Congress MUST stop The Fed and Treasury from printing any more money. The institutions that are insolvent must be forced into the open and put through bankruptcy.
We CANNOT wait until the next Congress and the election to stop this nonsense; that's five months in the future. By then The United States could easily be quite literally broke and forced into a hyperinflationary spiral!
Gary Larson’s classic Far Side cartoon says it all. The Federal Reserve has heaved a gigantic brick through the window of our nation’s economy. Jobs are getting scarce, retirement savings and housing values are declining, and basic necessities are less affordable. Using the current crisis as an opportunity to further empower the Federal Reserve at the expense of the people is not the answer.
We need to restart past conversations, and restore a Constitutional money and banking system that removes moral hazard from the equation entirely. We cannot allow a private monopoly to create money out of nothing to loan to us at interest. The Federal Reserve is welcome to compete in a free market, but accepting private debt-based currency should not be compulsory — it should be voluntary, and other forms of money that facilitate trade and local economic growth should be welcomed.
Alan Greenspan noted that our money system is not a free market — the power over our money is centralized in the hands of the Federal Reserve.
The government is only authorized to establish a level playing field with accurate “weights and measures.” In particular, Congress was given the authority to coin money, and regulate its value — it is not authorized to delegate monopoly authority over our money to a private central bank.
Since 1913, however, our money comes from a monopoly run for the benefit of private banks. The banks have the power to create money through debt, and the people and our governments thus accumulate debt instead of wealth.
What should Congress do? Follow the Constitution: eliminate the money monopoly that is crippling our country.
Competition between different money systems keeps people honest, and elimination of fractional reserve banking and fraudulent “deposit insurance” keeps banks honest.
Relentlessly seeking another hit of debt will not cure our unsustainable addiction. The poison is not the cure.
It’s time to get off the treadmill of a collapsing debt-based currency and empower local economic growth through an honest, Constitutional money system that will strengthen communities by empowering local producers of real goods and services.
When along comes a libertarian and says, “I favor the repeal, not the reform, of all those government programs,” conservatives and liberals become befuddled, confused, and sometimes even angry. Their entire world-view is being shattered by libertarians because their paradigm of “free enterprise” is based on the existence, not the absence, of those programs. Dealing with a libertarian causes liberals and conservatives no small amount of discomfort and dis-ease because it makes them confront their life of the lie and their life of unreality.
More and more people nowadays are working, as earlier generations were not, with a strong safety net of money under them. All options opened, they now swim in what Kierkegaard called "a sea of possibilities," and one of these possibilities in America is to refuse to grow up for a longer period than has been permitted any other people in history...
The old hunger for life, the eagerness to get into the fray, has been replaced by an odd patience that often looks more like passivity...
Political correctness and so many of the political fashions of our day--from academic feminism to cultural studies to queer theory--could only be perpetrated on adolescent minds: minds, that is, that are trained to search out one thing and one thing only: Is my teacher, or this politician, or that public spokesman, saying something that is likely to be offensive to me or members of any other victim group? Only an adolescent would find it worthwhile to devote his or her attention chiefly to the hunting of offenses, the possibility of slights, real and imagined...
Self-esteem, of which one currently hears so much, is at bottom another essentially adolescent notion. The great psychological sin of our day is to violate the self-esteem of adolescents of all ages. One might have thought that such self-esteem as any of us is likely to command would be in place by the age of 18...
The coarsening of American culture seems part of the adolescent phenomenon. Television commercials have gotten grosser and grosser. The level of profanity on prime-time television shows has risen greatly over the years. Flicks known to their audiences as "gross-out movies," featuring the slimy and hideous, are part of the regular film menu...
At a certain point in American life, the young ceased to be viewed as a transient class and youth as a phase of life through which everyone soon passed. Instead, youthfulness was vaunted and carried a special moral status. Adolescence triumphed, becoming a permanent condition. As one grew older, one was presented with two choices, to seem an old fogey for attempting to live according to one's own standard of adulthood, or to go with the flow and adapt some variant of pulling one's long gray hair back into a ponytail, struggling into the spandex shorts, working on those abs, and ending one's days among the Rip Van With-Its...
To put the matter in unadorned terms: Most self-defined conservative Christians are as apathetic about the slaughter of innocents in foreign wars as they are agitated about the annihilation of the pre-born through abortion, and they are expansively suspicious of government except when it is engaged in mass-murder abroad...
