Food Inc.

The movie Food Inc. that appeared last year (I saw it in June in Rhinebeck, NY's Upstate Films) seems on the surface to be just another left-wing protest movie. However, it captures a number of libertarian themes.  If you haven't seen it I highly recommend it.

First of all, it outlines serious risks associated with centralization of the food supply.  While centralization reduces costs it also creates risks such as the spreading of disease.  Second, it shows that USDA and government influence have contributed to harming small agriculture.  Organic farmers are often harassed by the USDA, which serves as an agent of large producers.  Third, it shows that many laws have been passed that reflect not the public interest but the interests of agribusiness.   After watching the movie, you will be glad that American agriculture has not been completely collectivized. I doubt that the movie's makers aim to pursue libertarian goals. However, the film makes clear that government's role has been to represent the large agribusiness firms, an inevitable outcome of socialist intervention. Government has not had a beneficial effect on the management of the nation's food supply.  Besides the issues the film raises, government has generally encouraged restriction of supply, which in other contexts would be illegal.  The effect has been to raise food prices.  At the very beginning of American socialism, during World War I, Herbert Hoover served as the food administrator whose job was to raise food prices by creating a food cartel.  This policy has been the American government's since the days of the New Deal.  Scientific management, in which the large producers excel, has driven down costs and prices in some areas.  The film argues that because they do not offer the same profit margins via fast food outlets, the same methods have not been applied to healthier foods like fruits and vegetables, which pound for pound now cost as much as and sometimes more than meat.

The aspects of the centralization story that libertarians might find most disturbing are first of all the role of government intervention in eliminating price signals.  If there are legitimate risks to centralization, the pricing ought to reflect this (i.e., lower prices would need to compensate consumers for the risk of contamination).  However, given restrictions on pricing and supply, government may eliminate these signals.  Second, the government has served as the enforcement wing of agribusiness in a variety of ways.  Libertarians will see at once that the pattern fits many other industries. Third, the courts' and regulators' harassment of small growers that the film depicts, whereby horrific conditions on agribusiness-related farms are given a free pass but much better conditions on small farms are found to violate trivial regulations that do not serve the public and the small farms are forced to close.

Overall, the film presents an argument against centralization of markets (that is, in favor of states' rights and elimination of federal regulation) and parceling of the market to prevent excessive emphasis on scale economies at the expense of innovation and other forms of competition. As well, it makes clear that when government gets involved, the producers will eventually dominate the public using the governmental system that was initially put in place under the pretense of serving the public.

More on CNN's Persistent Lying about The Tea Party

Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit continues to do an excellent job tracking the ongoing misinformation and lies at CNN (h/t Jim Crum and Bob Robbins). Jim notes of the above crowd:  "Just in case you still trusted the state-run media… CNN on size of Saturday’s rally: 'At least dozens of people.' This is dozens?"

 Jim is right to call CNN "state run media".  Although the Democratic Party probably does not officially review CNN's coverage, CNN is loath to question anything that Barack Obama does, much like the state run media in a communist or Nazi state.

RLC Has a Mission

I just submitted the following to the Republican Liberty Caucus (RLC) blog.

RLC Has a Mission

In his historical tour de force, On Power, Bertrand de Jouvenal traces the process of centralization of power in Europe from the fall of Rome. He paints a picture of an unstoppable centripetal force, power, whose ever tightening grip on humanity was hastened first by the increasing power of monarchs and then by the rise of democracy. Prior to mass rule that began with the French revolution and Napoleon, war was limited by the resources of local feudal rulers. Total war became possible with the rise of democracy and nationalistic centralization. The great wars of the twentieth century which saw unprecedented numbers killed were the product of nationalism, mass rule and socialism, indeed, of national socialism and socialism in one country. These last are the ideologies of both the Democratic and Republican parties today.

