33 posts from 2006

There is only one time when someone should bother to turn on The Rush Limbaugh Show. This is when Dr. Walter E. Williams is guest hosting for Mr. Limbaugh. Other then that, it is better to spend your time elsewhere on the dial.

While Dr. Williams does (unfortunately) have some “neoconism” in him, he is usually worth the listen. He typically has some good things to say about the free market and capitalism. Dr. Williams gives a few good economic lessons during the show. And so forth.

Well, he is filling in today! This gives me a reason to turn the radio on.

(Also, he gives some great advice for gift giving! Hehehe)

My mom very much enjoys the classic television show I Love Lucy. She owns the series on DVD. I think it is a good show too, especially compared to most of the junk that is on television today. It is a good family show. I Love Lucy is a classical that will live forever.

One of the movies that Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were in was Too Many Girls. (Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz first meet in this movie.) It came out on DVD. One of the extra bonus features the DVD has is the cartoon Shop, Look & Listen.

When you hit play to watch the cartoon you are forced to watch a little disclaimer. They specifically made it so that you cannot skip it. (You cannot fast-forward. It is like the copy right notice you have to watch when you first put the DVD in the player.)

Here is what it says:

"The animated short film you are about to see is a product of its time. It may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were wrong then and wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today’s society, this animated short is being presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed."

So I pushed play. This pops up. I read it. I watched the cartoon. And then I was thinking to myself “Did I miss something...?”

Maybe I am dull and something flashed in the corner of the screen for a few seconds, but surely nothing jumped out at me. Do the Politically Correct Police have nothing better to do then find something, anything, in this short cartoon to describe as possibly "racist" (or who knows what)?

At the link I provided, let me quote someone’s description/review of this carton:

No complaints here, but, this is just about the same cartoon as the slightly earlier, "Little Blabbermouse": a W.C.Fields-type character is giving a tour of a general store, after store hours, to a group of sightseers. The tour 'bus', actually one of those wire framed baskets, contains a tiny little mouse, wearing a gigantic bow tie. The little guy never stops asking questions, never! This all to the irritation of ol' W.C. There are many entertaining bits of the sightseeing car passing, for example, a box of rubber bands, and having said bands pop out playing a jazz-tinged tune...after all, they are a rubber BAND! It's an excellent cartoon, they both are! Cool music and great action.

It is just a simple cartoon! What else can be said? What, a couple of Native Americans in a painting, who were hitting each other? (What do you expect in a cartoon?) Is this un-PC? Or a black character saying “Amazing”? What in the world did the PC Police find? Who knows.

Who cares! It is just baloney.

The DVD of The Long, Long Trailer (also starring Lucile Ball and Desi Arnaz) has the classic cartoon Dixieland Droopy. There was no disclaimer here. Wouldn’t the title “Dixie” offend the PC Police? (At least I could then, perhaps, identify, at the very least, what the PC Police would be foolishly complaining about!)

Free Trade versus Government’s Version

When it comes to “free trade”: I support real free trade. This does not require an expansion of some government body or thousands of pages of regulations. Free trade is free trade: I want what you have, you want what I have. Let’s trade. It is mutually beneficial.

Politicians (like President Bush or Clinton), on the other hand, who speak of their support of “free trade”, really believe in a form of semi-protectionism, mercantilism, or corporate welfare. It is specifically designed to benefit the politically well-connected at the expense of the rest of us. And, perhaps worse, it harmonizes the centralization of powers between governments. (Only in the language of politics could so-called “free trade” really mean un-free trade!)

People like Rush Limbaugh would make you believe that all those that are against NAFTA (and other “free” trade agreements) are protectionists. But the truth is just the opposite for paleolibertarians.

As Murray Rothbard wrote in an October 1993 article called “STOP NAFTA!”:

What the Establishment wants is government-directed, government-negotiated trade, which is mercantilism not free trade. What it wants also is institutions of internationalist super-government to take decision-making out of American hands and into the hands of super-governments, which would rule over Americans and not be accountable to the American people. The mercantilist Establishment, emphatically including the right-centrist Bush-types, wants government-regulated trade as well as subsidized exports. Negotiated trade, whether Bush or Clinton is doing the negotiating or David Rockefeller were doing the negotiating directly, lowers import barriers only as bargaining chips to force-feed American exports into foreign countries. In addition, there is "foreign aid," essentially a vast racket by which the American taxpayer is forced to hand out billions to export firms and industries.

