End the War on Freedom

"Sometimes, to build a democratized omelette, you have to break 10,000 eggs." -- Anthony Gregory

# Anthony Gregory at LewRockwell.com - Warmongering Is the Health of Statism - War proves that the state has no useful purpose. Stop supporting the state by supporting its wars. A speech given on Wednesday, November 23, at the LRC conference. More anti-war essays by Mr. Gregory on his Why Libertarians Must Embrace Peace page. [sunni]

Objectivists, in particular, have come to embrace the warfare state as the source of their freedom and well-being. On a message board recently, John Hospers, the LP's first presidential candidate, invoked Ayn Rand's statement that an 80% tax rate would be quite tolerable if it were for defense spending. And of course, most of them think this war is defensive. I asked one of them what government actions he'd tolerate at this time of war, and he said anything, so long as it kept him alive. This is a more common view among supposed individualist thinkers than some in this room might imagine. What was once the libertarian, indeed the American, slogan, of "give me liberty or give me death" has now become "take whatever you want -- just please don't let me die!"

...

The ideology of wartime statism, and what it leads people to tolerate, is well demonstrated in conscription, which Higgs refers to as the "keystone" of leviathan. As Higgs points out, during World War I the Supreme Court would argue that because it deemed conscription to be constitutional, given the necessity of the war, it could not logically overturn any lesser expansion of government into civil society. The Supremes were being somewhat consistent here, and pragmatic. If you can get people to defend military slavery -- which is of course what the draft is -- you can get them to defend practically anything the government will do to its subjects. And only war seems to make so many people open to slavery.

We can summarize the diagnosis for economic freedom simply by saying that war and the free market are totally incompatible. Even the most defensible war one can imagine -- to repel foreign invasion -- presumably involves taxation when the government plays a role. This alone makes every warfare program as much an attack on the taxpaying class as welfare. Last time I checked, we were still paying McKinley's telephone excise tax for the Spanish-American War, though I hear there are plans to repeal it.

...

Whether we look at economic policy, civil liberties, or any other indicator, America got its big, consolidated government during Polk's war, Lincoln's war, Wilson's war, FDR's war, Truman's war, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon's war, and the two Bush wars, far more than it got leviathan during peacetime. Even the domestic Progressive Era and peacetime New Deal looked like golden eras of laissez faire when contrasted with the wars that soon followed them. Madison said that tyranny would come to this land only under the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. One hundred ninety-three years after his unnecessary war with Britain, I must say he was right.

We can trace the decline of liberty, the rise of collectivism, and the advent of the current regime in this country, and see the principal role that war has always had in advancing the state. To love all the big wars of America's past is to love the current leviathan. To seek more war for the future is to wish for the state to grow.

...

If warmongering is the health of statism, loving and championing peace are at the core of libertarian thinking. The very essence of freedom is, in fact, peace -- to be at peace to live your life as you see fit, without the politicians milking your bank account dry, sponsoring economic interests against you, or condemning you to a jail cell for personal and peaceful behavior. Once you embrace peace and call into question the warfare state, which is the primary justification for leviathan and its growth, the entire philosophy of statism falls under scrutiny. If the state is not even just and effective in protecting you from and slaying the world's monsters, what good is it at all?

# Charley Reese at LewRockwell.com - Slipped His Moorings - Not that he hasn't been crazy for years, but Dick Cheney has lost touch with reality in a recent speech.

I don't know who the vice president's speechwriters are, but he ought to fire them all forthwith. What he said was so far off the map of reality that it is embarrassing. He might as well have said that if Americans withdraw, Martians will land in spaceships and take over the country. His statement is that bizarre. If he himself believes what he said, then he has displayed an ignorance of the Middle East that is embarrassingly gargantuan. A 12-year-old street vendor in Baghdad could tell you that those three men have zero chance of ruling Iraq.

