Arm Our Pilots

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Wed, 03 Oct 2001 12:00:00 GMT
I walked around at the Albany International Airport entrance carrying my "Arm Our Pilots" sign for an hour yesterday afternoon. There were a total of six of us there carrying signs. One guy had a bull horn. We got quite a bit of positive response from the people driving by. An airport bureaucrat drove his truck up on the grass and tried to convince us to go away and come back only after we had received a permit, which he claimed was fast and easy to do. We refused. He went across the street for a pow-wow with some other guys and came back to inform us that we could stay until 7pm as long as we stayed out of the street. No police presence, though an airport security guy hung around across the street for a little while. A Channel 6 cameraman filmed us for a few minutes and interviewed one of us. We may have gotten a short blurb on the 11pm news, but I was asleep then, so I didn't see.

Lew Rockwell at LewRockwell.com - Speak the Truth - some are saying that now is a hard time to be libertarian. Bull. It's a great time. Liberty is the only way out of this and every problem. The state caused this. More statism will only make it worse. [lew]

Rarely are the initial ambitions compared with the actual results, for in each case we find that the program did not achieve what its designers claimed, and usually made the original problem worse. For example, it took a war on tobacco to actually increase the rate of teen smoking, a war on discrimination to actually increase unemployment among disabled people, a war on poverty to entrench an impoverished class, and a war on ignorance to cause the illiteracy rate and the cost of education to rise proportionally. I shudder to think what a full-scale war of terrorism is going to bring.

...

We were told that the FAA was providing security on planes, but it turns out that the FAA was preventing it from being provided. We were told that the military would protect US cities, but they couldn't even protect their headquarters. We were told that a vast intelligence apparatus kept a watchful eye on terrorists, but the large group involved in this attack either went unnoticed or was ignored. We were told that US foreign policy was designed to deter aggression, but it turns out to inspire it.

If the US government were a private security agency, it would be fired and sued. But because it is a monopoly provider without voluntary customers, it can't be. So it takes the opposite course after massive failure: it extracts even more money and grabs even more power.

Sheldon Richman at the Future of Freedom Foundation - Mistaken about Motives - Americans are being misled about the motives of the criminals who planned Bloody Tuesday. [lew]

In other words, it is highly likely that bin Laden wants the United States to unleash its military might in Afghanistan and Iraq. Doing so could upset Pakistan and embolden and win new sympathizers in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf states. Those U.S.-supported dictatorships are despised by many people in the region. The general turmoil could also have severe consequences for Israel. From bin Laden's perspective, why not roll the dice? What's to lose?

More catching up on The Libertarian series by Vin Suprynowicz:

pamri at Kuro5hin - Dubyaman takes to the Skies - The Times of India is running a series of "Dubyaman" cartoons: Goes to War, Sanctioned to Thrill, Osama's Secret, The Final Verdict, Back to the Future. GW dons his Dubyaman costume and protects the free world, incompetently. A couple that weren't in the kuro5hin article: Home of the Free, Air Farce One.

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