Re: What Did bin Laden 'Deserve'?

Translation: I am not actually refuting anything, but pretty please accept my fallacy spew as though it did.




At 02:02 PM 5/16/2011, you wrote:

There are so many mistruths,  and prevaricate misleading statements in this article, that I couldn't get past the second sentence in the fourth paragraph.  Not worth responding to any more Moonbats who don't have a friggin' clue about what they are talking about!!
 


 
On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 6:13 PM, Jonathan < jonathanashleyII@lavabit.com> wrote:

What Did bin Laden 'Deserve'?

by Butler Shaffer

Gabriela: And you believe everything the authorities tell you?

Franz Kafka: Well, I have no reason to doubt.

Gabriela: They're authorities! That's reason enough.

~ From the movie Kafka

My recent article on the U.S. government's assassination of Osama bin Laden elicited many favorable responses, along with a negative one that advised me that this man "got what he deserved." The reader went on to ask "how dare you imply that we owed him the 'right' to be captured and brought to justice." How effortlessly we make our judgments when our minds are in the default mode, and we need only parrot the words of those in authority!

The media has long been an echo chamber for the avoidance of independent thought and judgment. It is easy to repeat the party line that the state's enemy du jour "got what he deserved" when one refuses to ask the question "what does any of us 'deserve'?" What do I "deserve?" Do you know what you "deserve," and for what actions? From what set of facts do we draw when we make such judgments about the conduct of others? I am neither a fan nor a defender of bin Laden, but those who are so anxious to invoke "closure" as an excuse for evading inquiries into the nature of governmental policies, might ask themselves why they are so willing to embrace his murder.

An answer to the question "what did bin Laden deserve?" depends upon one's perspective. Even leaving aside the obvious responses that his Al Qaeda sympathizers would make, even patriotic Americans might have differing opinions, depending upon the time period of one's assessment. When the Reagan administration found bin Laden and Al Qaeda useful agents to help rid Afghanistan of Soviet military forces, American politicians took turns posing with these "freedom fighters" for self-serving photo-ops. Their combined efforts drove the Soviets from that country, and helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. For his part in all of this, did bin Laden "deserve" having a statue built to him in Washington, D.C., or a boulevard named for him?

But when his usefulness to American interests terminated – or even became hostile – he was quickly relegated to the character of "villain." This is a tactic long predating Machiavelli, having been useful, in recent years, to transform Saddam Hussein from Donald Rumsfeld's smiling photo-op "friend" to a linch-pin in the axis of evil; to Muammar Gaddafi's mercurial foe/friend/foe role of convenience in American foreign policy. That most Americans insist on remaining so dupable – if not outright stupid – as the state plays out its games of "endless enemies" at their expense, is remarkable.

What did bin Laden "deserve" in all of this? What do any of us "deserve" in our dealings with one another? Is there any principle to which we can turn to help us answer such questions? Do we "deserve" to be coerced, robbed, or killed whenever someone with superior strength is able to do these things to us? Is this the highest social standard to which we can repair? Have the playground bully and the brutalizing parent become the "founding fathers" of our "New World Order?"

If the defenders of state assassinations believe they have found a defensible tactic for resolving disputes – or just promoting their own preferences – should it become more widely available for all of us to employ? If two neighbors have a long-standing dispute as to the ownership of rose bushes along their property boundaries, should they resort to murder to settle the matter? Do we not understand that the problem of urban street-gangs is but politics on a different scale; that Obama's drive-by shooting in a house in Abbottabad differs from such a killing in south-central Los Angeles more in terms of geography than substance? If the political establishment is willing to embrace such methods as a way of eliminating political enemies in foreign countries, should the same practices be acknowledged as appropriate within America? Might we want to rethink the "lone-nut-with-a-gun" explanations most of us eagerly swallowed to explain the deaths of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, et. al. as well as the failed attempts on the lives of Ronald Reagan and George Wallace?

For decades, I have tried to discover whether there is some principle upon which all people can agree to define the propriety of our actions; a proposition that rises above arbitrary subjective preferences. Politically-defined laws will not suffice, since the state – being defined by its use of violence – exists to promote and enforce conflicts among people. Neither have I found so-called "natural law" principles much help, as their content seems to vary from one advocate to another.

The one standard to which I am able to find a virtual consensus is this: no one wants to be victimized. No one accepts that their life or other property interest should be subject to trespass by another. Sadly, most of us have internalized our regular victimization by the state, sanctioning such predations provided (a) we believe everyone else to be so bound – the vicious doctrine of "equality," and (b) if we are to be singled out for maltreatment, that we be accorded "due process of law."

The idea that the military and/or the police – the enforcement arms of the state – could undertake arbitrary and deadly force against any person, finds support among most conservatives. This is why the market for flags and "support the troops" decals blossoms whenever the emperor finds a new "enemy" to attack. It is also why so many conservatives – and even a number of so-called "liberals" – can get their diapers so knotted over the suggestion that Osama bin Laden should have been brought to trial rather than murdered. It is the same mindset that allows police officers to gun down "suspects" without, themselves, being held to account in a court of law.

Suppose a man is "suspected" of having committed a heinous crime (e.g., sexually assaulting and then murdering a small child)? Suppose this man is found and arrested by the police, who then take him into a back alley and kill him? Did he "get what he deserved?" Would you raise any objection to this – unless, of course, you were the suspect – or would you regard demands for a public trial to be only a "loophole" that might allow him to "escape" his punishment? Is a jury determination of "innocence" to be regarded as a "legal technicality?" Is "suspicion" or "accusation" the equivalent of "guilt?" Should "criminal procedure" classes in law school be required to address such matters as "how to organize a lynch mob?" Should a Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon square off with an ACLU activist to debate the question "is justice delayed, justice denied?"

Given the grisly history of lynching in this country – in which the race of the victim was often all that mattered – President Obama who, regardless of where he was born, has more melanin in his system than most Americans, ought to have resisted the self-righteous impulse that has led some people to respond to fear by pulling sheets over their heads!

Don't you understand that if the bin Ladens of the world can be "brought to justice" by government hit-men who, like their Mafia counterparts, then dump the bodies into the ocean, so can you? Insistence upon state-defined "due process of law" is no guarantee that the innocent shall not be punished, but it's an improvement over assassinations, torture, trips to hidden prisons around the world, and the denial of habeas corpus. Jury trials often result in wrongful convictions, but I'd rather take my chances with twelve men and women with no sinister agendas of their own, than with decisions made behind closed doors by the politically unscrupulous. Bin Laden "deserved" a public trial for the same reasons you and I would.

With each passing month, it becomes increasingly evident that the United States of America – as a formal system – is about finished. The Constitution has become virtually meaningless as a means of conducting the business of the state. The "separation of powers" of the various branches of government – which we used to pretend would limit the ambitions of each – has given way to notions of "empire," with the president playing the role of "emperor," able to start wars on his own motion (and without congressional approval); to torture or imprison without trial, or order the assassination of any persona non grata of his designation; to give away hundreds of billions of dollars to his corporate friends; ad nauseum. Over many decades, the powers granted to government in the Constitution – which, far from being limited, speak of "general welfare," "necessary and proper," and "reasonable" – have been given very expansive definitions by the courts. By contrast, the rights reserved to individuals have been accorded very restrictive meanings. In the treatment of bin Laden – as well as the continuing incarcerations at Guantanamo – we see further confirmation that what we once thought of as an inalienable right to a public trial is another illusion sacrificed to the empty rhetoric of "national security."

Though the "United States of America" is in a terminal condition, "America" – as a social system – may yet survive. America preceded the nation-state and, if we can revisit the basic assumptions that underlay the "founding fathers" efforts, we may discover why conditions in which peace, liberty, and respect for life must take precedence over edicts offered by rulers who smirk and strut as they demand obedience to their every whim.

In the course of such inquiries, we may discover why bin Laden – along with every one of us – deserved to not be dealt with in such an arbitrary, coercive manner. Institutionalized violence is the essence of every political system, and is in the process of destroying Western Civilization. But as secession and nullification enjoy an increasing interest among thoughtful people, members of the establishment power structure may find themselves regarded as the new "Red Coats." Like their predecessors – and in the words of Lysander Spooner – they may then be urged "to go home and content themselves with the exercise of only such rights and powers as nature has given to them in common with the rest of mankind."

May 14, 2011

Butler Shaffer teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938 and of Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival. His latest book is Boundaries of Order.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer236.html

--

Freedom is always illegal!