He goes on:

It's like the European Community, which is being sold to the public as a wonderful European "free trade zone." But European superbureaucrats in Brussels have the power to enforce "harmonization" of: taxes, welfare state regulations, etc., in all these countries. In order to insure a "level playing field" (another synonym for left-wing "fairness"), the Eurocrats can and have forced low-tax countries to raise their taxes to be on par with their fellow-countries, and to impose a greater welfare state or more stringent labor regulations. The same powers would be placed by Nafta into the hands of these North American bureaucrat Commissions.

And, for fun, I’ll quote his closing paragraph:

Kill Nafta – and strike a blow directly in the gut of the Clinton administration. A good rule of thumb: other things being equal, if the Clinton administration is for it, whatever it is, it should be opposed on general principles. The more the Clinton administration fails, the more it withers and dies, the more American freedom and prosperity, the more the Old Republic, shall live.

“Free” trade agreements try to harmonize regulations. This is the logical consequence of the growth of larger and larger, fewer and fewer, governments. This is why these so-called free trade agreements must be opposed.

More Governments = More Free Trade; Less Governments = Less Free Trade

Governments like centralization of power. One way people vote, so to speak, is with their feet. If a given nation-government is relatively aggressive internally, then people will be more inclined to move over to the nation next-door that is relatively less aggressive. This is especially true of the most productive and intelligent citizens. Governments don’t like this, for obvious reasons.

When there are many nation-governments in the world, then there is a greater chance people will vote with their feet. In this situation, therefore, it is more likely, generally speaking, that nations will be less internally aggressive and will be more likely to adopt real free trade, or at least relatively freer trade. To quote Hans-Hermann Hoppe:

Specifically, the smaller the country, the greater will be the pressure to opt for free trade rather than protectionism. All government interference with foreign trade forcibly limits the range of mutually beneficial interterritorial exchanges and thus leads to relative impoverishment, at home as well as aboard. But the smaller a territory and its internal markets, the more dramatic this effect will be. A country the size of the U.S., for instance, might attain comparatively high standards of living even if it renounced all foreign trade, provided it possessed an unrestricted internal capital and consumer goods market. In contrast, if predominantly Serbian cities or counties seceded from surrounding Croatia, and if they pursed the same protectionism, this would likely spell disaster. [Democracy - The God That Failed, p. 115]

“Accordingly,” says Hoppe, “the smaller a territory and its internal markets, the more likely it is that it will opt for free trade.” Competition of citizens that can vote with their feet is higher in this situation. Governments want to prevent this. They want to hold on to their subjects and gain even more control and power over them.

As the many governments are replaced with the fewer (larger) governments, the need for free trade will become less and less. Citizens’ ability to vote with their feet will become less. Governments then can afford to become more internally aggressive because they will have less competition.

Decivilization --- From Many Governments to Less

But how does society move from the many governments to the few large ones? For one government to win out over another, it must have a more productive population. This means it must be relatively less aggressive internally. We now come to what Hans Hoppe calls the “paradox of imperialism”. As these internally less aggressive States receive the benefits of having a stronger economy, they become relatively more aggressive externally. After all, they can afford it.

It explains why certain states generally win wars and why others loose. It also explains why the U.S. has become the world’s imperial power, i.e. empire. As Hans Hoppe explains:

Democracy: The God that Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

For one, as an agency that perverts justice and imposes taxes, every state is threatened with "exit." Especially its most productive citizen may leave to escape taxation and the perversions of law. No state likes this. To the contrary, instead of seeing the range of control and tax base shrink, state agents prefer that they be expanded. Yet this brings them in conflict with other states. Unlike competition between "natural" persons and institutions, however, the competition between states is eliminative. That is, there can be only one monopolist of ultimate decision-making and taxation in any given area. Consequently, the competition between different states promotes a tendency toward political centralization and ultimately one single world state. [“Reflections on State and War” at LewRockwell.com]

He continues:

Moreover, given that states must begin small and assuming as the starting point a world composed of a multitude of independent territorial units, something rather specific about the requirement of success can be stated. Victory or defeat in interstate warfare depend on many factors, of course, but other things such as population size being the same, in the long run the decisive factor is the relative amount of economic resources at a state's disposal. In taxing and regulating, states do not contribute to the creation of economic wealth. Instead, they parasitically draw on existing wealth. However, state governments can influence the amount of existing wealth negatively. Other things being equal, the lower the tax and regulation burden imposed on the domestic economy, the larger the population will tend to grow and the larger the amount of domestically produced wealth on which the state can draw in its conflicts with neighboring competitors. That is, states which tax and regulate their economies comparatively little — [classical] liberal states — tend to defeat and expand their territories or their range of hegemonic control at the expense of less-liberal ones.

But, as I said, when approaching fewer states, they can afford to be more aggressive internally.

