End the War on Freedom

"The average parent has no clue that the goal of parenting is to produce an adult, as much as that is under our control, which ain't much." -- unattributed

"Why is Lon Horiuchi still breathing?" -- unatrributed. Why indeed?

# Steward Carlson at Marc Brands Liberty - Does That Remind You of Anyone - cartoon commentary on the Newsweek snafu. Hahaha. [clairefiles]

# I took a few pictures outside the other day:

My rust bucket, a 1983 Civic DX Sedan with 250,000 miles
It still drives 400 miles a week, without fail


My daughter on top of the big rock behind our house


The "potato field" across the road from our house


The Shaker fence in our front yard


Yum

# Murray N. Rothbard at The Ludwig von Mises Institute - The Case for the 100 Percent Gold Dollar - long. Didn't read all of it. A history of the destruction of the gold standard, and why we should return to it. [lew]

There can be no genuine laboratory experiments in human affairs, but we came as close as we ever will in 1968, and still more definitively in 1971. Here were two firm and opposing sets of predictions: the Misesians, who stated that if the dollar and gold were cut loose, the price of gold in ever-more inflated dollars would zoom upward; and the massed economic Establishment, from Friedman to Samuelson, and even including such ex-Misesians as Fritz Machlup, maintaining that the price of gold would, if cut free, plummet from $35 to $6 an ounce.

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What then of the laboratory experiment? Flouting all the predictions of the economic Establishment, there was no contest as between themselves and the Misesians: not once did the price of gold on the free market fall below $35. Indeed it kept rising steadily, and after 1971 it vaulted upward, far beyond the once seemingly absurdly high price of $70 an ounce.[3] Here was a clear-cut case where the Misesian forecasts were proven gloriously and spectacularly correct, while the Keynesian and Friedmanite predictions proved to be spectacularly wrong. What, it might well be asked, was the reaction of the Establishment, all allegedly devoted to the view that "science is prediction," and of Milton Friedman, who likes to denounce Austrians for supposedly failing empirical tests? Did he or they, graciously acknowledge their error and hail Mises and his followers for being right? To ask that question is to answer it. To paraphrase Mencken, that sort of thing will happen the Saturday before the Tuesday before the Resurrection Morn.

# Anthony Gregory at LewRockwell.com - Gun Control and the War on Drugs - why drug control and gun control are basically identical, and why freedom-loving people should oppose both. End the war on freedom! [lew]

Many opponents of gun control support the war on drugs, and many critics and reformers of America's drug laws tend to believe in gun control. Conservatives tend to fall into the first category and liberals into the second.

In reality, these two issues are more similar than many people might think.

In both cases -- laws that restrict which guns people may buy, own, and carry; and laws that restrict which drugs people may buy, possess, and ingest -- what we're dealing with are possession crimes: victimless offenses against the state, whereby merely having something is branded a crime and punishable by fines and imprisonment.

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Since few people are naturally willing to turn in their neighbors for victimless activity, the government has to create perverse incentives for people to turn in lawbreakers. The drug war and war on the Second Amendment have inspired the government to pressure teachers and pediatricians to ask children about what drugs or guns their parents might have. Drug and gun offenders are also encouraged to testify against other offenders -- often-times ones who committed much more minor offenses -- in exchange for lowered prison sentences. This often leads to small-time offenders getting longer sentences than the big-time dealers. Such government programs to incite tattle-telling belong in history-book chapters about the Soviet Union, but they have no place in a free society.

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Of course, the drug war and gun control have led to huge black markets in drugs and guns. With millions of potential customers, people who enter the illegal businesses are people who are likely to take risks and perhaps break laws in other ways. Without the legal mechanisms of arbitration, disputes are often settled with violence. The more money spent on enforcement, the more lucrative and risky the business, and the more violence results. Economists have estimated that the drug war increases homicides by as much as 50 percent, and the Justice Department has estimated that 2 million crimes are stopped every year by private gun ownership. Few policies would cut down on crime more than ending the drug war and repealing America's gun laws.

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The elevated crime associated with the black markets in guns and drugs has, predictably, led to more laws against guns and drugs. Instead of punishing the crimes themselves -- and, ideally, ending the prohibitions that foster such crimes -- politicians have focused on guns and drugs as if these inanimate objects were the root causes of gang violence. Without the drug war and its corresponding crime, the motivation for supporting gun control would be much weaker. Without the drug war and its legacy of attacks on the Bill of Rights, proposals to further attack the Second Amendment would be without many of their most important precedents.

