Watch this political ad (below) promoting Washington State’s Initiative 1098, which seeks to dedicate $2 billion per year to fund education and healthcare for children. It’s always for the children! It’s not about soaking the rich! even though this other Yeson1098 video makes a point of demonizing the greedy rich. The slogan is “the wealthy pay more, the rest of us pay less.” Bill Gates, Sr., is presented as a grandfatherly figure sacrificing his comfort for the sake of childrens’ enjoyment while he explains the reasonableness of this new scheme to legally plunder the rich.

His son could donate $2 billion of his own money each year for a couple decades and still have plenty left over, thereby funding this initiative all by himself for a good long while, and yet wealthy progressives like the Gates’ eagerly volunteer the money of others.

You can’t really be generous or charitable with other peoples’ money. Taking from them against their will or volunteering them to be targets of theft is immoral and unjust.

Anyone who is in favor of funding this initiative can simply devise a voluntary payment scheme and put up their own money. Then we’ll see how much progressives really care about the children.

Instead, they waste creativity, time, and money manipulating the statist-democratic process and promoting majoritarian-populist initiatives with clever, emotional, yet substanceless propaganda.

Hypocrites.

~*~

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

I’m hearing reports that nearly $1 billion has already been spent on US House elections alone. Sheila Krumholz of the Center for Responsive Politics predicts “$3.7 billion will be spent on this midterm election.” That’s 30% more than last time. It’s no surprise that the more legal plunder government is able to redistribute, the more people are willing to spend to gain control of the state. Obama is making Bush the Younger look thrifty and the next president will likely do the same for him. The increase in electoral spending will continue apace.

Such a distraction and waste of money political elections, especially national elections, are. As I explained in Voting, Moral Hazard, and Like Buttons: “The very existence of [a] centralized voting system for deciding public matters of moral importance encourages citizens to focus their energies on this formal democratic process, which is to say that it encourages the wasting of time and money on vote getting (or buying), at the expense of getting anything actually productive done in a timely fashion.”

Republicans distracted their base from important issues, for example, by whipping up ignorant, bigoted hysteria and rage at Muslims and the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.” Fellow TLS blogger Matt Mortellaro recently discussed their latest gambit, an attempt to defund NPR (and PBS), ostensibly saving $608 million dollars next year, under the guise of defending the 1st Amendment rights of a liberal political pundit (Juan Williams) because he said something they like about Muslims. Political theater.

So let’s see… $3.7b spent (by Demopublicans) vs. $608m saved. Nice.

Well, at least all that spending is stimulating the economy… Oh wait.

Imagine what could be accomplished with all that wasted money, manpower, and brain power if only it were spent on — nay, invested in — something other than electoral politics. New companies started, existing ones expanded, more actually productive jobs created. Productive innovation in business models, manufacturing, science, technology. Socio-economic problems solved by direct action.

But forget all that. I guess it’s more important to get the “right guy” elected so we don’t have to be “fearful of the state” for a few years. Good luck. I suspect the Tea Party Congressional candidates and the next Republican president will prove just as disappointing to Republicans as Obama was to Democrats though.

~*~

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

So….the Republicans have put out their Pledge to America. Is it any good?

Jeffrey Tucker sums it up pithily by juxtaposing short quotes from it and the Declaration of Independence:

Declaration of Independence (1776): “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…”

A Pledge to America (GOP, 2010): “Whenever the agenda of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to institute a new governing agenda and set a different course.”

If this goes on, related fellow TLS blogger Daniel Coleman to me, in another 100 years it will be “Whenever a subpoint of policy within a government agenda becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to organize a committee to change those subpoints of policy and replace them with better subpoints.”

Liberty Central, the Establishment’s attempt to co-opt the Tea Party, has a poll asking us to grade the Pledge. Head on over there and tell them what you think of it. Fellow TLS blogger Jacob Huebert has a couple of good posts on LewRockwell.com about Liberty Central, the Tea Party, the Pledge, and Glenn Beck.

The Liberty Central poll only lets you grade the Pledge as a whole. Here is a quick graded breakdown of important aspects of the Pledge, with short reactions by me in parentheses:

Jobs

• Stop job-killing tax hikes — Grade: A. (It’s a start, but better to abolish taxes.)
• Allow small businesses to take a tax deduction equal to 20 percent of their income — Grade: A. (Ditto.)
• Require congressional approval for any new federal regulation that would add to the deficit — Grade: C.  (How about no new regulations period? Better yet, repeal all existing ones.)
• Repeal small business mandates in the new health care law. — Grade: A.