However, the further the process of more liberal governments defeating less liberal ones proceeds----i.e., the larger the territories, the fewer and more distant remaining competitors, and thus the more costly international migration----the lower a government’s incentive to continue in its domestic liberalism will be. [Democracy - The God That Failed, p. 112]

What we see is a shift from heavier competition among many states to less competition and less states. States want to expand and eat up more resources. It is the natural economic incentive. But for certain states to win out, they need to be less internally aggressive. This also implies that these states will have freer trade (internally and externally). The states that are less internally aggressive win out in competition and external aggression. These less internally aggressive states are then (or will become) more externally aggressive. Thus, these internally less aggressive states are generally more aggressive externally. This is the paradox of imperialism. However, as centralization continues, the victorious states can then become increasingly more aggressive internally. The incentive increases for these states to do just this. Here comes about the shift from relatively free trade to restrictive and regulated trade.

So here we see the shifts and natural inclinations of free and restrictive trade as it relates to the role of the state. Hans Hoppe gives the example of imagining households. Imagine the state says trade between households be outlawed. Obviously then, starvation and poverty would result. This is exactly why small states need to opt for freer trade. It is also why larger states can afford not to do so. Therefore they can opt for more restrictive trade.

Some Closing Thoughts

Government is an evil based on coercion and violence. While it is meant to bring order, it really brings chaos by distorting the market place. Free market capitalism, on the other hand, is the source of prosperity and human dignity. While I say this, this does not mean that I am indifferent to what direction or actions the government takes. I want it to move in the direction of freedom. This includes free trade. If we really want free trade, we have to understand that it will only come through decentralization and not through the political schemes that centralize trade.

Reading Material:
"STOP NAFTA!" by Murray Rothbard
“Reflections on State and War” by Hans Hoppe

Mistakenly I have been for school vouchers in the past. Now, however, I have seen the errors of my way. I have gone straight.

The first problem is that they are egalitarian in nature. We all pay different amounts of taxes due to our incomes, properties, and spending habits. It is then obvious that a uniform voucher that gives everyone z amount of money is wrong. If person y pays less then x in taxes, then person y should not receive the same amount of voucher money as x does. This, perhaps, could be solved through giving a voucher of equal ratio to what one pays into the system, but this is not the answer, as we shall see in the second problem.

The second problem is the expansion of government into the private sector. This moves us in the wrong direction. The State approving and/or disapproving private schools will be disastrous. They already do this, of course; but it will invariably increase. And, imagine, a bum student being sent to a private school via a voucher. Especially if this bum is black, then discrimination will be nearly impossible. They will lower the relatively higher standards that this private school once had, to then open up the flood gates to those that would otherwise not be there via government vouchers. They have no “right” to be there.

Therefore, it is erroneous to support such measures. The solution is radical decentralization and then the complete separation of State and education, which also implies an end to compulsory laws. What we need is a radically free market of education. After all, we are individuals and not robots. Collective planning is never the answer and egalitarianism is “a revolt against nature”. Only a free system can address a society of unique individuals.

“Conservatives” supporting vouchers would be a mistake. Paleoconservatives need to instead focus on decentralization. And those “libertarians” that support it should take a lesson from the paleolibertarians, such as Lew Rockwell.

Conclusion on Vouchers: Don’t dirty up private schools. Keep them as clean as possible from government’s claws.

What we really need is a dynamic and completely free schooling system. Today people only think in collective and statist terms. They believe that there is a one-size-fits-all solution to education to bring about so-called “equality.” But there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution. Since we are all individuals, children included, what must be done is the maximization of that individualism. Only this can be achieved in a truly free market. And with higher competition, comes innovation and improvement.

Vin Suprynowicz recently typed up an article called “Got Price-Fixed Milk?” that appeared on LRC. It is a classic example of how much of big business hates the free market and loves to cozy up to the State. Republicans and Democrats alike are anti-capitalism. Instead, they are pro-mercantilism.

The depressing truth is that many businessmen look to the government for protection and to cripple their competition. As most of us know all too well, Washington, D.C. is a play ground of lobby groups, including eager businessmen. (It is inherent in its very nature to be this way. Ridiculous campaign finance reform, notwithstanding.) Here is Thomas J. DiLorenzo in his book How Capitalism Saved America:

Today, most businesspeople are not even capitalists. In a free-market system, individuals and groups pursue profit by providing consumers with goods and services, and the rule of law and a code of morality protect the rights of property, contract, and association. But some people always try to operate outside the bounds of free-market capitalism by securing special favors from government. [p43]

Burton Folsom created the terms “market entrepreneur” and “political entrepreneur”. This allows us to differentiate between entrepreneurs that use the market place versus using State coercive intervention to achieve their ends. Today many people confuse capitalism with mercantilism, as if they were the same thing. They are not, however. Another confusion some people have is that we today exist in a free economy society, but this is also erroneous. This makes so many people so willing to blame the so-called “free-market” for this or that problem. In realty, the State intervention into today’s economy is enormous (and growing).

