Monthly Archives: November 2010

Three Great Criticisms of Marx

From the Mises Institute.

The Conflict of Ideologies: Marxism vs. the Majority
– Marxism denies consciousness by attributing all thought to class affiliation.
– Marx considered all dissent treason, and developed anti-democratic ideas where majorities failed to endorse his views.

***

The Critics of Marxism
– Materialism denies consciousness and contradicts itself by attempting to attribute all human decisions and civilization to material conditions.
– Marx hated Prussia’s Hohenzollern’s socialism, because it wasn’t *his* socialism.
– Marxism became decidedly anti-Christian.
– Dialectic materialism falls apart in trying to explain simplest historical events.
– Marxians never ascribe positive trends to class machinations, only negative ones.
– Marxism sharply contrasts Freud. The former denies consciousness, the latter relies on it. Even Marx critics ignore this.
– Christian Marxists ignore Marx’s decidedly anti-Christian views. Marxism, for example, teaches religious ideas are the “super structure” of material production.

***

The Ideological Impregnation of Thought
– Thoughts are always & inevitably attributed to one’s class, and they serve the interest of that class.
(Marx never reconciles this w/ his undeniably bourgeois background. Nor does he define “class.” Nor does he address the possibility that a correct theory might be more useful to a person than a false one.)
– Marx’s motive was the adoption of socialism. Instead of addressing the devastating criticism of economists, he dismissed their whole work as the machinations of a rival “class,” and ridiculed them. They are wrong, because they are bourgeois, and there is no reason for careful analysis.
– They made exception to their own thoughts and theories, which they assumed were true and pure.

Peter Schiff: Reversal Tuesday, jobs, Fed critics, Bernanke

* Gold and silver skyrocketing, but hard reversal on Tuesday. Same with other commodities.

* Bond market eroding as Quantatative Easing backfires.

* Friday’s optimistic job report is small limited to service sector. (Peter Schiff advocates production.)

* World-wide criticism of the Fed. Germany calls Ben Bernanke “clueless.” Obama defends Fed during India visit.

* Obama says Fed’s mandate is to grow economy. This is BS actual mandate is price stability and employment. Fed CAN’T grow economy.

* Sara Palin’s criticism of Fed in Wall Street Journal and WSJ calls it the “harshest criticism of Fed they’ve seen from a politician.” WTF??? There’s this guy Ron Paul who’s actually in office, you know.

* Ben Bernanke’s op-ed defends QE2. He has nerve to claim increase in stock prices will spur consumer spending. Completely incoherent! This is nothing but a stock market bubble. Surprising lack of criticism to this in WSJ.

Commentary on the recent repeal of gay-marriage Iowa

I consider this issue another tragedy of public property. Because the definition of marriage is presided over by the state, those of us who have strong beliefs about it are FORCED to do battle.

Can you imagine a world in which the government didn’t even know if I was married, didn’t preside over the definition and didn’t require a $40 fee for permission?

Conflicting points of view co-exist more peacefully when government isn’t involved.

In a such a world, the fact that two people choose to call themselves married, or the fact that some people don’t consider my marriage legitimate is no more a threat to me than, say, my neighbor adopting dietary habits that I consider nonsensical and counter productive.

Please feel free to disagree with me. Most of my friends do. :)

Commentary on the election of Rand Paul

I guess we’ll wait and see. I like his support for auditing the Federal Reserve and limiting spending. I like this skepticism about our wars too, though greatly prefer this father’s outright opposition.

I’m also very much influenced by Hans Herman Hoppe’s earth-shattering book, Democracy the God that Failed. I’ve begun to doubt that Democracy works, so I’m largely just an amused bystander when a politician is elected who seems to support my belief in individual liberty.

The Constitution was good, so good that it took 300 years for power to become centralized, concentrated, and predatory, but nevertheless, here we are. Realize that we used to be a nation in which half the population didn’t have to work.

Perhaps the best thing that can happen is a falling apart of the United States, preferably into 310 million independent nations. (peacefully!)

The case against coersive taxation

From a correspondence with friends:

I hold the very radical belief that taking someone’s property by force or threat of force is stealing, regardless of whether it’s done by an individual or institution or government, regardless of whether you call it taxation, and regardless of what virtues are invoked to justify the violence.

***

My apologies for the long-winded reply, but this stuff is my passion. I’m happy to make my case, even if we agree to disagree afterward:

> “Is it wrong to keep a standing army?”

Yes. The United States did not keep a large standing army during peacetime until 1948. Since then, we’ve had a foreign, undeclared war every decade, and never mind the fact that our Constitution requires congress to declare war. The psychopaths in government are having too much fun sending suckers like me off to war and their friends are making too much money.

How you like them apples? You’re a citizen of a country that can’t go a single decade without invading another.

How about the fact that we spend more than the rest of world COMBINED on “defense” which to me looks more like “offense”?