For a century the United States showed that in the absence of centralization economic progress would come quicker, the public made better off, and war limited to local expansionism. But the Civil War began a process of Progressive centralization, and elite Americans of the Gilded Age after the Civil War, envious of the status of German universities, sent their sons to graduate school in Germany and were surprised when they returned advocating ideas that would forestall freedom and progress. Not having access to the ideas of von Mises, Hayek and Schumpeter, elite Americans adopted German historicism, according to which they, as an expert elite, deserved power and that power ought to be centralized to that end. They chose to remake America in Germany’s image fifty years before the rise of Hitler.

We live with the heritage of their nationalist and now internationalist Progressivism. Progress has slowed; retirement savings are insufficient to cover the needs of the largest cohort of retirees in the history of the world; the Progressive health care system has faltered and been redesigned to restrict care; and for the past forty years Americans have seen the”promise of American life”, an ever increasing standard of living, betrayed and slowed to a halt as the Federal Reserve Bank and the federal government have transferred ever more resources to banks and speculators.

De Jouvenal saw the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt as the ultimate success of “power” in the United States. But the process has taken longer and become more intense as the centralizers’ ideas, one after the next, have failed and destroyed sections of America’s freedom and affluence. The nation retains its preeminent role because of the nineteenth century’s gains and because its diminishing sphere of private initiative remains larger than under the rigid socialism that dominates Europe and the rest of the world.

No one can calculate the damage that power has done to the nation. It is probable that, based on the absence of real wage growth since the gold standard was abolished in 1971 and the 2% compounded growth of real wages between 1800 and 1971, the real hourly wage today is but 40% of what it might have been without the depredations of the federal and state governments. But Americans are relatively worse off than that because of increases in taxes at the state and federal levels.

Both parties, Republican and Democratic, have participated in the relentless expansion of power. The Republican is the more likely of the two to be transformed from a socialistic, elitist party, to one that represents freedom and decentralization. Hence, there is no more important task in politics today than that which the Republican Liberty Caucus has set before itself: to reform the GOP and transform it into a party of freedom and decentralization; to overturn the process of centralization of power; and to reestablish America as a land of freedom.

Given the low quality of public debate and the domination of the public media, this is a difficult task. Struggle we must.

Rilke on the Transformative Power of Human Achievement

One of the most beautiful modern poems is Rainer Maria Rilke's Ninth Elegy. Rilke, who was Czech and wrote in German, died at age 51 in 1926. There is considerable mystery in the poem, which is the ninth of ten "Duino Elegies", his most famous work. The poem acclaims the transformative nature of the human mind and seems to be related to Kantian Idealism, the idea that the real depends on the construction of the human mind. In this article Jan Wojcik argues that Rilke was influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most famous American Kantian or "Transcendentalist". Although Kant was not a libertarian (he bases his philosophy of justice -law or right- on Rousseau's social contract), you can read Kant in a libertarian way. For the categorical imperative requires that each individual be treated as an end, and state compulsion treats human beings as means. The welfare state is inconsistent with Kantian ethics. To be fair, Kant held that it is required to obey the law and that revolution is immoral. He was not Lockean. I wonder if that's what got the Germans into trouble.

Notice the reference to laurel in the opening stanza. When a Greek athlete won a contest, an agon, he was awarded a laurel crown. So too, the poet. Thus, the phrase "poet laureate" was a medieval reference to the laurel crown awarded to poets in classical Greece. Note too that the poem refers to words, to "logoi", that are the poet's materials of transformation, as when he asks:

"Are we here perhaps just to say:
house, bridge, well, gate, jug, fruit tree, window--
at most, column, tower... but to say, understand this, to say it
as the Things themselves never fervently thought to be."

