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"If the federal government's economists have been good for nothing else," wrote Murray N. Rothbard, "they have made great strides in what might be called 'creative economic semantics.'" A so-called budget "cut" is not a cut these days. Even if the budget truly expands, we might still call it a "cut" because the rate of expansion decreased. (Oh, boy! How great.)
Euphemisms, fittingly, are also to be found in the language of economics. For sure, politicians could never allow anyone to utter the depressing word "depression." (Or, worse, "crash" or "panic.") Therefore the word was replaced with "recession." Other substitutes include "downturn," "slowdown," and "sidewise movement."
On the subject of depression the weekend edition of LRC featured a 1969 essay by Rothbard called “Economic Depressions: Their Cause and Cure.” According to LRC, the Constitutional Alliance of Lansing, Michigan originally published it as a minibook.
In the paper Rothbard explains that the modern establishment view of the business cycle matches Karl Marx's. That the business cycle is an integral part of capitalism, and that the State is required to smooth out its supposed instability. Similar to an automobile, capitalism is either traveling too fast or too slow, in terms of the spending behavior of consumers.
The problems with this are many. A two-faced view of the market economy exists with two incompatible theories. But they can't be both correct. There is a theory that explains the steady movement of market prices. Then there is the separate theory that tries to explain the occurrences of booms and busts, without squaring it with the first theory.
Today's Keynesian view, says Rothbard, does not account for the entrepreneur. No explanation exists why all of a sudden multiple errors suddenly occur on the market. In addition, there is a gap in explaining the fact that capital goods industries are hit the most; not consumers' goods. Keynesians say that the second area should be most hit.
The answer lies in inflation and the artificial lowering of the interest rate.
See Also: "Herbert Hoover's Depression" by Murray N. Rothbard and "The Greatness of the Market in a Crisis" by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Watch the Following:
Political Correctness & Housing Troubles:
See Steve Sailer's "The Diversity Recession, or How Affirmative Action Helped Cause the Housing Crisis" and "The Housing Recession: Political Correctness Makes Lenders Stupid."
Philip Weiss "Looking Into the Lobby."
Lew Rockwell's New Podcast: Episode I | Episode II
"They Didn't Attack Switzerland" by Bill Walker.
Bush's Secret War with Iran: "Preparing the Battlefield" by Seymour M. Hersh.
"How to Prevent a War With Iran" by Laurence M. Vance.
"No More Blank Checks for War" by Patrick J. Buchanan.
WWII - The Good War? Not So Fast.
A Few Ways to Spot a Kiddy-Conn: Ronald Reagan he imagines as a hero and saint. He believes that Reagan brought a limited government era. He attacks Jimmy Carter by default, whenever and wherever possible. The kiddycon believes that Carter was the biggest modern evil to ever set foot in the White House. He gloats that cutting taxation just right will have the upshot of growing the size of government. This way he can argue that conservative means can accomplish leftist ends (showing that he thinks it is a worthy goal). The anniversary of dropping atomic weapons in WWII he celebrates, praises, and believes was a necessary thing to do. That this is a "conservative" attitude. (Thus he has never heard of Richard Weaver or, say, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. To him conservative thought and debate has its fountainhead in talk radio and NR.) He praises civil "rights" and thus subconsciously supports affirmative action which is a logical and necessary extension. "Dr." Martin Luther King, Jr. was a conservative, according to the kiddycon. One must have a holiday to worship him. (The only "bad" about him, though, was that he was anti-war.) Patriotism is defined as love of government and military. Nation equals state. Democratic values, he thinks, are so good they should be spread around the world.
"John McCain on Foreign Policy: Even Worse Than Bush" by Ted Galen Carpenter.
"Authority Issues—Is There Sovereignty Beyond the State?" by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Interview with Walter Block.
The Mises Institute uploaded an mp3 interview with Dr. Block: "Economics of Oil, Hurricane Katrina, and the Real Estate Bubble." Listen Here.
Interview with James Bovard.
At Anti-War Radio, Mr. Bovard "discusses the outrageous new FISA amendments, relative criminality of Nixon’s wiretapping crimes to Bush’s and relative courage of the Congress then to now, the lack of outrage among the population at large, the massive imperial court surrounding Washington DC and America’s massive warfare-welfare-police state." Listen Here.
Interview with Patrick Buchanan.
Mr. Buchanan talks about his important new book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. Watch this Anti-War Radio interview.
