"Montage": It's The Economy, Stupid.
It's The Economy, Stupid
Mises.org provides an excellent "Bailout Reader." Be sure to check it out!
The Mises Institute has published Murray Rothbard's textbook The Mystery of Banking in hardback.
It is only $18. Rothbard's many books on money and banking are more relevant than ever.
Read Rothbard's "Money: Its Importance, Origins, and Operations." (Excerpt from his book.)
"Economics," wrote Ludwig von Mises in Human Action,
must not be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices and must not be left to esoteric circles. It is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything. It is the pith of civilization and of man's human existence.
On Anti-War Radio, both Lew Rockwell and Ron Paul are interviewed. Be sure to check out some of the other interviews as well.
Let me also highly, highly recommend The Lew Rockwell Show. All of the interviews are informative.
Pat Buchanan says that the "Day of Reckoning" is here.
Read "Blaming the Victim: The Free Market" and "The Truth About Gasoline Shortages" by Gary North.
(When will people learn? See The Paleo Blog's "Defending the Undefendable": Price-Gouging.)
"No More Help, Please" by by Stephen Fairfax.
And read Rockwell's "Bush the Socialist and Destroyer" and "Learning About the State."
It Must be the Market's Fault!
The notion, as propagated blindly & emotionally by some men who never seriously studied economics (especially as it relates to monetary issues), that the establishment (e.g., government, mainstream media, etc.) is supportive of free markets and is therefore engaged in hushing critics of the free market, is contradicted by the very fact that the establishment has pushed for bailouts that are inherently uncapitalistic and anti-market. So too is the comment that many politicians have supposedly moved from an anti-regulation perspective to a pro-regulation perspective a vacuous comment. (When has the GOP been a paradigm of free market support beyond mere word say?) Saying such a thing is happening is based on the assumption that the respected areas that are in trouble are without regulation. It is based on the assumption that Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, for example, were market institutions vs. statist institutions whose risks & losses were nationalized, creating moral hazard. It is based on the assumption that banks were not forced to engage in affirmative action in loaning. It is based on the assumption that easy credit did not flood the market from the government. If you ignore the government's hands all over each and every problem and believe that there is no such thing as law in a scientific sense as it relates to economics and arithmetic, then it is easy to say that it is the "free market" at fault.
By definition, only the government can inflate or force uneconomic affirmative action policies. When government collectivizes risks, checks and balances go away. Firms can act irresponsibly without worry of bankruptcy. When the government floods banks with credit, the government thereby lowers the rate of interest to a level lower that it otherwise would be at. Investments then will be misdirected out of lines they would have gone instead. It creates, roughly speaking, the illusion of added wealth (by the increase of paper money versus real capital in terms of a real interest rate forming) so as to make it seem feasible to sustain higher order investment. Government thus creates the incentive to loan to risky people----which would not have happened if the market was left alone.
Asking where checks and balances are located in the market is begging the question of where the checks and balances are for the government. That it is a coercive monopolist in a particular territory of ultimate decision making or jurisdiction means that disputes between parties are ultimately up to the government, as a sovereign, to resolve, which include conflicts that involve the government itself.
Ron Paul's Campaign For Liberty
- The Revolution Continues
Ron Paul Endorses Chuck Baldwin for President.
I'm a non-voter because I don't think you can find salvation or liberty in the democratic process. Nonetheless, if I had to vote, I would vote for this gentleman. Ron Paul made the right choice. Go Baldwin!
Daniel McCarthy shares some of his thoughts on Paul's endorsement.
Paul Gottfried writes about Stephen J. Sniegoski's The Transparent Cabal.
The "beating of war drums" against Iran continues, says Justin Raimondo.
"Republicans on the Left and Democrats on the Right," writes Ivan Eland.
VDare.com: "Racial Quotas In Malaysia: Grim Warning For America" by Jared Taylor.
Groups.
Some libertarians, it seems, just do not want to believe there could be any differences between groups of people. They think such thinking is “abstract." (This is similar to those who think libertarianism is too "abstract" when talking about the individual.) But "collective" judgment is not always a bad. Is it bad, for example, if I say that women and men have differences? Am I a pseudo-thinker, a socialist, an anti-individualist, and/or anti-libertarian?
"Men on average have greater upper-body strength than women."
This statement is a collective statement; it is true; it does not imply socialism; it does not disregard the individual or go against methodological individualism, and it does not deny individual rights. It also does not deny that we could find a counter-example. Of course we could. We could find a woman who has greater upper-body strength than a man. It thus does not deny that individuals differ.
The late Robert A. Nisbet (1913 - 1996) is without a doubt one of my favorite conservative scholars. Reading several hundred pages of his works has benefited me immensely. In this montage entry, please let me recommend you buy Nisbet's Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary. Now this book is not one to read straight through. It is one in which you will probably jump around, as I did. And it is a book that you will only want to read one or two "dictionary" entries at night per day. This way you can absorb what Nisbet has to say. It is a book like this that makes me love (anti-statist) cultural conservatism.
Nisbet's biographer, Dr. Brad Lowell Stone, is right. It only makes sense to be a libertarian in a Nisbetian sense.
Joe Sobran writes on "The Wisdom of Humanae Vitae."
"The Cultural Revolution in 16th-Century England" by Murray Rothbard.
A Poison in Libertarianism.
Located in some libertarian factions is a great poison that is anti-religion & anti-spirituality. They try to conflate libertarianism's anti-state position with an anti-religion position. Strictly speaking, though, libertarianism is a narrowly confided political philosophy. It examines the nature of the state, private property, aggression, defense, and punishment theory. But it is not a philosophy of life. It has nothing whatsoever to say about religion. A libertarian can be an atheist or a non-atheist, a Catholic or a Jehovah's Witness.
"Paleolibertarianism" came into being to combat this poison, among others. From a strategic frame of reference, libertarianism must be bourgeoisie to have the public embrace it. More than that, I find most atheist libertarians childish. They do not know the difference between authority and power. They do not understand the vital importance, for instance, the Catholic Church had and has on the development of Western Civilization. (See Dr. Thomas Woods' How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.) They see civilization and society as rootless.
Even some atheist libertarians who are not necessarily anti-religion, like Dr. Walter Block, conflate war and religion. Block might as well, like those who believe in using violence against the non-violent, conflate capitalism and war. But there is no conflation, properly understood, in either of the two cases. Now once being a borderline atheist myself, I can somewhat understand how they view existence and the world, and am tolerant of those who are non-militantly atheistic or agnostic in their views. Rothbard himself, while understanding the importance of Christianity and so forth, was an agnostic.
It is funny; many of these libertarians think that only those with low reasoning & deductive skills, a low IQ, and mental problems could possibly see before their eyes more than the materialistic and worldly. Though in my experience, those who are militantly anti-religion had some kind of bad experience growing up in a household that was religious.