> “With all that you own and all that was given to you just by virtue of being born in the US, don’t you think that is worth protecting?”

I feel tremendous admiration and gratitude to all the entrepreneurs who risk their personal wealth to produce goods and services they hope I will VOLUNTARILY buy.

These are the people we should revere. These are the people to whom we should build monuments, not the power hungry politicians and bureaucrats who are too stupid, lazy, and cowardly to provide us with things we want. They cannot serve society, so they seek to rule it. Entrepreneurs build civilization. They are the ones who need protection, primarily from their government.

> “You use the services of the country, therefore, you have to pay your share.”

1- There are many that don’t use, which I’m also required to pay for.

2- I’d hardly categorize the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bank bailouts, the nationalization of General Motors, the TSA’s pornographic body scanners, the NSA’s eavesdropping on my telephone calls, the Guatemalan Syphilis Experiment, and the BULLSHIT speeding ticket I got as “services.”

3- I’d absolutely *love* to stop using ALL public “services” in exchange for keeping all the money which people VOLUNTARILY give me for my work.

But regardless, I’m glad you at least used the words “have to.” You acknowledge then that government-provided services are coercive.

Violence will be used against me if I attempt to do without the benefit of infecting unsuspecting Guatemalans with Syphilis, for example. Initially, my refusal to pay for this public “service” will only inspire increasingly menacing letters from the tax collector, but ongoing refusal to pay will be met with physical violence, including lethal force should I attempt to defend my property. (btw, I pay all my taxes — out of fear.)

Please acknowledge the violence.

It can be justified only if you believe that a peaceful system of voluntary exchanges cannot provide education, security, food for the hungry, housing the poor, transportation, culture, etc.

Then you are faced with a dilemma: Should we leave the poor to their fate or should we violently separate people from their wealth? Should remain ignorant about the advanced stages of Syphilis or should we use the threat of violence to force people to pay for government experiments?

Of course, I believe there is overwhelming evidence that all these things are better provided in a free market (all the ones which are worth doing that is, and none of the ones which aren’t) . Therefore, the dilemma you might feel between violent taxation and some societal need doesn’t even exist.

Because your statist approach is the violent approach, I think the burden of proof lies with you; you must to demonstrate the government’s superiority to the free market. Nevertheless, I’ll make the case that the free market is the better provider, just because it’s so easy to do:

> 1) Security.

If you search for “mall cop tasers” on youtube, you don’t find anything (I didn’t), because privately hired security, unlike security hired by the greedy, lazy, cowardly, power-hungry sociopaths in government is accountable.

You might also be interested in the not-so-wild west where private security flourished, and the murder rate was lower than that of most modern-day U.S. cities:
www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=552

Also, gun town USA — where crime nearly vanished, and not a single person has been murdered in the 25 years since a renegade mayor required every household to purchase a gun:
www.wnd.com/?pageId=41196
(I’m philosophically against the requirement, because it’s coercive, but I think this demonstrates the ability of people to protect themselves peacefully.)

> 2) Transportation

The railroad was build on private initiative in pursuit of private profits. It worked great until government strangled it with regulation, then killed it by FORCING everyone to subsidize an interstate highway system.

The obvious failure of the free market then precipitated the nationalization of Amtrak, a government monopoly, which, if I remember correctly, has lost 32 billion dollars to date.

Despite the best efforts of the statist ideologues, Indiana, Chicago and California are considering selling roads to entrepreneurs who are willing to risk their private wealth in the providing of transportation services.

> 3) need a structured state government to implement changes

Like a hole in the head.

Local governments have either outlawed or required people to kiss the ring of governance, beg permission and pay a hefty licensing fee for the following privileges:
-arranging flowers in Louisiana
-selling coffins in Louisiana, even for monks
-interior designing in DC or Florida
-showing tourists around in Boston
-labeling GMO-free foods “GMO-free”
-selling raw milk
-running lemonade stands in Portland ($120 health department fee)
-selling pumpkins and Christmas trees into Lake Elmo MN
-delivering your neighbors garbage to the dump in San Francisco
-putting signs in your store windows in Dallas
-eyebrow threading in Texas
-training Yoga instructors in Virginia

You risk the violence of government for committing these “crimes.”

4) civil services

How about the fact that poverty in the US fell by 1% a year from 1950 until 1968 when the government’s “war on poverty” began? Since the government’s “war on poverty,” the poverty rate stagnated and remained so despite a quadrupling of the government’s anti-poverty budget.

Source:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=064YTtSxVSo#t=46m10s

Consider this next time you hear someone say the free market punishes the poor.

5) (I’ll cover education, though you didn’t list it.)