DiLorenzo quotes the great Murray Rothbard to answer the question “What is Capitalism?”:

Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at. [p9]

This should assist also to disprove the myth that libertarianism is atomistic, which has been recently addressed here at The Paleo Blog. Free-market capitalism brings about social cooperation. Please see my Blog entry “Libertarianism is not Atomism - My Response to a Reader”. And also, worthy to quickly note, let me quote Lew Rockwell in a recent article, “Entrepreneurs and Social Progress”, of his that was just posted up:

Philanthropy and entrepreneurship ... do not stem from opposite impulses, as is commonly thought. They originate from the same source: the intellectual and even spiritual commitment to serve others and make a difference in the world for the good. They are different means of doing the same thing, distinguished from each other only in the method we use to account for them.

Now we come back to mercantilism. Mercantilism is an economically destructive system. While large, politically well-connected, businesses like it, it will be economically harmful to the consumers as economic innovation is lowered. Mercantilist intervention cannot create prosperity. “The government,” says DiLorenzo, “can never subsidize any one business or industry without simultaneously harming others, since the money to pay for the subsides has to come from another part of the economy, usually through taxes.” [p46] The market place is like a pond. It is a complex profit-and-loss network of voluntary transactions that allows the rational allocation of scare resources which have alternative uses. Throw in a rock and see the waves of disturbances it creates to the market place.

So after a very brief run through of a few important issues on the market place, we will turn to Suprynowicz’s article. The article says that we are paying an extra 1.5 billion dollars per year (at least) because of “government-enforced price-rigging programs”. Hein Hettinga enters the picture of the government matrix.

...Hein Hettinga, an immigrant who started out as a hired hand in the Dutch American dairies of Southern California. He soon figured out he could build his own herd by buying cows with injured hooves, healing them, and selling them at a profit.

By the early 1990s, Hettinga had half a dozen dairies in Arizona and Southern California. His first customers were in Mexico. Then he started selling milk to a chain of Arizona stores that catered to the Hispanic population. By 2002, he and his son were building a second processing plant in Yuma to supply Costco stores in Southern California.

But Hettinga, now 64, never joined the government’s price-fixing program. Because he processed his own milk, a "loophole" in the 1937 law said he didn’t have to.

His competitors admit there was nothing particularly cost-efficient about Hettinga’s operation. He just felt free to sell his milk at what he considered a reasonable profit – with the result that the Costcos in California found they could sell Hettinga’s milk for 20 cents less per gallon than their competitors’ milk.

So what happens? Government and the political entrepreneurs go after him. The political players involved, reports Suprynowicz receive “thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Hettinga’s competitors”. Sen. Jon Kyl (Republican-AZ), who collects contributions from these competitors, tried to first get a bill that would force Hettinga to pay “all the ‘extra’ money he saved by operating outside the federal pool”.

Hettinga fought back, printing 50,000 milk labels that warned Sen. Kyl was trying to "limit competition and raise the cost of milk to the Arizona consumer."

I tip my hat! “But then...

in 2003, Nevada’s own Sen. Harry Reid [Democrat] got involved, co-sponsoring with Sen. Kyl an amendment that would free Nevada from federal milk price-fixing (don’t get too excited – Nevada has its own milk price-fixing board), in exchange for Sen. Reid’s support for cracking down on Hettinga in California and Arizona.

...

On Dec. 16, 2005, with the Senate chamber nearly empty, Sen. Reid introduced the proposal that would prevent Hein Hettinga from continuing to hold down the price of milk down by 20 cents a gallon in Arizona and Southern California. It passed by "unanimous consent." The House followed suit in March.

But Hein Hettinga is still fighting:

In October, Hein Hettinga filed a federal lawsuit. But he admits he was no match for the dairy lobby. "I had an awakening," he told the Post recently. "It’s not totally free enterprise in the United States."

Republicans and Democrats alike, by the point of the gun, raise the cost of food. Want to help the poor? Don’t look to the many Republicans and Democrats,  who intervene into the economy to make food cost more.

Read the full article here.

Justin Raimondo, from AntiWar.com, writes this:

The pretty-boy face and the accomplished actor's polished technique aside, Barack Obama is just another shill for the War Party. And the sooner antiwar Democrats realize that, the better.

An alliance between Libertarians and the ever stupid Left would be foolish indeed. The blind partisanship and kool-aid drinking is just as bad on the mainstream Left and it is on the mainstream Right.

