Let’s listen to Murray Rothbard (debunking myths part 1)

Sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Unfortunately, it’s a remark taken (heavily) out of context from an article called “What’s wrong with libertarianism” with the subtext “”The perfect liberty they seek is the liberty of making slaves of other people.” — Abraham Lincoln”. As you can imagine, I raged pretty hard at this one. Lets being to see who exactly he’s attacking, why, and the core fallacies of his(her?) argument.

First off, the link to the article , note he called the article “Libertos” and the extremely anti-immigration banner

Ignoring the Abraham Lincoln quote because it’s too large a topic to be  addressed quickly, we’ll move on to who he claims to be speaking to. He states that, after two re-writes, he isn’t talking to any libertarians that

“have never heard of (or don’t think much of) Rothbard, Rockwell, Rand, and von Mises, accept that the FDIC is a pretty good idea, and want a leaner, more efficient government, but don’t dream of getting rid of it”

and follows that up by supporting anyone who agrees with those three things.

Clearly, he’s talking to me.

While I appreciate that on a list of the front runners of intellectual libertarianism that Rothbard comes first, he puts Ayn Rand in the same list. This seems to be the popular anti-libertarian argument, to brand us as a collective under the objectivist movement, which I and most others clearly are not. Rand wasn’t much more then an author in my opinion, and it’s shameful how quickly a news anchor will shove irrelevant “Atlas Shrugged” jokes and references at anyone who begins to support a libertarian argument.

Also, Objectivism is clearly for a limited government, Objectivism being the movement Rand founded. Other then making his first and third qualification of who he is talking to contradictory, it also proves that he see’s any “radical”  libertarian philosophy as an unthinking borg. A borg he suspected wouldn’t find his article and meticulously rebut it.

The statement of addressees  is followed up by a suggestin for those not listed, “On the other hand, you might want to stick around to see what your more fundamentalist colleagues are saying”. Clearly he is using the term fundamentalist to call people who think like me unreasonable. However, the meaning of fundamentalism is just someone who believes strictly in a set of principles. The difference between me the fundamentalist and the pejorative fundamentalist he tries to label me as is that one of my principals is that I will never try to force my principals on anyone else, something that couldn’t be said of him.

His arrangement after that is that libertarianism sprang from an anti-communist movement and flipped their ideals around.  It’s not a bad argument. I would say the libertarianism begat communism and therefor could not have been in reaction to it, but essentially it is almost the opposite of communism. The problem with how this author puts it isn’t in the center of that argument, but misstating the principals of a libertarian. The first being that, in opposition to the “anti-capitalist” views of the communist that we think “Capitalists are noble Nietzchean heroes”. Assuming he’s not referring to the nihilist race of people from the TV show Andromeda, I figured he meant Nietzschean. It’s important to realize that libertarians (of the truest sense) don’t see capitalism as a political idea but a means of trade. Capitalism at it’s simplest is using a medium of exchange to make easier the process of trading goods and services. Capitalism is not Corporatism, which is what this guy is trying to make you think. Also, referring to libertarians as Nietschean’s is clearly an ad hominem attack and is not at all based on logic.

I’m going to take a break here and continue to address this article either later today or next weeks post (it’s quite a large article to cover). Be sure to leave comments here (and on any of the articles mentioned here) to be sure to make your thoughts heard!

Bailouts, Friend or Foe? Left or Right? Part 1

Well, assuming this isn’t your first time reading my blog, the first question is an easy one. Any self respecting Austrian will tell you that a “bailout” certainly isn’t in the interest of the people doing the bailing out. But for the common American who gets their news from CNN it might leave them a little confused. There was a bailout under the Bush administration, there was another bailout under the Obama administration. If both sides think a bailout is the answer, why aren’t things getting better?  Well from what I can tell, a “bailout” is nothing more then a way of convincing the American people that printing vast sums of money in order to prop up the current political agenda will somehow stimulate the economy, put more money in the tax payer’s pockets, and get everyone a shiny new job.

This is where we get to cover one of my favorite topics, the Phillips Curve. Learning this for the first time, and really understanding it is very important. But realizing what most people who are running the American coercive monopoly still believe in, is much like finding out that everyone you’ve elected still believes in Santa Claus. Trust me, it’s that bad.

The Phillips Curve;

We’ll If you’re not an economist, you’re probably curious as to what that means. What it means is, that these people think that inflation and unemployment are inversely related. When inflation goes up, unemployment goes down, when inflation falls, unemployment increases. Still confused? Well in short it basically means that the government thinks that, by printing money, and spending it (in any particular fashion) will increase wealth for all the good little boys and girls. This however, is an easily provable falsehood.