Although second on the ticket to arch-warmonger McCain, Palin is now the sentimental leader of a party that defines its priorites entirely in terms of winning one war of aggression, and carrying out several more. And the dim-witted incumbent of that party has very thoughtfully arranged the resumption of hostilities with Russia, the only nuclear-armed regime that presents a plausible threat to the security of the United States...
Indeed, government -- particularly the despicable state that rules us -- is little more than a perpetual organized assault on the Ten Commandments. The defining act of a government is extracting wealth from people through the threat of lethal violence, and swaddling such acts in invidious rhetoric about "social justice." Thus at its very foundation, the State institutionalizes violations of the commandments against theft, murder, and covetousness...
Alexander Solzhenitsyn offered this admonition to those who wanted to bring about the end of that totalitarian state, with respect to the proper treatment to be given to agents of that state: "Don't believe them, don't fear them, don't ask anything of them."
In other words, treat them with politeness and respect, and ignore entirely the conceit that they are clothed in some peculiar sanctity that permits them to use or require the use of lethal violence to compel submission to their will. To behave otherwise is to act on premises that are essentially idolatrous.
The Constitution was written in simple, declarative English language sentences by farmers. It was written in our name, "we the people." Not only does Young’s view belie the first three words of the preamble of the Constitution, "We the people…", but his philosophy essentially charges every social studies and civics teacher across the country with conspiring to make their students ineligible for jury service...
Juries cannot judge the law, Young says, even though he makes all jurors who enter his courtroom swear an oath to judge the “facts and the law.”
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The opinion of the judge is all that matters to Young, not the clear and unequivocal wording of the U.S. Constitution...
Juries must judge the law as well as the fact, which is why the federal oath of jury service requires them to judge both with guidance from a judge. This was true even in Young’s courtroom up until he made me swear a second oath...
Indeed, if judges can legitimately instruct juries to enforce congressional bans against newspapers criticizing public officials, as Young clearly said they can, then juries are nothing more than stage props for pretended legitimacy. Indeed, if judges can legitimately instruct juries to enforce congressional bans against newspapers criticizing public officials, as Young clearly said they can, then juries are nothing more than stage props for pretended legitimacy...
I am against the type of "rogues" Judge Young describes in his memorandum, the kind of people who ignore their oaths to judge the "facts and the law," throwing the law to the wind to substitute their own political agenda. But as a whole, the handful of "rogues" across the nation are far less dangerous to the rule of law than Humpty Dumpty judges.
Accept that definition and it quickly becomes apparent that the Republican Party does not represent conservative principles. The conservative ascendancy that began with the election of Ronald Reagan has been largely an illusion...
The presidency of George W. Bush illustrates the point. In 2001, President Bush took command of a massive, inefficient federal bureaucracy. Since then, he has substantially increased the size of that apparatus, which during his tenure has displayed breathtaking ineptitude both at home and abroad. Over the course of Bush’s two terms in office, federal spending has increased 50 percent to $3 trillion per year. Disregarding any obligation to balance the budget, Bush has allowed the national debt to balloon from $5.7 to $9.4 trillion. Worse, under the guise of keeping Americans “safe,” he has arrogated to the executive branch unprecedented powers, thereby subverting the Constitution. Whatever else may be said about this record of achievement, it does not accord with conservative principles...
Finally, there is President Bush’s misguided approach to foreign policy, based on expectations of deploying American military might to eliminate tyranny, transform the Greater Middle East, and expunge evil from the face of the earth. The result has been the very inverse of conservatism. For Bush, in the wake of 9/11, ideology supplanted statecraft. As a result, his administration has squandered American lives and treasure in the pursuit of objectives that make little strategic sense.
For conservatives to hope the election of yet another Republican will set things right is surely in vain. To believe that President John McCain will reduce the scope and intrusiveness of federal authority, cut the imperial presidency down to size, and put the government on a pay-as-you-go basis is to succumb to a great delusion. The Republican establishment may maintain the pretense of opposing Big Government, but pretense it is...
Above all, conservatives who think that a McCain presidency would restore a sense of realism and prudence to U.S. foreign policy are setting themselves up for disappointment. On this score, we should take the senator at his word: his commitment to continuing the most disastrous of President Bush’s misadventures is irrevocable. McCain is determined to remain in Iraq as long as it takes. He is the candidate of the War Party. The election of John McCain would provide a new lease on life to American militarism, while perpetuating the U.S. penchant for global interventionism marketed under the guise of liberation.