# Mark Morford at The San Francisco Chronicle - Scenes From A Bush Thanksgiving - Mr. Morford is thankful that the Bush administration is imploding. I would be, too, but their replacement is likely to be worse, as unimagineable as that might seem. [lew]

# PapersPlease.org - Next Stop: Big Brother - the story of Deborah Davis, arrested for refusing to show her papers to a fedgoon. Her arraignment is scheduled for December 9. [whatreallyhappened]

The bus she rides crosses the property of the Denver Federal Center, a collection of government offices such as the Veterans Administration, the U.S. Geological Survey, and part of the National Archives. The Denver Federal Center is not a high security area: it's not Area 51 or NORAD.

On her first day commuting to work by bus, the bus stopped at the gates of the Denver Federal Center. A security guard got on and demanded that all of the passengers on this public bus produce ID. She was surprised by the demand of the man in uniform, but she complied: it would have meant a walk of several miles if she hadn't. Her ID was not taken and compared to any "no-ride" list. The guard barely glanced at it.

When she got home, what had happened on the bus began to bother her. 'This is not a police state or communist Russia', she thought. From her 8th grade Civics class she knew there is no law requiring her, as an American citizen, to carry ID or any papers, much less show them to anyone on a public bus.

She decided she would no longer show her ID on the bus.

# Paul English - IVR Cheat Sheet - how to get around various large companies' interactive voice response systems and talk to a human. [picks]

# James R. Rummel - Fill Your Hand - some advice on practicing your quick draw. [fishorman]

# Jeff Quinn at Gunblast - The .500 Wyoming Express from Freedom Arms - Freedom Arms adds some punch to the .50 Action Express round and chambers their Model 83 revolver for the new cartridge. Mr. Quinn likes it.

Back to the new .500 Wyoming Express cartridge. Comparisons are inevitable, so let's get them out of the way now. The .500 WE's competitors are the .500 Linebaugh, the .500 S&W Magnum, and to a degree the .50 Beowulf, with the Linebaugh being the closest to the .500 WE. With comparable bullet weights, the .500 Wyoming Express beats the .500 Linebaugh cartridge by around 100 to 200 feet-per-second (fps). The heaviest commercial .500 Linebaugh load is from Buffalo Bore Ammunition, and pushes a 435 grain bullet to a muzzle velocity of 1300 fps. The .500 Wyoming Express will push a 440 grain bullet to 1450 fps, according to pressure tested data using Hodgdon Lil'Gun powder. This is significant, as both cartridges are chambered in revolvers of about the same size and weight. The .500 S&W Magnum has more power than either the Linebaugh or the Wyoming Express, but it is chambered in a revolver that is much larger, and weighs almost twice as much as either a .500 Linebaugh built on a converted Ruger or the Freedom Model 83. The .50 Beowulf is also a longer cartridge, and is chambered in the BFR revolver, which is also larger and heavier, and suffers the same crimp problem as does the .50 AE. The Beowulf is an excellent cartridge chambered in an AR-15, but is not the best choice in a revolver. Freedom Arms has been several years in development of the .500 Wyoming Express, and may well have produced the best fifty caliber revolver cartridge to date, achieving the optimum balance of power to weight of any of the fifties currently available. The .500 Wyoming Express is capable of taking any game that walks the Earth, if the hunter is up to the task. The recoil of full power loads from the Model 83 .500 WE can be best described as brisk. Another good word would be "painful"., but that is somewhat misleading. Firing a few rounds of the heaviest loads is not too bad at all, but the cumulative effect of a long test session can take its toll. I found moderate loads, which are really the most useful, to be quite pleasant to shoot, especially for a big-bore revolver. Developing hot loads using heavy bullets quickly became a chore, and I found myself dreading pulling the trigger on the faster loads using bullets of 400 grains and heavier. Again, firing a few was no problem, but long shooting sessions of the heavy stuff hindered my ability to accurately place my shots. I found that three pound trigger getting harder to pull with each shot. My favorite loads tested were those that moved a 400 to 450 grain bullet out the muzzle at around 1000 fps, or a bit less. These loads are capable of cleanly taking most game., and are much easier on the shooter.

Add comment Edit post Add post