Showing posts with label reason magazine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reason magazine. Show all posts
Monday, May 5, 2014
Did the Jews in the Dachau Gas Chambers Thank Government for Protection from Power Companies?
In my business class yesterday I mentioned my distaste for government regulation. A recent concern is the National Security Agency's use of personal information to retaliate against American dissidents. The NSA's actions are like the Soviet Union's 20th century economic retaliation against its dissidents. In a recent Reason Magazine article and the video above, William Binney, a former NSA official turned whistle blower, describes retaliation for his revealing the NSA's misuse of personal information about US citizens.
A student raised this point: "It is difficult to choose between regulation that suppresses competition and the absence of regulation that allows large firms to take advantage of individual citizens." The trouble is that there is little evidence that large firms took advantage of citizens when there was no regulation. There is little evidence that the benefits of regulation, if any, exceed the costs. The growth of large firms coincided with the growth of regulation; regulation is a prerequisite to large scale, so advocates of regulation claim to solve a problem that they have caused. Before federal intervention, cartelization of industry repeatedly failed. It did not succeed until the Sherman Antitrust Act and Theodore Roosevelt encouraged it. The Sherman Antitrust Act encouraged the growth of large-scale firms by illegalizing collusion or cooperation among small firms.
Moreover, the threat that large government poses to private citizens' welfare is worse than large firms' extraction of monopoly rents. Is a United States government that has expanded through imperialism, murdered Native Americans, enabled the enslavement of Blacks through the US Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Act, murdered a million-and-a-half Vietnamese, exiled immigrants who disagreed with the capitalist system, and funded political correctness in universities to be trusted to make us safe from power companies?
Did the Jews gassed in Dachau feel grateful to the Nazi government for regulating power companies?
Saturday, April 5, 2014
The Fallacy of Whig Libertarianism
Writing in Reason, Alex Stevenson reviews a debate about continued UK participation in the European Union (EU). Stevenson gives a useful overview of a new British political party, the United Kingdom Independence Party, and he questions whether participation in the EU is relevant to libertarianism. Stevenson holds on to an antiquated left-right dichotomy: He reasons that in the past the left opposed the EU, so there is no reason for libertarians to oppose it now. He claims that centralization is not a libertarian issue.
Bertrand de Jouvenal's On Power outlines the emergence of the unitary state from the decentralized fiefdoms of the Middle Ages. De Jouvenal shows that a decline in freedom coincided with the growth of the unitary state under Louis XIV, the Sun King, and Henry VIII, and continued centralization led to further diminution of freedom. In his Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, Murray Rothbard shows that 17th century mercantilism in Spain, France, and the UK led to inefficient, anti-libertarian outcomes.
The dream of a centralized Europe goes back to the Romans, the inventors of the mixed economy and government-business partnerships. Today's European and American economies are modernized versions of Rome, and the blessings of modernity were largely developed in the United States and Great Britain before the current, antique levels of centralization emerged.
Looking at the big picture, Charlemagne's conquest of much of Europe and Hitler's Third Reich were halting attempts to reestablish Rome. The EU is a third attempt. No attempt, including the EU, has been libertarian in nature. Centralization of power is neither left nor right, but it is anti-libertarian because centralization of power leads to abuse of power. It does so because citizens in a large, centralized state face high costs of organization, so protest becomes difficult. In contrast, compact special interests with access to the central bank and high benefits per capita from organization can organize efficiently. Centralization leads to skewed outcomes that benefit elite interests. Smaller scale increases the benefit per capita from organization by general citizens. Citizens' monitoring of and resistance to special interests increases as the scale of government decreases.
In the UK the Whigs began as the country party, and they originated many libertarian ideas. In the US the Whig Party, which used the country party's name, was a court party and a reaction to Andrew Jackson's democratic and libertarian views. By Jackson's time the courtly Federalists and country anti-Federalists were gone, but remnants of the anti-Federalists' views survived, including in the South, so when South Carolina threatened to secede in 1832 over its demand to nullify the Tariff of Abominations, Jackson threatened them with military force.
Jackson, then, was no libertarian, but he was too libertarian for the remnant of the Federalist Party, which Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln's mentor, led by the 1820s. In 1832 Clay founded the Whig Party, the party of a centralized bank, centralized power, subsidized banks, subsidized railroads, increased tariffs, big government, public works, and government waste.
The American Whigs have always claimed to be for freedom: Today's Republicans, like Mark Levin and Mitt Romney, continue to claim so just as today's Democrats continue to call themselves "liberals," a term that had been applied to libertarians in America until the 1890s.
