Virginia, Birthplace of Liberty, To Pass Bill To Ban Mandated Purchase of Insurance!

This is how state's rights is supposed to work! Virginia, the birthplace of such men as Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, appears poised to strike a blow for liberty on behalf of the people and the states by refusing to abide by any mandate issued by the national government for the citizens of Virginia to purchase health insurance. If passed into law by the newly elected governor of Virginia Bob McDonnell, it would be a clarion call to the American people on how to avoid the civil disorder that would inevitably proceed from the Democrats' tyrannical plans to pass a "healthcare reform" bill intended to hijack one-sixth of the U.S. economy.

Robert G. Marshall, who sponsored the Virginia bill, gave this blistering comment in rebuttal to the Democrats' plans:

"Mobsters used to offer ‘protection’ to business owners, so when Congress says that if individuals don’t become customers of businesses that contribute to them, to me that crosses the line. For me, it is hard to distinguish what is going on in Washington, D.C. from criminal activity."

Verification comes from The Washington Post:

The Virginia General Assembly has given final approval to a bill that would make it illegal for the government to require individuals to purchase health insurance, a measure intended to conflict with Democratic efforts to reform health care in Washington. 

Thirty-four other states are weighing similar legislation to block the individual mandate, which is an element of bills that have passed both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. But Virginia is the first state to complete legislative action on such a bill.

Such would be the wisest legislation passed by a state in defense of its rights and those of its citizens in recent memory. The last such rebellion against the ever-expanding power of the national government came in 2007, when several states refused through legislation to implement the Real ID program. This precedent in and of itself is important, since such senators as Republican ne'erdowell Lyndsey Graham and the slimiest of the Democrat slime Chuck Schumer are collaborating on a comprehensive "immigration reform" bill that would pave the path to a National ID system.

Of course, the passage of a "healthcare reform" bill would accomplish the same thing as Real ID by implication, as a central database of medical records (ostensibly to be provided by our fascist friends at General Electric and Google) would be at the disposal of government bureaucrats and politicians, and by implication, their corporate pals. The centralization of medical records would inevitably lead to an alarming violation of our privacy rights, as our allies the Brits are finding out.

In any event, the salvo that appears poised to be issued forth from Virginia would be an even stronger message to the national government than Texas Governor Rick Perry's secession talk last year, which after all, was just talk. What the American people need now is more action to prevent not only further usurpation of state's and individual rights, but a reclaiming by states of our rights as free citizens. If the several states mulling a rejection of the Democrats' intentionally ruinous legislation follow Virginia's lead, the long path to restoring Constitutional balance in our nation will finally be off to a productive start.

Update, from the Virginia bill article: "On the same day the Virginia General Assembly passed Marshall’s bill, the Idaho Senate also approved the Idaho Health Freedom Act (HB 391), which deems the individual mandate unconstitutional and permits the state to sue Congress or any other body enforcing such a mandate."

We need to keep the momentum going and urge the state legislatures to pass this legal protection of the American people!

Government Regulation of Buddhas

China Orders Living Buddhas to Obtain Permission Before Reincarnating

I've just come across this old news. The omnipotent and omniscient State claims power over things both earthly and heavenly. I suggest the Chinese government also issue permits for bread and wine to transsubstantiate into Christ's body and blood and for Santa Claus to come from the North Pole. 

What Will Be Our "The Revolution Was"...?

The Revolution Was by Garet Garrett:

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.

There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, "Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don't watch out." These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle. More than 2,000 years ago he wrote of what can happen within the form, when "one thing takes the place of another, so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about revolution in the state."

Worse outwitted were those who kept trying to make sense of the New Deal from the point of view of all that was implicit in the American scheme, charging it therefore with contradiction, fallacy, economic ignorance, and general incompetence to govern.

But it could not be so embarrassed and all that line was wasted, because, in the first place, it never intended to make that kind of sense, and secondly, it took off from nothing that was implicit in the American scheme. It took off from a revolutionary base. The design was European. Regarded from the point of view of revolutionary technic it made perfect sense. Its meaning was revolutionary and it had no other. For what it meant to do it was from the beginning consistent in principle, resourceful, intelligent, masterly in workmanship, and it made not one mistake.

The test came in the first one hundred days.

No matter how carefully a revolution may have been planned there is bound to be a crucial time. That comes when the actual seizure of power is taking place. In this case certain steps were necessary. They were difficult and daring steps. But more than that, they had to be taken in a certain sequence, with forethought and precision of timing. One out of place might have been fatal. What happened was that one followed another in exactly the right order, not one out of time or out of place.

Having passed this crisis, the New Deal went on from one problem to another, taking them in the proper order, according to revolutionary technic; and if the handling of one was inconsistent with the handling of another, even to the point of nullity, that was blunder in reverse. The effect was to keep people excited about one thing at a time, and divided, while steadily through all the uproar of outrage and confusion a certain end, held constantly in view, was pursued by main intention.

The end held constantly in view was power.

In a revolutionary situation mistakes and failures are not what they seem. They are scaffolding. Error is not repealed. It is compounded by a longer law, by more decrees and regulations, by further extensions of the administrative hand. As deLawd said in The Green Pastures, that when you have passed a miracle you have to pass another one to take care of it, so it was with the New Deal. Every miracle it passed, whether it went right or wrong, had one result. Executive power over the social and economic life of the nation was increased. Draw a curve to represent the rise of executive power and look there for the mistakes. You will not find them. The curve is consistent.

At the end of the first year, in his annual message to the Congress, January 4, 1934, President Roosevelt said: "It is to the eternal credit of the American people that this tremendous readjustment of our national life is being accomplished peacefully."

Peacefully if possible — of course.

But the revolutionary historian will go much further. Writing at some distance in time he will be much less impressed by the fact that it was peacefully accomplished than by the marvelous technic of bringing it to pass not only within the form but within the word, so that people were all the while fixed in the delusion that they were talking about the same things because they were using the same words. Opposite and violently hostile ideas were represented by the same word signs. This was the American people's first experience with dialectic according to Marx and Lenin. [...]

Now given — (1) the opportunity, (2) a country whose fabulous wealth was in the modern forms — dynamic, functional, non-portable, (3) a people so politically naive as to have passed a law against any attempt to overthrow their government by force — and, (4) the intention to bring about what Aristotle called a revolution in the state, within the frame of existing law — Then from the point of view of scientific revolutionary technic what would the problems be?

They set themselves down in sequence as follows:

The first, naturally, would be to capture the seat of government.

The second would be to seize economic power.

The third would be to mobilize by propaganda the forces of hatred.

The fourth would he to reconcile and then attach to the revolution the two great classes whose adherence is indispensable but whose interests are economically antagonistic, namely, the industrial wage earners and the farmers, called in Europe workers and peasants.

The fifth would be what to do with business — whether to liquidate or shackle it.

(These five would have a certain imperative order in time and require immediate decisions because they belong to the program of conquest. That would not be the end. What would then ensue? A program of consolidation. Under that head the problems continue.)

The sixth, in Burckhardt's devastating phrase, would be "the domestication of individuality" — by any means that would make the individual more dependent upon government.

The seventh would be the systematic reduction of all forms of rival authority.

The eighth would be to sustain popular faith in an unlimited public debt, for if that faith should break the government would be unable to borrow, if it could not borrow it could not spend, and the revolution must be able to borrow and spend the wealth of the rich or else it will be bankrupt.

The ninth would be to make the government itself the great capitalist and enterpriser, so that the ultimate power in initiative would pass from the hands of private enterprise to the all-powerful state.

Each one of these problems would have two sides, one the obverse and one the reverse, like a coin. One side only would represent the revolutionary intention. The other side in each case would represent Recovery — and that was the side the New Deal constantly held up to view. Nearly everything it did was in the name of Recovery. But in no case was it true that for the ends of economic recovery alone one solution or one course and one only was feasible. In each case there was an alternative and therefore a choice to make.

