Old MySpace Blogpost:

Yes, indeed, this former liberal turned libertarian when he became an entrepreneur and realized how businesses really work and the beneficial role they really play in our lives. See “The Transformation of John Mackey” for more. He also tells the story himself here.

Old MySpace Blogpost:

“Gore warns that “what is at stake [is] our ability to live on planet Earth, to have a future as a civilization.” Let’s take a look at some of the evidence that he presents to justify this dire conclusion. He begins by insisting that nothing he has to say is scientifically controversial. Gore claims to be presenting the “scientific consensus” on global warming. But is that so?”

Read more of this illuminating article at ReasonOnline.

I don’t agree with all of the claims the author makes, but it is for the most part a healthy rebutal of Gore’s alarmist documentary. I don’t deny that some degree of global warming is occurring, but statist environmentalists would be just as up-in-arms about global cooling. There are in fact both positive and negative consequences to both. Such climate change is natural, however, and I’m not absolutely convinced that humans are making a significant contribution to global warming (see here for example). Moreover, there is no consensus on what effects global warming is having or will have. One recent study suggests it could cause a mini-ice age in Europe, another suggests it is responsible for increased vegetation (a positive for environmentalists!). As for the negative consequences, we don’t know whether they will outweigh the positive. More importantly, we don’t know if the alleged positive consequences (if any) of the statist public policies recommended by Gore and his alarmist ilk will outweigh by their negative consequences. A sound understanding of political and economic theory and history provides little reason to suspect they will come even close to doing so. Certainly the shaky and highly exaggerated “evidence” provided by the alarmists does not justify them. Finally, Gore and his ilk rarely consider the largely unseen negative consequences of their proposed policies, fail to consider the general superiority of free market solutions, and, as the article indicates toward the end, fail to consider how we can cope with the negative consequences of global warming with existing and possible future technologies, practices, and entrepreneurial innovations.

Consider this: If humans aren’t the primary and/or a significant cause of global warming, then statist policies will not only have their usual predictable negative consequences, but will leave us (especially the poor) less able to cope with the negative consequences of a global warming we didn’t cause and can’t stop. And if we are the primary and/or significant cause, statist policies are still the wrong way to go because they will inevitably hinder economic progress (again harming the poor the most) not only making us less well off materially than we otherwise would have been but also, actually, at the same time and for the same reasons, hindering the advance toward more environmentally-friendly technologies, personal lifestyles, and business strategies. Not to mention the fact that the statist route will serve to perpetuate the plutocracy in this country and the world, as it has always done and will ever do, contrary to the professed wishes of leftists yet perfectly in keeping with their actual actions.

I’ve got a blogpost on global warming in the works, but in the meantime:

Old MySpace Post:

1) PETA president and co-founder Ingrid Newkirk has described her groups overall goal as total animal liberation. This means no meat, no milk, no zoos, no circuses, no wool, no leather, no hunting, no fishing, and no pets (not even seeing-eye dogs). PETA is also against all medical research that requires the use of animals.

2) Despite its constant moralizing about the unethical treatment of animals by restaurant owners, grocers, farmers, scientists, anglers, and countless other Americans, PETA has killed over 10,000 dogs and cats at its Norfolk, Virginia headquarters. During 2003, PETA put to death over 85 percent of the animals it collected from members of the public.

3) PETA has given tens of thousands of dollars to convicted arsonists and other violent criminals. This includes a 2001 donation of $1,500 to the North American Earth Liberation Front (ELF), an FBI-certified domestic terrorist group responsible for dozens of firebombs and death threats. During the 1990s, PETA paid $70,200 to an Animal Liberation Front (ALF) activist convicted of burning down a Michigan State University research laboratory. In his sentencing recommendation, a federal prosecutor implicated PETA president Ingrid Newkirk in that crime. And PETA vegetarian campaign coordinator Bruce Friedrich told an animal rights convention in 2001 that blowing stuff up and smashing windows is a great way to bring about animal liberation.

4) PETA activists regularly target children as young as six years old with anti-meat and anti-milk propaganda, often waiting outside their schools to intercept them as they walk to and from class-without notifying parents. One piece of kid-targeted PETA literature tells small children: Your Mommy Kills Animals! PETA brags that its messages reach over 2 million children every year, including thousands reached by e-mail without the permission of their parents. One PETA vice president told the Fox News Channels audience: Our campaigns are always geared towards children, and they always will be.

5) PETA has used a related organization, the PETA Foundation, to fund the misnamed Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a deceptive animal rights group that promotes itself as an unbiased source of medical and nutritional information. PCRM’s president also serves as president of the PETA Foundation.