While claiming to favor freedom, the Whigs--both today's Democrats and today's Republicans--are anti-libertarian, while a minority of decentralizers has tended to be libertarian. The reason that decentralization fosters liberty even when some of the smaller units adopt anti-libertarian policies is that government cannot be measured as just a quantity. The government that governs least is not the most libertarian government if it is imposed by force; it is fundamental to Lockean libertarianism that government be derived from the consent of the governed.
A government that governs an increasingly large population finds that it has a decreasing ability to derive consent from the governed. If America had conquered the heart of Mexico instead of just California and Texas, it would have imposed less government on the Mexicans than they have since imposed on themselves. Nevertheless, as Thoreau points out in Civil Disobedience, such an action would not have been libertarian because it would have involved force rather than consent. As the scope of a governed territory grows, the likelihood of consent diminishes. A single government cannot represent the diverse needs of a large number of people. In 1787 America had three million, mostly Christian, mostly white, mostly English citizens. The governments of about half of today's states govern larger, more diverse populations.
In economic terms there is only one real-world governmental utility curve; it reflects the sum of public choices about government's use of violence. At the same time each citizen has his own utility curve, and culturally convergent groups, nations, communities, and peoples share utilities, so the distance from each individual's utility curve to the government curve is smaller under self-rule than it would be if strangers were to impose their values from without.
The imposition of an American state, albeit with a lesser quantity of government, would have been more divergent from the Mexicans' preferences than the Mexicans' own government has been even though there would have been less government under American imperialism. Hence, less can be more. In the same way, the imposition of a centralized state on diverse Europeans leads to greater divergence from each group's preferences than would exist under decentralized, nationalist rule. Scale increases coercion.
Decentralization not only leads to freedom because it leads to competition among governments, but it also leads to freedom because of a greater likelihood that a given government will reflect its citizens' preferences. The EU, like Rome, imposes a unitary set of preferences on all of its citizens. The sum of the distances of the preferences from the stated policy is greater than would be under a greater number of decentralized states.
As the power of Brussels increases, additional threats to liberty will emerge. The centralization of power will lead, as it did in the United States, to suppression of consent. Suppression of consent in the United States led, within four decades after the Civil War, to suppression of a wide range of rights, and within five decades to the founding of a central bank, an income tax, and an imperialistic foreign policy linked to the central bank and the income tax.
The Whigs, who in the post-Civil War, Mugwump era claimed to be libertarians, had ended government by the consent of the governed through the Civil War; they have since relentlessly extended the scope and power of the state, just as de Jouvenal describes. (De Jouvenal discusses FDR toward the end of his monumental work.) For the past 120 years Whig liberalism has amounted to government by experts who shape and control public opinion through a centralized media and enforce special interests' dictates to a manipulated majority.
Bertrand de Jouvenal's On Power outlines the emergence of the unitary state from the decentralized fiefdoms of the Middle Ages. De Jouvenal shows that a decline in freedom coincided with the growth of the unitary state under Louis XIV, the Sun King, and Henry VIII, and continued centralization led to further diminution of freedom. In his Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, Murray Rothbard shows that 17th century mercantilism in Spain, France, and the UK led to inefficient, anti-libertarian outcomes.
The dream of a centralized Europe goes back to the Romans, the inventors of the mixed economy and government-business partnerships. Today's European and American economies are modernized versions of Rome, and the blessings of modernity were largely developed in the United States and Great Britain before the current, antique levels of centralization emerged.
Looking at the big picture, Charlemagne's conquest of much of Europe and Hitler's Third Reich were halting attempts to reestablish Rome. The EU is a third attempt. No attempt, including the EU, has been libertarian in nature. Centralization of power is neither left nor right, but it is anti-libertarian because centralization of power leads to abuse of power. It does so because citizens in a large, centralized state face high costs of organization, so protest becomes difficult. In contrast, compact special interests with access to the central bank and high benefits per capita from organization can organize efficiently. Centralization leads to skewed outcomes that benefit elite interests. Smaller scale increases the benefit per capita from organization by general citizens. Citizens' monitoring of and resistance to special interests increases as the scale of government decreases.
In the UK the Whigs began as the country party, and they originated many libertarian ideas. In the US the Whig Party, which used the country party's name, was a court party and a reaction to Andrew Jackson's democratic and libertarian views. By Jackson's time the courtly Federalists and country anti-Federalists were gone, but remnants of the anti-Federalists' views survived, including in the South, so when South Carolina threatened to secede in 1832 over its demand to nullify the Tariff of Abominations, Jackson threatened them with military force.