When we ask for freedom, we have already failed. It is only when we declare freedom for ourselves and refuse to accept any less, that we have any possibility of being free.

"Why should we bother with 'realities' when we have the psychological refuge of unthinking patriotism?"

Gary Leupp - Professor of History, Tufts University

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Re: Newt Gingrich, Weasel

Here is that Constitution thingy: http://www.constitution.org/cons/constitu.txt

Regard$,
--MJ

"We pledge to honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers and honor the original intent of those precepts that have been consistently ignored  particularly the Tenth Amendment, which grants that all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." -- A Pledge to America, Republicans in Congress, September 2010



At 09:50 AM 5/16/2011, you wrote:

ASSISTANCE FOR THE NEW INDEPENDENT STATES OF THE FORMER SOVIET UNION


SEC. 565. (a) Funds appropriated by this Act under the heading
''Assistance for the New Independent States of the Former Soviet
Union'', and funds appropriated by the Supplemental Appropriations
for
the New Independent States of the Former Soviet Union Act, 1993,
shall
be available for economic assistance and for related programs as
follows:
--------------------------------------------

Jonathan,  are you proposing that that is a bad thing?

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Re: Herman Cain is NOT a True Tea Party Candidate! His record speaks for itself.

At 01:27 PM 5/14/2011, you wrote:

    If we follow your logic then Ronald Reagan was not a true Republican.  His record speaks for itself.  After all he was a registered Democrat for years, president of a union local, big union boss - how could he be considered a Republican then.

The Myths of Reaganomics
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
by Murray N. Rothbard

This memo to Mises Institute members was written in late 1987, and published in "The Free Market Reader," LH Rockwell, Jr., ed., 1988, pp. 3342–362 and is posted on Mises.org in an edited edition.

I come to bury Reaganomics, not to praise it.

How well has Reaganomics achieved its own goals? Perhaps the best way of discovering those goals is to recall the heady days of Ronald Reagan's first campaign for the presidency, especially before his triumph at the Republican National Convention in 1980. In general terms, Reagan pledged to return, or advance, to a free market and to "get government off our backs."

Specifically, Reagan called for a massive cut in government spending, an even more drastic cut in taxation (particularly the income tax), a balanced budget by 1984 (that wild-spender, Jimmy Carter you see, had raised the budget deficit to $74 billion a year, and this had to be eliminated), and a return to the gold standard, where money is supplied by the market rather than by government. In addition to a call for free markets domestically, Reagan affirmed his deep commitment to freedom of international trade. Not only did the upper echelons of the administration sport Adam Smith ties, in honor of that moderate free-trader, but Reagan himself affirmed the depth of the influence upon him of the mid-19th century laissez-faire economist, Frederic Bastiat, whose devastating and satiric attacks on protectionism have been anthologized in economics readings ever since.

The gold standard was the easiest pledge to dispose of. President Reagan appointed an allegedly impartial gold commission to study the problem­a commission overwhelmingly packed with lifelong opponents of gold. The commission presented its predictable report, and gold was quickly interred.

Let's run down the other important areas:

Government Spending. How well did Reagan succeed in cutting government spending, surely a critical ingredient in any plan to reduce the role of government in everyone's life? In 1980, the last year of free-spending Jimmy Carter the federal government spent $591 billion. In 1986, the last recorded year of the Reagan administration, the federal government spent $990 billion, an increase of 68%. Whatever this is, it is emphatically not reducing government expenditures.

Sophisticated economists say that these absolute numbers are an unfair comparison, that we should compare federal spending in these two years as percentage of gross national product. But this strikes me as unfair in the opposite direction, because the greater the amount of inflation generated by the federal government, the higher will be the GNP. We might then be complimenting the government on a lower percentage of spending achieved by the government's generating inflation by creating more money. But even taking these percentages of GNP figures, we get federal spending as percent of GNP in 1980 as 21.6%, and after six years of Reagan, 24.3%. A better comparison would be percentage of federal spending to net private product, that is, production of the private sector. That percentage was 31.1% in 1980, and a shocking 34.3% in 1986. So even using percentages, the Reagan administration has brought us a substantial increase in government spending.

Also, the excuse cannot be used that Congress massively increased Reagan's budget proposals. On the contrary, there was never much difference between Reagan's and Congress's budgets, and despite propaganda to the contrary, Reagan never proposed a cut in the total budget.

Deficits. The next, and admittedly the most embarrassing, failure of Reaganomic goals is the deficit. Jimmy Carter habitually ran deficits of $40-50 billion and, by the end, up to $74 billion; but by 1984, when Reagan had promised to achieve a balanced budget, the deficit had settled down comfortably to about $200 billion, a level that seems to be permanent, despite desperate attempts to cook the figures in one-shot reductions.

This is by far the largest budget deficit in American history. It is true that the $50 billion deficits in World War II were a much higher percentage of the GNP; but the point is that that was a temporary, one-shot situation, the product of war finance. But the war was over in a few years; and the current federal deficits now seem to be a recent, but still permanent part of the American heritage.

One of the most curious, and least edifying, sights in the Reagan era was to see the Reaganites completely change their tune of a lifetime. At the very beginning of the Reagan administration, the conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives, convinced that deficits would disappear immediately, received a terrific shock when they were asked by the Reagan administration to vote for the usual annual increase in the statutory debt limit. These Republicans, some literally with tears in their eyes, protested that never in their lives had they voted for an increase in the national debt limit, but they were doing it just this one time because they "trusted Ronald Reagan" to balance the budget from then on. The rest, alas, is history, and the conservative Republicans never saw fit to cry again. Instead, they found themselves adjusting rather easily to the new era of huge permanent deficits. The Gramm-Rudman law, allegedly designed to eradicate deficits in a few years, has now unsurprisingly bogged down in enduring confusion.

Even less edifying is the spectre of Reaganomists who had inveighed against deficits­that legacy of Keynesianism­for decades. Soon Reaganite economists, especially those staffing economic posts in the executive and legislative branches, found that deficits really weren't so bad after all. Ingenious models were devised claiming to prove that there really isn't any deficit. Bill Niskanen, of the Reagan Council of Economic Advisors, came up with perhaps the most ingenious discovery: that there is no reason to worry about government deficits, since they are balanced by the growth in value of government assets. Well, hooray, but it is rather strange to see economists whose alleged goal is a drastic reduction in the role of government cheering for ever greater growth in government assets. Moreover, the size of government assets is really beside the point. It would only be of interest if the federal government were just another private business firm, about to go into liquidation, and whose debtors could then be satisfied by a parceling out of its hefty assets. The federal government is not about to be liquidated; there is no chance, for example, of an institution ever going into bankruptcy or liquidation that has the legal right to print whatever money it needs to get itself­and anyone else it favors­out of any financial hole.

There has also been a fervent revival of the old left-Keynesian idea that "deficits don't matter, anyway." Deficits are stimulating, we can "grow ourselves out of deficits," etc. The most interesting, though predictable, twist was that of the supply-siders, who, led by Professor Arthur Laffer and his famous "curve," had promised that if income tax rates were cut, investment and production would be so stimulated that a fall in tax rates would increase tax revenue and balance the budget. When the budget was most emphatically not balanced, and deficits instead got worse, the supply-siders threw Laffer overboard as the scapegoat, claiming that Laffer was an extremist, and the only propounder of his famous curve. The supply-siders then retreated to their current, fall-back position, which is quite frankly Keynesian; namely deficits don't matter anyway, so let's have cheap money and deficits; relax and enjoy them. About the only Keynesian phrase we have not heard yet from Reaganomists is that the national debt "doesn't matter because we owe it to ourselves," and I am waiting for some supply-sider to adopt this famous 1930s phrase of Abba Lerner without, of course, bothering about attribution.

One way in which Ronald Reagan has tried to seize the moral high road on the deficit question is to divorce his rhetoric from reality even more sharply than usual. Thus, the proposer of the biggest deficits in American history has been calling vehemently for a Constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget. In that way, Reagan can lead the way toward permanent $200 billion deficits, while basking in the virtue of proposing a balanced budget amendment, and trying to make Congress the fall guy for our deficit economy.

Even in the unlikely event that the balanced budget amendment should ever pass, it would be ludicrous in its lack of effect. In the first place, Congress can override the amendment at any time by three-fifths vote. Secondly, Congress is not required to actually balance any budget; that is, its actual expenditures in any given year are not limited to the revenues taken in. Instead, Congress is only required to prepare an estimate of a balanced budget for a future year; and of course, government estimates, even of its own income or spending, are notoriously unreliable. And third, there is no enforcement clause; suppose Congress did violate even the requirement for an estimated balanced budget: What is going to happen to the legislators? Is the Supreme Court going to summon marshals and put the entire U.S. Congress in jail? And yet, not only has Reagan been pushing for such an absurd amendment, but so too have many helpful Reaganomists.