The essential point is this: conservatives intent on voting in November for a candidate who shares their views might as well plan on spending Election Day at home. The Republican Party of Bush, Cheney, and McCain no longer accommodates such a candidate...
As part of the larger global war on terrorism, Iraq has provided a pretext for expanding further the already bloated prerogatives of the presidency. To see the Iraq War as anything but misguided, unnecessary, and an abject failure is to play into the hands of the fear-mongers who insist that when it comes to national security all Americans (members of Congress included) should defer to the judgment of the executive branch. Only the president, we are told, can “keep us safe.” Seeing the war as the debacle it has become refutes that notion and provides a first step toward restoring a semblance of balance among the three branches of government.
Above all, there is this: the Iraq War represents the ultimate manifestation of the American expectation that the exercise of power abroad offers a corrective to whatever ailments afflict us at home. Rather than setting our own house in order, we insist on the world accommodating itself to our requirements...
But this much we can say for certain: electing John McCain guarantees the perpetuation of war. The nation’s heedless march toward empire will continue. So, too, inevitably, will its embrace of Leviathan. Whether snoozing in front of their TVs or cheering on the troops, the American people will remain oblivious to the fate that awaits them...
The community does support its local schools - through the taxes that are extorted from every individual, whether they have children in public schools or not. And why shouldn't home schooling parents feel superior to public schools? Fact of the matter is that public schools are failing. Much like lack of competition breeds complacency and stunts progress, lack of competition in public schools, due to the fact that they're a monopoly breeds a lack incentive to succeed. And it's NOT a lack of funding that's the problem...
Don't assume that just because a parent chooses to educate their children at home, that they isolate them socially. Home schooled children still have friends and participate in sports and other activities...
Why home school?
Maybe I want my children to know the difference between a democracy and a republic and which one the Founders intended this nation to be...
Self righteous? I wouldn't call it that. I would call it loving one's kids and caring about what they're taught. As a parent you care about what they put in their bodies and what they eat. Why wouldn't you care about what goes into their minds?
Tucker Carlson kicked off the Rally for the Republic event and captured the essence of the Ron Paul movement: “Ron Paul sincerely has zero interest in controlling other people.” No one admits they want to control others, he said, but most politicians are devoted to the idea of passing laws that force other people to behave in certain ways or to fund certain things. Most people want to be left alone, but they don’t want to extend that freedom to others, added Carlson.
Sarah Palin, vice-presidential candidate for the Republican Party, was once a member of the Alaskan Independence Party (AIP), and may still be sympathetic with their mission, according to Lynnette Clark, Chairman of the AIP.
The AIP believes that the vote for statehood was invalid, and that there should be a vote on Alaskan secession...
As for Palin's current views about the AIP, Clark wrote, "I cannot say where Governor Palin now "stands" regarding the AIP Platform, however, she did send a wonderful DVD from her office for the 2008 AIP Statewide Convention sharing her opinion of the importance of this Party."
We're happy to report that the girls and their father are fighting back, circulating a permission to let the girls reopen their stand. The story is receiving national attention, and of course most decent and sensible people are on the side of the kids.
But few of these same people will bother to think about the fuller implications of the story. How many *adults* see their business plans and entrepreneurial dreams burdened or destroyed by red tape and bureaucratic control -- by occupational licensing laws, zoning laws, permit requirements and countless other authoritarian measures?
There's seldom a word written about these tragedies, which occur constantly nowadays -- an outrage in a country founded on the ideals of entrepreneurship and free enterprise...
So why do these laws exist? Liberator Online readers will not be surprised to learn that the push for such laws comes exclusively from established industry leaders, such as the American Society of Interior Designers.
These organizations, quite simply, want to keep out competition and thus enrich themselves. And they're succeeding. According to the free-market Foundation for Economic Education, these laws have already put thousands of would-be interior designers, mainly middle-aged and elderly women, out of work...
Today, an incredible one in five Americans must secure the government's permission to pursue their occupation -- a figure that has risen from about one in 20 in the 1950s...
Frequently the War on Marijuana is defended as necessary to keep drugs out of the hands of young people.
But judged by that standard, the War on Pot is a farce and an extraordinary failure...
A recent survey by the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University has some stunning news: 46 percent of government (public) school teachers support education tax credits -- and just 41 percent oppose them.