Jackson, then, was no libertarian, but he was too libertarian for the remnant of the Federalist Party, which Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln's mentor, led by the 1820s. In 1832 Clay founded the Whig Party, the party of a centralized bank, centralized power, subsidized banks, subsidized railroads, increased tariffs, big government, public works, and government waste.
The American Whigs have always claimed to be for freedom: Today's Republicans, like Mark Levin and Mitt Romney, continue to claim so just as today's Democrats continue to call themselves "liberals," a term that had been applied to libertarians in America until the 1890s.
While claiming to favor freedom, the Whigs--both today's Democrats and today's Republicans--are anti-libertarian, while a minority of decentralizers has tended to be libertarian. The reason that decentralization fosters liberty even when some of the smaller units adopt anti-libertarian policies is that government cannot be measured as just a quantity. The government that governs least is not the most libertarian government if it is imposed by force; it is fundamental to Lockean libertarianism that government be derived from the consent of the governed.
A government that governs an increasingly large population finds that it has a decreasing ability to derive consent from the governed. If America had conquered the heart of Mexico instead of just California and Texas, it would have imposed less government on the Mexicans than they have since imposed on themselves. Nevertheless, as Thoreau points out in Civil Disobedience, such an action would not have been libertarian because it would have involved force rather than consent. As the scope of a governed territory grows, the likelihood of consent diminishes. A single government cannot represent the diverse needs of a large number of people. In 1787 America had three million, mostly Christian, mostly white, mostly English citizens. The governments of about half of today's states govern larger, more diverse populations.
In economic terms there is only one real-world governmental utility curve; it reflects the sum of public choices about government's use of violence. At the same time each citizen has his own utility curve, and culturally convergent groups, nations, communities, and peoples share utilities, so the distance from each individual's utility curve to the government curve is smaller under self-rule than it would be if strangers were to impose their values from without.
The imposition of an American state, albeit with a lesser quantity of government, would have been more divergent from the Mexicans' preferences than the Mexicans' own government has been even though there would have been less government under American imperialism. Hence, less can be more. In the same way, the imposition of a centralized state on diverse Europeans leads to greater divergence from each group's preferences than would exist under decentralized, nationalist rule. Scale increases coercion.
Decentralization not only leads to freedom because it leads to competition among governments, but it also leads to freedom because of a greater likelihood that a given government will reflect its citizens' preferences. The EU, like Rome, imposes a unitary set of preferences on all of its citizens. The sum of the distances of the preferences from the stated policy is greater than would be under a greater number of decentralized states.
As the power of Brussels increases, additional threats to liberty will emerge. The centralization of power will lead, as it did in the United States, to suppression of consent. Suppression of consent in the United States led, within four decades after the Civil War, to suppression of a wide range of rights, and within five decades to the founding of a central bank, an income tax, and an imperialistic foreign policy linked to the central bank and the income tax.
The Whigs, who in the post-Civil War, Mugwump era claimed to be libertarians, had ended government by the consent of the governed through the Civil War; they have since relentlessly extended the scope and power of the state, just as de Jouvenal describes. (De Jouvenal discusses FDR toward the end of his monumental work.) For the past 120 years Whig liberalism has amounted to government by experts who shape and control public opinion through a centralized media and enforce special interests' dictates to a manipulated majority.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Reason Blogs My Interview with Gov. Gary Johnson
Reason Magazine's Jesse Walker just e-mailed that Reason has blogged my interview with Gov. Gary Johnson that appeared on the RLC site. Reason's blog is entitled "Johnson makes some sweet, sweet sounds."
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Widespread Media Distortion About Tea Parties
The Democratic Party's propaganda machine concertedly failed to cover yesterday's two million strong tea party. Much like Big Brother in George Orwell's book 1984, the propaganda machine paints the centrist tea party demonstrators as "extremist" and the extremists in Congress as "centrists".
There is little reason to continue to watch, pay attention to or care about the "news" as presented by Democratic Party organs. Fox is no better because it is a Progressive Republican mirror.
In the current issue of Reason Magazine Jesse Walker has an excellent article on the Democrats' and Rockefeller Republicans' use of allegations of "extremism" to aim to suppress the speech of moderates who disagree with them. Extremists in the media and in Congress have been using allegations of "right wing violence" to sustain proposals to suppress views that diverge from "progressivism". One extremist, writing in one of the "progressive" organs, has called for bans on "hate speech", in other words for a program to transfer the authoritarian policies of politically correct universities to the nation at large.
