a few others. They expanded greatly during the ’90s and ’00s in order to meet the desires of the big-spending masses. But now that the masses aren’t so free and easy with their money, the New York Times reports that these chains are in desperate competition for remaining diners. This competition is manifesting itself as price deflation.

Applebee’s offers dinner for two for only $20. Chili’s advertises entrees for just $7. Ruby Tuesday’s is going for a 2-for-1 deal. Buy one meal, get one free. All of them are making heavy use of discount coupons.

Oversupply is producing deflation. Prices are falling as suppliers fight for demand by offering more for less. And over at the Red Roof…the roof has already caved in, as the chain has defaulted on its mortgage debt.

This is what you’d expect at the end of a long period of credit expansion. EZ credit brought forth too much demand and too much supply. Now, the demand is disappearing…and the suppliers struggle to hold on.

Even now, we’re facing an economy in which 70% of our economic output depends on consumer buying. And consumers are in no condition to consume. Ergo, no buyers, no recovery.

Economic contraction is natural, normal and perhaps necessary to a market economy. And the current contraction will take years to sort out. Roofs have to fall in on thousands of enterprises, speculators and households. Then, the rebuilding can begin.

But the Bernanke Fed is not about to let nature take her course. Don’t expect any tightening from the Fed anytime soon, dear reader…it is far too soon for that.

Governments are essentially parasites on productive activity. So the best governments are the smallest – meaning, the least parasitic. As has been said before, “That government is best which governs least.”

But now we are in the third and fatal stage of a great country – the political stage. In this stage, the parasites take over. Government governs a lot. And governing a lot costs a lot of money. In England, the government budget is bumping up against half the total GDP of the nation. In America, health care is still largely a private matter, so the government spends a smaller percentage of GDP…but it is a percentage that is rising quickly.

Where will the money come from? Taxes? Gordon Brown has already put the income tax rate up to 50%. Michael Caine, an English actor who moved from the U.S. to England to escape the high taxes of the ’70s, says he will tolerate 50%…but not a penny more.

“If it goes to 51% I will be back in America,” he says.

Ahem…he might have to try somewhere else. Everybody’s gunning for the rich – in America as well as in England. Obama has pledged to raise taxes on the rich. The states, notably California, are desperate for more revenue too. Add federal, state and local levies…and private health care costs…and you could easily be over the 50% bracket in America too.

The history of European monarchies is largely a history of debt. Kings and queens squeezed what they could out of the turnips. Then they turned to the moneylenders. These lenders had to be careful. They were happy to extend monarchs credit, because in this way they gained a measure of control over them. But there were many dangers. Kings lost their heads…or went broke. Or, often, the monarchs could turn the tables on the moneylenders…and have their heads cut off. Reading the history of the loans to the French crown is eye-opening. It is amazing anyone wanted to lend at all. The risks were great; the rewards were few. Rarely were the loans settled honorably.

Government raises money. Sometimes it repays the loan with revenues from other taxes. Sometimes, it is the lender who pays the tax himself – either because the government defaults…or because inflation reduces the value of his money. What you come to see is that lending to the government – which always has the power to betray the loan and behead the lender – is merely another form of taxation. But the lender can blame no one but himself for his losses. The wounds he suffers are self-inflicted.

This is a story that often ends badly, if not disastrously.

Regards,
Bill Bonner

August 26, 2009

The Political Phase and the Death of Nations was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

How about slavery?  Suppose one of your friends began to argue in earnest that slavery was not only beneficial in history because the nations of the west were built on free labor from whipped African backs, but that the nations of the world need to return to a slave economy.  If it’s the only political position they will entertain, would you continue to be their friend?

But suppose to justify the slavery this person said things like, “these people simply cannot take care of themselves,” “they’re far too simple and stupid to live free,” and “they need to be protected from the world and their own bad behavior.”  Could you see how they might have a point?

Suppose this person said the slaves would be allowed to choose their masters and the work they did to serve those masters.  It might be a bit arduous and complicated for the slaves to change their positions, or it may be made simpler with bribes and favors.  But either way the slaves may not work if they don’t have a master’s even hand to guide them.  And if they work for themselves, their most recent master may hunt them down and force them to work for him or even kill them if they resist.  Would that convince you to believe in the righteousness of this person’s plan?

Suppose that the slaves this person wants to create were allowed by their master to keep as much as half of what they earned after all accounts with the master were settled—perhaps they could keep as much as three quarters if they weren’t able to earn much—Instead of just the shacks and rags and vegetable patches that were the bulk of the possessions of slaves in the US of old.  And suppose also the slaves were allowed to trade what they were allowed to keep with other slaves in ways approved of by the masters.  Would you accept their position as reasonable then?

Suppose this person insisted everybody—both you and he included—should be enslaved this way.  And suppose instead of “slaves” this person says these people should be called “citizens,” that the nations of the world may be their masters, and that most of the rest of the people in the world have already submitted to this position.  Would that make the enslavement they propose tolerable?