Reading Material:

It is about two years old, but still worth a listen.

Download here. [mp3]

Secondary Note: The Robert Nisbet Resource has been updated. It now includes a link to a lecture given by Thomas Woods. Listen Here [mp3].

The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America by Robert Nisbet is a five star book. After reading this book a couple of weeks ago or so, and after researching a bit about Robert Nisbet, yes, I am impressed. Please see my entry in The Paleo Blog called "Robert Nisbet (some resources)."

While this book would benefit everyone, it especially should be read by young conservatives. They need to be exposed to these kinds of old fashion conservative thinkers, such as Nisbet. Indeed, according to George H. Nash and his momentous The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, Robert Nisbet is one of the three most important intellectuals in traditional conservatism. Today, however, young conservatives are just exposed to people like Sean Hannity. And for a while people like Hannity were the only ones I was exposed to. They are treated as some kind of paradigm of conservatism. Young conservatives have no idea or very little idea, sadly, of these great conservative thinkers. Daniel McCarthy, of The American Conservative, wrote an article on this in the November 6th edition of this biweekly magazine called "GOP and Man at Yale." I recommend it. You can read it here.

The late Robert A. Nisbet (1913 - 1996), a paleoconservative* sociologist and historian, in his book The Present Age starts off by asking the question of what the Founding Fathers' reactions might be if they could time-travel to today, "the present age." Obviously they would see such things as our technological advances and things of this nature, but what else? What about government?, politics?, culture?, etc.?

(*I put the "paleo" prefix in because I think it is fitting.)

Robert Nisbet says that the first thing they would notice is the prominence of war since 1914. The second thing, Nisbet writes, would most likely be the expansion of the national-federal government everywhere, even in cities and local towns. Third, would be how the social fabric has changed. Specifically, that Americans, writes Nisbet, "seem only loosely attached to groups and values such as kinship, community, and property and whose lives are so governed by the cash nexus."

"What would doubtless astonish the Framers most," though, says Nisbet, "is that their precious republic has become an imperial power in the world, much like the Great Britain they had hated in the eighteenth century."

Robert Nisbet saw the evils of war and understood that war, above all else, is destructive to civil society. The Founding Fathers knew, understood, this too. The Constitution gave strict limits in the war making ability of the government. According to the Constitution, the President cannot declare war, only the Congress can. When we shift to "the present age," this limit has been abandoned, as has practically the rest of the Constitution's restrictions on the Federal government. The limited government dream failed and now we have an unchained Leviathan. This is something that both left-liberals and modern day conservatives have accepted.

We have come to a point where, Nisbet notes, "the military and the whole armaments-defense private sector had become interlocked fatefully." [p 25] It is as Eisenhower famously warned against, i.e., the military-industrial complex. This sector of the economy has become dependent on government contracts. They are the political entrepreneurs of the worst kind.

As you can imagine, Robert Nisbet was not a typical National Review "conservative" when it came to the issue of the Cold War. He believed that the primary explanation for it was the military-industrial complex. To him, it was largely a scam. The size of the military growth could not be explained by the Cold War. (The former Soviet Union was an economic basket case and therefore could not pose a direct threat to the United States. Only the economically  ignorant can claim otherwise.) On the other hand, the military-industrial complex could: "The economy has a vested interest in the prevalence of war; that is obvious." [p 26]

The Great Myths & Propaganda

The principal breaking point to where we are today in "the present age," says Nisbet, started with Woodrow Wilson and World War I. Since the so-called "Great War" we have almost been in constant-perpetual warfare involved in one war after another war. With this shift came an attitude shift in the American public. Nationalistic patriotisms replaced local patriotisms. Patriotism became the spreader of myths of America's greatness in military affairs. These are the "Can Do, Know How, and No Fault myths which abide to this minute in America and yield up such disasters as Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, and Grenada." [p 19]

Without question these myths certainly apply to this very day and our present military disasters. Take Iraq. Was there extensive planning? No. The Myths were with us and told us that we need not worry about planning because the war would be a "cake walk." It would be a simple and quick affair. Some "cake walk" it has turned out to be!

With the expansion of government in WWI (see below), came propaganda. Woodrow Wilson knew, as Nisbet notes, that just mobilizing the industries to serve in the war effort was not enough. He would have to get the public on board as well. Thus, the birth of "superpatriots." (Just turn on the intellectual and morally bankrupt talk radio shows to hear them today.)

