Friday, January 16, 2009

On Protecting Criminal Violence

Among the enemies of freedom are those who would impede the protection of public safety and liberty on behalf of criminals. The left has several reasons to desire that criminals and others who impede the freedom of law abiding citizens do so with impunity. Criminal violence and thuggery serve as metaphors to the left's design on violent power. Criminals do today what the left dreams of doing tomorrow. Because the left believes that wealth can be obtained only by theft, it believes that criminals are as moral as an inventor, entrepreneurial risk taker, or someone who saves money instead of stealing it. The state functions as a criminal thief via its taxation powers, and the left takes pleasure in this. Protection of criminals serves to destabilize society, making freedom difficult to defend. The left desires the destabilizatio of free society so it can install slave-societies like Cambodia, China, Cuba and the Soviet Union.

I just received this message and video from Jim Crum:

>Damn straight! My guess is that either the ACLU or the Sothern Poverty Law Center are involved. No one else is that stupid to find moral confusion in this. Let’s hope for the officer’s sake that the bad guy was not also a transgendered illegal immigrant, then hoo-boy! Watch out!

6 comments:

TruthHurts said...

"The left has several reasons to desire that criminals and others who impede the freedom of law abiding citizens do so with impunity. Criminal violence and thuggery serve as metaphors to the left's design on violent power. Criminals do today what the left dreams of doing tomorrow. Because the left believes that wealth can be obtained only by theft, it believes that criminals are as moral as an inventor, entrepreneurial risk taker, or someone who saves money instead of stealing it. The state functions as a criminal thief via its taxation powers, and the left takes pleasure in this. Protection of criminals serves to destabilize society, making freedom difficult to defend. The left desires the destabilizatio of free society so it can install slave-societies like Cambodia, China, Cuba and the Soviet Union."

Do you really believe that?

That was quite a sweeping generalization.

I find it interesting that you fear what "the left" will do. Personally I get nervous when someone starts talking about "enemies of freedom".. I immediately think McCarthyism and/ or Axis of Evil etc..

Do you classify the current administration as "left"?

Please define "Left"?
I am confused. I have read on your site about Palestinian egg tossers who you group in this "left" category..(I'm guessing that gays, immigrants, and minorities may be lumped in.) I'd like some clarification. Is it anyone who disagrees with you. I don't like the idea of government intervention to use my tax dollars without my say so...,I love ("LOVE") making money.., I feel like an extremely proud American and I have a general hate from criminals(and the extension of their rights over victims).. What does that make me?

Random thought:
Can you still use the term "Left" when 60% of the population voted "left"? Wouldn't that make the "left", the "right"?

-Enjoy your day.

Mitchell Langbert said...

Obviously I believe it. Do you think I joke around on this blog? I'm serious, baby.

I do not think that statement is very sweeping. I define the left as the movement that advocates governmental or forcible or violent (all terms equivalent) redistribution of wealth in the name of moral principles, to wit, equity, income distribution, ending exploitation, killing Jews, fairness, the New York Times said so, or whatever.

Let us look at what the left has accomplished.

USSR: murder of approximately 65 million human beings.
China: murder of approximately 25 million human beings.
Similar results in Cambodia, Cuba, and eastern Europe. As well, suppression of free speech.

Now, let's talk about the western European left.
-Destruction of economic opportunity. In New York City, for example, I watched the entire economic infrastructure be ravaged by the left. Business fled and poor and moderate income housing was destroyed in favor of private use eminent domain that favored the wealthy. The New York Times favored this in the name of the poor.

Shall I go on?

The city was gutted of jobs, so millions of New Yorkers had to flee. Very few of the people I grew up with were able to stay. Opportunities destroyed.

What about the medical cures never invented because of regulation? I wonder how many Americans have died because of misallocation of resources due to low interest rates, taxation of resources diverted to fraudulent or incompetently managed schemes like social security.

I can go on and on.

As far as your tired cliche about McCarthyism--tens of thousands of university professors lives have been ruined due to left wing political correctness in American universities, many times the number of people affected by McCarthyism. But the left denies it happens, lies about it, or is unconcerned about it. I'm curious why you think that Zero Mostel's career is more important than Mark Moyar's? Why slandering and ruining a professor's career, as I have personally seen happen several times to conservative faculty, is less troubling to you than a 60 year old saga about a few screen writers and government employees who were blacklisted. Do you think your focused might be biased?

The fact that 60% of Americans voted for a socialistic candidate does not justify socialism. A plurality of Germans supported Hitler, and many Russians to this day support Stalin. Do you believe that popular support provides moral justification? Popular support leads to murder and theft in many cases.