Yes, that's right: more government school teachers support education tax credits than oppose them...
Tax credits would open up a world of educational options and alternatives for kids now stuck in dead-end, failing government schools. In addition, tax credits would save states billions of dollars.
When government school teachers support the idea in such large numbers, there is great hope for genuine education reform...
"If you took all the fraud out of politics, there might not be a lot left." -- libertarian economist and syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell.
A tax cut is a pay raise.
A tax hike is a pay cut...
And property taxes amount to, in practice, a kind of "rent" you have to pay the government each year to be allowed to keep living on your own property!
In a libertarian society, government couldn't take your land by eminent domain. There would be no zoning boards. Deed restrictions, which you would be aware of when you bought the property, would be the only limitations on what you did with your property. Deed restrictions would protect your property rights, and also protect your neighbor's property rights, far more fairly and effectively than zoning laws...
If you like the idea of having the freedom to do any peaceful thing you wish on your own property, you just might be a libertarian...
Very early, I concluded that the big danger is the elite, and not the masses, and for the following reasons.
First, even granting for a moment that the masses are the worst possible, that they are perpetually Hell-bent on lynching anyone down the block, the mass of people simply don't have the time for politics or political shenanigans. The average person must spend most of his time on the daily business of life, being with his family, seeing his friends, etc. He can only get interested in politics or engage in it sporadically.
The only people who have time for politics are the professionals: the bureaucrats, politicians, and special interest groups dependent on political rule. They make money out of politics, and so they are intensely interested, and lobby and are active twenty-four hours a day. Therefore, these special interest groups will tend to win out over the uninterested masses. This is the basic insight of the Public Choice school of economics. The only other groups interested full-time in politics are ideologists like ourselves, again not a very large segment of the population. So the problem is the ruling elite, the professionals, and their dependent special interest groups.
A second crucial point: society is divided into a ruling elite, which is necessarily a minority of the population, which lives off the second group – the rest of the population...
Calhoun pointed out that the very fact of government and of taxation creates inherent conflict between two great classes: those who pay taxes, and those who live off them; the net taxpayers vs. the tax-consumers. The bigger government gets, Calhoun noted, the greater and more intense the conflict between those two social classes...
If a minority of elites rule over, tax, and exploit the majority of the public, then this brings up starkly the main problem of political theory: what I like to call the mystery of civil obedience. Why does the majority of the public obey these turkeys, anyway? This problem I believe, was solved by three great political theorists...
They pointed out that, precisely because the ruling class is a minority, that in the long run, force per se cannot rule. Even in the most despotic dictatorship, the government can only persist when it is backed by the majority of the population. In the long run, ideas, not force, rule, and any government has to have legitimacy in the minds of the public...
But we still haven't solved the mystery of civil obedience. If the ruling elite is taxing, looting, and exploiting the public, why does the public put up with this for a single moment? Why does it take them so long to withdraw their consent?
Here we come to the solution: the critical role of the intellectuals, the opinion-molding class in society. If the masses knew what was going on, they would withdraw their consent quickly: they would soon perceive that the emperor has no clothes, that they are being ripped off. That is where the intellectuals come in.
The ruling elite... are in desperate need of intellectual elites to weave apologias for state power. The state rules by divine edict; the state insures the common good or the general welfare; the state protects us from the bad guys over the mountain; the state guarantees full employment; the state activates the multiplier effect; the state insures social justice, and on and on. The apologias differ over the centuries; the effect is always the same... If the ruler is God, few will be induced to disobey or question his commands...
So, to sum up: the problem is that the bad guys, the ruling classes, have gathered unto themselves the intellectual and media elites, who are able to bamboozle the masses into consenting to their rule, to indoctrinate them, as the Marxists would say, with "false consciousness."
The thing to do is to convert the top philosophers to the correct ideas, they will convert the lesser, and so on, in a kind of "trickle-down effect," until, at last, the masses are converted and liberty has been achieved...
Of course, ideas and persuasion are important, but there are several fatal flaws in the Hayekian strategy. First, of course, the strategy at best will take several hundred years, and some of us are a bit more impatient than that. But time is by no means the only problem. Many people have noted, for example, mysterious blockages of the trickle...