Let’s begin with the Cantillion Effect. I have mentioned this before, in a previous argument, but never explained it. The Cantillon Effect is when a central bank, who has been given permission to issue fiat currency (currency with no real or “intrinsic” value), gives this currency out in loans, investments, or issuances, and, before the market can adjust to the new currency by adjusting their prices to it’s relative value, the spenders of this fresh, previously unknown of money get it at a much lower cost then if every knew there was a larger money supply in circulation. This, essentially, drives wealth back the original money issuers. The bailout is basically this happening unprecedentedly fast, about 750 billion dollars at a time. All this does is makes the people with the power to print, and their friends much wealthier, while the people in the lower classes with unflexable wages and savings have less and less due to this rampant inflation. It hurts 95% of people in the long run.

Come back tomorrow, part II in the works. (sorry didn’t expect this to be so long, and I like to keep these relatively short. Be sure to comment on it and let me know what you think and if you have any questions.)

The Political Spectrum

What an article this will be. I take most of my inspiration, obviously, from the late Murray N. Rothbard. He passed January 7, 1995, long before internet 2.0 and this revolution where everyone thinks they’re a graphic designer. I don’t think he ever published a graphic representation of what would be called today a “political spectrum”, and after doing a lot of searching, I don’t think anyone who did, did it right.

In doing what most americans do when researching something that is visually depicted easily, a google image search lead me to this, first result for “political spectrum.

Is that confusing to you? It creates such a false dichotomy. I don’t think any honest person falls anywhere on this thing. Just for fun, I circled what I agree with on the graph.

Where does that put me? Am I A Liberoconadicalarie? No wonder people unsatisfyingly put themselves in a red team blue team camp based on false pretenses. It’s a false choice.

Not only that, but many of the choices displayed are personal ones. Who cares if I look to the past or the future for inspiration, who says I want to force my views on other people? What if I don’t think any kind of state sponsored schooling is a good idea? Where is that chart, where’s my chart?

Upon looking at many charts I found either unsatisfactory or irrelevant I really didn’t find anything to my liking, everything seems to have a bias to some government control.

That’s when I started looking at the quizzes, answering honestly as possible, and even most called me a right-anarchist at best. The world smallest political quiz at Theadvocates.org called me a libertarian with this description:

“Libertarians support maximum liberty in both personal and economic matters. They advocate a much smaller government; one that is limited to protecting individuals from coercion and violence. Libertarians tend to embrace individual responsibility, oppose government bureaucracy and taxes, promote private charity, tolerate diverse lifestyles, support the free market, and defend civil liberties.”

Ugh, I get no respect. Even the advocates are calling me a minarchist. Assuming this is the most simplist, pure quiz, biased towards me, it leads me to two conclusions about these quizzes and charts. One, that when asked a series of political questions in order to be ordained as a generalization on a chart, the questioner assumes that the person being questioned wishes to use a violent monopoly to force his beliefs on others. Two, that either economic and personal liberty are seen as somewhat mutually exclusive by the general public, or that there is a justified minimum or required economic sacrifice that must be made in order to have a perfectly restricted small government.

I think that I should be free economically and personal and be responsible for my own actions entirely, however if someone wishes to enter a volunteery contract where either someone punishes them for victimless actions or manages a large portion of their salary, that’s fine as long as it doesn’t affect me. This is the first major flaw of placing people in an ideology, it neglects the very basic questions of “Do you think everyone else should be forced to do this also?” which seems to be almost an afterthought in today’s society.

The second major flaw is that both “major” philosophies people find themselves forced to be in propose the idea that economic freedom and personal freedom are somehow mutually exclusive. The generalization of the blue team is that they are more “liberal” when it comes to personal freedom like gay marriage, medical marijuana (which are psuedo freedoms, but they seem like personal freedom to them) but they favor a more social financial system, like a free range national commune where we pay a majority of our wealth into centrally planned social programs. The red team seems to support a free’er (certainly not free) market, lower taxes,  and less restrictive regulation on business, yet they advocate legislated morals, the drug war, and censorship. Wheres the party for both brands of freedom?

If I can do anything I want, yet only with a fraction of the wealth I’m able to acquire, I am not free. If I am able to keep all of the wealth I earn, yet can only spend it on things other people have decided I can spend it on, I am not free.

Most people just want to be left alone. It’s unfortunate , that in being left alone, they don’t want to fight for what is their inherent freedom. It’s abhorrent that in this country we are forced to line up on one side of the same coin if we choose to make our opinion’s heard in the accepted system. And it’s unjust to expect to separate an entire country into only two groups, neither of which support freedom.