Cutting Spending

• Repeal and replace health care reform law — Grade: Unknown, probably B or lower. (Replace with what?)
• Roll back non-discretionary spending to 2008 levels before TARP and stimulus (will save $100 billion in first year alone) — Grade: B.  (Should roll back more.)
• Establish strict budget caps to limit federal spending going forward — Grade: B, maybe C.  (How strict? Will these caps be lifted periodically like the national debt ceiling?)
• Cancel all future TARP payments and reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — Grade: Unknown, no higher than a B. (Reform Fannie and Freddie how? Better to abolish them.)

Reforming Congress

• Will require that every bill have a citation of constitutional authority — Grade: C. (Won’t stop Constitutional-but-still-bad bills, and the Constitution is a “living” document anyway.)
• Give members at least 3 days to read bills before a vote — Grade: C.  (Little impact; they still won’t read them.)

Defense

• Provide resources to troops — Grade: F. (Get troops out of foreign countries. Cut the military and intelligence budgets.)
• Fund missile defense — Grade: F. (Worthless boondoggle.)
• Enforce sanctions in Iran — Grade: F.  (Act of war.)

Overall: F. The military provisions outweigh the good things. How about ending the War on Drugs, rolling back the surveillance and police state, and ending aggression against immigrants? In any case, put not your faith in campaign promises.

I think I’m being generous. What do you think? How would you grade the Republicans’ Pledge to America?

~*~

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Micah White at The Guardian writes of the growing danger of ecofascism or environmental authoritarianism. Some environmentalists, like James Lovelock and Pentti Linkola, want to put democracy on hold and/or return humanity world-wide to a primitive state of existence in order to combat global warming. Ironically, his proposal to fend off this growing danger is itself an example of the very thing he fears, though perhaps his proposal is motivated not entirely by environmental concerns but also by an independent dislike of consumerism.

White’s solution is to end the culture of rampant consumerism in the West. How does he propose to do this? Ah, now there’s the rub.

White’s own ecofascist solution is three-fold: the criminalisation of advertising, the revocation of corporate power, and the “downshifting” of the global economy.

The nature of criminalizing advertising is clear. But he no doubt has equally authoritarian means in mind for implementing his two other proposals.

How does he plan to revoke corporate power? By eliminating limited liability. By “reviving the possibilty of death penalties for ['misbehaving'] corporations.” And presumably by other government means.

How does he plan to “downshift” the global economy? He offers some apparently voluntary examples here, at least, but I doubt he’d be satisfied with purely voluntary means.

It’s an awfully convenient rhetorical strategy to juxtapose authoritarian environmental and anti-market proposals with the most extreme examples of ecofascism. It makes his own proposals seem downright reasonable in comparison.

The extreme ecofascists are perhaps making a strategic blunder too in attacking the sacred cow of democracy. White is more clever. He is catering to the widespread religious devotion to democracy and demonization of market activity, crying: No need to put democracy on hold! We’ll just put the economy on hold instead!

Does White call for an end to, or even mention, government policies and rhetoric that encourage rampant consumerism? such as artificially low interest rates, inflation, stimulus checks and other forms of subsidies, taxes on savings and investment, targeted tax credits for various forms of spending, various social-welfare programs, indoctrination in public schools to be good consumerist citizens, calls from political leaders to spend spend spend, and so on.

No, he does not.

Instead, he calls for a softer ecofascism in the name of fending off ecofascism. Consumption is a compulsion and is harming the environment; only corporations are to blame and government is the solution. Where have I heard that before?

~*~

Cross-posted at the Mises Econ blog and The Libertarian Standard.

This is the paper I presented at ASC, chapter 5 of my dissertation.
After much too much procrastination the rough draft is finally
finished and it’s uploaded to my website. I’m sure it’s in need of
revision so constructive comments, suggestions and criticisms are
welcome.

I’m not optimistic about their chances of success – the United States government is a jealous god – but one can hope.

“Lakota group pushes for new nation“

“Descendants of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse break away from US“

And here’s some commentary on the plight of Native Americans: “Native Americans: Victims of Bureaucracy.”

I was just watching Crimson Tide on tv and there was a mention of the famous dictum by the Prussian general, military historian, and theorist Carl von Clausewitz: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.”

There is a profound truth in that dictum. It identifies shared characteristics of statist politics and war: anti-social conflict, some imposing their will on others, destruction and redistribution of wealth, etc. When statist political means fail to have the desired result and recourse is made to naked war, the true character of both the aggressors and the statist political process is revealed.

But I think that von Clausewitz got it backwards; the observation would have been more profound and true had he written instead: “Statist politics is the continuation of war by other means.”

Ballots replace bullets within the democratic state but conflict persists with special interest groups vying for the reins of power so that they can use the perceived legitimacy of the state to impose their will on each other. Beneath the sophisms that grant the state legitimacy there lies the same threat or use of initiatory violence that is present in war. Open war is traded for the illusion of peace.

Update 12/11/07: Might this quote from Ronald Reagan touch upon a similar insight? “Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”

~*~

Update: Revised version at The Libertarian Standard.