What we shall see is that in every case the choice was one that could not fail:

(a) To ramify the authority and power of executive government — its power, that is, to rule by decrees and rules and regulations of its own making; (b) To strengthen its hold upon the economic life of the nation; (c) To extend its power aver the individual; (d) To degrade the parliamentary principle; (e) To impair the great American tradition of an independent, Constitutional judicial power; (f) To weaken all other powers — the power of private enterprise, the power of private finance, the power of state and local government; (g) To exalt the leader principle.

[Continued]

America Being Drowned in Regulations

"The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation's oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters. " (!)

Obama administration will accept no more public input for federal f...

Auberon Herbert on "Voluntaryism"

From Gary Galles of The Freemen:

Voluntaryism. Other than to those who have seriously considered the overwhelming case for liberty in human affairs, the word doesn’t have a very catchy ring. As a result, it would not survive vetting by our modern gamut of political focus groups and public-relations gurus. Yet that was what Englishman Auberon Herbert used to describe and endorse the only social arrangement that does not deny people’s self-ownership—voluntary cooperation.

Herbert, who was born in 1838, died a century ago in 1906. As well as being a member of Parliament, he was a writer, editor, and political philosopher. He advocated government “strictly limited to its legitimate duties in defense of self-ownership and individual rights.” Therefore, he said, it must be supported by voluntary contributions.

Unlike many intellectuals, Herbert acted on his avowed beliefs in a manner that made him, as the late Chris Tame put it, “probably the leading English libertarian” in the early twentieth century. His writing, in the words of Benjamin Tucker, the libertarian-anarchist editor of Liberty, was “a searching exposure of the inherent evil of State systems, and a glorious assertion of the inestimable benefits of voluntary action and free competition.” But in addition, he founded the journal Free Life and The Personal Rights and Self Help Association, was an anti-war leader, and more.

(For more about Herbert’s life and philosophy, see his collection, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays, Liberty Press, 1978, and Eric Mack’s “Voluntaryism: The Political Thought of Auberon Herbert,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, vol. 2, no. 4, 1978.)

Auberon Herbert rejected the term anarchism for his beliefs because he believed in government empowered solely for the defensive use of force. Instead, he chose the term voluntaryism because it captured a characteristic that is true of “complete liberty in all things,” but not of any alternative social “ism”: the no coercive “respect for the rights of others.” In his words, “under voluntaryism the state would defend the rights of liberty, never aggress upon them.”

If one accepts that every individual owns himself, which Herbert called “supreme moral rights,” there is only one consistent form of social organization: mutual consent. From that he derived his view of the role of government: “[T]herefore force may be employed on behalf of these rights, but not in opposition to them.” Any other state-imposed compulsion is illegitimate because it must inherently violate mutual consent, and therefore self-ownership. But such illegitimate compulsion is the core of government as we have long experienced it.

[Continued]

A World of Our Enemy's Design

Socialism can be most succinctly defined as a world without private property. Private property is seen by socialists as a barrier between human beings that keeps people from cooperating with one another, and that feeds their selfishness and egotism. In the reductivist socialist worldview, all phenomena of the world, including human behavior, can be extrapolated from material conditions. In a world of perfect material equality, so socialist thinking goes, there would be peace and harmony among men.

Yet there is a fatal flaw in this worldview. The desire of the individual for self-expression manifests itself in the need for property as an extension of self; either in terms of the reification (or realization) of a person's labor, which is the concrete encapsulation of creativity, time, and a human being's very life; or in terms of a person's desire for security from the mob or the state.

To deny private property, in a sense, is to obliterate the word "mine," from the lexicon of humanity; not to be replaced by the word "ours," the superficial antithesis of "mine"; but rather both terms are stricken from man's vocabulary because his conceptualization of property is erased through the removal of the referents, replaced by a state of non-comprehension of the nature of the self and the limits of material reality. The self does not develop through the process of a man interacting with his environment; in fact, the sacramentalization of the environment implies the destruction of individualization.

The removal of property from the private sphere and displacement into the public arena or into the growing abyss of "the environment" (which a step further removed in the direction of the state's absolute control of natural resources) is the underlying cause of the ancient (i.e. non-Marxist) version of the "tragedy of the commons." The phenomenon of the deterioration of "public goods" was later refined by Luis Molina of the School of Salamanca, who noted that individuals care for their own property better than that of property held in common. The tragedy of the commons can be seen in any inner city ghetto, which is non-coincidentally, any place that modern liberals have prolonged power.

This examination of the insidious effects of the obliteration of private property can be further informed by deconstruction of Pierre Joseph Proudhon's famous maxim in What is Property? (1840) of "Property is theft." But in a world without property rights, there can be no theft. There is no moral-legal structure of economic order, there is only a world with no legal barriers to prevent victimization, not only by other human beings, but by the state itself. But wouldn't this be an exact reversal of the Enlightenment project, which began with Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan and was developed into its mature form in the philosophy of John Locke?

There may be those who intuitively disagree with this narrative, and believe that I am constructing a straw man; that no modern liberal is so radical as to support the obliteration of private property, and that what is really proponed by the Democrats in power is a "mixed economy," that is, a combination of the best parts of capitalism and socialism, experimented with until the best of both worlds is constructed.

But this point of view belies an ignorance or disingenuous exposition of the implementation of the philosophy of Marx. The method of socialist corruption of the economy is "dialectical materialism," which means that, following Fichte and informally Marx's teacher Hegel, "the development of the thesis into the antithesis, which is sublated by the synthesis." What does this mean essentially? It means from a Hegelian point of view that history is a process of change and transformation, which may be practically adapted, in the Marxist-Leninist and the neomarxist point of view, as the destruction of the capitalist system through the introduction of elements of it's antithesis.

If the American people take for granted that the hallmark of "capitalism," a term coined by Marx, is simply the presence of capital, or currency, then this leaves the state free to corrupt other elements of the economy. The master stroke for the socialists was John Maynard Keynes' development of a "general theory" of economics, that supported the incremental erosion of the purchasing power of the currency through inflation. Lenin couldn't have developed a better "Fabian socialist" strategy, as John Maynard Keynes noted in an essay:

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. [...]

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

Thus we see the hidden motive of Keynesianism: To debauch the currency and to bring chaos and disorder to the economic system of "capitalism." And one can ask any government bureaucrat, Keynes is almost universally revered in the government and in the civil service. While Lenin is more to the taste of the intellectual class in the universities, the difference between the Bolshevik and the Fabian Socialist is a matter of speed, not ends.

So how can the Democrats, and even some Republicans, get away with disguising their statist agenda, which is cloaked either in social welfare and military Keynesianism, respectively? Statist politicians are given cover in the American political system two ways. First of all, the legislative branch is founded on deliberation and compromise. This means that the foundation of the capitalist economy, individual rights and private property, can be compromised away by the two parties through the dialectics of discourse. This is the reason that we Americans constantly hear about "bipartisanship" and "democracy," but only if it fits the statist agenda. Second, being that the foundation of America is assumed to be "capitalist," the ghosts of the free market system that are the dollar bills we hold in our hands persist long after the market system has been incrementally and systematically corrupted through the institution of fiat currency. One might even say that our Hegelian historical moment of truth has passed, and that the logical implication of the establishment of fiat currency is that we work at the behest of the state, our labor given in debt to the labor of others. Philosophically, this is the destruction of individual rights through the undermining of private property, which is measured in a "capitalist" system in capital. If the state owns the capital that we exchange, then we are effectively at the mercy of the state. Taxes are not the confiscation of property, but the state's collection of notes of legal tender that it dispersed at an earlier point in time for the benefit of the "public good."