Regards,
Chris Hitzroth

May 21, 2009

Political Intolerance was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

It’s not because I’m a computer wizard (far from it), nor is it because I’m addicted to video games involving animated fighting of fantasy creatures. It isn’t because I’m a champion Dungeons & Dragons player, a widely published author of Lord of the Rings fan fiction, or because I drive some little electric roller skate of a car — although this one thing alone would qualify me…

It’s because every year in January, I watch the State of the Union address, instead of the NFL playoffs.

All right, so maybe I am a dork.

But since an informal personal poll in my group of like-aged friends showed that I’m one of only a few that watched the speech in real time (not including my colleagues in the publishing world, of course), that makes me a dork who’s at least somewhat in touch with the American political process…

And as troubling as it may be that a lot of American 30-somethings seemingly aren’t paying much attention to the goings-on of our political machine (clearly, they aren’t — look at how sporadically they vote), it’s nowhere near as troubling as what was in the State of the Union address itself — and what wasn’t.

Statists of the Union

Along with most of America, my feelings about George Dubya have been pretty wobbly of late. Not that they were ever as cheerleader-ish as many of my critics would claim…

However, I’ll admit there have been moments when the man’s, uhh, uncomplicated leadership has loaned a much-needed singularity of vision to certain political endeavors, in my opinion. His was the opposite of Carter’s “analysis to paralysis” style — and a refreshing change from Clinton’s finger-to-the-wind, ask-the-wife-first, what-they-don’t-know-can’t-hurt-’em method of governance.

I say “was” because Bush has clearly morphed — like most modern lame-duck American politicians — into a shapeless, spineless entity more worried about his legacy than his country. Borrowing a page from the Democrats’ playbook, Bush has tailored his rhetoric and agenda toward not principles or leadership, but appeasement and capitulation to those in power, and a more favorable depiction among those who write tomorrow’s accounts of today’s history…

Seriously, all partisanship aside (literally — I’m feeling like a man without a party these days), I want those of you reading this who actually watched the State of the Union address to ask yourselves this question:

If you somehow didn’t know that George W. Bush was a Republican president, could you have figured it out by what he said in his speech?

I’ll tell you right now that I couldn’t have, at least not by any of the yardsticks the GOP likes to claim as its own. Aside from a token bit of nebulous rhetoric about erasing the deficit and balancing the federal budget — laughable coming from the mouth of what has to be one of the biggest-spending, government-bloating presidents in history — many of Bush’s talking points sounded like some of Bill Clinton’s, and Al Gore’s, from various speeches during their tenure…

Only not as well (or even as convincingly) articulated.

That’s one of the main reasons I’m writing this rambling discourse today: Because I’m alarmed at the fact that the rhetoric of the two dominant political parties in the U.S. today seems always to inexorably blend together when there’s a balance of power between them in our government — like a pair of amoebas mating…

Actually, I’m not alarmed. That’s what they do, politicians. They test the wind, kiss each other’s butts, line each other’s pockets, and then tell us what they think we want to hear while telling each other whatever pays them the most. And we all know it. What’s worse, we’ve all grown to expect and accept it. What disgusts me about it is that they all tell the same lies, just at different times — yet ALWAYS toward the same goal: a bigger and more intrusive government.

In this respect, at least across the span of the election and reign of the current administration, the Democrats are far less deceptive than their Republican rivals. Though they try to understate it in election years, most times, the left makes little effort to conceal its desire to expand government — they see it as the cure to all our ills. The GOP, however, rides to power on the votes of millions of Americans who cling naively to the hope that it is the “smaller government” party it claims to be…

Then it legislates and spends us into the governmental equivalent of a diabetic coma too!

And in this State of the Union speech, I heard not only the same old lies in frilly, updated verse, but also a whole pack of new ones that I find so brazen and absurd I can’t stay quiet about them. Here are just a few of the low spots, for me…

The Speech As Spin

Aside from being one of the least meaty State of the Union addresses I can remember, Bush 43′s latest effort rung throughout with a kind of desperation, in my opinion — not the desperate will to persevere in policy leadership against newly empowered political adversaries, but the need to simply be a relevant part of changing policies that are well beyond his control.

Though well delivered (for him), the speech smacked more of issue ownership than initiative. In other words, the status-quo “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” mentality that so frequently pervades two-party American politics. A few examples…

SPENDING

Dubya spoke with conviction about a return to “spending discipline” in government. But does this mean “spending cuts”? Because I didn’t hear much in the speech about what programs, entitlements, or benefits are in line to get the ax. In the address, Bush never makes the promise to actually trim any spending at all. Instead, he appears to be relying on future tax revenues computed from his own rosy economic forecasts to eliminate the federal deficit and balance the budget — without raising taxes.

Yet in the real world of an ever-older American citizenry coupled with a draining invasion of parasitic illegal immigrants (from a free benefits standpoint), his pledge to restrain the spending appetite of the federal government seems contradictory to his stated desire to “fix” Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid with nothing more than “good sense and goodwill.” Again, without raising taxes.

It takes MONEY to bail out these programs. That means other programs have to go or revenue has to increase. Simple as that. Since Bush seems unwilling to do anything but expand programs and entitlements (not to mention tax cuts), where is this money going to come from? Especially in time of war?