# Charley Reese at Antiwar.com - More Manly Galloways, Fewer Slimy Colemans - Mr. Reese praises Mr. Golloway's senate subcommittee testimony, as well he should. [sierra]

The slimy Coleman tried to save face afterward by telling the press that Galloway wasn't "a credible witness." The hell he wasn't. It's Coleman and his subcommittee who lack credibility, not to mention ethics or a sense of justice.

# Robert Kaercher at Strike the Root - Neoconomics in One Lesson - creative story illuminating the nature of the inhuman scum who make war to make money for themselves and their friends, while sucking the good people dry and murdering their children. [root]

While I readily admit that this hypothetical scenario of mine may not have included every detail, I submit that it more or less sums up the economic principles of war, with myself and my gang representing government and its assorted hangers-on, lackeys and sycophants. The purpose of my illustration is to demonstrate how, contrary to a long-standing popular misconception I've heard repeated in this country many times over the years, war never increases the net wealth of a nation, as there is never any net economic creation. There is only net economic destruction. (I confess that there is one particularly huge, gaping hole in my analogy, which I'll get to later.)

This essential truth should not be surprising, as it is the very nature of government to suck up the resources of the population it purports to "govern," in times of relative peace as well as in times of war. There is absolutely no way that government can "create" anything--it can only take away or destroy. That's all it can do. If it is "providing" something to someone, it is doing so only by the means of taking something away from someone else. To forcibly transfer something from one individual's hands to another's is, obviously, not really "providing," it's stealing, and indeed it is destroying, as the plundered individual gets absolutely nothing in exchange. The State is a parasitic leech.

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By using the word "neoconomics" in the title of this piece, it may appear that I'm implying that the current Bush-Cheney neoconservative war cabal in Washington invented this whole corporate warfare/welfare state scam, but that would be an inaccurate claim to make. The model was established many, many years ago.

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This corporate warfare/welfare state model has been the means by which the few have plundered the many ever since. It is clear that the Bushian neocons stand atop the shoulders of giants past. Unlike the great mass of average Americans, they have studied this tried-and-true formula very closely, and so far they are doing quite well for themselves, as recent events highlight.

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The one really big hole in my hypothetical sketch analogizing the economics of war was that my gang and I didn't kill anyone. We know that in real wars, our government murders many thousands of human beings. Many thousands more are not only physically scarred for life, but psychologically, too, as they strain to erase the memories of dead children and their neighbors' bloodied, mutilated bodies from their psyches. The mothers and fathers of dead soldiers are forever caught in a cycle of grief and sadness over having to bury their children, when they'd always believed that it would be their children who would bury them. The loss of human life is the one loss that simply cannot be measured in economic terms. There is no yardstick by which to measure the net loss of thousands of worlds that have been annihilated along with the senseless slaughter of each human being.

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Since it is becoming clearer and clearer as time goes on that the American people simply will not exercise their full intellectual capacity to keep the growth of destructive, centralized government power in check, as Thomas Jefferson had hoped they would, we can still take comfort in the fact that such a system will eventually destroy itself. What we are discussing here, after all, is Empire, that evil state of affairs by which a few self-anointed, politically-empowered elites enslave the many and send countless thousands to kill and die in endless wars that, one way or another, result in fatter pockets and greater material resources for those elites, whose moral scruples are so skewed and so perverse that one has to wonder if they are even of the human race.

# Jason Hallmark at Epinions.com - A 'Terminal' Diagnosis of the State - a review The Terminal, a movie about a U.S. visitor who gets trapped in the airport, unable to gain admittance to the U.S., and unable to return home. Bad as a movie, says Mr. Hallmark, but good story about gummint idiocy. [root]

Throughout the film we see one example after another of the pettiness of Dixon, and the heroism of Navorski. Dixon is power hungry, and bent on breaking Navorski. Navorski, (presumably from a former Communist nation and well familiar with the antics of administrators in the employ of the State), simply follows the rules, but is always one step ahead of Dixon, creatively looking for ways to survive and thrive. He maintains a healthy distrust of Dixon, knowing that Dixon is out to get him, but mostly just regards him as being a fool. This symbolism is the perfect analogy for the state and the free market. The state, often staffed by petty, scheming types who thrive on the use of power, seeks to establish control over the lives of its subjects. Yet, no matter how many obstacles and controls the state erects, the market is always adapting, changing course, and minimizing the relevance of the State. The market does a heroic job of moving human civilization forward.

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