Wilson hired George Creel to do this. The State promoted citizens to watch their neighbors and report dissent. There was also the creation of the "four-minute men," who, by government edict, had the "right" to storm in anywhere they wanted to give war propaganda. They would go to "any club, lodge, school labor union, service club, whatever, whether invited or not," writes Nisbet. [p 47] Schools, of course, were also affected. The government removed references to, for example, classic German literature. There was also the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act, "making it easy to charge and often indict the most casual comment in public as seditious to nation & war effort."

Ideological War

War, with Woodrow Wilson, was turned ideological. Under Wilson came the birth, which continues today, of the crusade to "spread democracy around the world." The U.S. "under Democrats and Republicans alike oftentimes, has boiled down to America-on-a-Permanent-Mission; a mission to make the rest of the world a little more like America the Beautiful," [p 32] to quote Robert Nisbet. So here came the United States Empire, police man and boss of the world.

For a more recent example of this kind of mentality, take Jimmy Carter in his own words:

a nation's domestic and foreign polices should be derived from the same standards of ethics, honesty and morality which are characteristic of the individual citizens of the nation. ... There is only one nation in the world which is capable of true leadership among the community of nations and that is the United States of America. [p 36]

It should be plainly obvious that when the Framers wrote up the Constitution, they never dreamed of a United States in the role Carter gives. Today the government sees war through ideology: We just have to plant some democracy here or there and all will be well. Or, so we are supposed to believe, with the left-neocon establishment.

Nisbet wrote something that I found interesting because it very much connects to how neoconservatives have viewed Saddam and bin Laden:

When, in the late 1950s, there were unmistakable signs of a growing rift between Communist China and Communist Russia, the official position of the United States, a position largely initiated by the Right, was for some time that no rift existed, that Mao’s China was a Soviet pawn.

...With Stalin and the Cold War "our right-wing moralistic ideologists in this country were seeing stereotypes, pictures in their head, of the defunct Trotskyist dream of Russia not a nation but instead a vast spiritual force leading all mankind to the Perdition."

This kind of moralism is still a menace to our foreign policy. It is the mentality that converts every incident in the world into an enormously shrewd, calculated operation by the KGB. To sweep every North-South happening into an East-West framework is the preoccupation of the Right-----religious and secular. So was it the preoccupation of the Right when for years, all evidence notwithstanding, it insisted that because Russia and China were both officially Communist, therefore they had to be one in faith, hope, and destiny. [pp 37-38]

They were thought to be joined at the hip, as it were. It is interesting how this fits so well today. History surely does repeat itself. As conservative George Santayana said: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Despite all the reason and evidence to the contrary, neoconservatives insist on the belief that Saddam and bin Laden were somehow joined at the hip.

The Total State and The Military-Industrial Complex (Fascism)

Randolph Bourne: "War is the health of the State."

It is in times of war Leviathan gets fed...and grows. The planning of the economy, the centralization of power, the growth of the executive, the rise of the police state, and the like grow exponentially. Woodrow Wilson and his administration brought the creation of such things as the War Industries Board, the War Labor Polices Board, a Shipping Board, a Food Administration, and so on. The dreams of the left and the neocon right can be fulfilled in war. "Railroads," writes Robert Nisbet, "mines and other interstate industries were nationalized, made wards of Washington, D.C." In the book Nisbet quotes Charles & Mary Bread, which help paints the picture:

In a series of the most remarkable laws ever enacted in Washington, the whole economic system was placed at his [Wilson] command. Under their provisions the President was authorized to requisition supplies for the army w/out stint, to fix the prices of commodities so commanded, arrange a guaranteed price for wheat, take possession of the mines, factories, packing houses, railways, steam ships, and all means of communication and operate them through public agencies and license the importation, manufacture, storage and distribution of all necessities. [p 44]

"More and more centers," said Nisbet, "think tanks, and institutes in Washington are directed to war policy and war strategy, and to war intelligence." We moved from (relatively) laissez-fair to Leviathan. Once some people got a taste of that, they got addicted because they saw that they could use the coercion and violence inherent in the State to their advantage. "Certain figures, intellectuals and business executives included," says Nisbet, "began to think of techniques for escape from" freedom --- the free market --- to the State. [p 46] We get cooperate welfare and regulations, which in all truth come into existence to protect the well-connected from competition. And the birth and protection of the merchants of death, which exist to this very day.

One of the quick examples that Robert Nisbet writes about in The Present Age, is the Kennedy administration's Project Camelot. Here we have the education system (the universities) working hand-in-hand with the State and the War Machine... University Professors collaborated with the Kennedy administration and the military to work on covert operations in Chile (of all places!) that "could spark counterinsurgency operations in countries where the resident government seemed perhaps unable to cope." [pp 26-27] However, thankfully, a whistleblower came and it was reported in the first page of the Washington Star. And as you can see, every little thing in the world has become "our" concern. Someone goes "boo" and it is somehow "our" concern.