Let me be clear: I’m all for tax cuts. They worked to stimulate the economy in Kennedy’s era (he was a fiscal conservative, you know), during the Reagan years, and have arguably worked in the current administration. But how overheated would our economy have to get to sustain tax cuts AND new programs AND a massive benefits bailout AND an expensive war?

Is a boom of such scope even possible, never mind likely? More importantly, were it to occur, would the government REALLY be able to resist the urge to fritter away all that shiny new money squaring the books, instead of on a bunch of programs aimed at increasing your dependence on them?

Uhh, no.

IMMIGRATION

In keeping with Bush’s tone-deafness toward those who got him into office, his plans to double the size of the Border Patrol and to fund “new infrastructure and technology” run contrary to what the American people want — on both sides of the political fence (but especially on the right). A Rasmussen poll in 2005 revealed that more than 60% of Americans favored the construction of a barrier along our nation’s southern border. Surveys closer to the election pegged this number at as much as 80%. Candidates from both parties promised strong action on illegal immigration in the run-up to the 2006 midterm election, with the border fence an oft-mentioned solution…

Yet here we are, talking about the same old stuff. Increasing the Border Patrol. “Guest worker” programs. Employer accountability. These things all expand the scope and reach of government, and increase spending in all the wrong ways — yet do nothing to curb the influx and cost of illegals who come here not for work, but for the free benefits and instant citizenship status for their babies.

To be fair about it, BOTH parties want the illegal tide to continue unabated. The Republicans want it for cheap labor for businesses and the Democrats want it to expand dependency on government, which translates into votes.

But think about it: If ever there were an opportunity for Bush and the Republicans to redeem themselves in the eyes of the people, it’s with this issue.

The GOP already knows that most Americans want the fence. It’s far cheaper and more reliable than expanding the Border Patrol, and people know it. You’d think that even if Bush doesn’t want the fence in his big-business heart of hearts, he would at least aggressively push for it rhetorically to make the Democrats show their true colors by shooting it down…

But NO, he’s got to roll over into the great wishy-washy middle ground that inevitably prevails for both parties. Meanwhile, we pay out ever more in benefits to illegals, lose ever more in taxes from under-the-table wage paying, and STILL live with the most lax border security imaginable!

GAS

Here’s a gem: Bush is going to cut U.S. gasoline consumption by 20% in 10 years. Did you see Cheney’s expression in the background as the Prez unleashed this one? Was that a smirk I saw?

Yeah, this’ll happen. Our country’s population is exploding exponentially. Air travel is such a god-awful pain in the ass that people are driving more for vacations. Cities are expanding into greater and greater sprawl, so commuting distances are getting longer and longer…

Aside from this, “hybrid” gas-electric vehicles aren’t proving as fuel-efficient as they’re touted to be (look this up — it’s true). Ethanol takes more energy to produce than it saves and is a bona-fide nonstarter, as almost any of my Agora Financial comrades can tell you. Hydrogen “fuel cells” are potentially decades off — if manufacturers can work out the safety, range, and supply issues. And although rechargeable electric cars may someday indeed curb gas usage, they would increase consumption of air-polluting coal for electricity generation, not to mention present environmental challenges from this battery disposal.

Basically, this is nothing more than an attempt at issue control. The Republicans know that rank-and-file Americans (especially tomorrow’s voters) are turning greener, and are against dependence on Middle East oil — yet they’re also unwilling to tolerate ramping up domestic oil production…

So they try to rebrand themselves as being on the cutting edge of conservationist policies t A) garner future votes, B) steal some of the opposition’s core thunder, and C) be able to blame a Democrat Congress when this ridiculous proposal fails.

It’s just more of the same type of typical political rhetorical game-playing that marks the Republocrat party that’s perennially running things.

Small Gov Snubbed Forever?

I’m usually pretty good about putting a “bottom line” on these missives, but today I haven’t really got one. I just wanted to vent a bit about the mealy-mouthed, double-tongued nature of two-party American politics, as revealed by the latest State of the Union address — not that this one is so unique in the modern age. And of course, there’s a lot more I could say about the speech to buttress my points (health insurance, the war, etc.), but you already get my drift…

That all American political rhetoric is a crock of crap we’ve come to accept without outrage — and that the two parties are basically dedicated to the same insidious goal of governmental expansion. The fact that they marginally disagree about how best to do this is immaterial.

Basically, the frustrating bottom line for me is this: Not that this would even be possible, but in order for this country to once again have a true two-party parity of ideas, there’d almost have to be a viable THIRD party in the mix (are you listening, Libertarians?). In my opinion, the Republicans are too far gone to reverse course and become the smaller-government “yin” to the Democrats’ “yang.” They’ve sipped from the fountain of big government and found that it was sweet…

Now, the two parties are only truly distinct from one another at their fringes. For the most part, neither is dedicated to preserving our freedoms (perish the thought!) or protecting our citizenry — only extracting the most money out of us to sustain the greatest possible dependency on government.

And at this, they should be toasting each other to their great and continuing success.

Wishing for a State of Disunion,

Jim Amrhein,
Contributing Editor, Whiskey & Gunpowder

January 30, 2007

Where’s the Party? was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.