More generally, the Hayekian trickle-down model overlooks a crucial point: that, and I hate to break this to you, intellectuals, academics and the media are not all motivated by truth alone. As we have seen, the intellectual classes may be part of the solution, but also they are a big part of the problem. For, as we have seen, the intellectuals are part of the ruling class, and their economic interests, as well as their interests in prestige, power and admiration, are wrapped up in the present welfare-warfare state system...
It is important to realize that the establishment doesn't want excitement in politics, it wants the masses to continue to be lulled to sleep. It wants kinder, gentler; it wants the measured, judicious, mushy tone, and content, of a James Reston, a David Broder, or a Washington Week in Review. It doesn't want a Pat Buchanan, not only for the excitement and hard edge of his content, but also for his similar tone and style...
And so the proper strategy for the right wing must be what we can call "right-wing populism": exciting, dynamic, tough, and confrontational, rousing, and inspiring not only the exploited masses, but the often shell-shocked right-wing intellectual cadre as well. And in this era where the intellectual and media elites are all establishment liberal-conservatives, all in a deep sense one variety or another of social democrat, all bitterly hostile to a genuine right, we need a dynamic, charismatic leader who has the ability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly. We need a leadership that can reach the masses and cut through the crippling and distorting hermeneutical fog spread by the media elites...
Whenever liberals have encountered hard-edged abolitionists who, for example, have wanted to repeal the New Deal or Fair Deal, they say but that's not genuine conservatism. That's radicalism."
McCarthy was able, for a few years, to short-circuit the intense opposition of all the elites in American life: from the Eisenhower-Rockefeller administration to the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex to liberal and left media and academic elites – to overcome all that opposition and reach and inspire the masses directly. And he did it through television, and without any real movement behind him; he had only a guerrilla band of a few advisers, but no organization and no infrastructure...
And how did the conservative movement get into its present mess? Why does it need to be sundered, and split apart, and a new radical right movement created upon its ashes?
The answer to both of these seemingly disparate questions is the same: what happened to the original right, and the cause of the present mess, is the advent and domination of the right wing by Bill Buckley and the National Review. By the mid-1950s, much of the leadership of the Old Right was dead or in retirement...
And so the purges began. One after another, Buckley and National Review purged and excommunicated all the radicals, all the non-respectables. Consider the roll-call: isolationists (such as John T. Flynn), anti-Zionists, libertarians, Ayn Randians, the John Birch Society, and all those who continued, like the early National Review, to dare to oppose Martin Luther King and the civil rights revolution after Buckley had changed and decided to embrace it...
And so the neocons have managed to establish themselves as the only right-wing alternative to the left. The neocons now constitute the right-wing end of the ideological spectrum. Of the respectable, responsible right wing, that is. For the neocons have managed to establish the notion that anyone who might be to the right of them is, by definition, a representative of the forces of darkness, of chaos, old night, racism, and anti-Semitism. At the very least...
The only other point worth noting on the purges is Buckley's own passage on exactly why he had found it necessary to excommunicate the John Birch Society (O'Sullivan said it was because they were "cranks"). In a footnote, Buckley admits that "the Birch society was never anti-Semitic," but "it was a dangerous distraction to right reasoning and had to be exiled. "National Review," Bill goes on, "accomplished exactly that."
One of the authors of the Daniel Bell volume says, in horror and astonishment, that the radical right intends to repeal the twentieth century. Heaven forfend! Who would want to repeal the twentieth century, the century of horror, the century of collectivism, the century of mass destruction and genocide, who would want to repeal that! Well, we propose to do just that...
A large standing army is repugnant to republican institutions and a menace to the liberty of our own people. If we annex the Philippines, we shall have to conquer the Filipinos by force of arms, and thereby deny to them what we claim to ourselves – the right to self-government."
We hold that the policy known as imperialism is hostile to liberty and tends toward militarism, an evil from which it has been our glory to be free. We regret that it has become necessary in the land of Washington and Lincoln to reaffirm that all men, of whatever race or color, are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We maintain that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. We insist that the subjugation of any people is 'criminal aggression' and open disloyalty to the distinctive principles of our Government...
We deplore the sacrifice of our soldiers and sailors, whose bravery deserves admiration even in an unjust war. We denounce the slaughter of the Filipinos as a needless horror. We protest against the extension of American sovereignty by Spanish methods...
We urge that Congress be promptly convened to announce to the Filipinos our purpose to concede to them the independence for which they have so long fought and which of right is theirs...