Felix Morley (1894 – 1981) was a gentleman of what the late Murray Rothbard referred to as the Old Right. Morley was one of the founding editors of Human Events. He wrote for the Baltimore Sun and was an editor of the Washington Post. For his writings he won the Pulitzer Prize. Morley for a few years was the President of Haverford College. His books include The Power in the People (1949) and Freedom and Federalism (1959). He was also part of the anti-interventionist League of Nations.
Morley, not being a part of the Buckley takeover, saw the incompatibility between a Republic, on the one hand, and an Empire, on the other. He wrote about how the government and the military-industrial complex have created an interest in maintaining an empire and having some enemy; that this has created a "self-perpetuating managerial elite." And that empire brings about illusions of grandeur. He was a Cold War skeptic. Morley, in addition, was anti-egalitarian and socially conservative.
Read His Seminal Essay: "American Republic or American Empire" (Modern Age: Summer, 1957)
Morley at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
His Wikipedia Entry.
Intellectual Bio Essays:
- "Felix Morley and the Commonwealthman Tradition: The Country-Party, Centralization and the American Empire" by Leonard P. Liggio.
- "Felix Morley: An Old Fashioned Republican Critic of Statism and Interventionism" by Joseph R. Stromberg.
- "Felix Morley: An Old-fashioned Republican" by Joseph R. Stromberg.
- "Felix Morley, RIP" by Murray N. Rothbard (page 5 of pdf)
Other Essays:
- "The Anti-Imperialist League and the Battle Against Empire" by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
- "It Didn't Start with Bush" by Ira Katz.
- "What Has Happened to Human Events?" by Christopher Manion. (It was neoconized.)
- "War, Peace, and the State" by Joseph R. Stromberg.
- "Libertarianism, Conservatism, and All That" by Jude Blanchette.
Man must be careful when speaking about "conformity" because one cannot pronounce it categorically or wholly as a bad. In a more cultural left-liberal and socialist sense, I would say, it is a bad. In a cultural traditional-conservative (but non-coercive) and capitalist sense, in contrast, it is a good.
The reality is that conformity, that arrives spontaneously in the free interactions, associations and institutions of man, is a necessary part of any civilized and orderly society. Society, being defined as freely cooperating men, expresses itself in the division of labor, which gets its being from men working together towards common goals.
It is in society that a framework develops. This framework begets conformity in terms of language, norms, manners, morals, rules, and so forth. It makes interactions, because a framework exists, possible and has the effect of strengthening these interactions.
As
he wrote, this kind of free market conformity brings "harmony." He
gives the example of time schedules. Without them, no one could conduct
orderly business with another. By the same token, society develops
conformity in manners. What one wears to a special event, for example.
Or the way man behaves when listening to a lecturer. Thus man can see
the development of many prejudices, so to speak, and customs.
Moreover, the development of science, or the progress of science, is dependent not on "dissent simply for dissent's sake," but through a working within the organically developed structure of science. The same is true with the arts. It changes conservatively through old forms.
To quote Hazlitt:
But in pointing to the indispensableness of conformity I am not trying to disparage nonconformity, or diversity, or independence, and certainly not individuality or originality. . . . True individualism and originality can flourish only within a basically cooperative system.
As you will see, Hazlitt's short essay is to some extent similar to Robert Nisbet's "The Nemesis of Authority" and a few of the topics covered in Nisbet's outstanding book Twilight of Authority. (See my entry: Power Destroys Civil Society.)
Beyond this, and to expand this topic a bit, this discussion also connects or overlaps with natural law or natural rights.
Briefly, I believe that natural law is something static in that it is to be discovered, through reason (rationalism), and cannot be invented arbitrarily. (For man it works from the beginning of time to the end, and at any location.) (Natural law brings conformity.) However, because it is something to be discovered, it is therefore possible for new things to be found about natural law over time. New discoveries, though, are rare. It is a slow process. There should accordingly be skepticism about those claiming to have found something genuinely new.
(Law was once looked at and thought of in a symmetrical manner as libertarians see it. Today's idea of legislation is the relatively new thing.)