As I said, I believe the burden of proof lies with the advocates of violence. I challenge you to find any evidence that public education has been anything but a pathetic, disastrous failure despite a tripling of the federal education budget, and a doubling of the number bureaucrats per student:
www.lostrepublic.com/archives/4630

There’s also the fact that before America’s first public schools appeared in Massachusetts, there was near 100% literacy.

I think all the evidence of the superiority of the free market in providing services generally provided by government is irrefutable. You may find ways spin, question and undermine it, but instead of doing that, can you find evidence that the government approach is superior? Can you find any evidence whatsoever to justify the coercive funding of public “services”?

A parable reflecting the common, unimaginative objections to privatizing education

People in the Soviet Union were standing in line for butter. After several hours, one of them said:

“This sucks. Why does government control food distribution?”

There were some nods of agreement, but the young man behind him, a Phd student, said “the free market is great for the rich, but what about the poor? Who would feed the poor?”

“Can you imagine a system in which food is only grown and sold for profit??? A system in which everything was about MONEY!” said another man. “How barbaric!”

“I can speak to this personally,” said a fourth man, a drunk who wobbled on his legs. “Every day of my life I eat from my government quota of food. If it wasn’t for the government, I would starve!”

“Yes, you’re right, the original dissenter agreed. Perhaps food is too important to be left to the free market.”

Commentary on Libertarian Environmentalism

A corresondence with a friend about to begin studying libertarianism:

You’re asking all the right questions about government’s role and environmentalism. I’m happy to share my perspective.

W.r.t. Global Warming, I’m personally skeptical. I think it’s going to go the way of many other government endorsed “scientific consensuses” of the previous century, like eugenics (50,000 American citizens were FORCIBLY sterilized), the consensus that black people’s brains were anatomically inferior, the coming ice age of the 1970s, the imminent over-population problem of the 1980s, and of course the fact that peak oil has been predicted since Standard Oil struck black gold in Texas.

Whenever there is a “scientific consensus” about a threat to humanity whose solution calls for the use of massive government power, be skeptical.

So, I’ll limit this discussion to pollution, conservation and water.

Pollution and conservation are best handled by private property. If you own woods and want to chop them down, no problem. If you, however pollute the ground water which contaminates your neighbor’s property, then there is a role for the justice system.

This is a philosophically different approach from the arbitrary regulations set by government.

* In this lecture, Stephen Kinsella mentions how California’s environmental law requires all gas companies to purchase a specific gadget, which, by the way, is patented by a politically connected California company. This means more expensive gas for everyone. Government controls are rife with corruption. Contrast this with the private-property approach — So long as you’re not polluting your neighbor, who cares what technology you use?

* Government controls also take an all-or-nothing approach. Either entrepreneurs are completely forbidden for turning vast stretches of resources into goods that you and I want, or the government leases the resources with far too few restrictions to a mining/logging/drilling company whose only goal is to extract as much as possible, as fast as possible.

Imagine if you and I owned a stretch of woods. Imagine all the innovations which we’d create negotiating with loggers, meeting their needs, but also maintaining the land for future use. Politicians don’t have this foresight. Perhaps we would make money from hikers, campers, hunters.

Another characteristic of government controls is that no matter how much lobbying happens, the government remains just a few pen strokes away from swinging from one extreme to the other.

The vast resources spent lobbying government about control of government-owned resources would be better spend, buying, owning and managing natural resources. Sadly, it’s illegal for people to buy / own very much land. Realize, also, that the environmental lobbies are extremely well-funded and powerful, and could realistically buy vast amounts of land for the purpose of conservation.

The method of privatization, of course, is an important and difficult issue, but in general, I think private property is a much better scheme for environmentalism than government regulation.

Have confidence that every human desire is a business opportunity, including the desire to preserve/enjoy nature. Maybe our privately owned woods can out-compete other privately owned woods for the business of hikers by preserving endangered species. What a great blurb this might be on our billboards. Private ownership creates a market-incentive to protect endangered species. This is in stark contrast with the government approach of punishment. If you do happen to own a little bit of woods and the government finds some endangered animal on it, you’re fucked, and the way people deal with this is to shoot, shovel and shut-up.

Water. I just read a great little book called “water for sale” which studies privatization of water distribution. (I’d be more interested in the more radically libertarian idea of private ownership of water, but this doesn’t really exist anywhere.) In any case, the short little books addresses all the common objections — how can we force the poor to pay for water???

It makes an exhaustive and brilliant case for privatization of water distribution. There are many places in the world where, after privatization, poor neighborhoods received potable water for the first time ever. It’s a great success story, which it’s critics have a hard time denying.

Expect a whole lot of socialist propaganda in your courses.

These issues are similar to food freedom issues, in that the socialists and I usually agree on the problem, but have exact opposite solutions.

For example, you can try to reduce the amount of Ecoli in beef by having the government do more — stricter laws, stricter enforcement, stricter regulation — that is the socialists’ solution.