When the left was subjected to Palmer Raids and McCarthyism in the early to mid twentieth century (and labor leaders were convicted of violence in the late 19th century) the left claimed to support freedom of speech. Now that left-wing extremism has come to dominate American political discussion, the left, as it generally has wherever it has come to power, favors violent suppression of speech with which it disagrees.
Walker makes an excellent point:
"We've heard ample warnings about extremist paranoia in the months since Barack Obama became president, and we're sure to hear many more throughout his term. But we've heard almost nothing about the paranoia of the political center."
I would, though, take issue with Walker's depiction of the current power elite as representing a "center". American politics is divided among several disparate points of view, and there is no longer a viewpoint that can be called center, any more than there is a "center" between alligators and elephants. A creature that is part alligator and part elephant is not a midpoint between the two, rather it is an absurdity, and there is likewise no midpoint between those who believe in state suppression and those who believe in freedom.
Walker quotes Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" in which he argued that right wing extremists adopted the practices of left-wing extremists. Hofstadter wrote:
"It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him...The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through 'front' groups..."
In the same way, the "progressive" left, now that it has power, can be expected to emulate the fascist suppression that it has long claimed to oppose by accusing moderate Americans who believe in freedom of "extremism".
Walker reviews the history of labor leader Walter Reuther's urging the Kennedy administration to use the FBI to politically attack the right. In other words, today's dominant "progressives" mirror the authoritarian right; and the authoritarian right has often reflected the views of "progressives". Neither is "moderate".
In fact, the only moderates are those millions who demonstrated in the tea party rally yesterday, the same people that the propaganda outlets aim to marginalize, demonize and accuse of extremism.
One of the fascinating points in the essay is Walker's remark that Kenneth Stern, author of the tendentious Force Upon the Plain argues that all who advocate decentralization are racists. Then, it would seem that all advocates of modern management theory are racists since decentralization is fundamental to it.
Stern typifies the thuggish, authoritarian tendencies in American progressivism. He argues that anyone who does not want to obey centralized authority is "objectionable." Walker quotes one of Stern's particularly ugly passages:
"When a political movement rejects the idea of common American values and says, 'Let me do it my own way,' it usually means it wants to do things that are objectionable, and yearns to do them undisturbed and unnoticed."
Walker notes that Timothy McVeigh's extremist violence made it possible for the Clinton White House to turn the tables on the Gingrich Congress. This is similar to concepts of Fourth Generation Warfare: public sympathy is a potent weapon. Indeed, in labor history public opinion typically went to the victims of violence. Thus, if a labor union committed acts of violence the public became sympathetic to management while if management committed acts of violence the public became sympathetic to labor. This was the case in the 1920s following the Colorado Fuel and Iron strike in which a number of workers' children were burned to death by Pinkerton guards employed by the Rockefeller owned firm, CF&I.
Conservatives are well counseled to keep violent rhetoric out of the debate. That is, until the point where a revolution is necessary. This was John Locke's argument. While individual rights are sacrosanct and the state is a thuggish institution that violates them, the right to defense needs to be tempered by political reality.
The Obama administration leaped at the opportunity to use federal government apparatchiks in the Department of Homeland Security to issue a report about "right wing extremism". Naturally, the state is itself reflective of extremism, not the right wingers, and one can predict an effort by Congressional and federal thugs to institute violent action against Americans with whom they disagree. Walker describes an "infamous dossier produced by the Missouri Information Analysis Center devoted to...the militia movement" that said "it is not uncommon for militia members to display Constitution Party, Campaign for Liberty or Libertarian material. These members are usually supporters of former Presidential Candidate Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin and Bob Barr."
Hence, the Obama administration already engages in incipient totalitarianism. The reasoning the left uses to support state suppression (that those who disagree with Obama fuel the motives of murderers) is so circuitous that it is evident that their agenda is to silence the speech of any who disagree with their incompetent economic ideas, their mean-spirited stealing in the name of "equality" and the inevitable redistribution of wealth from those who work and are ambitious to Nacy Pelosi-Mussolini, George Soros and their welfare-recipient clients.
Overall, Walker's article is sensational. If you don't subscribe to Reason I urge you to do so. If you're still reading Democratic Party propaganda and not supporting the information sources that agree with you you are part of the problem, not the solution (to project a left-wing phrase).
There is little reason to continue to watch, pay attention to or care about the "news" as presented by Democratic Party organs. Fox is no better because it is a Progressive Republican mirror.