A self-governing state cannot accept sovereignty over an unwilling people. The United States cannot act upon the ancient heresy that might makes right...
The real firing line is not in the suburbs of Manila. The foe is of our own household...
When the white man governs himself, that is self-government, but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government – that is despotism...
Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us. Our defense is in the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men in all lands. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and under a just God cannot long retain it...
Then, as now, the argument justifying war started as a matter of self-defense, then morphed into a war for "freedom," and finally stood naked as a political and economic power grab...
Jay Garner, the first proconsul of Iraq, made explicit the parallels. He said Iraq would serve the same purpose as the Philippines in that it would be an outpost for American troops and a place where resources could be exploited, just as the Philippines were a vital "coaling station.
Admittedly, for present-day critics of Empire, the legacy of the Cold War has made conjuring from history a convincing vision (or memory) of a non-interventionist America dramatically more difficult...
Critics of the "War on Terror" then should spend at least as much time arguing that the neocon drive for Empire will actually encourage and expand the threat of terrorism as they do pointing out its all too tragic moral costs...
those who repeat the "support our troops" line may simply be expressing the hope that their friends and relatives don't get killed "over there." Parents, friends, and relatives who "support the troops" aren't necessarily uncritically swallowing the rah-rah propaganda. Rhetoric that continually makes no distinction between state policy and the country, between individual Americans and their leaders, and between democracy and Empire, will almost certainly fall flat...
The sending of hundreds of thousands of young men and women off to kill and be killed – in order to occupy a country that did not threaten us – was based on a pack of lies perhaps unique in the unsavory history of the American government's justifications for war...
But the war didn't end with the fall of Baghdad, as we know all too well. A look back at the Anti-Imperialist League offers a guide to moving forward today – if we're prepared to work together.
Leaders are rarely as ideologically sound as followers...
Private intellectuals have more freedom to speak out; politicians, as a part of their job description, have to seek a broader appeal...
Even before the 104th Congress met in official session, however, hope was lost when old-timers like Newt Gingrich subverted the revolution, consolidating power and persuading the radicals that it was their civic duty to betray every election promise they had made...
do not place your hopes in politics as an instrument of social change. After all, libertarians believe in a completely depoliticized society...
Strategic thinking is essential, but no matter what the political moment seems to demand, libertarians must never be drawn away from the first principles of liberty and private property. Never permit yourself the slightest compromise with those two principles, and check every political position you hold against them...
Never underestimate the power of bad ideas. They must be refuted again and again...
The primary goal of intellectual outreach to other camps cannot be to convince others, ... but rather to learn from others and improve your own understanding. The movement grows not by leaps-and-bounds, but step-by-step...
Always focus on the long-term, while doing what’s right day-to-day. Someday you will see, and maybe sooner than we think, that all your efforts on behalf of liberty have helped reap huge rewards for civilization. When that day comes, however, you will not receive any credit, and that is fine because the point is not institutional or personal aggrandizement. Others will jump in to grab the spotlight and attempt to subvert the movement, and our job will begin all over again.
When Massachusetts' Horace Mann in the 1830s began to proclaim the concept of the public school as an agency of personal virtue and social redemption, his timing was perfect. The state of Massachusetts had abandoned tax support of Congregational churches in 1833. The public school soon became America's only established church...
The common creed of the public schools was Unitarian and moralistic: salvation by good public works...
the defense of academic neutrality is a myth. Faculties screen themselves. For example, they do not hire defenders of Aryan racial supremacy...
The researcher requires freedom of inquiry because he does not know what his research will produce. But when he supports himself as a teacher, he cannot legitimately claim the same kind of immunity from those who fund his teaching. Yet he does make this claim...
Men want to receive money with no strings attached. This includes the faculty members of every institution of higher learning...
The critics did for God and Man at Yale what a later generation of critics did for The Passion of the Christ. They turned it into a phenomenon by means of their preposterous accusations and off-the-wall rhetoric. Their strategy backfired...
Anyone who seeks to call into question the legitimacy of the alma mater is calling into question the reflected glory on its alumni. This is a futile effort...
Buckley established his conservative bona fides with God and Man at Yale. Never again did one of his books have an impact to rival this one...
Pat Buchanan has done a masterful job in challenging the many myths surrounding both World War I and World War II. His book is a must-read for anyone concerned about the moving our nation in the direction of the non-interventionist, non-militarist, anti-empire philosophy of America’s Founding Fathers...