It is true that I disagree with statism and the left, as I have defined it, includes all statism. However, I do not include all with whom I disagree as leftists. I do not believe that someone who favors legalization of abortion is a leftist, necessarily, nor do I believe that someone with preferences for a food I dislike is a leftist.

A leftist is someone who supports the use of violence to take or to deprive of life or property in the name of morality. That includes socialism, Nazism, communism and Progressivism, all of which are violent philosophies.

You can disagree with me, but you have no right to use force to steal from me.

Read up on your John Locke, Second Treatise on Government. I'm sure you and the majority who voted Democrat have never read Locke because of our left-dominated schools, so the ideas on which the nation was founded seem exotic to you.

PS--"that gays, immigrants, and minorities may be lumped in"

That's a cheap shot. Given the left's history toward these groups:

-incarceration and murder of gays in Cuba and China
-persecution of Jews and other minorities in the Soviet Union and through the communist world, including Venezuela here and now
-labor unions' suppression of blacks and encouragement of discrimination throughout the 19th century and until the post-war period

I don't totally understand why you'd indulge in a stereotype of that kind about me except through prejudice. I would like you to show me one point in this blog that expressed hostility toward these groups.

TruthHurts said...

Mr. Langbert,
I wrote what I did because I am tired of people taking the "you'll all be sorry when this is said and done" tone, while at the same time questioning the patriotism of others.

When I read a post that you wrote and it talks about how "democracy is dead" and how you "have no children on whom to inflict America's dismal future, made dismal by the democratic mob."

Who is wishing for the downfall of the country, you or me?

There are so many "right" leaning bloggers, pundits, and radio hosts who take this same stance. The problem with it is that it puts you in a situation where you are hoping for collapse just so you can say with glee as blood runs in the streets, "I TOLD YOU SO!" Why would any one who loves this country what bad things to happen to its citizens, economy, president, president-elect? That's an oxymoron in itself..

I am also sick of the argument about some sinister "left" who wants to kill our babies, leave us penniless and rob us of liberties.

I do not read your blog to insult your point of view, I read it because I have a belief that the truth lies in the middle of what some may call "liberal" media, and "conservative" media. I do not shut myself off to opposing viewpoints just because they are not pleasing to my ears/ eyes and more and more, I feel that I am not sure if I am a Democrat at all.

You had many examples in your response which included:
"low interest rates, taxation of resources diverted to fraudulent or incompetently managed schemes like social security."

Correct me if I missed the mark, but your view is that the fed should be disbanded and that social security is unnecessary and a drain on our resources? I may agree that reforms need to be made in the SS program, but if anything can counter the argument of privatization it would be the market events of the last year. I do think that a SS program that required more working years to "qualify" would be more efficient.

"I don't totally understand why you'd indulge in a stereotype of that kind about me except through prejudice. I would like you to show me one point in this blog that expressed hostility toward these groups."

I have read on this very blog references to the president-elect as "the first affirmative action president"...several "terrorist" references,.. And 10% of the time, his name is written like so "Barack HUSSEIN Obama".. I only mentioned gays because of the initial post that made a joke(which I was not offended by in the least, because I agreed) about "transgendered illegal immigrant".

I will not even entertain the Hitler/ Stalin comparison.

Don't get me wrong though.. you have a write to write whatever you please, but as I said before, it sounds as if you are praying for our downfall, in order to justify your claims.

As I've mentioned in the past, if 4 years from now, the situation has improved, people like Rush Limbaugh are going to be upset because their argument will have been proven false. Does anger at the success/ resilience of the U.S. sound right to you?

Have a nice weekend. Thanks for responding.

Mitchell Langbert said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mitchell Langbert said...

Dear Truthhurts:

The truth does not lie in the middle. For instance, in the 18th century Dr. Benjamin Rush advocated bleeding as a cure for various illnesses. Today, physicians use antibiotics. Is the truth in the middle? Do you use bleeding half the time and antibiotics the other half? Or is bleeding based on an erroneous theory, so you dispense with it? The ideas of the left are equivalent to bleeding, yet the public, academics, economists, and politicians insist on bleeding.

I do not wish to see a patient dying of an infection die because he is being bled. Nor do I wish to tell his physician, "I told you so". But I will tell the patient and the physician that the cure is a quack cure. So I speak my mind about statism, Keynesian economics, socialism and collectivism: they are quack cures. There is no middle ground.

Hayek wrote "The Use of Knowledge in Society" in the 1940s. In it, he showed that economic information is best communicated using prices. Since you seem to identify with "truth", why not expose yourself to Hayek's ideas and read this lucid essay? Ludwig von Mises made similar arguments in the 1920s in books like Human Action. Why not read it and decide for yourself? For the truth indeed hurts.