Obviously, anti-State libertarian philosophy, in some ways, is something still being "worked out." But this is an organic thing that works through the basic starting principles. (Again, it is consequently a "conservative" thing in this regards. Even the physical, empirical sciences change conservatively or organically, as covered above.)*
Murray Rothbard defended, for instance, intellectual property. Yet today there have been scholarly papers on the subject that reason that such property is not property at all. That is to say, man cannot own ideas. Ideas are not scarce or physically tangible. And intellectual "property" creates, rather than eliminates, conflict. If I invented the word "hello," then it makes little sense to say that I own it, and that people must get permission, from me, to say it.
See Also: Hayek & Tradition.
*While
it is true that we can draw some kind of analogousness between natural
laws, the laws of physics, mathematics, and economics, we have to
remember, or keep in mind, that they are necessarily different in the
way we discover them.
Physics, while it actually has a rationalistic basis to it (viz., kinematics and its foundation in calculus), is an empirical science. We can derive equations about the motion of a ball, but to then try to do the same with human action is something completely different. And for pure mathematics, clearly it is a deductive science and requires no empirical testing.
Economics and mathematics overlap in the sense that they are deductive sciences, even though economics can only objectively deal with ordinal numbers versus cardinal numbers (and, hence, cannot be subjected to algebra). But economics does input certain empirical assumptions about the world.
Natural law, I think, can be seen most close with economics. It inputs certain empirical assumptions about the world and is rationalistic.
The American Conservative, a paleo magazine of the Old and Traditional Right, always has superb commentary and analysis on foreign policy issues. I do not know what I would do without it. Many of the other "wild-card" topics they cover are great as well. The previous issue (June 16), for example, had an excellent essay (sorry, not online) by William Lind titled "Love Your Neighborhood" on New Urbanism.
Even so, in my opinion, sometimes when they cover economic matters they are not so good. It seems like many of them believe that, if it were up to the supposed "free market" we have, there would be maybe two or three giant, Wal-Mart-like, companies that everyone would work under and always shop at for all needs. (But, if that transpired, those super-giant companies could not last because they would have calculation problems. As a matter of fact, many in the "higher ups" in the big business world are dependent on the government for their very existence.) Or that the market destroys community and family. (Well, I think the reality of the matter is just the opposite. The most important features of community life [e.g., private authorities and a local connection], which go well beyond the issue of local shops and Wal-Mart, have been politicalized and centralized. If all property was private, then communities could easily fulfill all the desires of cultural conservatives. [Listen to Dr. Woods' "Up from Conservatism."] A private property society would be more compliant with a bourgeois society. Private roads and spaces, for instance, would not be detached from the values of the community. They could justly enforce rules against prostitution or whatnot. Secondly, note that markets cannot be blamed when they are a reflection of bad ideas---which need to be challenged---in the minds of the public.)
With that caveat in mind (caveat emptor), in the June 30th issue of TAC (subscribe!), you will find a few of features on "The Case for Culinary Conservatism." John Schwenkler writes that we need to renew culinary culture. Then there is an interview with Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, conducted by Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons. Plus see "Burning Dinner" by Timothy P. Carney.
(But for a debunk of the "Crunchy Con" thing, read this.)
***
The traditional family meal at the dinner table, with its salutary effects on family life and spirit, should be an area all real cultural conservatives should push and thrive for. Recrudescence we should all work for because there is very sadly too little of it in today's society.
Fr. Leo Patalinghug thus in 2003 started the Grace Before Meals project. Check it out. (And here Mr. Tucker gives us Grace in the Latin Chant.)
***
"Being ill is not a phenomenon independent," wrote Ludwig von Mises, "of conscious will and of psychic forces working in the subconscious." He was more correct than most people realize.
While by no means perfect myself (to say the least), diet, exercise, prayer and meditation profoundly has an impact on our health. This makes me think that health insurance, if we had a free market, would largely (but not completely) go away. Today, of course, health insurance does not work in accordance with how markets work because it is a statist industry, but my view is that a free market, in the long-run, would probably look to a greater extent different than what most free market economists think.
It has been argued that our bodies are like a pool. What we put in changes the pool's pH, something that is a good determiner of our health: See this, this, this.
***
Sorry, I cannot help myself; I must add some politically incorrect thoughts: I think that moderate coffee drinking is good for you. (Unless I am mistaken, I think the author of those three articles does too, in spite of its pH.) "Google it" to find reasons. But even more incorrect politically: I would say that very moderate tobacco use has some positive things to it. (Hey, people drone on about marijuana! Although, marijuana usage I think is more of a hippie leftist thing. Hence, I discourage it.)