Despite the fact that America’s Founding Fathers had warned against U.S. involvement in Europe’s endless wars, President Wilson intervened in the war with two objectives: to make the world safe for democracy and to end all future wars. After the war was over, it increasingly became clear to the American people that neither of these goals had been achieved...
Of course, some people argue that victory in World War II brought freedom to Great Britain and France. But Great Britain and France were free before the war. Don’t forget: It was Great Britain and France that declared war on Germany, not the other way around.
In fact, Buchanan destroys another long-held myth — that Hitler intended to conquer the world, including the United States. As Buchanan carefully documents, Hitler was looking east, not west for expanding the German Empire...
Some people argue that World War II was necessary because the world could not have survived Hitler and the Nazis. Nonsense. If the world could survive Stalin and the communists, it could have survived Hitler and the Nazis because Stalin and the communists were worse, or at least as bad, as Hitler and the Nazis...
With respect to the Holocaust, Buchanan documents how it was the war itself that brought it about. Prior to the war, Hitler’s objective had been to evict the Jews from Germany. Once Hitler realized that he was going to lose the war, he implemented his Final Solution.
When it comes to separatist movements, the American and Russian governments have no principles whatever. They take whatever side advances their political interests at the moment. When ethnic Albanians in Kosovo sought to break from Yugoslavia, the Russians sided with ally Serbia and opposed independence, but the United States backed the separatists and unleashed its bombers. Something similar happened when the Bosnians did the same thing. (The United States gave mixed signals when the Russians moved against separatists in Chechnya.) Yet when the Ossetians and Abkhazians want to be free of Georgia, the big-power roles are reversed.
If you hold your breath waiting for a sign of integrity from any government, you will turn blue...
Do Americans really want to be in the middle of this conflict? While decent people wish the Georgians well in their efforts to stay free of the Russians, we should balk at supporting Georgian President Saakashvili — who is no defender even of the Georgians’ liberties — and his determination to hold the breakaway regions against their will.
Enough big-power politics, client states, and cynical Orwellian lies! Innocent people have suffered too much to let this go on another moment. Bush presumes Americans will take him at his word, not bother to do any fact-checking, and support his provocative agenda in the South Caucasus. If they do, more injustice will be committed in America’s name.
The moral alternative to Putin is not Bush or Saakashvili, but rather condemnation of all the governments involved. Freedom should always take precedence over “territorial integrity.” Secession is the indispensable check on government power.
Putting aside the issue of Russia’s broken promise to Sarkozy, the EU and the UN Security Council, which is no doubt serious, what is wrong with recognizing the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia? Do people not have the right to democratically secede?
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No nation has a permanent claim on its citizens, not even for geopolitical expediency.
Ludwig von Misses wrote in Omnipotent Government that “A nation, therefore, has no right to say to a province: You belong to me, I want to take you. A province consists of its inhabitants. If anybody has a right to be heard in this case it is these inhabitants. Boundary disputes should be settled by plebiscite.” He also wrote in Nation, State, and Economy that “No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.”
It appears that in both the case of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the people have expressed a desire through democratic processes to change their political association. The concept in international law that demands that a secessionist movement, in order to be legitimate, must first be recognized by the nation from which it hopes to secede is like demanding bi-partisan agreement before a divorce is recognized. Unilateral secession must be allowed after it can be demonstrated that there is a genuine will among the people to separate...
In an interview for this post, Dr. Jason Sorens, founder of the Free State Project and expert on international secessionist movements, said “It is difficult to defend Russia's conduct of the war with Georgia, but it is equally difficult to defend the willingness of the U.S., Canada, and other NATO governments to recognize Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence while ruling out future recognition for Abkhazia and South Ossetia. If independence for minorities is ruled out from the start, then they have no alternative but to turn to violence. Independence with security guarantees for ethnic Georgians should at least be on the negotiating table.”
As I stated in my previous post on this matter, Russia should stay out of Georgia, and Georgia should stay out of South Ossetia (and Abkhazia). Let me add that the international community should also be less reluctant to recognize independence movements.
Sorens thinks we can learn something else: “The other lesson from this whole episode is that NATO expansion is foolish. Bringing Georgia into the security guarantee would entail that our soldiers could end up dying in a war against Russia while helping Georgia crush the legitimate aspirations of its ethnic minorities. Is that what we really want?”