Tax Cuts. One of the few areas where Reaganomists claim success without embarrassment is taxation. Didn't the Reagan administration, after all, slash income taxes in 1981, and provide both tax cuts and "fairness" in its highly touted tax reform law of 1986? Hasn't Ronald Reagan, in the teeth of opposition, heroically held the line against all tax increases?

The answer, unfortunately, is no. In the first place, the famous "tax cut" of 1981 did not cut taxes at all. It's true that tax rates for higher-income brackets were cut; but for the average person, taxes rose, rather than declined. The reason is that, on the whole, the cut in income tax rates was more than offset by two forms of tax increase. One was "bracket creep," a term for inflation quietly but effectively raising one into higher tax brackets, so that you pay more and proportionately higher taxes even though the tax rate schedule has officially remained the same. The second source of higher taxes was Social Security taxation, which kept increasing, and which helped taxes go up overall. Not only that, but soon thereafter; when the Social Security System was generally perceived as on the brink of bankruptcy, President Reagan brought in Alan Greenspan, a leading Reaganomist and now Chairman of the Federal Reserve, to save Social Security as head of a bipartisan commission. The "saving," of course, meant still higher Social Security taxes then and forevermore.

Since the tax cut of 1981 that was not really a cut, furthermore, taxes have gone up every single year since, with the approval of the Reagan administration. But to save the president's rhetorical sensibilities, they weren't called tax increases. Instead, ingenious labels were attached to them; raising of "fees," "plugging loopholes" (and surely everyone wants loopholes plugged), "tightening IRS enforcement," and even revenue enhancements." I am sure that all good Reaganomists slept soundly at night knowing that even though government revenue was being "enhanced," the president had held the line against tax increases.

The highly ballyhooed Tax "Reform" Act of 1986 was supposed to be economically healthy as well as "fair"; supposedly "revenue neutral," it was to bring us (a) simplicity, helping the public while making the lives of tax accountants and lawyers miserable; and (b) income tax cuts, especially in the higher income brackets and in everyone's marginal tax rates (that is, income tax rates on additional money you may earn); and offset only by plugging those infamous loopholes. The reality, of course, was very different, In the first place, the administration has succeeded in making the tax laws so complicated that even the IRS admittedly doesn't understand it, and tax accountants and lawyers will be kept puzzled and happy for years to come.

Secondly, while indeed income tax rates were cut in the higher brackets, many of the loophole plugs meant huge tax increases for people in the upper as well as middle income brackets. The point of the income tax, and particularly the marginal rate cuts, was the supply-sider objective of lowering taxes to stimulate savings and investment. But a National Bureau study by Hausman and Poterba on the Tax Reform Act shows that over 40% of the nation's taxpayers suffered a marginal tax increase (or at best, the same rate as before) and, of the majority that did enjoy marginal tax cuts, only 11% got reductions of 10% or more. In short, most of the tax reductions were negligible. Not only that; the Tax Reform Act, these authors reckoned, would lower savings and investment overall because of the huge increases in taxes on business and on capital gains. Moreover savings were also hurt by the tax law's removal of tax deductibility on contributions to IRAs.

Not only were taxes increased, but business costs were greatly raised by making business expense meals only 80% deductible, which means a great expenditure of business time and energy keeping and shuffling records. And not only were taxes raised by eliminating tax shelters in real estate, but the law's claims to "fairness" were made grotesque by the retroactive nature of many of the tax increases. Thus, the abolition of tax shelter deductibility was made retroactive, imposing huge penalties after the fact. This is ex post facto legislation outlawed by the Constitution, which prohibits making actions retroactively criminal for a time period when they were perfectly legal. A friend of mine, for example, sold his business about eight years ago; to avoid capital gains taxes, he incorporated his business in the American Virgin Islands, which the federal government had made exempt from capital gains taxes in order to stimulate Virgin Islands development. Now, eight years later, this tax exemption for the Virgin Islands has been removed (a "loophole" plugged!) but the IRS now expects my friend to pay full retroactive capital gains taxes plus interest on this eight-year old sale. Let's hear it for the "fairness" of the tax reform law!

But the bottom line on the tax question: is what happened in the Reagan era to government tax revenues overall? Did the amount of taxes extracted from the American people by the federal government go up or down during the Reagan years? The facts are that federal tax receipts were $517 billion in the last Carter year of 1980. In 1986, revenues totaled $769 billion, an increase of 49%. Whatever that is, that doesn't look like a tax cut. But how about taxes as a percentage of the national product? There, we can concede that on a percentage criterion, overall taxes fell very slightly, remaining about even with the last year of Carter. Taxes fell from 18.9% of the GNP to 18.3%, or for a better gauge, taxes as percentage of net private product fell from 27.2% to 26.6%. A large absolute increase in taxes, coupled with keeping taxes as a percentage of national product about even, is scarcely cause for tossing one's hat in the air about a whopping reduction in taxes during the Reagan years.

In recent months, moreover; the Reagan administration has been more receptive to loophole plugging, fees, and revenues than ever before. To quote from the Tax Watch column in the New York Times (October 13, 1987): "President Reagan has repeatedly warned Congress of his opposition to any new taxes, but some White House aides have been trying to figure out a way of endorsing a tax bill that could be called something else."

In addition to closing loopholes, the White House is nudging Congress to expand the usual definition of a "user fee," not a tax because it is supposed to be a fee for those who use a government service, say national parks or waterways. But apparently the Reagan administration is now expanding the definition of "user fee" to include excise taxes, on the assumption, apparently, that every time we purchase a product or service we must pay government for its permission. Thus, the Reagan administration has proposed not, of course, as a tax increase, but as an alleged "user fee," a higher excise tax on every international airline or ship ticket, a tax on all coal producers, and a tax on gasoline and on highway charges for buses. The administration is also willing to support, as an alleged user fee rather than a tax, a requirement that employers, such as restaurants, start paying the Social Security tax on tips received by waiters and other service personnel.

In the wake of the stock market crash, President Reagan is now willing to give us a post-crash present of: higher taxes that will openly be called higher taxes. On Tuesday morning, the White House declared: "We're going to hold to our guns. The president has given us marching orders: no tax increase." By Tuesday afternoon, however, the marching orders had apparently evaporated, and the president said that he was "willing to look at" tax-increase proposals. To greet a looming recession with a tax increase is a wonderful way to bring that recession into reality. Once again, President Reagan is following the path blazed by Herbert Hoover in the Great Depression of raising taxes to try to combat a deficit.

Deregulation. Another crucial aspect of freeing the market and getting government off our backs is deregulation, and the administration and its Reaganomists have been very proud of its deregulation record. However, a look at the record reveals a very different picture. In the first place, the most conspicuous examples of deregulation; the ending of oil and gasoline price controls and rationing, the deregulation of trucks and airlines, were all launched by the Carter administration, and completed just in time for the Reagan administration to claim the credit. Meanwhile, there were other promised deregulations that never took place; for example, abolition of natural gas controls and of the Department of Energy.

Overall, in fact, there has probably been not deregulation, but an increase in regulation. Thus, Christopher De Muth, head of the American Enterprise Institute and a former top official of Reagan's Office of Management and the Budget, concludes that "the President has not mounted a broad offensive against regulation. There hasn't been much total change since 1981. There has been more balanced administration of regulatory agencies than we had become used to in the 1970s, but many regulatory rules have been strengthened."

In particular, there has been a fervent drive, especially in the past year; to intensify regulation of Wall Street. A savage and almost hysterical attack was launched late last year by the Securities and Exchange Commission and by the Department of Justice on the high crime of "insider trading." Distinguished investment bankers were literally hauled out of their offices in manacles, and the most conspicuous inside trader received as a punishment (1) a fine of $100 million; (2) a lifetime ban on any further security trading, and (3) a jail term of one year, suspended for community service. And this is the light sentence, in return for allowing himself to be wired and turn informer on his insider trading colleagues. [Editor's note: Ivan Boesky was sentenced to three years in prison.]

All this was part of a drive by the administration to protect inefficient corporate managers from the dread threat of takeover bids, by which means stockholders are able to dispose easily of ineffective management and turn to new managers. Can we really say that this frenzied assault on Wall Street by the Reagan administration had no impact on the stock market crash [October 1987]?