If we can imagine for a moment, with our radical compatriots, what a world without private property would look like, one where unlimited democracy reigns, and one where the means of production are at the disposal of the proletariat, what would this world look like? Hypothetically, say that one wanted a new vehicle for the transport of one's family to visit a relative, would the collective see the need to manufacture a vehicle, simply because one desired to visit a family member? Or more to the fancy of collectivists' presuppositions, what if the commune's vehicle was being used by someone else, and it was a family emergency for one of the group's members? That person is simply out of luck, and possibly brandished as selfish if he makes demands on the commune for the use of a public resource.

It gets much worse if we explore the assumption of a world without private property further. Inevitably, demands on public resources skyrocket, the government is forced to ration goods and services, including the provision of healthcare, and social entropy ensues. People begin to be morally corrupted, engaging in selfish behavior such as pilfering public resources for oneself, which can hardly be considered stealing given the collectivists' own supposed philosophy.

But the proposition of a world without private property is not something that has been contemplated fully by the radical left, as I know from experience. The culimination of the destruction of the capitalist system results not in utopia but in the "Then what?" question. On the contrary, the founding fathers fully contemplated a world without private property, drawing on the works of men like Aristotle, and informed by the testimony of its disaster by men like William Bradford. Such true philosophical and rational exploration of the issue led John Adams to conclude:

Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty. Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors. Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of every thing be demanded, and voted. What would be the consequence of this? The idle, the vicious, the intemperate, would rush into the utmost extravagance of debauchery, sell and spend all their share, and then demand a new division of those who purchased from them. The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.

Defying Reason: Discourse and American Decline

Americans are engaged in a war of ideas. Two main factions, conservatives and leftists, are vying for the soul of the republic. On each side of the highly contentious issues facing this country are factions that have opposing views of what it is to be "reasonable." Those who consider themselves "moderates" view themselves as "reasonable" in the sense that they wish to avoid extremes. Many self-described "independents" seek to extricate themselves from the conflict by not taking sides, while others simply feel that the "reasonable" view is not represented at all. American conservatives look to the founding, which was based on an Enlightenment view of Reason that is rooted in Aristotelian philosophy. Leftists are irrational in the sense they do not believe in the Aristotelian view of reason, but rather argue that reason is determined by "discourse." The leftist program itself is specifically destructive of reason through its denial of objective reality and its embrace of Hegelian and Marxist dialectical philosophy.

We can inform the ideological and political warfare going on through a cursory examination of conflicting views of reason, especially with a view to how it impacts the leading factions, American conservatives and leftists, and by extension, moderates and independents. To do this we need to do as Aristotle advised, and start at the beginning. Later we will apply this historical and philosophical overview to the current political situation.

Reason, in the Enlightenment sense, can be seen as a faculty of the human mind that one uses to determine truth based on logic, evidence, and history. This view of reason can roughly be termed the "Aristotelian view" of reason, due to the great thinker's codification of logic, his argument that objective reality exists independently of the mind, and his law of identity, which states that A = A.

The primary philosophical rival of Aristotle, according to most accounts, was his teacher Plato. Plato used the ancient form of dialectics, meaning the ascertainment of truth by argument, most famously employed by the philosopher Socrates. The Socratic dialogues show his interrogation of the "sophists," those who cynically manipulated the language to justify any position. Socrates, who was nicknamed the "gadfly" of Athens, was famously executed for his challenging of tradition and religion.

While Plato's collectivist view of the ideal "Republic" prefigures communism, Plato's view of attempting to ascertain truth by dialogue and questioning should not be seen as the antithesis of Aristotle's method. The starkest contrast for both Aristotle and Plato are the sophists, who are emblematic of civilizational decline as manifested by their abuse of language.

One of the clearest illustrations of how the deterioration of language leads to stasis or revolution and chaos is Thucydides' The History of the Peloponnesian War. In this first "modern" history, Pericles is the demagogue who manipulates the Athenian mob into continuing the war against Sparta, despite the Athenians' decimation by plague. Later, in the ultimate sign of hubris, the Athenians are persuaded into launching a disastrous expedition to Sicily, where they are promptly routed by the Syracusans and the Spartans.

Such we can see in ancient history the theme of Aristotle as the elucidator of reason as a human faculty capable of knowing objective reality, Plato as the expositor of reason as discourse, and the sophists as the propagators of anti-reason.Logos in ancient Greek means not only reason, but language. By implication, the destruction of language is the destruction of reason.

The Romans borrowed heavily from the ancient Greeks and applied the Aristotelian view of reason to make great strides in law and engineering. After the Roman empire collapsed in the West, the Europeans fell into a period of superstition and obscurity, known popularly as the "Dark Ages." While many challenge that there was such a period of civilizational stagnation in Europe, they are merely bridling at the implication that collectivism is a dysfunctional political and societal ordering principle. But the proof is in the pudding - the Roman achievements in engineering, law, and literature still stand, and post-Roman Europe, up to around the tenth century, is a rabble of disconnected artifacts.

The rediscovery of Aristotle by scholastic thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas paved the way for the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. Since that period, men began to systematically question and sweep away the dogmas of the day, the human mind again being seen as an instrument of observing and making sense of objective reality. The true leap forward in logic and empiricism ushered in astounding progress in the fields of astronomy, anatomy, chemistry, physics, and the natural sciences.

But in the spirit of skepticism inherent in the Enlightenment project of dismantling superstition and illogical beliefs lay a seed of anti-reason. In the newly found freedom of inquiry, intellectuals began to dismiss the logical and empirical foundations of scientific thinking and to attack reason and thinking itself.

The Romantic period can be seen as a transition in human thought from the Enlightenment conception of reason, rooted in an Aristotelian view of reality, to a new view of reason, one stressing reason as discourse and deliberation. Romanticism fed a desire by many to "escape from reason" and objective reality by retreating into sentimentalism, collectivism, mysticism, and tribalism. But it only presaged the eventual backlash and assault on reason that came with Frederic Nietzsche's nihilism and the dialectics of Hegel, and his pupil, Karl Marx.

While Nietzsche can be seen as someone who sincerely desired to liberate the mind from ancient superstitions, including in his view, religion, ultimately he urged the "will to power" by those whom he called "the supermen," and the creation of mythos to turn men back from the brink of self-destruction.

While Nietzsche can be seen as the modern "gadfly" of our age, it took Hegel and Marx to codify a systematic philosophy of anti-reason, which was ushered in by the great leveler of reason, Immanuel Kant. Kant built on David Hume's dismissal of causality as happenstance to compose destructive critiques of reason.


Immanuel Kant was admired by Hegel, and Kantian thinking turns up in several of Hegel's passages. But Hegel's adaptation of his rival Fichte's dialectical reasoning was the symphony of destruction needed to undo the gains of the Enlightenment, both intellectually and politically.

Hegelian dialectics is a self-contained, self-referential philosophical system that in its simplest popular form means that "thesis and antithesis results in synthesis."& It is a view of human history and reality that is the obliteration of the Aristotelian law of identity, A = A, which was the touchstone of the founding philosopher of objectivism Ayn Rand.

It took Karl Marx to take the limitations of dialectics as a phenomenon of mind and instrumentalize it as a weapon to be put into practice by developing his key approach of "dialectical materialism." Marx thus brought to fruit the teachings of the old master Hegel by "turning him right side up." Hegel was a believer in the "unity of the particular and the universal" and a proponent of "freedom in the state." In this way he is a philosopher often credited with fathering the twentieth century left and right totalitarianisms of communism and fascism, respectively.