A few months ago Thomas J. DiLorenzo wrote an article called "The Fatherland Protection Racket" up at LRC. It was a review of the book Homeland Security Scams by James Bennett. View the article here. It really can be amazing, though not surprising, how much pork is in Homeland Security. (To note, this is yet another example that should shatter the fairy tale that mainstream conservatism today has anything in common with limited government principles, classical liberalism, or libertarianism.) Political entrepreneurs see this and they have grabbed on. And government loves it. In point of fact, the whole 9-11 attack shows how government is rewarded in failure. The State fails on 9-11 and then gets a bigger pay check. For the government, success equals failure. In the private sector, if you fail, you go out of business. This is why the worst rise to the top in government. Whereas, the market entrepreneurs (not the political entrepreneurs) are the bedrock of civilization --- the creators --- the inventors etc. The market rewards success.

Here is DiLorenzo speaking of Homeland Security Scams:

The primary beneficiaries of all this are "politicians, lobbyists, and a flourishing homeland security industry." This would also include, in my opinion, all of the neocon "think tanks," magazines, and "scholars" who are paid to provide the intellectual cover for the scam. The "one constant" that keeps the racket going is fear. As long as our rulers can continue to frighten the public with promises of "terror" their motives and actions will not be questioned by the vast majority of the public.

War and Culture

The warfare state does not only have a very ugly impact in political and economic manners, it also has a very ugly impact on culture. "War, its tragedies and devastations understood here, breaks down social walls and by so doing stimulates a new individualism," said Nisbet. [pp 7-8] It corrupts culture as "Old traditions, conventions, dogmas, and taboos are opened under war conditions to a challenge." War therefore promotes cultural leftism, as it "tends to break up the cake of custom, the net of tradition." We go from the natural to the unnatural dehumanizing, unethical, and decivilizing which the government in war promotes. To quote Robert Nisbet more fully:

All was of any appreciable length have a secularizing effect upon engaged societies, a diminution of the authority of old religious and moral values and a parallel elevation of new utilitarian, hedonistic, or pragmatic values. Wars, to be successfully fought, demand a reduction in the taboos regarding life, dignity, and property, family, and religion; there must be nothing of merely moral nature left standing between fighting forces and victory, not even, or especially, taboos on sexual encounters. Wars have an individualizing effect upon their involved societies, a loosening of the accustomed social bond in favor of a tightening of the military ethic. Military, or at least war-born, relationships among individuals lend to supersede relationships of family, parish, and ordinary walks of life. Ideas of chastity, modesty, decorum, respectability change quickly in wartime. [p 10]

As Nisbet said, hedonism goes from the unnorm to the norm. This includes not only materialistic hedonism, but also sexual hedonism. War also makes us more militaristic. This is displayed, as Nisbet shows in his book, in how the culture has turned more militaristic in how, for example, awards are given, to changes in the language, art, Hollywood, etc.

As I have already noted, patriotism becomes ramped. "We," as a nation, look at our neighbor's speck in his eye, but never do we look at our own speck. People then start to believe in the "Great Myths." Nisbet says that biographer Lord Devlin thus coined "Wilson's Law," which says that "What America touches, she makes holy." From FDR, to Clinton, to the Bush's these Myths are everywhere.

Nisbet suggests that the only way, for example, we could be so blind to the danger of the nation's national debt is due to the acceptance of the "Great Myths." They have polluted the culture and intellect.

The Total State - The New Absolutism

"Democratic absolutism, chiefly in the manifestation of the thick, heavy bureaucracies we build today, can be as oppressive to the creative instinct, the curiosity itch, and the drive to explore as anything that exists more blatantly in the totalitarian state." [p 58]

Here, too, I think Robert Nisbet is 100% correct: the move to democracy "can yield a higher degree of absolutism in its relation to the individual than is found in any of the so-called absolute, divine-right monarchies." [p 41] There use to exist strong "intermediate authorities," which were out of the purview of the State. This limited how strong, for example, monarchies were. It is the State that has slowly destroyed these natural intermediate authorities and institutions. This way, the State can gain more control and power.

Today's absolutism has become accepted in democracy. In fact, the neoconservatives believe democracy to be the "end of history." But with this foolish belief in the so-called virtues of democracy, it has given risen to the giant centralization we see in government today.