See: "Thank You for Smoking" by Peter Brimelow.
"Culture separate from government? Don't make me laugh."
KULTURKAMPF!
Abraham Lincoln, one of the messiahs and saints of U.S. politics, purged the idea of secession as a noble and acceptable thing. Why celebrate Independence Day then, given that it is a holiday that commemorates (or is meant to commemorate) an act of secession? Moreover, and more importantly, why celebrate a holiday of independence if today there is no genuine independence from a massive federal government? A federal government that is many times over the size of King George III's. And one that is much more oppressive and intrusive in our lives-----not to mention the lives of men outside America. A government that is nothing but a caldron in its relationship to liberty and independence. A government-empire that is the world's largest in history. That's independence? . . . That's liberty?
In October I typed a Paleo Blog post asking: "Does Freedom Come From The State?" My answer was that it does not. Those that believe so, or believe that freedom is a positivistic thing, only invite tyranny and have no rational means to stop the development of tyranny. This is why the Declaration spoke of men having "unalienable Rights." Government does not create the idea or meaning of justice. Government, says the Declaration, gets its "foundation on such principles" and organizes "its powers in such form."
No doubt our view of government has come a very long way from how some of our ancestors viewed this institution.
Butler Shaffer, in a new essay, notes one irony about the Fourth of July in today's day and age:
Just how far we have contorted our thinking about "independence day" is reflected in most people's thinking about fireworks. Like private gun-ownership, our personal use of fireworks represents too much power in the hands of individuals. And so, we confine ourselves to the absurdity of having the state celebrate our liberty and independence for us!
In this 2001 essay, Thomas DiLorenzo requests that we put Independence Day in perspective; to take a look at the "train of abuses" from the King.
Frank Chodorov, one of the "Old Right" who enjoyed the fun of saying that no one was to the right of him, in One is a Crowd wrote that if "the disposition of the current crop of Americans [was] comparable to that of their forebears" a new revolution would be happening. Patricide, it could be argued, has occurred.
In the mind of Chodorov, the death of freedom resulted from the Sixteenth Amendment. Government then went from being the servant of man to being the master. The income tax brought about the centralization of power, opened the door to numerous abuses, and fed the growth of the government's increasing interventions into civil society. It denied the only real human right there is, i.e., private property:
The government says to the citizen: "Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim to them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide."
This is no exaggeration. Take a look at the income-tax report that you are required by law to make out, and you will see that the government arbitrarily sets down the amount of your income you may have for your living, for your business requirements, for the maintenance of your family, for medical expenses, and so on. After granting these exemptions, with a flourish of generosity, the government decides what percentage of the remainder it will appropriate. The rest you may have.
Although, this transformation from the more-or-less limited government to the Leviathan we have today was, I have come to believe, a natural and unavoidable event. This is because once man accepts the existence of a government, its incentive structure, which cannot be gotten rid of, will only lead to an expansionist trend. Not even "divided" government or a constitution can stop this.
"[I]t is the conservative laissez-fairist," as Murray Rothbard wrote in For a New Liberty, "the man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, 'Limit yourself'; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian."
Furthermore, the very nature of government has nothing whatsoever to do with freedom or security. Bringing security and protection is a contradiction since it first violates the very thing it is claimed to do. In the name of "protection," the State first must resort to robbery (a.k.a. taxation). (And who is there to protect us from our "protectors"?)
Hans Hoppe in "On the Impossibility of Limited Government and the Prospects for a Second American Revolution" (be sure to read his footnotes) sets forth an analysis that concludes that the death of freedom had its commencement before the Sixteenth Amendment. Creating the institution of government (local and federal), Hoppe says, was the mistake. The government, being an aggressive organization, can't bring freedom or "limit" itself in size. Consequently there needs to be a movement that promotes secession and the development of a free, voluntary market in the service of protection and adjudication.
America, Hoppe writes, has every right to be proud of itself as a country of pioneers. As well we should be proud of the American Revolution. The later adoption of the Constitution*, on the other hand, was a fatal blunder and something we should not be proud about.
*(Many times it is asserted that Fourth of July is a day that celebrates the birth of a nation-state. That the original day was a day that created a nation-state. Nothing of the sort happened, though. The Declaration does not speak of any nation-state. It only speaks of "Free and Independent States," which were individually sovereign. Nor was the Constitution any part of it.).