But Marx's master stroke, by reversing Hegel, was being able to make an argument that his dialectical materialism led to ultimate freedom from the state. Yet the application of Marxism, since it is a philosophy that is "free" from the objective reality of scarcity, leads itself to totalitarianism without any miraculous "redemption" at any unspecified point in the future. It is simply destruction, of reason, of economy, of society, all the way down.

In some ways, the structure of American government facilitated the traction of dialectical reason because the representative bodies were founded on deliberation and discourse. Freedom to debate truth in a marketplace of ideas led to the apprehension of the process of debating truth as reason itself. But reason is not about the process, it is about ascertaining truth as grounded in objective reality, with the assumption that there is such a thing as cause an effect.

A transitional thinker in the history of liberalism, and one who can be seen as a fulcrum in the shift from classical liberalism to modern liberalism is John Stuart Mill. Mill's On Liberty, though a marvelous work in many regards, shows signs of the replacement of the Aristotelian view of reason with the view of reason as discourse and deliberation. It is with the deep drive for liberty in the thinking of some philosophers that freedom begins to intellectually cannibalize itself through a focus more on language than on objective reality. "Freedom" becomes unhinged from the moorings of Aristotelian rationality and begins to embrace aspects of nihilism, leading to modern liberalism.

Within the modern liberal left developed left and right flanks, Marxism and progressivism, respectively, around the turn of the twentieth century. While Marxists were revolutionaries eager to destroy the "bourgeois" state and the prevailing capitalist economy, the progressives were incrementalists who sought to usher in the Hegelian triumph of the Idea.

The problem with Marxism is that though its program was perfectly destructive, its explanation of reality and history is simply wrong. It failed to predict spontaneous socialist revolutions in advanced capitalist states, and the cooperation of workers worldwide to break the horror of World War II. The "vulgar" sentiment of nationalism overwhelmed the workers and convinced the Marxists that their assessment of the power of socialism as an idea was mistaken. This led to a resurgence of Hegel on the left, and an adoption of a program by leftists in the most advanced capitalist states to proceed with socialism, or more accurately, the destruction of capitalism, incrementally. This impetus gave birth to both Fabian socialists and neomarxists, the twin heads of the progressive program to transform capitalist societies; the economic and the ideal spheres of the New Left, respectively.

The New Left's program initially argued for a "Third Way" between radical Marxism and capitalism, which was only "reasonable" according to the synthetic logic employed by the left. Since America, the land of the free, embraced the model of reason in government as deliberative discourse according to the "will of the people," the creeping introduction of socialistic ideals led to a situation where capitalists, whose model of economy explicitly embraced an Aristotelian understanding of objective reality through scarcity, supply and demand, and the free operation of prices, were forced to "compromise" with the undoing of the system, that is, they had to introduce unreason and unreality into government and economy.

The earliest paragon of the "third way" between capitalism and socialism is best exemplified by Benito Mussolini. As Jonah Goldberg details in Liberal Fascism, Mussolini was a Marxist who opportunistically exploited rising Italian nationalism and the corporatism of Benedetto Croce, to found a "mixed economy" where capitalism still existed, but property was owned and controlled by the state, and labor was directed by the state.

It should be noted that not even the Soviet Union adopted Marxism in practice, since Marxism is inherently unrealistic. What the Soviet Union adopted in practice was fascism, which is the presence of capital, which were rubles, but the command and the control of the economy by the state. The only difference between the fascist states calling themselves communist and the fascist states as they are known popularly is the form of collectivist propaganda, which is either nationalist or internationalist. Totalitarian states are totalitarian not because of the nature of their justifications in the realm of ideas for complete rule over the life and labor of their subjects, but because in economic reality they have complete control over individuals.

The justifications for the increasing power of the state was pioneered in the modern era by neomarxists, most notably those of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and the Hungarian communist Gyorgy Lukacs. The Frankfurt School, led by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, drew on the work of Hegel to develop sophisticated forms of propaganda that would erode capitalist and Christian societies and usher in their demise. Gramsci urged communists to penetrate every sphere of culture and use it to urge members of "democracies" to capture the state. Lukacs essentially codified ways to pervert the youth to rebel against Christianity. Cloward and Piven harnessed Gramscian theory to persuade the less well-off to make incessant demands on the welfare state, as established by the pseudo-fascist FDR and continued by Lyndon Johnson. Alinsky was a field general in organizing communities to make increasing demands on the system, propelling it to collapse.

The chaos and discontent of the late 1960s led to radicals seeking to specifically undo any reason that might be drawn upon to make sense of their destructive program and to head it off before it was too late. Many entered academia and began the project of codifying unreason. This was not only done through the teaching of Marx, but by the adaptation of Alinsky's principles to teaching, specifically, speaking to one's audience in the language the people will understand.

Jurgen Habermas is a modern philosopher whose "intercommunicative rationality" has persuaded elites that discourse is reason. Subjectivism, as encapsulated in postmodernism, has stymied the penetration of evidence into the minds of leftists to provide counterfactuals and to illustrate the destructive nature of their worldview. Thomas Kuhn transformed science from the Popperian philosophy of science as the falsification of theory to the Kuhnian one based on "paradigms" and "consensus." Kuhnian science can be demonstrated most readily by the incessant refrain from elites that the "debate is over" regarding the theory of anthropogenic global warming, which has been falsified six ways from Sunday by satellite data and other empirical evidence.

Modern intellectuals, including teachers, professors, journalists, and politicians, are cordoned off from reason and evidence in the Aristotelian view by their sense of elitism. They are convinced that the arcane theories they have studied are the truth, which can only by modified by the words that, in their self-referential mental world, are spewed forth by leftists like themselves. Any words that crash in upon the self-referential system of ultimate "freedom" - freedom from facts, evidence, logic, reality, or morality - are intruders, invaders to be seized upon and expelled post haste. Any descriptor of their ideology or themselves that they perceive is negative is rejected not on the merits, but by its power to dispel the illusion of their elite status. Meanwhile, every word in the arsenal that can be used to advantage is wielded against anyone perceived to be in the way of their program.

In such a view of the world as the elites now propagate, evil is not evil, good is not good, there is only the gray area that is "reality." Justice is what the elites say it is, not what is best for each individual, the only legitimate foundation of law, in its specific meaning as the equal application of rules for society. Private property is negotiable, individual rights are expendable, and the Constitution is subject to "interpretation."

The destruction of reason as a means to ascertain truth using logic and evidence is the destruction of the free society, which only exists in objective reality, not in the utopian constructs of the systematically unhinged mind. The universities have become institutions of systematized insanity, factories for the training of unreasonable foot-soldiers who only know the refrain, "we want," "we demand," and "we have a right." Whether those "rights" infringe on the fundamental rights of others is beyond their comprehension; to reason as such would be a destruction of their "have their cake and eat it too," "that's a false choice" mentality. As George Orwell noted, "Political chaos is connected with the decay of language." And the language of the left is not only decayed, it is twisted, manipulative, and perverse to its very core.

The full import of the argument of this article is that there is no reasoning with the elites currently directing American society and economy to its necessary destruction. The elites have no need for the average American's "common sense," the logic and fact-based reason of conservative spokesmen, or the demonstrable history of republics that descend into democratic chaos and ultimately, tyranny. There is literally no traction for truth based in reality in the minds of elites, there is only their innate drive for power, influence, and the admiration of their elite peers. Their scorn of tea party activists is predictable, and their inability to see how the statist program they view as a "reasonable mix of capitalism mixed with socialism" (or "mixed economy") undermines the freedom that is the foundation of their worldview is intellectually ingrained. They view the dominant news media as "mainstream," due to the sheer number of elites that reinforce their worldview. Any words such as "fascist" or "communist" will strike them as funny and hysterical and having no intellectual merit, considering the source.