Last year in a column, I listed what I think children need for school. Many of you requested a reprint of that list. So here again, thank you, are "20 things children truly need for school."
1. A No. 2 pencil and a willingness to erase.
2. A respect for themselves and others, especially their teachers.
3. An awareness that the world does not revolve around them and that they alone are responsible for their actions.
4. Parents (or grandparents) who teach by example a love for reading, learning and life.
5. An assurance that school is a good, safe place; their teachers will like them; and their parents won't leave town without them.
6. An understanding that school is their "job" and no one else can or will do it for them.
7. A system for exchanging communication between school and home; a backpack for notes; an emergency phone number that always answers; a quiet place and time to do homework; a daily chance to read aloud and to be read to.
8. A plan for getting to and from school on time.
9. A pet to care for.
10. A public library card.
11. Someone to welcome them home; laugh at their jokes; answer their questions; listen to what they say and don't say.
12. The power of knowing how it feels to give anonymously and sacrificially to help someone less fortunate.
13. The encouragement to try new things; the freedom to fail; and the chance to try again.
14. The gifts of being well fed, well rested, well mannered and well covered for medical, dental and after-school care.
15. The confidence to deal with bullies (stand up straight, look them in the eye, don't start a fight, but don't back down); how to ask questions (raise your hand and wait to be called on); and to never stop asking questions, especially "why?"
16. To be the best or at least pretty good at something; and to know that it's OK not to be good at everything.
17. To spend more time with humans and less with machines.
18. To have nothing to do once in a while but daydream.
19. To have someone love them unconditionally, regardless of their grades; someone to "beam" at them, to light up when they walk into the room.
20. Finally, they need to know that school won't last forever, but learning is a lifelong process.
What Crovitz doesn’t discuss is that there is a tremendous difference between private businesses knowing selected bits of your personal habits, versus a government agent having access to all of your personal information. In a related context, Friedrich Hayek pointed out in The Road to Serfdom that it makes the difference between tyranny and liberty when central planners "merely" accumulate in one group of bureaucrats all of the power that had previously been dispersed among thousands of CEOs and other decision-makers in the private sector...
The free market has mechanisms to ensure the optimal amount of privacy is provided, consistent with the tradeoffs between other objectives. The real privacy danger comes not from business, but from government.
The most important news for the month of August was the fact that President Bush has quietly sent the largest armada into the Persian Gulf since the Iraq war began in 2003, when there were six carrier groups. This is a huge number of ships to be concentrated in one location in peacetime. This story has been completely ignored by the news media all over the West
There is no question that this is a major military show of force in the region. President Bush has decided to make this show of force. He has done so without informing the American media regarding the reason for this show of force. If the reason has nothing to do with Iran, he should say so. If the reason has something to do with Iran, then he should publicly discuss the question of the supply of oil exported from the Middle East. He should discuss how he intends to enable Iran to continue to export oil to the West, yet at the same time persuade the Iranians to change their policy on nuclear development. What is it that five carrier task forces in the Persian Gulf can do to persuade the Iranians to change their policies, other than by interdicting oil trade with Iran? If this armada does this, how will Iranian oil exports not be affected? If these carrier forces are to interdict goods coming into Iran, what motivation does Iran have for continuing to export its most vital commodity, when Iran will not be able to use the proceeds from the sale of this commodity in order to buy Western goods?
The failure of the American media is again evident in the coverage of the Georgian-Russian conflict. The US media presented the conflict as a Russian invasion of Georgia, whereas in actual fact the American and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian military launched a sneak attack to kill and to drive the Russian population out of South Ossetia, a separatist province...
This action by Saakashvili, elected with money from the neoconservative National Endowment for Democracy, an election-rigging tool of US hegemony, was a war crime. In truth, the Russians should have hung Saakashvili, as he is far more guilty than was Saddam Hussein. But it is Russia, not Saakashvili, that the US media has demonized.
Americans have become perfect subjects for George Orwell’s Big Brother. They sit stupidly in front of the TV news or the New York Times or Washington Post and absorb the lies fed to them. What is wrong with Americans? Why do they put up with it? Are Americans the nation of sheep that Judge Andrew P. Napolitano says they are? Americans flaunt "freedom and democracy" and live under a Ministry of Propaganda...
These Americans have no realization that there was no more reason for the US to be fighting in Vietnam 40 years ago than to be fighting today in Iraq and Afghanistan or tomorrow in Iran.