Think about the idea of limited government this way: Government "limiting" itself is as nonsensical as a business "limiting" itself in its desire to make profit. Both have a desire and incentive to expand. The way they expand, though, is fundamentally different.
You find competition in a free market among countless private businesses. Each business is in competition with all other businesses (if they are in the same industry or not) over consumers and resources (including labor). An individual private enterprise must be pioneering to please the demands of consumers; otherwise these consumers may voluntarily go to one of their competitors who they view as offering a superior good or service in terms of quality and/or price. They thus must thrive at improving quality, in terms of consumer demand, and at lowering costs.* Expansion is hence dependent on these things. This forces, via the "invisible hand," men to work together and to work in the production of things with other people in mind. (So much for capitalism, as some dullards claim, being selfish, nasty, egotistic, etc.! As will be seen below, these words more correctly describe statists.)
*(Compare this to socialized industries. Health care, despite what so many incessantly claim, is in the U.S. an example of fascism and socialism. It is no surprise that we see, because of this, high prices and inefficiency.)
The government is completely different. It is a monopolist and has no direct competition. It does not need to please its so-called "customers" because the relationship between men and the government is not based on voluntarism, like the free market, but the threat of violence. Everyone is uniformly forced into a relationship with the government and its activities. Whereas markets offer choices, states offer forced choices that are uniform. Government's growth is hence not dependent on voluntary individual consumers or their various and complex demands.
Remember, a businessman can only expand in the long-run if he is cost-efficient. He must economize his scarce resources to do this. Debt must be limited. And there is always the possibility of bankruptcy and being driven off the market. Conversely, government does not expand because it is necessarily cost-efficient with little to no debt. In fact it does not matter if government is ballooning with astronomical debt and is completely un-economic! It cannot (directly or immediately in a meaningful sense) go out of business. Growth is hence not dependent on lowering costs to its "customers" or acting in a cost-efficient way. Improving the quality of its goods or services (e.g., adjudication) is not a requisite, either.
When a businessman fails he then suffers a loss and perhaps disappears. He has the guide of profit-and-loss. This promotes correct allocations. However, when the government fails nothing directly happens. There is nothing that helps divert resources into productive uses. So allocations of the government, with no pricing signals, will always have to be arbitrary and wasteful.
This makes the growth of government, which is a restrictor and parasite of liberty, and the growth of a free market enterprise, which is an expression of free man and groups of men voluntarily working together for mutual ends, inversely related. They are antithetical to each other. The growth of a business is a "good," in terms of consumer demand and their interests, but government's growth can only be seen, given the above deductions, as a "bad." Because both have the incentive and interest to expand, starting up a government will set into motion the increasing parasitic allocation of resources, away from civil society and free market enterprises, into "bad" consumptions and (redistributive-parasitic) productions.
It is then no wonder that government is like what it is like today. Man must not see this as an anomaly but see the government itself as the anomaly in society. If there is to be freedom, then there must be a (peaceful) revolution against the state. While, as Dr. Hoppe argues in the above essay, this might not be conceivable on a national level, it is relatively more conceivable seeing local states, districts, cities, and towns peacefully seceding. Even if this act of secession did not lead to areas with no government, this still is a tremendous improvement over the current affairs and a movement that would be working towards (not away) the direction of an anarcho-capitalist society.
Books are definitely not something to confine to "summer reading." But here is an extra summer intellectual stimulus you might be interested in: Robert Higgs' 2004 ten-lecture Crisis and Liberty seminar. You can download the mp3s and then upload them to your mp3 player. On very long road trips it would be good company.
(I have almost completed the seminar.)
Lecture One: Introduction
MP3.
Lecture Two: Ideology
MP3.
Lecture Three: 19th Century
MP3.
Lecture Four: Progressive Era
MP3.
Lecture Five: World War I
MP3.
Lecture Six: New Deal
MP3.
Lecture Seven: World War II
MP3.
Lecture Eight: Post-WWII
MP3.
Lecture Nine: Post-WWII Non-Military Growth
MP3.
Lecture Ten: Modern Crises and the Future
MP3.
The Ludwig von Mises Institute, the premier scholarly institute supporting free-markets and liberty, has other seminars as well, which might be more to your liking. Check them out here. There is Block on libertarianism and Austrianism, Gordon on the history of political philosophy, Hoppe analyzing and reconstructing human history, Hülsmann on von Mises, Woods on American history, and more.