We are on our own as a political movement and the only thing we can do is swamp Washington and remove as many supposed "elites" as humanly possible. The leftists in the Democrat party and the "reasonable" compromisers of the Republican party must go. Those who see reason as "discourse," those self-described moderates and independents, cannot be persuaded by moderation itself, but by a forceful articulation of the antithesis of the left's ideas, not only on the basis of the substance of particular issues, but on that of the fundamental approach to government-individual relations as articulated by the Constitution as framed by a proper understanding of reason. The Constitution is the best known political guideline for society not because it implies a philosophy that we desire to be true, but one that simply is true. The success of the United States, far from being the result of injustice, was due to the proper understanding of reason and reality by the founders as applied to the framing of the Constitution.

Only those who are strict adherents to the Constitution, therefore, must be elected. Whether or not we can save ourselves from the element of "reason as discourse," which is eroding the fundamental individual rights of life, liberty, and private property, is very much in doubt. Increasing numbers of moderates, however, are slowly being persuaded through living evidence of the error of the "third way" of economics, though the Marxists, who are intent on destruction as their demented view of "liberation," will only push harder with their inherently destructive program. But armed with the truth and the proper understanding of reason and reality, we can bring to bear the best possible defense for our republic. Only by showing and displaying to the moderates and independents the light of reason can we possibly hope to impose our will as a political movement on an increasingly tyrannical government.

Plurality Voting as a Check on Tyranny

There is one aspect of the U.S. system of checks and balances that is often ignored. It is the plurality voting system. This system is closely tied to federalism, since it tends to strongly represent regional and local interests. In Europe, where the proportional representation system (such as party-list representation) is much more widespread, regional interests are ignored and a tyranny of the nationwide majority is likely to emerge.

While giving voice to regional majorities (which are minorities relative to the entire nation), the plurality system disfavors minority parties nationwide, resulting in a two-party system (with the U.S. being a classic example). Proportional representation, on the other hand, tends to produce a multi-party or dominant-party system.

Both are extremes and, as in many other cases, two opposites merge. A multi-party system is the extreme of radical democracy bordering on anarchy. When everyone rules, no one in particular rules, and the other way around. In a radical democracy, no one's life, liberty or property is secure, since it is driven by the spur of the moment and by the whims of anyone who happens to be in power. This system tends to either clamp down on individual rights whenever a radical coalition comes to power or neglect the protection of rights while it's busy with factional infighting (this is why some of the Founding Fathers criticized political parties). A dominant-party system, on the other hand, is the rigid despotism of a minority. Since both are types of arbitrary government, they often turn into each other.

A two-party system is the golden mean. It promotes moderation (moderation is not always good but in this case it is) and is hostile to radical activists seeking to undermine the constitutional system. One could argue that it is also inconvenient for libertarian activists but the point is that they would be unlikely to usher in a libertarian society if they are a radical minority in a hostile nation (misunderstood by everyone, their ideas would be discredited).

Another aspect of U.S. party politics is that parties are decentralized. There is no party discipline, and candidates of one party slam each other in primaries with the same zeal as they criticize the other party. A moderate degree of decentralization (radical decentralization would be anarchy) often promotes liberty.

In Europe, parties are centralized rigid bureaucracies with no primaries. This again demonstrates the fact that a centralized tyranny of the minority (bureaucracy) is logically related to a centralized tyranny of the majority (democracy) and both tend both towards too much government (despotism) in some fields and too little government (anarchy) in others.

The First Patient

 

President Obama is congratulated by psychiatric staff for the great strides he has made dealing with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  Now someone please, take him away...

What is Government?

There is a great deal of confusion among the American people regarding a fundamental political question, and that is: "What is government?" Many Americans misconceive government as something other than an institution of the enforcement of laws and the protection of citizens. They believe government can be their adviser, caretaker, and provider. To paraphrase Orwell, they feel that government is a big brother who is looking out for them.

The lack of understanding regarding government's proper role is the single greatest cause of political problems in the United States. It is the ultimate root of freedom's destruction and it has allowed the government to grow virtually unchallenged.

So what is government? Governments are designed to govern, not provide services. Fundamentally, they are institutions of coercion.

This brings us to a related question" "What is the proper role of government?"

Essential safety is the mandate of a legitimate government. Police, and military protection are needed for people to go about their business without fear of personal harm or property confiscation. There are good arguments on behalf of the privatization of some safety services such as fire protection. The market more effectively penalizes those businesses that are inefficient, ineffective, or inept, than elections or government bureaucrats can.

Most bureaucrats are sheltered from the results of elections and are shielded by the coercive power of the government itself, which is one reason they are typically so complacent. They are also subsidized by a government that is charged with the power to tax, which has become the power to confiscate property arbitrarily. Without fear of job termination or the pressure of competing in a market for customers, it is easy for a human being to become lax in his job and dismissive of others.

Another proper sphere of government is the maintenance of law and order. The court system is the proper venue to try individual cases and redress the harm of particular individuals. When the government intervenes to prevent harm from ever happening to anyone through regulations, it can impose heavy burdens on society. The random occurrences of misfortune or the happenstance of some individuals harming other individuals is a condition of human existence that can be used as a pretext for oppressive systemic regulations in the name of "safety." The level of precautions the government can impose on society is virtually endless; this is how the government takes the mandate of providing "safety"or "security" and uses it to penetrate every sphere of human life.

Related to the provision of safety is the issue of government as an insurer. The government now insures bank deposits, mortgages, and now intends to insure health. Just like the government's insurance of mortgages led to rampant risk-taking in investments, and eventually to a crash, the government insurance of health will lead to a disregard for one's health, an incalculable demand for health services, subsequent rationing, and calls for restrictions of liberty such as eliminating food choices, the types of transportation one can use (due to emissions and "air quality"), and so forth. The amount of intervention the government can justify using the premise of providing healthcare, and even more insidiously, preventing health problems, is limited only by a politician's imagination.

What is the recourse for the citizen who desires public services, given a world where the government is relegated to the sole status of an institution of coercion to enforce laws and provide protection? The answer is spontaneous self-organization to address local interests and to solve local problems.

One of the founders of the nation, Benjamin Franklin, is the paragon of this approach to satisfying social wants and desires. Public libraries were started by Franklin as a voluntary book exchange in Philadelphia for those who desired to put their books to good use and to acquire new knowledge and literary tastes. Eventually he commissioned the pooling of resources to found a subscription library. Franklin organized a postal service, the cleaning of roads, insurance against fire loss, and fire fighting. These services did not need to be mandated by a central government along with the confiscation of property to pay for them. There was no "public good" except what particular people in a particular locality ascertained them to be. Self-interested men and women organized these services themselves without the need for public coercion, given that they are living human beings cognizant of their own needs.

Over time, the pressure on the nation to incorporate and harmonize led to the construction of large national works projects; the subsidization of agriculture, transportation, and communications companies; the obliteration of state's rights; the increase in the federal government's power of taxation and power of the purse, which it uses to manipulate states and localities; and the growth of government for the sake of growing government. Government has become an industry unto itself, and is not only leading to inefficiency and waste economically, for reasons above-stated, it has begun to dictate to us what our wants and needs are, and to take on spheres of responsibility that are not only outside of its proper purview, but by their very nature are beyond the ability of the government to control. Every individual's health cannot be preserved by government, despite the imploring tones of the proponents of a single, inescapable healthcare system. All animal species cannot be saved from extinction by virtue of our simply caring about them. And the climate cannot be modulated, not only because of its vast complexity, but because we simply lack the power to affect climate, let alone prevent it from changing.

The effect of allowing government to impede on our ability as citizens to self-organize to address our own wants and needs is a decline in the greatness of the nation by necessity. A great nation must be composed of great men; one cannot have a passive, apathetic, demanding citizenry insistent on entitlements without a corresponding offset in the productivity of the working class to provide for them, at the opportunity cost of taxes, overhead administration, lost man-hours that could be better spent by people actually providing for themselves. The best and most efficient government is the one where the people govern themselves.