And yet the Reagan administration has reacted to the crash not by letting up, but by intensifying, regulation of the stock market. The head of the SEC strongly considered closing down the market on October 19, and some markets were temporarily shut down­a case, once again, of solving problems by shooting the market­the messenger of bad news. October 20, the Reagan administration collaborated in announcing early closing of the market for the next several days. The SEC has already moved, in conjunction with the New York Stock Exchange, to close down computer program trading on the market, a trade related to stock index futures. But blaming computer program trading for the crash is a Luddite reaction; trying to solve problems by taking a crowbar and wrecking machines. There were no computers, after all, in 1929. Once again, the instincts of the administration, particularly in relation to Wall Street, is to regulate. Regulate, and inflate, seem to be the Reaganite answers to our economic ills.

Agricultural policy, for its part, has been a total disaster. Instead of ending farm price supports and controls and returning to a free market in agriculture, the administration has greatly increased price supports, controls and subsidies. Furthermore, it has brought a calamitous innovation to the farm program; the PIK program ["Payments In Kind"] in which the government gets the farmers to agree to drastic cuts in acreage, in return for which the government pays back the wheat or cotton surpluses previously held off the market. The result of all this has been to push farm prices far higher than the world market, depress farm exports, and throw many farmers into bankruptcy. All the administration can offer, however, is more of the same disastrous policy.

Foreign Economic Policy. If the Reagan administration has botched the domestic economy, even in terms of its own goals, how has it done in foreign economic affairs? As we might expect, its foreign economic policy has been the exact opposite of its proclaimed devotion to free trade and free markets. In the first place, Adam Smith ties and Bastiat to the contrary notwithstanding, the Reagan administration has been the most belligerent and nationalistic since Herbert Hoover. Tariffs and import quotas have been repeatedly raised, and Japan has been treated as a leper and repeatedly denounced for the crime of selling high quality products at low prices to the delighted American consumer.

In all matters of complex and tangled international economics, the only way out of the thicket is to keep our eye on one overriding question: Is it good, or bad, for the American consumer? What the American consumer wants is good quality products at low prices, and so the Japanese should be welcomed and admired instead of condemned. As for the alleged crime of "dumping," if the Japanese are really foolish enough to waste money and resources by dumping­that is selling goods to us below costs­then we should welcome such a policy with open arms; anytime the Japanese are willing to sell me Sony TV sets for a dollar, I am more than happy to take the sets off their hands.

Not only foreign producers are hurt by protectionism, but even more so are American consumers. Every time the administration slaps a tariff or quota on motorcycles or on textiles or semiconductors or clothespins­as it did to bail out one inefficient clothespin plant in Maine­every time it does that, it injures the American consumer.

It is no wonder, then, that even the Reaganomist Bill Niskanen recently admitted that "international trade is more regulated than it was 10 years ago." Or, as Secretary of Treasury James Baker declared proudly last month: "President Reagan has granted more import relief to U.S. industry than any of his predecessors in more than half a century." Pretty good for a Bastiat follower.

Another original aim of the Reagan administration, under the influence of the monetarists, or Friedmanites, was to keep the government's hand completely off exchange rates, and to allow these rates to fluctuate freely on the market, without interference by the Federal Reserve or the Treasury. A leading monetarist, Dr. Beryl W. Sprinkel, was made Undersecretary of the Treasury for Monetary Policy in 1981 to carry out that policy. But this non-intervention is long gone, and Secretary Baker, aided by the Fed, has been busily engaged in trying to persuade other countries to intervene to help coordinate and fix exchange rates. After being removed from the Treasury after several years, Sprinkel was sent to Siberia and ordered to keep quiet, as head of the Council of Economic Advisors; and Sprinkel has recently announced that he will leave the government altogether. [Editor's note: Sprinkel was later rehabilitated, and given Cabinet status, in return for his agreement to take part in the disastrous Baker dollar policy.]

Moreover, the policy of foreign aid and foreign lending conducted or encouraged by the government has proceeded more intensely than even under previous administrations. Reagan has bailed out the despotic government of Poland with massive loans, so that Poland could repay its Western creditors. A similar policy has been conducted in relation to many shaky or bankrupt third world governments. The spectre of bank collapse from foreign loans has been averted by bailouts and promises of bailout from the Federal Reserve, the nation's only manufacturer of dollars, which it can produce at will.

Wherever we look, then, on the budget, in the domestic economy, or in foreign trade or international monetary relations, we see government even more on our backs than ever. The burden and the scope of government intervention under Reagan has increased, not decreased. Reagan's rhetoric has been calling for reductions of government; his actions have been precisely the reverse. Yet both sides of the political fence have bought the rhetoric and claim that it has been put into effect.

Reaganites and Reaganomists, for obvious reasons, are trying desperately to maintain that Reagan has indeed fulfilled his glorious promises; while his opponents, intent on attacking the bogey of Reaganomics, are also, and for opposite reasons, anxious to claim that Reagan has really put his free-market program into operation. So we have the curious, and surely not healthy, situation where a mass of politically interested people are totally misinterpreting and even misrepresenting the Reagan record; focusing, like Reagan himself, on his rhetoric instead of on the reality.

What of the Future? Is there life after Reaganomics? To assess coming events, we first have to realize that Reaganomics has never been a monolith. It has had several faces; Reaganomics has been an uneasy and shifting coalition of several clashing schools of economic thought. In particular, the leading schools have been the conservative Keynesians, the Milton Friedman monetarists, and the supply-siders. The monetarists, devoted to a money rule of a fixed percentage increase of money growth engineered by the Federal Reserve, have come a cropper. Fervently believing that science is nothing else but prediction, the monetarists have self-destructed by making a string of self-confident but disastrous predictions in the last several years. Their fate illustrates the fact that he who lives by prediction shall die by it. Apart from their views on money, the monetarists generally believe in free markets, and so their demise has left Reaganomics in the hands of the other two schools, neither of whom are particularly interested in free markets or cutting government.

The conservative Keynesians -- the folks who brought us the economics of the Nixon and Ford administrations -- saw Keynesianism lose its dominance among economists with the inflationary recession of 1973-74, an event which Keynesians stoutly believed could never possibly happen. But while Keynesians have lost their old eclat, they remain with two preoccupations: (1) a devotion to the New Deal-Fair Deal-Great Society-Nixon-Ford-Carter-status quo, and (2) a zeal for tax increases to moderate the current deficit. As for government spending, never has the thought of actually cutting expenditures crossed their minds. The supply-siders, who are weak in academia but strong in the press and in exerting enormous political leverage per capita, have also no interest in cutting government spending. To the contrary, both conservative Keynesians and supply-siders are prepared to call for an increasing stream of goodies from government.

Both groups have also long been keen on monetary inflation. The supply-siders have pretty much given up the idea of tax cuts; their stance is now to accept the deficit and oppose any tax increase. On foreign monetary matters, the conservative Keynesians and the supply-siders have formed a coalition; both groups embrace Secretary of Treasury Baker's Keynesian program of fixed exchange rates and an internationally coordinated policy of cheap money.

Politically, the Republican presidential candidates can be assessed on their various preferred visions of Reaganomics. Vice-President Bush is, of course, a conservative Keynesian and a veteran arch-enemy of supply-side doctrine, which he famously denounced in 1980 as "voodoo economics." Secretary of Treasury James Baker is a former Bush campaign aide. White House Chief of Staff Howard Baker is also in the conservative Keynesian camp, as was Paul Volcker, and is Alan Greenspan. Since former White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan was a fellow-traveller of the supply-siders, his replacement by Howard Baker as a result of Iranscam was a triumph of conservative Keynesians over the supply-siders. This year, in fact, our troika of Economic Rulers, Greenspan and the two Bakers, has all been squarely in the conservative Keynesian camp.

Senator Robert Dole, the other Republican front-runner for president, is also a conservative Keynesian. In fact, Bob Dole carried on the fight for higher taxes even when it was relatively unfashionable inside the administration. So devoted to higher taxes is Bob Dole, in fact, that he is reputed to be the favorite presidential candidate of the Internal Revenue Service. So if you like the IRS, you'll love Bob Dole.

Congressman Jack Kemp, on the other hand, has been the political champion of the supply-siders ever since supply-side was invented in the late 1970s. Kemp's call for higher government spending, and approval of deficits, monetary inflation, and fixed exchange rates, all attest to his supply-side devotion.