Taxes, part 2

In my earlier post I examined the ill-logic of taxes, today we’ll examine it’s morality.

One of the easiest ways to start the discussion is an example borrowed from Dr. Mary Ruart’s book, Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression. When you were a child and you went over to a friends house and he or she had more toys then you, did you have the right to take home one or two of those toys because he or she had so many more then you? Of course not.

This may seem like a silly example, but it’s one that many people can relate to. Just because someone has more then us doesn’t mean it is unfair. If someone has a vast sum of wealth, even if acquired by luck or inheritance, it does not justify stealing from them.

This is an example of how unjust taxes are in their most altruistic form. But in reality, it’s even more immoral then that. If taxes on the wealthy seem just to you, think about this. Corporate taxes are the second (or third, Finland’s was much higher but I believe that’s changed since 2007) largest in the world in the United States. Since corporations are in business to profit, any and all increase in taxes is pased on to either the end user, or a producer or corporations customers. This largely affects the lower class who fund widely based companies. So really, those rallying for taxes on these big companies, are normally just hurting themselves.

Then there is the very simple Ayn Rand argument, which is that over taxing the rich will have a negative effect on the most productive people in our society. The top 10% of the earners in the states pay for 37% of federal income taxes. If you can clearly see the mistakes the Cuban government made, then you know what happens when the government coercively robs from the rich to give to the poor (not that we’re helping with the trade restrictions, but that’s for a different article)

The final article will be about why how taxes affect the economy at large and what a truly free market is, and that we’ve never seen one in the united states.

David Angelo call

The call in I did to the David Angelo show. I call in at about 20 minutes, but the whole show is funny so check it out. David Angelo goes live at DavidAngeloRadio.com Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7pm CST.

Falling for it? Again?

After the “Ron Paul revolution”, a lot of liberty minded people started to think that joining (some would say infiltrating) the republican party is the quickest way to smaller government. After failing to get Ron Paul past the primaries, after putting up an unprincipled, inconsistent, former CIA agent up for the presidential election for their own party, some party libertarians still think they can have the influence to take over the unprincipled republicans. Never before I have I seen such naivete from a political party once so rooted in logic.

Perhaps a brief history lesson is in order. In 1792, while George Washington was still in office and would be for another 5 years, two parties were formed. One, led by Alexander Hamilton, was called the federalists. They stood for a powerful, centralized, iron fist style of government and a national bank. They represented the old order of Brittan, of class systems, serfdom, and nepotism. During the same year, the Democratic-Republicans were formed by Thomas Jefferson. The Democratic-Republicans believed in small federal government, states rights, the free market, and a neutral foreign policy.  After being voted out in 1800, Hamilton and his party lost favor and the Democratic-Republicans gained a majority in both houses as well was the presidency until 1824. At this point the “Democrats”, and “Republicans” split, forming two parties. Democrats holding the ideals of Jefferson, and the Republicans (foolishly) began acting like socialist and supported high tariffs and public works programs. Many of the former federalists who support a more “democratic” style of government joined the Republicans, and the rest of the former federalists created the anti-autocratic yes statist Whigs. However, by 1856 the party fell apart over the tense issue of expanding slavery and left the Democrats and Republicans to themselves as they appear, more or less, in their current form.

To rewind a bit, and to focus on the original issue, the Jacksonian Democrats had a brilliant plan to perpetuate small government and instill an even freer market in America. Unfortunately, the plan went sour. After two terms of Jackson, and one term of Van Buren, the democratic party began infighting about the issue of slavery, and was also blindsided by the new form of campaigning, politicking. If you were wondering when politics became a game, this was more or less it. And it was began by a bunch of statist who eventually merged with the republicans. Little has changed since.

The Republicans are just as bad as the Democrats at pretending to find their ideals when they slip out of power. Does anyone else remember the “Contract with America”? Bush ran on a free market and humble foreign policy message. They will lie to get to to vote for them, but people seem to forget that every four years.

The other large glaring error in the logic of trying to use the system to beat the system by infiltrating the Republican party is the obvious conclusion of my opening paragraph. The Libertarian party is a party in ruin. Bob Barr, 12 years after an information technology revolution and and increased population size, was only able to put out the same number Harry Browne did in 96. The Ron Paul revolution is over. He’ll be 77 years old by the next presidential election and currently there is no one principled enough to fill his shoes. If he does run again, who’s to say that the Republican party will see the error of their ways and turn to the Ron Paul’s of the world? The end point is this, the Libertarians can’t run their own house, how do they presume to walk in to the Republicans and tell them how to run theirs?