In the 1930s, Oskar Lange claimed to have disproven von Mises's arguments, but when you read his article it is so laden with logical fallacies, question begging and patently absurd assumptions about organizations and management that it is difficult to believe that anyone would have take it seriously. Yet, academic economists and sociologists for many years seriously stated that Lange had disproven von Mises. I guess the truth hurts.

In 1989 the Soviet Union fell for the very reasons that von Mises and Hayek said it would. But not one of the academic economists or sociologists who insisted on nonsense arguments like "convergence", the ancient idea of the happy medium, admitted that convergence was wrong because socialism failed. Rather, many continued to advocate socialism.

There is no medium. Socialism fails because it interferes with the communication of information. Cognitive limits of socialist managers inhibit innovation. There is no in between. You either reward people fully for their innovation, or you don't. If you don't you get less innovation.

I do not wish for the downfall of the United States. I oppose socialism, I do not favor it.

You seem to believe that economic progress is a matter of taste. You prefer English breakfast tea but I prefer orange pekoe, you prefer socialism and I prefer capitalism, and if I only got with the socialist program and supported it, it would work. If only we were nicer to each other and got along, social security would work.

But it doesn't work. I do not like the current emphasis on the stock market, which is part of the same program that created social security, the New Deal. The two are not opposed. The public is obsessed with the stock market because excess money enables speculation. The excess money comes about because FDR abolished the gold standard. Wall Street benefits from FDR's abolition of the gold standard, and FDR created social security.

Social security is failure becuase the amount of money I put in is vastly greater, adjusted for a normal interest rate of 6%, than the discounted annuity I will receive back. If a private sector firm offered a deal as bad as social security, they would be accused of fraud.

I do not believe in the stock market. My money is in a variety of investments. I do not think that most Americans are equipped to invest in financial markets. They do so because the statist program since 1933 has supported Wall Street. Savings are harmed through inflation but stock prices are boosted by inflation, and inflation is the direct result of socialist and Wall Street policy.

Do not think for a minute that the massive inflation currently in process due to the Bush/Obama bailout will not boost the stock market. This is the greatest subsidy in history to the wealthy, supported by the New York Times, Paul Krugman, the liberal establishement, Wall Street and the mass media. They are all allied. Do you really think that the Ochs Sulzbergers and Princeton professors who live off a multi-billion dollar endowment are a conscience to Wall Street?

Nor is it a matter of a "sinister" left. I do not doubt that many on the left actually believe its ideas. The world is full of useful idiots. But when the USSR fell, and many academics with high IQs continued to advocated socialism, then I began to wonder.

Pursuing a left wing path is not like choosing a cup of tea. You don't get to throw one pot away and make another one or just call a waiter and be served. Once the socialist steps are taken, they are difficult to undo because of vested political interests. The only way out becomes economic collapse. It is not what I want, it is what the left has caused. I do not want it, no one does.

As far as the phrase "affirmative action president" it appears in a post by Nancy Razik, that is the only place I could see it. Her post is rather emotional and I did not find the phrase sufficiently distasteful to expurgate it.

Are you saying that Nancy should be arrested or that I should be denied tenure because she used that phrase? You're concerned about McCarthyism, are you?

I appreciate your arguments and sincerely hope that you will continue to pursue them. I do recommend two books that might be of interest:

FA Hayek, "The Road to Serfdom"
Henry Hazlitt, "Economics in One Lesson"
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom

TruthHurts said...

I quoted the "affirmative action president" line because you specifically asked for an example.

"Are you saying that Nancy should be arrested or that I should be denied tenure because she used that phrase?"

No, never.. she has the right to say what she wants. I do find it odd that she would associate BHO with affirmative action being that he was at the top of his class at Harvard Law?... as if he didn't deserve to be there at all.. But I will let you think that over. It has always made me laugh when the same folks that are up in arms about Affirmative Action are not the least upset about people admitted to college due to lineage. As if that is some how it is different?

In both instances a person gets in to a school that they may not have qualified for otherwise...why is the family ties association acceptable? (e.g. M. Bloomberg buys a dorm at Princeton and his daughter is admitted or G.W. Bush getting in to Yale with a 2.0 GPA in High School and we all smile).. The hypocrisy amuses me.

I will purchase all three books you mentioned. I am already familar with Milton Friedman being a Rutgers University graduate, but I have not heard of the others. I have studied a large amount of Econ and Finance in my life and it is my chosen field, so how could I not be interested? Take care.