Let us finally draw on Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America as a call to us citizens to consider the absolutely crucial matter of the nature and role of government, for it guides our thinking on what we should ask of it, and what we can expect from it.

When the opponents of democracy assert that a single individual performs the duties which he undertakes much better than the government of the community, it appears to me that they are perfectly right. The government of an individual, supposing an equality of instruction on either side, is more consistent, more persevering, and more accurate than that of a multitude, and it is much better qualified judiciously to discriminate the characters of the men it employs. If any deny what I advance, they have certainly never seen a democratic government, or have formed their opinion upon very partial evidence. It is true that even when local circumstances and the disposition of the people allow democratic institutions to subsist, they never display a regular and methodical system of government. Democratic liberty is far from accomplishing all the projects it undertakes, with the skill of an adroit despotism. It frequently abandons them before they have borne their fruits, or risks them when the consequences may prove dangerous; but in the end it produces more than any absolute government, and if it do fewer things well, it does a greater number of things. Under its sway the transactions of the public administration are not nearly so important as what is done by private exertion. Democracy does not confer the most skilful kind of government upon the people, but it produces that which the most skilful governments are frequently unable to awaken, namely, an all-pervading and restless activity, a superabundant force, and an energy which is inseparable from it, and which may, under favorable circumstances, beget the most amazing benefits. These are the true advantages of democracy.

In the present age, when the destinies of Christendom seem to be in suspense, some hasten to assail democracy as its foe whilst it is yet in its early growth; and others are ready with their vows of adoration for this new deity which is springing forth from chaos: but both parties are very imperfectly acquainted with the object of their hatred or of their desires; they strike in the dark, and distribute their blows by mere chance.

We must first understand what the purport of society and the aim of government is held to be. If it be your intention to confer a certain elevation upon the human mind, and to teach it to regard the things of this world with generous feelings, to inspire men with a scorn of mere temporal advantage, to give birth to living convictions, and to keep alive the spirit of honorable devotedness; if you hold it to be a good thing to refine the habits, to embellish the manners, to cultivate the arts of a nation, and to promote the love of poetry, of beauty, and of renown; if you would constitute a people not unfitted to act with power upon all other nations, nor unprepared for those high enterprises which, whatever be the result of its efforts, will leave a name forever famous in time – if you believe such to be the principal object of society, you must avoid the government of democracy, which would be a very uncertain guide to the end you have in view.

But if you hold it to be expedient to divert the moral and intellectual activity of man to the production of comfort, and to the acquirement of the necessaries of life; if a clear understanding be more profitable to man than genius; if your object be not to stimulate the virtues of heroism, but to create habits of peace; if you had rather witness vices than crimes and are content to meet with fewer noble deeds, provided offences be diminished in the same proportion; if, instead of living in the midst of a brilliant state of society, you are contented to have prosperity around you; if, in short, you are of opinion that the principal object of a Government is not to confer the greatest possible share of power and of glory upon the body of the nation, but to ensure the greatest degree of enjoyment and the least degree of misery to each of the individuals who compose it – if such be your desires, you can have no surer means of satisfying them than by equalizing the conditions of men, and establishing democratic institutions.

But if the time be passed at which such a choice was possible, and if some superhuman power impel us towards one or the other of these two governments without consulting our wishes, let us at least endeavor to make the best of that which is allotted to us; and let us so inquire into its good and its evil propensities as to be able to foster the former and repress the latter to the utmost.

The Tea****** Revolution

The Tea Party revolution is gaining momentum. Rand Paul, the son of Ron Paul, (no, he wasn't explicitly named after Ayn Rand, though one suspects this particular abbreviation of the name "Randal" is not a coincidence) is the frontrunner in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky. Ron Paul himself recently won a major Republican straw poll in the presidential race. Scott Brown's recent surprising victory in Massachusetts, a cryptocommunist stronghold -a glorious revival of the 1773 tea party spirit in that state - is part of the same trend. I haven't been following US politics closely lately. Would someone back up my assertion with more examples of this "libertarian" trend?

What worries me is that it's unlikely to last long unless the American people's resistance to tyranny is based not only on instinct but on a sound understanding of the fundamental principles. But there is none so far… For starters, even libertarians like the Paul family lack it.

See also: http://reaganx.livejournal.com/321351.html

Curing Mob Rule with the Rule of Law

I have stumbled upon an interesting observation. Here's the gist. Everyone knows that Athens, a textbook example of absolute, unlimited democracy, collapsed in 411 BC (and then again in 404 BC after a brief restoration) because of its inherently unstable and arbitrary nature and lost the Peloponnesian War partially because of the same reason. Few know, however, that in the fourth century BC Athens attempted to introduce a new type of government - majority rule subject to the rule of law. The experiment is interesting because it demonstrates a general interest in similar political principles in the Mediterranean at that time. It failed eventually (perhaps due to a lack of checks and balances) and Greece yielded first to Macedonian despotism and then to a superior type of government - a much more advanced experiment in the rule of law called the Roman Republic. Below are some quotes:

By a little-known researcher:

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=15626956
This article refines our understanding of the fourth-century Athenian democracy by examining the extent to which the rule of law checked the power of the popular Assembly. Although the concept of the rule of law may take on various meanings in different contexts, when used in this article the phrase 'rule of law' refers to the idea that the Assembly should be subject to, and act in accordance with, written law. The conclusions presented in this study are based on a systematic analysis of the legal arguments delivered in graphai paranomon and graphai nomon me epitedeion theinai, which were the primary vehicles in the fourth century for enforcing the rule of law. The graphe paranomon allowed the courts to annul any Assembly decree (psephisma) that ran contrary to standing law, while the graphe nomon me epitedeion theinai permitted a similar review of new statutes (nomoi). I will argue that despite the aggressive legal reforms enacted in 403/2 Bc to bring the popular Assembly under the rule of law, the rhetoric of the graphe paranomon and graphe nomon me epitedeion theinai speeches shows that these reforms were likely to have imposed only a weak restraint on the sovereignty of the Assembly. Ultimately, this study provides new grounds for concluding that the Athenian democracy of the fourth century was no less radical than that of the fifth century.

By prominent classical liberal Lord Acton:

http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=75&chapter=42894&layout=html&Itemid=27
But for those who were beaten in the vote there was no redress. The law did not check the triumph of majorities or rescue the minority from the dire penalty of having been outnumbered. (…) The restless and inquiring spirit of the Athenians was prompt to unfold the reason of every institution and the consequences of every principle, and their Constitution ran its course from infancy to decrepitude with unexampled speed.
Two men’s lives span the interval from the first admission of popular influence, under Solon, to the downfall of the State. Their history furnishes the classic example of the peril of Democracy under conditions singularly favourable. (…) (The Athenians) venerated the Constitution which had given them prosperity, and equality, and freedom, and never questioned the fundamental laws which regulated the enormous power of the Assembly. (…) But the possession of unlimited power, which corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding of monarchs, exercised its demoralising influence on the illustrious democracy of Athens. It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason. The humblest and most numerous class of the Athenians united the legislative, the judicial, and, in part, the executive power. The philosophy that was then in the ascendant taught them that there is no law superior to that of the State—the lawgiver is above the law.
It followed that the sovereign people had a right to do whatever was within its power, and was bound by no rule of right or wrong but its own judgment of expediency. On a memorable occasion the assembled Athenians declared it monstrous that they should be prevented from doing whatever they chose. No force that existed could restrain them; and they resolved that no duty should restrain them, and that they would be bound by no laws that were not of their own making. In this way the emancipated people of Athens became a tyrant; and their Government, the pioneer of European freedom, stands condemned with a terrible unanimity by all the wisest of the ancients. They ruined their city by attempting to conduct war by debate in the marketplace. Like the French Republic, they put their unsuccessful commanders to death. They treated their dependencies with such injustice that they lost their maritime Empire. They plundered the rich until the rich conspired with the public enemy, and they crowned their guilt by the martyrdom of Socrates.
When the absolute sway of numbers had endured for near a quarter of a century, nothing but bare existence was left for the State to lose; and the Athenians, wearied and despondent, confessed the true cause of their ruin. They understood that for liberty, justice, and equal laws, it is as necessary that Democracy should restrain itself as it had been that it should restrain the Oligarchy. They resolved to take their stand once more upon the ancient ways, and to restore the order of things which had subsisted when the monopoly of power had been taken from the rich and had not been acquired by the poor. After a first restoration had failed, which is only memorable because Thucydides, whose judgment in politics is never at fault, pronounced it the best Government Athens had enjoyed, the attempt was renewed with more experience and greater singleness of purpose. The hostile parties were reconciled, and proclaimed an amnesty, the first in history. They resolved to govern by concurrence. The laws, which had the sanction of tradition, were reduced to a code; and no act of the sovereign assembly was valid with which they might be found to disagree. Between the sacred lines of the Constitution which were to remain inviolate, and the decrees which met from time to time the needs and notions of the day, a broad distinction was drawn; and the fabric of a law which had been the work of generations was made independent of momentary variations in the popular will. The repentance of the Athenians came too late to save the Republic. But the lesson of their experience endures for all times, for it teaches that government by the whole people, being the government of the most numerous and most powerful class, is an evil of the same nature as unmixed monarchy, and requires, for nearly the same reasons, institutions that shall protect it against itself, and shall uphold the permanent reign of law against arbitrary revolutions of opinion.

The Quintessence of Utopianism

If socialism is a social necessity, then it would be human nature and not socialism which would have to readjust itself, if ever the two clashed.

Karl Kautsky

One wonders how it can be a social necessity if it is against nature, since a social necessity is exactly what is necessary to comply with the requirements of nature.

Mark Steyn: When Responsibility Doesn't Pay

Do yourself a favor and read one of the best pieces by Mark Steyn I have read in a while, When Responsibility Doesn't Pay:

While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand-new, even-more-unsustainable entitlement at the health-care “summit,” thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen — because they’re part of the same story.

It’s just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They’re at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is farther upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter Twenty (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter Seventeen or Eighteen.

What’s happening in the developed world today isn’t so very hard to understand: The 20th-century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless, insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany, and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they’ve reached the next stage in social-democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. [...]

So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don’t have one. [...]

[Greece's] socialist government has been forced into supporting a package of austerity measures. The Greek people’s response is: Nuts to that. Public-sector workers have succeeded in redefining time itself: Every year, they receive 14 monthly payments. You do the math. And for about seven months’ work: For many of them, the work day ends at 2:30 p.m. And, when they retire, they get 14 monthly pension payments. In other words: Economic reality is not my problem. I want my benefits. And, if it bankrupts the entire state a generation from now, who cares as long as they keep the checks coming until I croak?

We hard-hearted small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government: Once a chap’s enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and to hell with everyone else. People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense. [...]

Welfare always breeds contempt, in nations as much as inner-city housing projects: How dare you tell us how to live! Just give us your money and push off. [...]

Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less profligate, still-just-about-functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn’t pay. You’ll wind up bailing out anyway. The problem is there are never enough of “the rich” to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they’ve run out Greeks, so they’ll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick their defense tab to the Americans. And in America, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans. What could go wrong?

Read the full article.

Encapsulating Progressivism: A State of Mind

Progressivism is often described as a political movement that sought to cure the social ills that arose in the late nineteenth century due to "unrestrained" free market or "laissez-faire" capitalism. On the contrary, progressivism is a movement that undermines the rule of law as expressed in a full view of the spirit and intent of the United States Constitution.

Progressivism is an uneasy and shifting blend of ideas and can perhaps best be seen as a syncretism of socialism, pragmatism, and religion. We shall tackle these elements briefly one at a time in order to better flesh them out.

Shot through one spectrum, progressivism is seen as a popular revolt against the abuses of "trusts" and "monopolies" by those who feel that the social movements and powerful unions corrected inherent flaws in capitalism that lead to a wide class disparity between haves and "have-nots." It should be noted that nearly every time a trust has arisen in American history, if one examines the real record of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and the railroads of Cornelius Vanderbilt, for example, you see violation of the rule of law and government-business collusion to drive out competitors in the "national interest."

Progressive social reformers also cite poor working conditions in the developing American economy as a call for government intervention. But poor working conditions that are not an aspect of a voluntary contract and that lead to personal harm are a violation of contract and can be remedied in the courts without recourse to a state-dominated economic system. Statist economies inevitably lead to greater repression than is ever countenanced by the fools who see the state as an ally in a war against corporations. The government is the most unavoidable and repressive monopoly of all;  to paraphrase Max Weber, the state is defined as a "monopoly of coercion."

With this in mind, the role of the "muckraking" press in the progressive era should not have been to tear down capitalism in a petulant fit of rage, but to expose violations of the rule of law, specifically the collusion of government and business.

It should be mentioned that statist intervention into the economy was virtually a fait accompli following from the United States Constitution due to the "General Welfare" clause, the necessary and proper clause, and the following extremely odd passage of the Fifth Amendment:

"[No person shall be} deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

An explicit right to private property, as can be found in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, would have remedied this unfortunate opening for "public" confiscation of property. There is no "public" as far as rights are concerned, only individuals whose rights pre-exist government. To claim that the government exists to violate the rights of those who incorporate it is an absurdity, as Frederic Bastiat points out in The Law. And to address the "General Welfare" clause, we can add two relevant quotes from key drafter of the Constitution James Madison that demonstrates the error of misconstruing the clause to mean government license:

"With respect to the two words 'general welfare,' I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators."

And:

"If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions. It is to be remarked that the phrase out of which this doctrine is elaborated is copied from the old Articles of Confederation, where it was always understood as nothing more than a general caption to the specified powers."

The social reform aspect of "progressivism" can be seen as inherently, and sometimes explictly, anti-constitutional in nature. As such, the statists in government co-opted the "social(ist) reform" movement to transform the nation away from its limited government founding in the "evolutionary fashion" of Social Darwinism, whose roots the progressive movement deny (for more on this, see Jonah Goldberg's discussion of "eugenics" in the first chapter of Liberal Fascism; see also Fabian socialism).

The progressives come in the left and right statist flavors; on the left we have Woodrow Wilson, an appallingly overt blue-blooded statist, and on the right we have Theodore Roosevelt, a "trust-buster" who arbitrarily decided which trusts promoted the national interest and which ones were adverse to it. Wilson himself personifies in American political history the transition point from the radical left to the statist left; Roosevelt can be seen as a nationalist-collectivist and a forerunner of neo-conservativism.

Indispensable to the progressive "counter-revolution," which sought to undermine Enlightenment principles and values in an extremely mischievous manner, was the pseudo-philosophy of pragmatism. Pragmatism is not "practicality" - it is the approach to problem-solving, including government problem-solving, that emphasizes ad hoc application of cost-benefit analysis to the transitory manifestation of problems. John Dewey, William James, and Charles Saunders Peirce were ideological leaders of pragmatism who lubricated the machinery of the state as it ground up the Constitution. Fordism and Taylorism, neologisms of the day that express the business ideal of "efficiency" without regard to the rights of the individual, are the corporatist expressions of government when applied to the nation as a whole.