6) PETA runs campaigns seemingly calculated to offend religious believers. One entire PETA website is devoted to the claim-despite ample evidence to the contrary-that Jesus Christ was a vegetarian. PETA holds protests at houses of worship, even suing one church that tried to protect its members from Sunday-morning harassment. Its billboards taunt Christians with the message that hogs died for their sins. PETA insists, contrary to centuries of rabbinical teaching, that the Jewish ritual of kosher slaughter shouldn’t be allowed. And its infamous Holocaust on Your Plate campaign crassly compares the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide with farm animals.

7) PETA has repeatedly attacked research foundations like the March of Dimes, the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, and the American Cancer Society, because they support animal-based research that might uncover cures for birth defects and life-threatening diseases. PETA president Ingrid Newkirk has said that even if animal research resulted in a cure for AIDS, we would be against it.

For more information about PETA, see these websites: www.consumerfreedom.com and www.petakillsanimals.com. Especially interesting is this piece: “PETA (Still) Kills Animals.” The hypocrisy of PETA, an organization that explicitly (and deplorably) values the lives of animals over human beings, is mindboggling.

Old MySpace Blogpost (June 7, 2006):

Here are some choice passages from the collection of some of Albert Jay Nock’s essays, The State of the Union: Essays in Social Criticism.

While spending time in Europe he remarked: “Here I saw the State behaving just as I had seen it behave at home [the USA]. Moreover, remembering the political theories of the eighteenth century, and the expectations put upon them, I was struck with the fact that the republican, constitutional-monarchical and autocratic States behaved exactly alike. This has never been sufficiently remarked. There was no practical distinction to be drawn among England, France, Germany, and Russia; in all these countries the State acted with unvarying consistency and unfailing regularity against the interests of the immense, of the overwhelming majority of its people. So flagrant and flagitious, indeed, was the action of the State in all these countries, that its administrative officials, especially its diplomats, would immediately, in any other sphere of action, be put down as a professional-criminal class; just as would the corresponding officials in my own country, as I had already remarked. It is a noteworthy fact, indeed, concerning all that has happened since then, that if in any given circumstances one went on the assumption that they were a professional-criminal class, one could predict with accuracy what they would do and what would happen; while on any other assumption one could predict almost nothing. The accuracy of my own predictions during the war [WWI] and throughout the Peace Conference was due to nothing but their being based on this assumption.”

Another, earlier passage is equally incisive: “Everyone knows that the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime that I spoke of a moment ago, and that it makes this monopoly as strict as it can. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien. There is, for example, no human right, natural or Constitutional, that we have not seen nullified by the Unites States Government. Of all the crimes that are committed for gain or revenge, there is not one that we have not seen it commit – murder, mayhem, arson, robbery, fraud, criminal collusion and connivance. On the other hand, we have all remarked the enormous relative difficulty of getting the State to effect any measure for the general welfare. Compare the difficulty of securing conviction in cases of notorious malfeasance, and in cases of petty private crime.”

Nock also remarks eloquently on the disjunction between what statists consider to be immoral in private life with what they think is acceptable, even necessary behavior in politics. “The idea came to me then, vaguely but unmistakably, that if the primary intention of government was not to abolish crime but merely to monopolize crime, no better device could be found for doing it than the inculcation of precisely this frame of mind in the officials and in the public; for the effect of this was to exempt both from any allegiance to those sanctions of humanity or decency which anyone of either class, acting as an individual, would have felt himself bound to respect – nay, would have wished to respect.”

Old MySpace Blogpost (June 6, 2006):

Many Straussians, Lincoln-idolators (many of whom are Straussians), and other statists like to suppress the fact that the states had the right to secede from the “Union” as well as the right to nullify legislative enactments they thought were unconstitutional. As one piece of evidence that these rights were widely recognized prior to Lincoln’s unconstitutional and unjust war on the South, and not just made up by Calhoun in order to protect the institution of slavery:

Section One of the Kentucky Resolve of 1798
(Authored by Thomas Jefferson)

November 10, 1798

Resolved, that the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principles of unlimited submission to their General Government; but that by compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes, delegated to that Government certain definite powers, reserving each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self Government; and that whansoever the General Goverment assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force: That to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming as to itself, the other party: That the Government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well as of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.

Old MySpace Blogposts:

From May 20, 2006:

Bill Kauffman, author of Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists – localist conservative anarchist, Jeffersonian decentralist, and reactionary radical – whose book I just began slowly reading, has a group blog [which unfortunately looks to be ended] to promote his book. Check out Reactionary Radicals.

***

I love the opening paragraph of Kauffman’s book:

“I am an American patriot. A Jeffersonian decentralist. A fanatical localist. And I am an anarchist. Not a sallow garret-rat translating Proudhon by pirated kilowatt, nor a militiaman catechized by the Classic Comics version of The Turner Diaries; rather, I am the love child of Henry Thoreau and Dorothy Day, conceived amidst the asters and goldenrod of an Upstate New York autumn.”