In the current issue of Reason Magazine Jesse Walker has an excellent article on the Democrats' and Rockefeller Republicans' use of allegations of "extremism" to aim to suppress the speech of moderates who disagree with them. Extremists in the media and in Congress have been using allegations of "right wing violence" to sustain proposals to suppress views that diverge from "progressivism". One extremist, writing in one of the "progressive" organs, has called for bans on "hate speech", in other words for a program to transfer the authoritarian policies of politically correct universities to the nation at large.
When the left was subjected to Palmer Raids and McCarthyism in the early to mid twentieth century (and labor leaders were convicted of violence in the late 19th century) the left claimed to support freedom of speech. Now that left-wing extremism has come to dominate American political discussion, the left, as it generally has wherever it has come to power, favors violent suppression of speech with which it disagrees.
Walker makes an excellent point:
"We've heard ample warnings about extremist paranoia in the months since Barack Obama became president, and we're sure to hear many more throughout his term. But we've heard almost nothing about the paranoia of the political center."
I would, though, take issue with Walker's depiction of the current power elite as representing a "center". American politics is divided among several disparate points of view, and there is no longer a viewpoint that can be called center, any more than there is a "center" between alligators and elephants. A creature that is part alligator and part elephant is not a midpoint between the two, rather it is an absurdity, and there is likewise no midpoint between those who believe in state suppression and those who believe in freedom.
Walker quotes Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" in which he argued that right wing extremists adopted the practices of left-wing extremists. Hofstadter wrote:
"It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him...The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through 'front' groups..."
In the same way, the "progressive" left, now that it has power, can be expected to emulate the fascist suppression that it has long claimed to oppose by accusing moderate Americans who believe in freedom of "extremism".
Walker reviews the history of labor leader Walter Reuther's urging the Kennedy administration to use the FBI to politically attack the right. In other words, today's dominant "progressives" mirror the authoritarian right; and the authoritarian right has often reflected the views of "progressives". Neither is "moderate".
In fact, the only moderates are those millions who demonstrated in the tea party rally yesterday, the same people that the propaganda outlets aim to marginalize, demonize and accuse of extremism.
One of the fascinating points in the essay is Walker's remark that Kenneth Stern, author of the tendentious Force Upon the Plain argues that all who advocate decentralization are racists. Then, it would seem that all advocates of modern management theory are racists since decentralization is fundamental to it.
Stern typifies the thuggish, authoritarian tendencies in American progressivism. He argues that anyone who does not want to obey centralized authority is "objectionable." Walker quotes one of Stern's particularly ugly passages:
"When a political movement rejects the idea of common American values and says, 'Let me do it my own way,' it usually means it wants to do things that are objectionable, and yearns to do them undisturbed and unnoticed."
Walker notes that Timothy McVeigh's extremist violence made it possible for the Clinton White House to turn the tables on the Gingrich Congress. This is similar to concepts of Fourth Generation Warfare: public sympathy is a potent weapon. Indeed, in labor history public opinion typically went to the victims of violence. Thus, if a labor union committed acts of violence the public became sympathetic to management while if management committed acts of violence the public became sympathetic to labor. This was the case in the 1920s following the Colorado Fuel and Iron strike in which a number of workers' children were burned to death by Pinkerton guards employed by the Rockefeller owned firm, CF&I.
Conservatives are well counseled to keep violent rhetoric out of the debate. That is, until the point where a revolution is necessary. This was John Locke's argument. While individual rights are sacrosanct and the state is a thuggish institution that violates them, the right to defense needs to be tempered by political reality.
The Obama administration leaped at the opportunity to use federal government apparatchiks in the Department of Homeland Security to issue a report about "right wing extremism". Naturally, the state is itself reflective of extremism, not the right wingers, and one can predict an effort by Congressional and federal thugs to institute violent action against Americans with whom they disagree. Walker describes an "infamous dossier produced by the Missouri Information Analysis Center devoted to...the militia movement" that said "it is not uncommon for militia members to display Constitution Party, Campaign for Liberty or Libertarian material. These members are usually supporters of former Presidential Candidate Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin and Bob Barr."
Hence, the Obama administration already engages in incipient totalitarianism. The reasoning the left uses to support state suppression (that those who disagree with Obama fuel the motives of murderers) is so circuitous that it is evident that their agenda is to silence the speech of any who disagree with their incompetent economic ideas, their mean-spirited stealing in the name of "equality" and the inevitable redistribution of wealth from those who work and are ambitious to Nacy Pelosi-Mussolini, George Soros and their welfare-recipient clients.
Overall, Walker's article is sensational. If you don't subscribe to Reason I urge you to do so. If you're still reading Democratic Party propaganda and not supporting the information sources that agree with you you are part of the problem, not the solution (to project a left-wing phrase).
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