Jack Kemp, however, has for some reason not struck fire among the public, so Mrs. Jeanne Kirkpatrick stands ready in the wings to take up the cause if Kemp should fail to rally. I confess I have not been able to figure out the economic views of the Reverend Pat Robertson, although I have a hunch they do not loom very large in his world outlook.

Although there are a lot of Democratic candidates out there, it is hard at this point to distinguish one from another, on economic policy or indeed on anything else. As Joe Klein recently wrote in a perceptive article in New York magazine, the Republicans are engaged in an interesting clash of different ideas, while the Democrats are all muddily groping toward the center. To make the confusion still greater, Klein points out that Republicans are busily talking about "compassion," while the Democrats are all stressing "efficiency." One thing is fairly clear; Congressman Gephardt is an all-out protectionist, thoroughly jettisoning the old Democratic commitment to free trade, and is the most ardent statist in agricultural policy.

On monetary and fiscal policy, the Democrats are the classic party of liberal Keynesianism, in contrast to the Republican policy of conservative Keynesianism. The problem is that, in the last decade or two, it has become increasingly difficult to tell the difference. Apart from supply-sider Kemp, we can expect the president of either party to be a middle-of-the-road liberal/conservative Keynesian. And so we can expect the next administration's economic policies to be roughly the same as they are now. Except that the rhetoric will be different. So we can, therefore, expect diverse perceptions and responses to a similar reality by the public and by the market. Thus, if Jack Kemp becomes president, the public will wrongly consider him a champion of hard money, budget cutting, and the free market. The public will therefore underestimate the wildly inflationist reality of a Kemp administration. On the other hand, the public probably perceives the Democrats to be wilder spenders relative to the Republicans than they really are. So should the Democrats win in 1988, we can expect the market to overestimate the inflationary measure of a Democratic administration.

All of this, along with the universal misperception of Reaganomics, illustrates once more the wisdom of those incisive political philosophers, Gilbert and Sullivan: "Things are not always what they seem; skim milk masquerades as cream."


See more on Murray N. Rothbard, including his Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market.

http://mises.org/daily/1544

Re: Herman Cain is NOT a True Tea Party Candidate! His record speaks for itself.

At 01:27 PM 5/14/2011, you wrote:

    If we follow your logic then Ronald Reagan was not a true Republican.  His record speaks for itself.  After all he was a registered Democrat for years, president of a union local, big union boss - how could he be considered a Republican then.

Not So Fast!
Revolutions and Government Institutions
The bureaucracy wins.
William L. Anderson
Posted February 09, 2011

Republicans are fond of referring to the "Reagan Revolution" of the early 1980s, when in fact it was no revolution at all. I would go as far as to say that the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Iranian Revolution of 1979 were not revolutions in the sense that the institutions of government changed radically in those countries; at best, they were coups d'état.

For all the euphoria over the people-driven revolution in Egypt, as I see it, whatever regime emerges will in the end carry on business as usual, even if the players change. Government institutions are powerful things, and government itself always seems to come out on top.

In Iran the secular government was replaced by people loyal to the religious leaders who sought to create an Islamic state. It might have been called a revolution, but all that happened was that a new set of strongmen seized the existing governing apparatus and made it their own.

Iranians supposedly revolted in part because they were abused by the Shah's government and many were tortured or killed by the secret police, SAVAK. Was SAVAK eliminated after the "revolution"? Hardly. The people directing the secret police simply wore religious garb rather than coats and ties, but the job was the same: to root out and destroy "enemies" of the current regime. For that matter, the secret police of Czar Nicholas II morphed into the Cheka after the October Revolution.

The seeming imperviousness of government institutions is not limited to the State security apparatus. All kinds of government agencies have a knack for outlasting the political figures who supposedly govern them. Take the so-called Reagan Revolution for example.


Department Remained

Ronald Reagan allegedly went to Washington to cut government spending, and in his view that meant abolishing the newly created departments of education and energy. Not only did those two departments outlast Reagan, but when he left office in 1989, the machinery to create a cabinet-level Department of Veterans Affairs had been set in motion. (It opened in March 1989.)

One can criticize Reagan (and rightly so) for not sticking to his stated principles, but I contend that even had Reagan been utterly sincere and determined to cut federal spending, it would have been nearly politically impossible for him to do it. Why? Because the government consists of numerous departments, agencies, and employees with a vested interest in keeping things as they are.

Furthermore, millions of people in the "private sector" feed at the government trough, and real budget cutters face their wrath, not to mention opposition from those who intellectually support the "statist" quo. I remember watching the news shows in 1981 that were filled with angst because Reagan had proffered very small cuts in federal spending, and journalists such as Bill Moyers and Charles Kuralt excoriated the President, claiming he was conducting "a war on the poor."

The United States no longer is a constitutional republic; it is a Progressive democracy, and its governmental institutions reflect the Progressivist vision. Accordingly, it will be difficult to change it, although we have to try.

As for the Egyptians, I hope they succeed in dumping the dictatorship. But I'm afraid we are going to see little more than the rise of someone else who learns how to use the existing levers of power. He might not be as ruthless or dishonest as Mubarak, but over time he will learn the standard ways of "governing."

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/not-so-fast/revolutions-and-government-institutions/

Re: Herman Cain is NOT a True Tea Party Candidate! His record speaks for itself.

At 01:27 PM 5/14/2011, you wrote:

    If we follow your logic then Ronald Reagan was not a true Republican.  His record speaks for itself.  After all he was a registered Democrat for years, president of a union local, big union boss - how could he be considered a Republican then.

"During his eight years in office, Reagan increased federal spending by 53 percent, added a quarter of a million new civilian government employees, escalated the War on Drugs, created the "drug czar's office," and lowered the value of your 1980 dollar to 73 cents. "

The Reagan Fraud -- and After
Friday, February 04, 2011
by Jeff Riggenbach

[Excerpted from Why American History Is Not What They Say (2009)]

Like most Republican politicians since the early 1930s, Ronald Reagan always portrayed himself throughout his political career as a champion of limited government, individual rights, and free enterprise -- the classical-liberal values, which, of course, he absurdly described as "conservative." But, like almost all Republican politicians since the early 1930s, he seemed to forget all about these values once he got into office and assumed the reins of power. Consider, as a case in point, Reagan's eight years (1966–1974) as governor of California. As Murray Rothbard noted in 1980,

Despite his bravado about having stopped the growth of state government, the actual story is that the California budget grew by 122 percent during his eight years as governor, not much of an improvement on the growth rate of 130 percent during the preceding two terms of free-spending liberal Pat Brown. The state bureaucracy increased during Reagan's administration from 158,000 to 192,000, a rise of nearly 22 percent -- hardly squaring with Reagan's boast of having "stopped the bureaucracy cold."

Nor "is Reagan's record on taxes any comfort. He started off with a bang by increasing state taxes nearly $1 billion in his first year in office ­ the biggest tax increase in California history. Income, sales, corporate, bank, liquor, and cigarette taxes were all boosted dramatically." After his reelection as governor in 1970, "two more tax hikes ­ in 1971 and 1972 ­ raised revenues by another $500 million and $700 million respectively." Overall,

by the end of Reagan's eight years, state income taxes had nearly tripled, from a bite of $7.68 per $1000 of personal income to $19.48. During his administration, California rose in a ranking of the states from twentieth to thirteenth in personal income tax collection per capita, and it rose from fourth to first in per capita revenue from corporate income taxes.

During his 1970 campaign for reelection, Reagan assured voters that his feet were set "in concrete" against adopting payroll withholding of state income tax in California. Less than a year later he was joking that "I can hear the concrete cracking around my feet," as he signed exactly that provision into law.

According to Rothbard, Reagan "created seventy-three new state government councils and commissions, with a total budget, in his last year alone, of $12 million. Included was the California Energy Commission, which put the state hip-deep into the energy business" and created a regulatory climate under which a three-year review process was required before any new power plant could be constructed in the state.

Reagan always claimed to have "reformed" welfare in California during his years in the governor's office. And, as Rothbard noted in 1980, he did remove "more than 510,000 from the welfare rolls by -- among other things -- forcing adults to support their welfare parents." The problem is that "[h]e then turned around and boosted the amount of welfare paid to those remaining by 43 percent, so that total welfare costs to the taxpayer didn't decline at all."[1]

In 1974, his time in Sacramento at an end, Reagan began running for president. And by the fall of 1980 he had succeeded in winning both the Republican nomination and then the election campaign against the incumbent, Jimmy Carter. In January 1981, he was called upon to deliver his first inaugural address. "For decades," he told Americans,

we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals. You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation? We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding -- we are going to begin to act, beginning today.