The absolutism is also in how government sees wars. Today's wars are smaller and, for lack of a better phrase to put it, less dramatic. But the State, as stupid as it naturally is, does not get this. Today's wars call for a different kind of military, but, Nisbet says,

the enormous bureaucracy with its tentacles stretched out in every possible direction, tripping over one another, treating to strangle the monster they are connected with, has apparently made it impossible for the great military bureaucracy in America to develop proper forces for the late twentieth century's kinds of war. [p 60]

Here is the modern absolutism of the "present age":

If the Pentagon is the most glaring, and downright dangerous, of our mammoth bureaucracies, it is far from being the only one. There isn't an aspect of individual life, from birth to death, that doesn't come under some kind of federal scrutiny every day, and that means of course bureaucratic scrutiny. Horror stories are legion and related to every bureaucracy from the Internal Revenue Service to Commerce, Labor, Human Services, and so forth.

In this great book he also wrote that he thought that courts were becoming a play ground for political activism:

Law, especially the law of the entire nation, federal law, presents itself as the most potent force for social change now imaginable. Inevitably, therefore, the attention of the eager, impatient, and activist among humanitarians and reconstructionists is already being turned from the presidency and the Congress---and conspicuously the merely state-level political offices---to the federal judiciary with its grand prize of the Chief Justiceship of the United States. [p 69]

Robert Nisbet writes that while Americans pretends, by their rhetoric, to hate all of this bureaucracy; they really love it. "'Dammed bureaucracy' may be one word in most conversations," says Nisbet, "but it is said with more and more toleration, even affection."

Ronald Reagan, says Nisbet, is a good illustration of this:

Arresting----egregious, some would say----as the Reagan spectacle is, however, it not unfairly epitomizes the attitudes of a great many Americans toward bureaucracy and state centralization. They curse it, deride it, abhor it, all the while they are beckoning it to them with one hand. [p 61]

Today people look to the State as the supposed solution to all the problems of the world under the sun. We think the solutions to world problems are to expand the U.S. Empire and plant democracy. We think the solution to every damn problem can somehow be solved through the State ---- through the President. Politicization, as Robert Nisbet wrote in The Present Age, has taken everything over. But the State needs help to do this. Here is where the political clerisy comes in.

The "political clersiy," are what Nisbet calls the intellectuals that defend and justify the State. Before the State rulers were looked as divine, and in some cases they were seen as a god. Today democracy is the puppet show, used to justify Leviathan. The State needs these intellectuals and the media to justify the State and to justify the expansion of it.

We have moved to the attitude that "the President is never wrong!" Lies, deceptions, manipulations, and outright corruption notwithstanding. When something goes wrong, we do not blame the President. There is always a fall guy.

As the absolutism has taken over, we today treat the President like an outright "king"----actually, much more than a king. He comes into town? The whole town has to stop what it is doing and bow to the despot.

The Loose Individual

As the State has grown, it has created the "loose individual." Nisbet defines this as the loosening of the individual from the natural "intermediate authorities." We have become cut off from them. As the State distorts the natural order and cultural left-liberalism takes over, we have become a society that is dying. One of the important books on this topic, by the way, is Patrick J. Buchanan's The Death of the West. It can be clearly seen how our society has adapted cultural liberalism. Our birth rates are not even high enough for replacement levels, as third world immigrants flood in. As far as I can see, a free society does not commit suicide. But we are not a free society, are we? Our age might be an age of democracy, but democracy, it seems to me, is a decivilizing institution that brough about "the present age." It is therefore that real conservatives (paleoconservatives) must become anti-statist libertarians.

As Hans-Hermann Hoppe said in his outstanding book, Democracy – The God That Failed:

Democracy: The God that Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

What the countercultural libertarians failed to recognize, and what true libertarians cannot emphasize enough, is that the restoration of private property rights and lasses-faire economics implies a sharp and drastic increase in social "discrimination" and will swiftly eliminate most if not all of the multicultural-egalitarian life style experiments so close to the heart of the left libertarians. In other words, libertarians must be radical and uncompromising conservatives.

We have also become a society of debt and incompetence. The nature of capitalism has also changed: "The revolving door between government and corporate America works overtime in the present age, in this late part of the age." [p 109]

Empires all bankrupt themselves. The Empire of America will be no different. Just like other Empires have fallen in debt and cultural lefitsm, so is America. Sad to say, the American Empire will keep on getting itself involved in one immoral war after another until it dies or suffers an utter defeat.

To understand the shift to the present age, I recommend also reading the two books shown in this entry: Pat Buchanan's The Death of the West and Hans Hoppe's Democracy – The God That Failed.

"We have moved since 1914 from a highly traditionalist, hierarchical, decentralized, and inegalitarian society to one that in our time approaches the diametrical opposite of these qualities." [p 140]

Ideas are a powerful thing, be they good or bad. They have caused "the present age." This is why websites like LewRockwell.com and AntiWar.com, for example, are so important.