The next two paragraphs aren’t half-bad either:

“Like so many of the subjects of this book, I am also a reactionary radical, which is to say I believe in peace and justice but I do not believe in smart bombs, daycare centers, Wal-Mart, television, or Melissa Etheridge’s test-tube baby.

“Reactionary radicals” are those Americans whose political radicalism (often inspired by the principles of 1776 and the culture of the early America) is combined with – in fact, flows from – a deep-set social “conservatism.””

Another great paragraph: “Look Homeward, America – and yes, the echoes of Thomas Wolfe and George McGovern are intentional – offers an alternative to the American Empire whose subject no true-hearted American would wish to be. Mine is a Middle American, profoundly un-imperial patriotism based in love of American music, poetry, places, quirks and commonalities, historical crotchets, holy fools and eminent Kansans. It is not the sham patriotism of the couch-sitter who sings “God Bless America” as the bombs light up his television, or the chickenhawk who loves little of his country beyond its military might.”

And another: “Robert Frost put his faith in the “insubordinate Americans,” throaty dissenters and ornery traditionalists, and this book is for and about them – those Americans who reject Empire; who cherish the better America, the real America; who cannot be broken by the Department of Homeland Security, who will not submit to the PATRIOT Act, and who will make the land acrid and bright with the stench and flame of burnt national ID cards when we – should we – cross that Orwellian pass. This is still our country, you know. Don’t let Big Brother and the imperialists take it from us.”

I’m against empire and the State in general. I like television, but I recognize its downsides as well. I generally don’t have a problem with Wal-Mart, except insofar as it benefits from government aid (and it does). I am in many ways a localist and definitely a decentralist, but I’m also a global humanist who sees humanity as a loose-knit global society with a shared human nature and, if we are to have a free society, some shared values as well. I’m also not quite so convinced as most social conservatives that what they think is morally wrong actually is so for everyone. In any case, there is no necessary contradiction between being a social conservative and a radical libertarian; indeed, many libertarians I know are both.

I am an American patriot…but of America as it once was and might have been, not as it is now. I am an Aristotelian-libertarian anarchist.

***

From May 21st, 2006:

Kauffman ends the first chapter of his book with a great quote from Chodorov followed by a self-comparison that is revealing of the difference between a reactionary like Kauffman and a radical like Chodorov. I remain skeptical just how radical a reactionary radical can be.

The quote: “A government building you regard as a charnel house, which in fact it is; you enter it always under duress, and you never demean yourself by curtsying to its living or dead statuary. The stars on the general’s shoulders merely signify that the man might have been a useful member of society; you pity the boy whose military garb identifies his servility [sorry Ben! but I have to agree!]. The dais on which the judge sits elevates the body but lowers the man, and the jury box is a place where three-dollar-a-day slaves enforce the law of slavery. You honor the tax dodger. You do not vote because you put too high a value on your vote.”

That last sentence is reminiscent of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience in which he analogized voting to gambling with morality. If you’re willing to leave an issue up to a vote or, worse yet, up to a vote for a statesman (read state’s man; a much more apt term than politician) you foolishly hope will represent your views, then you either don’t care all that much about the issue or lack the integrity and responsibility to do the right thing yourself. For example, concerned about the poor? Help them out yourself rather than get Uncle Sam to rob Peter to pay Paul.

Kauffman’s self-comparison with Chodorov: “Mind you, my profuse and sentimental localism keeps me from being half as radical as Chodorov. I have friends who are judges, legislators, even soldiers. I vote often, if futilely. I pay town, village, and county taxes without grumbling. (I’ve a mild objection to state taxes, and I loathe, execrate, and abominate – but pay – federal taxes, which are put to purposes nefarious and even homicidally sinister.)”

Now, I pay taxes too. I’m not a moron, nor am I in a position in my life in which I feel the need to play the martyr. But I don’t pay any taxes willingly and consider all taxes to be immoral and unjust. I have a friend who is a soldier, but I don’t hold it against him. I myself was once a soldier in the LA Army National Guard. (As a side note, the National Guard no longer performs the function it was intended to and is really just another branch of the national standing army.) And I no longer vote. A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for evil and, in any case, is still just a gamble, an attempt at self-defense at best, a sanction of evil at worst.

[I don’t vote for political candidates, but I may occasionally vote in referendums or whatnot in an attempt to directly decrease state power – by blocking some statist measure or supporting a measure that moves in a libertarian direction. I don’t trust any politicians, not even Libertarian party candidates – especially not since the LP apparatchiks sold out.]