"It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment," Reagan thundered. "It is time to … get government back within its means, and to lighten our punitive tax burden. And these will be our first priorities, and on these principles, there will be no compromise."

But in fact both taxes and deficits increased under Reagan. As Rothbard put it in a 1988 retrospective on Reagan's years in the White House,

In the first place, the famous "tax cut" of 1981 did not cut taxes at all. It's true that tax rates for higher-income brackets were cut; but for the average person, taxes rose, rather than declined. The reason is that, on the whole, the cut in income tax rates was more than offset by two forms of tax increase. One was "bracket creep," a term for inflation quietly but effectively raising one into higher tax brackets, so that you pay more and proportionately higher taxes even though the tax rate schedule has officially remained the same. The second source of higher taxes was Social Security taxation, which kept increasing, and which helped taxes go up overall.

Moreover, in each of the seven years that followed that phony "tax cut," taxes increased

with the approval of the Reagan administration. But to save the president's rhetorical sensibilities, they weren't called tax increases. Instead, ingenious labels were attached to them: raising of "fees," "plugging loopholes" (and surely everyone wants loopholes plugged), "tightening IRS enforcement," and even "revenue enhancements." I am sure that all good Reaganomists slept soundly at night knowing that even though government revenue was being "enhanced," the president had held the line against tax increases.[2]

As for deficits, Slate's Timothy Noah puts the matter succinctly: "The deficit, which stood at $74 billion in Carter's final year, ballooned to $155 billion in Reagan's final year. In the words of Vice President Dick Cheney, 'Reagan taught us deficits don't matter.'"[3] In the words of syndicated columnist Molly Ivins, "Ronald Reagan came into office in 1980 on the mantra that he would rid the nation of Waste, Fraud and Abuse. He proceeded to raise the national deficit by $2 trillion with tax cuts and spending on the military in the face of a collapsing Soviet Union."[4]

Then there was Reagan's policy on international trade. "Our trade policy," he stated during his 1980 campaign, "rests firmly on the foundation of free and open markets. I recognize … the inescapable conclusion that all of history has taught: the freer the flow of world trade, the stronger the tides of human progress and peace among nations." Then, as president, he acted as though such ideas had never entered his mind. According to Sheldon Richman, Reagan "imposed a one hundred percent tariff on selected Japanese electronic products," explaining that he did so "to enforce the principles of free and fair trade." As president he

• "forced Japan to accept restraints on auto exports";
• "tightened considerably the quotas on imported sugar";
• "required eighteen countries, including Brazil, Spain, South Korea, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, Finland, Australia, and the European Community, to accept 'voluntary restraint agreements' that reduced their steel imports to the United States";
• "imposed a forty-five percent duty on Japanese motorcycles for the benefit of Harley Davidson, which admitted that superior Japanese management was the cause of its problems";
• "pressed Japan to force its automakers to buy more American-made parts";
• "demanded that Taiwan, West Germany, Japan, and Switzerland restrain their exports of machine tools";
• "extended quotas on imported clothes pins";
• and "beefed-up the Export-Import Bank, an institution dedicated to distorting the American economy at the expense of the American people in order to artificially promote exports of eight large corporations."
  
  

By the time Reagan left office, at least 25 percent of all imports were restricted, "a one hundred percent increase over 1980." As Reagan's Treasury Secretary, James A. Baker, put it, Reagan "granted more import relief to U.S. industry than any of his predecessors in more than half a century."[5] Then there was draft registration. In 1979, Reagan told Human Events that conscription

rests on the assumption that your kids belong to the state. If we buy that assumption then it is for the state -- not for parents, the community, the religious institutions or teachers -- to decide who shall have what values and who shall do what work, when, where and how in our society. That assumption isn't a new one. The Nazis thought it was a great idea.

A year later, he promised voters to end compulsory draft registration, which had been resurrected by President Jimmy Carter. Yet, as Murray Rothbard noted in a 1984 appraisal of Reagan's first term, "compulsory draft registration has been continued, and young resisters have been thrown into jail."

"Reagan," Rothbard wrote,

has been a master at engineering an enormous gap between his rhetoric and the reality of his actions. All politicians, of course, have such a gap, but in Reagan it is cosmic, massive, as wide as the Pacific Ocean. His soft-soapy voice appears perfectly sincere as he spouts the rhetoric which he violates day-by-day."[6]

"Wherever we look," Rothbard wrote four years later, as Reagan left office for the last time,

on the budget, in the domestic economy, or in foreign trade or international monetary relations, we see government even more on our backs than ever. The burden and the scope of government intervention under Reagan has increased, not decreased. Reagan's rhetoric has been calling for reductions of government; his actions have been precisely the reverse.[7]

During his eight years in office, Ronald Reagan increased federal spending by 53 percent, added a quarter of a million new civilian government employees, escalated the War on Drugs, created the "drug czar's office," and lowered the value of your 1980 dollar to 73 cents. His Republican successor, George Herbert Walker Bush, further increased taxes, further increased federal spending, and "managed to knock thirteen cents off the value of your dollar in just four years."

It will be objected that Democratic presidents like Johnson and Carter also grew the federal government, that they too increased taxes and spending and regulations, that they too made government steadily more intrusive and the individual steadily less free. It will be objected that the Republican Party is here being singled out for undeserved abuse. But in fact, the situation is far otherwise. As James Ostrowski noted in 2002, "Over the last one hundred years, of the five presidents who presided over the largest domestic spending increases, four were Republicans. Include regulations and foreign policy, as well as budgets approved by a Republican Congress, and a picture begins to emerge of the Republican Party as a reliable engine of government growth."[8]

In fact, despite the liberal apostasy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and virtually all Democratic politicians since his time, despite their choice to try to beat the Republicans at their own game, promoting mercantilism, welfare statism, and war, and calling it "liberalism" ­ despite all this, the conservative party, the GOP, remains the more devoted to mercantilism, welfare statism, and war of the two major parties. Throughout the '70s and '80s, Republicans depicted the philosophy of their Democratic opponents as "tax and spend, tax and spend." But in fact, it is the Republicans, the conservatives, who are the biggest taxers and the biggest spenders of all.

The years since George Herbert Walker Bush have seen nothing that might make one wish to revise or soften this statement -- for George H.W. Bush's son, former Texas governor George W. Bush, who won the presidency in a hotly contested election in the year 2000 and was reelected in 2004, had spent more federal money by the end of his third year in office than Bill Clinton, the "tax-and-spend" Democrat who preceded him, managed to spend in a full eight years.

Nor should this seem surprising. Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz noted late in 2005 that "many of contemporary conservatism's central ideas and slogans renovate old Whig appeals," and that "the [George W.] Bush administration's political and ideological recipe was invented … by a nearly forgotten American institution: the Whig Party of the 1830's and 40's."[9]

Thus, "despite occasional exceptions," wrote columnist Doug Bandow, fewer than three years into George W. Bush's first term in office,

the Bush administration, backed by the Republican-controlled Congress, has been promoting larger government at almost every turn. Its spending policies have been irresponsible, and its trade strategies have been destructive. The president has been quite willing to sell out the national interest for perceived political gain, whether the votes sought are from seniors or farmers. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 encouraged the administration to push into law civil-liberties restrictions that should worry anyone, whether they are wielded by a Bush or a Clinton administration.[10]

Journalist Steven Greenhut agreed. "This president," he wrote, late in 2003, "has not vetoed a single bill, which means he has signed into law every big-spending project that has come down the pike. Federal spending, even on non-military matters, has soared. His nation-building experiments are downright Wilsonian, a far cry from the 'humbler' foreign policy he promised when he ran for office."

Greenhut hastened to add, lest anyone get the wrong idea, that

these are criticisms from the right, so save the "you stinking Democrat-loving pinko" e-mails for someone else. I argued for libertarians to vote for Bush in a column before the election, believing that his calls for limited government and restrained foreign policy were far superior to Al Gore's quasi-socialism, nutty environmentalism and love of Clinton-style nation-building.[11]

It is clear that Greenhut considers himself a man of the Right. It is also clear that he considers himself an advocate of smaller government, a "humbler foreign policy," and the sort of environmentalism that acknowledges the human animal's rightful place in nature. Yet these values and goals are liberal values and goals. They are the historic values and goals of the Left, not the Right.

