Daily Archives: 8 July 2010
Ron Paul: Military Victory in Afghanistan impossible
IMF warns against budget cuts
Very, very stupid.
The International Monetary Fund today called the government’s spending cuts into question, warning western countries that cutting budget deficits this year risked derailing economic recovery.
. . . .
“Most advanced economies do not need to tighten before 2011, because tightening sooner could undermine the fledgling recovery, but they should not add further stimulus,” the IMF said in an update to its twice-yearly world economic outlook.
(Read more from guardian.co.uk)
See also:
Broadcast viewership hits record low
Americans avoided television in historic levels over the past week.
CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox together had the smallest number of prime-time viewers last week in two decades of record-keeping, the Nielsen Co. said. Given the dominance of the big broadcasters before then, you’d probably have to go back to the early days of television to find such a collective shrug. (Read more from washingtontimes.com)
I’m a blogger, hear me roar!
Peaceful vs. Violent Anarchists
This essay from mises.org is about Emma Goldman and her evolution from anarcho-communism to a very individualistic anarchism which, I think, strongly resembles anarcho-capitalism.
I was struck by a small portion of the essay with compared the dangerous allies of libertarianism around the turn of last century with present-day ones. I also raises the question of how anarchists should label themselves.
When Mother Earth was suppressed, and its editor and publisher, a 51-year-old woman who had spent nearly 35 years — her entire adult life so far — in this country, was deported, the first American libertarian movement truly came to an end. In effect, the movement’s organizers had committed an important tactical error. Like the libertarians of our current movement, they had seen that a fully consistent libertarian must be an anarchist, but they had made the tactical mistake of frankly calling themselves by that name.
They used the word “libertarian” in describing themselves, too, but the main term of self-description they used was “anarchist.” They thought of their movement, not as the libertarian movement, but as the anarchist movement. And since, like libertarians of today, they were a tiny minority in the population, they sought to make common cause with other unconventional thinkers who seemed to share many or even most of their goals. The members of the first libertarian movement, regarding themselves as anarchists, made common cause with other anarchists — most of whom were European immigrants with rather different ideas from those of Benjamin R. Tucker and his associates when it came to matters like economics and political violence.
Inevitably, when certain of their more numerous anarchist allies got the wrong sort of publicity, that bad publicity rubbed off on Tucker and his associates. In the last years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century, after the Haymarket affair, the attempt on Frick’s life, and the assassination of President McKinley by a self-proclaimed anarchist, there came to be widespread public prejudice against anarchists.
. . . .
Today’s libertarians have allies who vastly outnumber them, just as the libertarians of 1901 did. But we contemporary libertarians have taken the path Benjamin Tucker and his associates avoided. Our allies are what Tucker and his associates would have called “liberals” — we call them “minarchists” or “limited-government libertarians” — and sometimes their behavior is embarrassing to us, just as Tucker and his associates were sometimes embarrassed by the behavior of their anarchist allies a hundred years ago.
There is a key difference, however. Tucker’s allies embarrassed him by attempting and sometimes carrying out assassinations — murders. Our allies embarrass us by lending their moral support to state-sponsored murder — as when they support the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — or by nominating a conservative like Bob Barr to represent the Libertarian Party in the 2008 election. (Read more from mises.org)