Lastly, there is a religious aspect to progressivism that cloaks the entire enterprise. Numerous social activists of the Progressive Era took a Christianic approach to using the state to "remedy" the poverty and misery they saw all around them. William Jennings Bryan, in his famous "Cross of Gold" speech, encapsulated much of this synthesis of Christianity and social reform. But progressivism was eventually undermined by the Social Darwinist and pragmatist aspects of the ideology, leading to the retention of Christian gospel in secularized form. Those who were most enthralled by the utopian vision of a society without division or inequity turned to Marxism. This is what is meant by the argument that Marxists are "progressives in a hurry." Progressives who were most persuaded of the pragmatic approach to transform society, including the modern messiah of progressivism Saul Alinsky, became "radical pragmatists."

A consequence of the uneasy synthesis of ideas in progressive thought led to an internal cannibalization of ideologies. Pragmatism eventually hijacked the religious aspect of progressivism, as can be seen with the cynical way modern progressives cherry pick the Bible (much in the same way they cherry pick the Constitution) to underwrite their program of transfiguration and their message of "redemption." Barack Obama is perhaps the perfect example of the ideological triumph of pragmatism in modern progressivism, though he is thoroughly utopian in rhetoric. Obama on one hand affirms that he is "his brother's keeper," though he refuses to act on this admonition in regards to his own family, and has even stated on one occasion to his progressive cohorts that "they [Christians] get bitter, they cling to [their] guns or religion." Duplicity is an inherent and necessary aspect of progressivism.

Progressivism in the final word is best understood when it is not seen as a specific ideology, but rather as a state of mind. It undermines the Enlightenment through deliberately misconstruing the nature and foundations of freedom. While the Enlightenment emphasizes rational self-interest and respect for the individual, progressivism is a collectivist religion that neither acknowledges the individual, nor rationality. It unreflectively devours the freedoms established by the Constitution that "democracy," as the left misreads it to mean, depends on. It disavows checks on democracy as "barriers" to be broken through. It rejects the private property that is necessary for people to live in personal security. It attacks the free market with the erection of a welfare state, destroying the engine of prosperity that allows for the wealth of the nation. It crushes the innovation associated with progress, by claiming that the labor of the skilled and unskilled are equal in value, thereby disincentivizing the desire to excel that truly drives social, economic, and technological progress. It turns the Enlightenment argument for universal education on its head by promoting a state monopoly system of education, which promptly fills people's heads with unbalanced lies and propaganda. It mocks the purpose of a free press by glorifying and even collaborating with the state, the very entity that the free press was intended to check. It corrupts academia by restating the mission of education from that of honest, unbridled intellectual inquiry, to "critical" thinking as an attack on all things that inhibit the power of the state and the mob. In essence, progressivism is the denial of all barriers to power, a rejection of the rights of the individual, and an erosion of the liberty that animates a free people.

Rome: Fundamental Justice Brought to Reality

Ancient Eastern kingdoms were headed by despots (i.e. one person held absolute power), while Greek and Phoenician poleis were either absolute democracies or absolute oligarchies - i.e. either the majority or the minority wielded virtually unlimited power. Moreover, they generally failed to create federations in the true sense of the word - their alliances were usually dominated by the hegemon city in a tyrannical way and were inherently unstable (the Athenian, Spartan and Carthaginian empires). Meanwhile, Hellenistic kingdoms were a mixture of despotism and poleis.

Rome was the first polis founded on a stable foundation - the rule of law. Neither one person nor a minority nor a majority ruled. It was a constitutional republic with checks and balances. Moreover, it was the first successful federation - Rome's allies did not suffer oppression similar to previous city-state alliances. As you can guess, Rome served as a major inspiration for the United States - a federal constitutional republic. Law had existed since the beginning of civilization but only in Rome it acquired its modern sense - not primitive irrational custom but impartial justice based on reason. It is this factor that made Roman rule attractive for the entire Mediterranean and caused Rome's military triumphs - to the unpredictable whims of despotism and majority rule the empire's subjects preferred the secure aegis of Roman law. The inertia of Roman law kept the wheels turning even for some time after the constitutional system collapsed in the imperial period, when the principle of princeps legibus solutus est (the sovereign is not bound by the laws) came to the fore (though the position of emperors was very precarious and the ultimate check on their power was the tyrannicide's sword). 

Rome was not a liberal constitutional republic (unlike the U.S.) - because liberalism did not exist yet and numerous atrocities were inevitable - but it was the highest political achievement up to that time. To a certain extent, it was the first government of laws, and not of men - the Aristotelian ideal brought to reality. It was a precursor to the republic of the Founding Fathers. 

It is for this ideal of fundamental justice - not for persecution - that the early Christians hated Rome and considered it the new Babylon. The this-worldly success of the Roman way of life was a refutation of Christian other-wordly escapism - just like the success of America is a refutation of Islamist self-denial and self-flaggelation and is therefore hated by jihadists today.

Interesting insights on the nature of the Roman government can be found in the God of the Machine by Isabel Paterson.

Poll: People May Be Catching On...

From the Communist News Network:

A majority of Americans think the federal government poses a threat to rights of Americans, according to a new national poll.

Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they think the federal government's become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. Forty-four percent of those polled disagree.

The survey indicates a partisan divide on the question: only 37 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Independents and nearly 7 in 10 Republicans say the federal government poses a threat to the rights of Americans. [Continued]

The Best Obama One-liners

Economics
"Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, I am an ardent believer in the free market."

"I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system."

Finance
"Like it or not, we have to have a financial system that is healthy and functioning."

Spending
"What do you think a stimulus is? It's spending - that's the whole point! Seriously. "

Jobs
“Now, if you hear some of the critics, they'll say, well, the Recovery Act, I don't know if that's really worked, because we still have high unemployment. But what they fail to understand is that every economist, from the left and the right, has said, because of the Recovery Act, what we've started to see is at least a couple of million jobs that have either been created or would have been lost. The problem is, 7 million jobs were lost during the course of this recession.”

Taxes
"I will cut taxes - cut taxes - for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class."

"I can make a firm pledge, under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes. "

"You will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime."

Pork
"We need earmark reform, and when I'm President, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely."

"You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig."

Spreading Da Wealth
"I think when you spread the wealth around it's good for everybody."

Lobbyists
"I don't take a dime of their [lobbyist] money, and when I am president, they won't find a job in my White House."

Mathematics
"I hope I said 100,000 people the first time instead of 100 million. I understand I said there were 57 states today. It's a sign that my numeracy is getting a little, uh." (At that point, an aide cut him off and ushered journalists out.)

Sports
“I bowled a 129….it was like Special Olympics, or something.”

Music
"A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence; or a good piece of music. Everybody can recognize it. They say, 'Huh. It works. It makes sense.'"

"The thing about hip-hop today is it's smart, it's insightful. The way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable. "

Marijuana
"I did. It's not something that I'm proud of. It was a mistake as a young man, but you know? I mean not going to -- I never understood that line. The point was to inhale. That was the point."

"Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack [heroin] though."

War
"I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war."

"We're not going to baby sit a civil war. "

Islam
"America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings. "

Nuts
"I've been fighting with Acorn, alongside Acorn, on issues you care about, my entire career."

Child Rearing
"I've got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby. "

Leadership
"In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world."

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK. That's not leadership. That's not going to happen."

The Hoi Polloi
"It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations. "

"My administration is the only thing between you [CEO's] and the pitchforks. "

Typical White People
"The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, there's a reaction that's been bred into our experiences that don't go away, and that sometimes comes out in the wrong way, and that's just the nature of race in our society."

Red State, Blue State
"We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. "

Elections
"My first job is to say thank you to those who voted me. Those who didn't, I'm going to get your vote next time."