This is why any libertarians who read Greenhut's preelection arguments for Bush would almost certainly have rejected them as unsound. If they were libertarians -- i.e., classical liberals -- and if their historical understanding of American politics went back any more than half a century, they knew that it was scarcely possible for a libertarian to support a Republican. The Republicans are and have always been the party of big, mercantilist government and an aggressive, meddlesome foreign policy -- exactly what liberals (libertarians) have historically opposed. It is "by focusing on the history of the nineteenth century," Murray Rothbard wrote, that "we learn of the true origins of the various 'isms' of our day, as well as the illogical and mythical nature of the attempted 'conservative-libertarian' fusion."

How, Rothbard wondered, could a libertarian consider himself a man or woman of the Right, when "everywhere on the Right the 'open society' is condemned, and a coerced morality affirmed. God is supposed to be put back into government. Free speech is treated with suspicion and distrust, and the military are hailed as the greatest patriots, and conscription strongly upheld. Western imperialism is trumpeted as the proper way to deal with backward peoples."[12]

It is striking how contemporary this sounds for a passage that was written more than 40 years ago. It is striking how well the words of conservative leader William F. Buckley, Jr., quoted by Rothbard, still serve to capture the essence of the American right wing in our own time: "Where reconciliation of an individual's and the government's interests cannot be achieved, the interests of the government shall be given exclusive consideration."

The GOP is the conservative party in American politics, the party that since Lincoln (and Henry Clay and Alexander Hamilton before him) has stood for mercantilism, welfare statism, and war. Libertarians are not conservatives; they are not on the Right. They are on the Left, the last remnant of the original liberals. Though some true liberals remain in the Democratic Party of today, almost all of them have made the error of pursuing liberal goals by conservative means. And the majority in the party has been New
Deal liberal -- false liberal, conservative in liberal's clothing -- since the 1930s. In effect, the United States is now governed by one or the other of two conservative parties.



Jeff Riggenbach is a journalist, author, editor, broadcaster, and educator. A member of the Organization of American Historians and a Senior Fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, he has written for such newspapers as The New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle; such magazines as Reason, Inquiry, and Liberty; and such websites as LewRockwell.com, AntiWar.com, and RationalReview.com. Drawing on vocal skills he honed in classical and all-news radio in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Houston, Riggenbach has also narrated the audiobook versions of numerous libertarian works, many of them available in Mises Media.

This article is excerpted from Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009).


Notes

[1] Murray N. Rothbard, "The Two Faces of Ronald Reagan" (1980).
[2] Murray N. Rothbard, "The Myths of Reaganomics" (1988).
[3] Timothy Noah, "Ronald Reagan, Party Animal," Slate June 5, 2004.
[4] Molly Ivins, "Baghdad on the Bayou," September 28, 2005.
[5] Sheldon Richman, "Ronald Reagan, Protectionist."
[6] Murray N. Rothbard, "The Reagan Phenomenon" (1984).
[7]Murray N. Rothbard, "The Myths of Reaganomics" (1988).
[8] Ostrowski, "Republicans and Big Government" (2002).
[9] Sean Wilentz, "Reconsideration: Bush's Ancestors," New York Times Magazine, October 16, 2005.
[10] Quoted in Steven Greenhut, "Mr. Right?" Orange County (Calif.) Register, December 7, 2003.
[11] Steven Greenhut, "Mr. Right?" Orange County (Calif.) Register, December 7, 2003.
[12] Rothbard, "The Transformation of the American Right" (2009).

http://mises.org/daily/5009/The-Reagan-Fraud-and-After

Re: Empty Ritual is stymieing America’s hopes

Pointing at rampant stupidity does not a 'groupie' make.

Regard$,
--MJ

"One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms." -- H.L. Mencken



At 04:53 PM 5/13/2011, you wrote:

MJ:  If you suppose that I am a person with demonstrable misgivings,
then why are you my GROUPIE, following wherever I post?  It's because
I am the VOICE OF REASON in correcting our out-of-control government.
You, on the other hand, are someone who likes to belly-ache and to
find fault.  If I solve all the problems in our society, you and so
many others wouldn't have anything to harp about.  So, you try to
impede my success.  That makes you a... NON patriot!  Think about
that.  — J. A. Armistead —  Patriot
>
On May 12, 1:32 pm, MJ <micha...@america.net> wrote:
> At 11:55 AM 5/12/2011, you wrote:
>
> >Dear J. Ashley:  Either you can't read (likely) or you have no earthly
> >idea what socialism and communism are.
>
> Projecting your own demonstrable misgivings upon others does nothing
> for your cause.
>
> Regard$,
> --MJ
>
> Much of the intellectual legacy of Marx is an anti-intellectual
> legacy. It has been said that you cannot refute a sneer. Marxism has
> taught many-inside and outside its ranks-to sneer at capitalism, at
> inconvenient facts or contrary interpretations, and thus ultimately
> to sneer at the intellectual process itself. This has been one of the
> sources of its enduring strength as a political doctrine, and as a
> means of acquiring and using political power in unbridled ways. --
> Thomas Sowell

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Re: Empty Ritual is stymieing America’s hopes

You can continue to INSIST that this constitution of yours does all sorts of
things, but the REALITY is that it simply does not. THAT was the point made
for you here ... a pity you constantly try to obfuscate and change the subject.

Regard$,
--MJ

The authority of government can have no pure
right over my person or property but what I concede to it. -- Thoreau, 1849

>MJ: My New Constitution RESTORES the maximum property rights to the
>people! I force our (was) police state to be deferential to any and
>all law-abiding citizens. You, like J. Ashley, need to learn to
>read. Socialism, or getting without giving, is banned by my document.
>That's because socialism would be government sanctioned theft from the
>rich to give to the lazy and good for nothings. Stealing isn't
>'fair', now is it? — J. A. A. —
> >
>On May 12, 1:38 pm, MJ <micha...@america.net> wrote:
> > At 11:16 AM 5/11/2011, you wrote:a
> job. Trust me that my New Constitution will hang for TREASON any
> > elected official who proposes anything "social" like SS, Medicare,
> > Medicaid, and unemployment insurance. All of those must be privatized
> > EXCEPT for those too old or too sick to survive otherwise.
> > And we AGAIN see an endorsement for socialism.
> > Pssst, Armistead, the Government doing
> *anything* other than securing EVERYONE's right
> to life; their own life; self-ownership serves
> to provide advantage to some at the expense of
> others AND necessarily interferes with the use
> of one's private property -- you know, socialism.
> > How does one privatize THEFT and DISTRIBUTION of ill-gotten gains?
> > Regard$,
> > --MJ"Among the natural rights of the
> Colonists are these: First, a right to life;
> Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property;
> together with the right to support and defend
> them in the best manner they can. These are
> evident branches of, rather than deductions
> from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly
> called the first law of nature." -- Samuel Adams, November 20, 1772
>
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Re: Empty Ritual is stymieing America’s hopes

Your constant efforts to avoid reality do nothing for your cause.
Why is it you continue to AVOID the words, concepts and ideas presented?

Regard$,
--MJ

Much of the intellectual legacy of Marx is an anti-intellectual legacy. It has been said that you cannot refute a sneer. Marxism has taught many-inside and outside its ranks-to sneer at capitalism, at inconvenient facts or contrary interpretations, and thus ultimately to sneer at the intellectual process itself. This has been one of the sources of its enduring strength as a political doctrine, and as a means of acquiring and using political power in unbridled ways. -- Thomas Sowell


At 05:06 PM 5/13/2011, you wrote:

MJ:  You are just a gadfly.  I swat you down, but you can't believe
you are dead.  — J. A. A. —
>
On May 12, 1:47 pm, MJ <micha...@america.net> wrote:
> At 08:18 PM 5/11/2011, you wrote:Dear Jonathan:  No!  Only "schemes" that have the strings being pulled
> by government would be socialist.  My New Constitution includes these
> and other protections to require "fairness" (not... equality) from
> businesses:
> Government REQUIRING any business, individual, collection of individuals that serves ANYTHING other than securing EVERYONE's right to life; their own life; self-ownership serves to provide advantage to some at the expense of others AND necessarily interferes with the use of one's private property -- you know, socialism.
> You STILL do not see how you are endorsing and promoting what you claim to be eliminating."Businesses and professions shall be fair to their employees and to
> their customers.  The wages, benefits and perks, as well as the
> charges that are made for goods and services, shall not be
> discriminatory nor exploitive of any person, group nor class, nor
> shall such be overly influenced by the profit motive of those who
> perform no actual work on an ongoing basis.  Fair and honest business
> practices require that management be forthright with employees and
> customers without coercion."
> This is socialism in any of its many forms.
> Take 'discriminatory' -- which necessarily occurs whenever more than one person seeks an available position ...
> What about the discrimination against the Business Owner that occurs when people choose NOT to work for him?And... "Only laws, rules, regulations and procedures that are in the
> best interest of the People and the world environment shall be passed,
> enacted or enforced, and no business contrary to such shall be allowed
> to prosper."
> MORE Socialism in any of its many forms.
> Regard$,
> --MJ"Daily experience proves clearly to everybody but the most bigoted fanatics of socialism that governmental management is inefficient and wasteful" -- Ludwig von Mises in "Economic Freedom and Interventionism," 1990.