If words transform being, or create being as the reality of human experience, then might not human achievement be our ultimate purpose and the world's fulfillment? In my favorite passage Rilke writes of the angel who is more advanced spiritually and emotionally but is not familiar with achievement in the material world:

"Praise the world to the angel, not the unutterable world;
you cannot astonish him with your glorious feelings;
in the universe, where he feels more sensitively,
you're just a beginner. Therefore, show him the simple
thing that is shaped in passing from father to son,
that lives near our hands and eyes as our very own.
Tell him about the Things. He'll stand amazed, as you stood
beside the rope-maker in Rome, or the potter on the Nile.
Show him how happy a thing can be, how blameless and ours;
how even the lamentation of sorrow purely decides
to take form, serves as a thing, or dies
in a thing, and blissfully in the beyond
escapes the violin."


Rainer Maria Rilke (C. F. MacIntyre, translator)

"The Ninth Elegy"

Duino Elegies

Why, if it's possible to spend this span
of existence as laurel, a little darker than all
other greens, with little waves on every
leaf-edge (like the smile of a breeze), why, then,
must we be human and, shunning destiny,
long for it?...

Oh, not because happiness,

that over-hasty profit of loss impending, exists.
Not from curiosity, or to practise the heart,
that would also be in the laurel...
but because to be here is much, and the transient Here
seems to need and concern us strangely. Us, the most transient.
Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more.
And we also once, Never again. But this having been
once, although only once, to have been of the earth,
seems irrevocable.

And so we drive ourselves and want to achieve it,
want to hold it in our simple hands,
in the surfeited gaze and in the speechless heart.
want to become it. give it to whom? Rather
keep all forever...but to the other realm,
alas, what can be taken? Not the power of seeing,
learned here so slowly, and nothing that's happened here.
Nothing. Maybe the suffering? Before all, the heaviness
and long experience of love--unutterable things.
But later, under the stars, what then? They are better untold of.
The wanderer does not bring a handful of earth,
the unutterable, from the mountain slope to the valley,
but a pure word he has learned, the blue
and yellow gentian. Are we here perhaps just to say:
house, bridge, well, gate, jug, fruit tree, window--
at most, column, tower... but to say, understand this, to say it
as the Things themselves never fervently thought to be.
Is it not the hidden cunning of secretive earth
when it urges on the lovers, that everything seems transfigured
in their feelings? Threshold, what is it for two lovers
that they wear away a little of their own older doorstill,
they also, after the many before,
and before those yet coming...lightly?

Here is the time for the unutterable, here, its country.
Speak and acknowledge it. More than ever
the things that we can live by are falling away,
supplanted by an action without symbol.
An action beneath crusts that easily crack, as soon as
the inner working outgrows and otherwise limits itself.
Our heart exists between hammers,
like the tongue between the teeth,
but notwithstanding, the tongue
always remains the praiser.

Praise the world to the angel, not the unutterable world;
you cannot astonish him with your glorious feelings;
in the universe, where he feels more sensitively,
you're just a beginner. Therefore, show him the simple
thing that is shaped in passing from father to son,
that lives near our hands and eyes as our very own.
Tell him about the Things. He'll stand amazed, as you stood
beside the rope-maker in Rome, or the potter on the Nile.
Show him how happy a thing can be, how blameless and ours;
how even the lamentation of sorrow purely decides
to take form, serves as a thing, or dies
in a thing, and blissfully in the beyond
escapes the violin. And these things that live,
slipping away, understand that you praise them;
transitory themselves, they trust us for rescue,
us, the most transient of all. They wish us to transmute them
in our invisible heart--oh, infinitely into us! Whoever we are.

Earth, isn't this what you want: invisibly
to arise in us? Is it not your dream
to be some day invisible? Earth! Invisible!
What, if not transformation, is your insistent commission?
Earth, dear one, I will! Oh, believe it needs
not one more of your springtimes to win me over.
One, just one, is already too much for my blood.
From afar I'm utterly determined to be yours.
You were always right and your sacred revelation is the intimate death.
Behold, I'm alive. On what? Neither childhood nor future
grows less...surplus of existence
is welling up in my heart.