Or you can reduce the amount of Ecoli in beef by having the government do less — end the MASSIVE subsidies of corn. Corn-fed cows have 3x the amount of ecoli as grass-fed. The latter is only done because government subsidy makes it economical.

Here‘s a review I wrote of a documentary about Monsanto.

(More on food freedom)

What Kind of Person Runs For Political Office?

A wonderful and shocking show from Radio Free Market:

“If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you’re a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate. If you don’t want gov’t to intervene anywhere, you’re an extremist.” ~Joe Sobran

Obama waiver allows U.S. aid to 4 countries using child soldiers

Yes we can!

open quotePresident Obama has granted a waiver allowing four countries to continue receiving U.S. military aid even though they use child soldiers, officials said Wednesday.

Human rights groups reacted with surprise and concern, saying the decision would send the wrong message.

“What the president has done is basically given everybody a pass for using child soldiers,” said Jo Becker, children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch.

Administration officials said cutting off aid would cause more damage than good in countries where the U.S. military is trying to fight terrorism and reform abusive armies.

Obama sent a memo to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, dated Monday, saying that it was “in the national interest” to waive a cutoff of military assistance for Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Yemen. close quote (Read more from washingtonpost.com)

2010 winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, Mario Vargas Llosa on the Tea Parties

I found Vargas’s column about the Tea Parties and translated it through Google translation, which made for some garbled English, but most of it remained understandable.

Here are some excerpts, with emphasis added:

open quoteBecause of his [the Tea Party’s] face [is hidden(?)] below ultraconservative, reactionary, populist and demagogic, and the nonsense that can claim some of their leaders, like those who say that President Obama is a Muslim ambush that want socialism for the United States or outbursts of Mrs. Christine O’Donnell, candidate for Delaware, a former practitioner of witchcraft who has accused homosexuals have created AIDS, there are in the core of this movement something healthy, realistic, deeply democratic and libertarian. The fear of runaway growth of the state and bureaucracy, whose tentacles are increasingly infiltrated into the private lives of citizens, cutting and stifling their freedom and their initiatives, the appropriation by the public sector functions or services that society civil could take more effective and less waste of resources, the creation of striking systems of social assistance can be financed only with systematic increases in taxes, which will result in falling living standards of middle and lower classes.

These fears are not free, respond to the reality of our time and originate from problems like living in the First and the Third World. But in the U.S. have a particular resonance, as always lively touch a nerve in a country where individualism is not ever had the bad press it has in Europe, in the collectivist doctrines that have taken deep roots in its modern history. A U.S. European pilgrims came seeking freedom, to practice their religion, it was not official, to defend the right of individuals to be independent, to choose your life without any limitation other than respect for life forms others. In the purest American tradition is not the state but the citizen is responsible first of its failure or success. . . .

For a long time, this ideal design was more or less respected and worked with the extraordinary development and prosperity of the country as a result. . . .

Then, because of wars, economic inequality multiplied, reformist political action was being amended, in many ways to improve it, but sometimes for worse. And among the latter, no doubt, given that inflation elephantine bureaucracy that, as much as in Europe, has reduced the area of freedom and autonomy of the individual, resulting in shrinkage of civil society and, therefore, the responsibility of the citizen against himself, his family and social group. . . .

In modern society, where the State is God, the individual is becoming less responsible, because reality can be just him, it pushes each extra day being only a state-dependent. For almost everything: studying, heal, get a job, enjoy a safe, participate and enjoy the cultural life, retirement account with the State. The idea that that is the final destination of the evolution that has followed the situation in his country is simply intolerable for a significant part of the United States, where the idea of the sovereign individual that should not be coil or exploitation by the State. . . .

If the State is decentralized and slim, if not . . . the individual is no longer free and has become an automaton manipulated by invisible and all-powerful bureaucrats who, in the shadows of their offices, taking all important decisions concerning their fate. . . .

In many cases, they [private individuals] do better and spend less than bureaucrats. In culture, for example, here in the United States, largely, magnificent museums, operas and concerts, dance, major exhibitions, public libraries are funded mainly by civil society. True, there are tax incentives that encourage this generosity, but the main reason is a cultural tradition, not entirely disappeared, which induces people to act, take initiative to invest their money in what they think right and necessary. Unlike others, this message from the Tea Party deserves to be taken into account.close quote

Big Media seems uneasy about the Tea Parties

I have every expectation of betrayal, once these people get into power, as it appears they will. Many, I would say, are already betraying the libertarian and constitutional principles they claim to uphold by advocating social conservatism and unconstitutional war.

Nevertheless, the fact that the media is scared seems like a good sign:

Pure vitriol:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Also, from Paul Krugman:

open quoteThis is going to be terrible. In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness. close quote (Read more from nytimes.com)

The title of the article is “Divided We Fail.” He doesn’t mean ‘divided,’ though, he means doing as I say.