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Re: Newt Gingrich, Weasel

 
To prove my point, I will take the time to refute another one of your dumb, "cut and paste" posts. 
 
As usual,  Michael  took an article from a Moonbat,  Tom Woods, who quotes another Moonbat, Bob Wenzel, in their bashing of Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich,  the crux of the articles amount to nothing other than some name calling, specifically that Mr. Gingrich is a weasel. 

So far we see the typical fallacy spew.

 
Let's review:
 
First,  Woods  cites Wentzel's "brief" article as being somehow "sharp"  and "insightful".    Here's what Wentzel said, according to Woods, the, "brief,  sharp insightful"  article in its entirety:
 
"Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will officially jump into the race for the Republican presidential nomination on Wednesday with announcements on Facebook and Twitter,
 
The Gingrich campaign strategy appears to be that he will run not on any principles, but more on the fact that he is not President Obama.

A Gingrich snippet:

The fact is, we are not going to close the deficit and move towards a balanced budget unless we follow the policies that foster the economic growth necessary to create jobs.The first and most immediate step would be to employ the policies that encourage investment, create jobs, and reward innovation and entrepreneurship -- exactly the opposite of the Obama anti-jobs policies

 

Aside from the attack on President Obama, the underlying message here is that Gingrich wants to balance the budget not by reducing government spending, but by increasing tax revenues through more jobs. In other words, Gingrich sees no problem with the current size of government."
 
========
 
Obviously,  both Wentzel and Woods are either just total ignoramuses, and/or they are purposely attempting to besmirch Mr. Gingrich's long record and established policy of smaller federal government.  For example,  here is a speech from just two months ago,  on Mr. Gingrich's policies on smaller, limited federal government:
 
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/118653/20110304/newt-gingrich-2012-presidential-aspirations-smaller-government.htm

Is see ... your problem is that you are STILL operating in the "intentions" and "talk" realm rather than the "ACTION" realm.
In his 'speech' he TALKS about 'reform' -- reform, of course, means re-arranging the deck chairs (you know, an embrace of socialist policy operated in a manner he agrees). There are also a lot of generalities and promises for 'Blue Ribbon Commissions' to study and look into purported problems. (this, too, is meaningless political spew). He wants to balance the budget -- another charade.
He also TALKS about the Tenth Amendment (as though he embraces it) and yet he recently affirmed parts of ObamaCare -- something CONTRARY to Amendment X.

Was there something SPECIFIC from that speech that was supposed to somehow SUPPORT your assertions?

 
"We need to declare our independence from trying to protect and defend failed bureaucracies that magically become ours as soon as we are in charge of them. We appoint solid conservatives to a department and within three weeks they are defending and protecting the very department that they would have been attacking before they got appointed.

I think that there are two grave lessons for the conservative movement since 1980. The first, which we still haven't come to grips with, is that governing..."

Source: Speech at 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference Feb 9, 2008

Re: The Deliberate Destruction of a Great Nation

Good article.

 

 

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 7:38 PM, Travis <baconlard@gmail.com> wrote:

The Deliberate Destruction of a Great Nation

Read More About: ACORN, Black Panthers, Marriage dispute, Wisc. Gov

 

Redacted from WHISTLEBLOWER MAGAZINE, May 2011

It may have been "Morning in America" during Ronald Reagan's presidency, but under Barack Obama life is becoming a blinding fog. What is real and what is not? One week, polls show most Americans think Obama is a liar, his popularity reaching an all-time low. The next week, his ratings skyrocket on news that terror kingpin Osama bin Laden has been killed.

But as the modern entertainment medium called "news" switches gears from week to week, lurching from story to story, what is really going on underneath it all?

For tens of millions of Americans, what is going on is the destruction of the greatest nation in history, whose morals and money are both in free-fall and whose politics have been steered maniacally leftward under Obama. They see their legendary liberty, prosperity and sovereignty evaporating into the mist of an advancing new global order where America and Americans are being intentionally diminished in every conceivable way.

Realizing they're being deceived and misled constantly by both their government and the elite media, they're doing two things simultaneously: Preparing themselves and their families for hard times, and organizing and working as diligently as possible to save their troubled country.

And one of the most disturbing manifestations of the Age of Obama is documented in the eye-opening May issue of Whistleblower, "RISE OF THE LAWLESS LEFT."

"America – at least America as it has long been known and loved – is disintegrating," said WND Managing Editor David Kupelian. "It is becoming a more lawless place, one where the old rules, the old standards, values, understandings and laws no longer hold sway. And it starts at the top."

While previous presidents have stretched and even distorted the Constitution to accommodate their ambitions, Obama contemptuously tramples the supreme law of the land, which he has publicly condemned as "fundamentally flawed":

Obama's Justice Department, under Attorney General Eric Holder, not only refused to prosecute the most brazen case of voter intimidation in modern history, starring club-wielding New Black Panther thugs. Its Civil Rights Division refuses to prosecute cases where the perpetrators are black and the victims white.


Not only is Team Obama unconcerned with stopping the tidal wave of illegal aliens flooding into the U.S. from Mexico, but when one state, Arizona, passed a law to enforce federal immigration laws, Obama's Justice Department sued Arizona to halt the enforcement.


Though citizens in every state given the chance have voted to reject same-sex marriage, Obama is intent on imposing it on the entire nation. For while Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act by a huge majority in 1996 and Bill Clinton signed it into law, Obama's Justice Department now says it won't enforce the law, without which the Constitution's "full faith and credit" clause will be perverted to force all states to recognize same-sex marriages as legitimate within their borders.


An overwhelming majority of Oklahomans, 70 percent, voted in November to exclude Shariah – the barbaric 7th century legal system that amputates limbs of shoplifters, stones women to death for adultery and burns homosexuals alive – from consideration in settling American legal cases in American courts. But then one judge overturned the law, leaving the door open for one of the most enslaving forces on earth – Shariah – to become a guiding principle in an American courtroom. With such contempt for the rule of law at the top, no wonder leftists around the country are becoming increasingly and openly lawless.

When Wisconsin's governor had the courage to try to bring his state's near-bankrupt budget into balance by limiting the power of government-employee unions, Democrat legislators went AWOL for weeks, running from their elected jobs, crossing their southern border and hiding out in Illinois to avoid being apprehended by police. Meanwhile, thousands of leftist agitators and union thugs vandalized the capitol building. Following their example, 37 out of Indiana's 40 Democratic lawmakers likewise fled westward into Illinois to prevent the Republican majority from balancing their state's budget by checking the power of public-employee unions.

But all that's just the tip of the iceberg, says Kupelian. "Respect for law is breaking down in America. Those on the hard left, encouraged by our radical-in-chief, are increasingly rising up and revealing themselves as the lawless revolutionary ground troops they truly are.

ACORN is back and the unions are just getting warmed up. "Now that we're heading into the 2012 presidential election cycle," said Kupelian, "be warned: Obama and his people will do whatever they possibly can – legal or illegal, moral or immoral – to win the 2012 election.

Remember that community organizing guru Saul Alinsky, whose teachings Obama said were 'seared into my brain' and provided 'the best education I ever had,' taught that it's perfectly fine to violate your own 'individual conscience' – in other words, to lie, steal and cheat – in order to accomplish what is 'good for mankind.'"

Added Kupelian: "We're now in the midst of a civil war between two Americas – between traditional middle-class, hard-working, Judeo-Christian America and the angry, deluded, redistributionist, utopian left. Only one side can prevail. So, while we fight the good fight to restore our culture, economy and constitutional government, understand that the lawlessness on the left is only going to increase."

Read: Whistleblower Magazine, May, 2011

© 2011 WorldNetDaily

Posted by Jerome S. Kaufman on May 11, 2011.

 

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