FBastiat's Comments

Frontpage Magazine : First, They Came for the Catholics

Thu, 2 Feb 2012 18:41:28 +0000

FROM Knocking Over the Wall: The Suppression of Church by State: Observe what is necessary to bring a minimum of coherence to the argument: an equivocation between "the public primarily" -- the private citizens who work for or patronize these private institutions -- and "the public rules" -- the dictates that government wants to force upon these private parties. The bill "restores the separation of church and state in the insurance market" only in the sense that when the "State" invades that market, the "Church" must go -- state imperialism in practice. Observe also the real motive: the dubious insulation of employees from what Leftism labels the "economic power" of employers. In practical terms, prospective employees who don't like the benefits package offered by a religious employer will flock to his secular competitors -- something that millions of people do every day. (Conversely, there are many religious "customers and employees" who very much want a company that reflects their values -- something that "progressives" have no problem understanding when it involves their values.) Finally, observe the fundamental principle: Socialist imperatives supersede civil liberties -- déjà vu encore une fois.

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Soak the Poor - Frank Chodorov - Mises Daily

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:01:54 +0000

When you've got a liberal in a receptive mood ...

Antiwar.com Original Articles : What War With Iran Might Look Like

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:41:52 +0000

Dueling Defense Charts: Cato Wins; Heritage Loses

Ludwig von Mises Institute : University Guildsmen and the Anticapitalistic Mentality - Morgan A. Brown - Mises Daily

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:08:06 +0000

From HERE:

Even the economic inequality of the market substantiates the moral superiority of the Left, since the latter is the singular good that will vanquish the evil of the former. "Greed," like rape and racism, is judged yet another evil spreading throughout society. And the greater the evil of the social masses, the greater the need for the good of the socialist elite. "What you need," reveals Catharine MacKinnon, "is people who see through literature [!] like Andrea Dworkin, who see through law like me, to see through art and create the uncompromised women's visual vocabulary." While the Left condemns the free market for a division of labor based on ability and the alleged concoction of "false needs," its own politics centers on the dire need of the endarkened masses for axiological experts. …

And like all aspects of the Left, it traces back to the same source -- Marx: "[While] its heart is the proletariat," the "head of the emancipation is philosophy," i.e., the theory class of the socialist elite. So much for the endless ruminating as to why "the workers' struggle" so engages intellectuals. In time, that "heart" has come to be identified with the Third World, minorities, women, the environment, but in every incarnation it remains an organ to be controlled by that "head," an epistemological and ethical hierarchy who will rule as philosopher-tyrants. The Republic of Marx (to paraphrase Bakunin)

will not content itself with administering and governing the masses economically. It will also administer the masses culturally, concentrating in the hands of the State the formation of character, the development and spread of ideas, the standardization of language, the control of literature and the arts, the content of education, and finally the codification of the duties of each citizen to the only moral authority -- the State. All that will demand an immense virtue and many heads overflowing with "good intentions" in this government. It will be the reign of ideological virtue, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit humanists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of the Good, and an immense evil majority. And then, woe unto the mass of evil ones!

The Communist state -- even as the embryonic project of the League of the Just, whose proclamation was penned by Marx and Engels -- was never anything so much as an Inquisition launched against, not a handful of heretics, but the whole populace, for whom freedom would be only the freedom to do evil.

Antiwar.com Original Articles : We Shall Overcome

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:23:47 +0000

Nader has good things to say about Paul.

Frontpage Magazine : The NAACP Sics the UN on Our Sovereign States

Fri, 9 Dec 2011 15:26:15 +0000

FROM Requiem for the Left: For Leftists, all evil is mass evil -- "systemic," "institutional" evil -- against which only they stand. Just look at how over these past decades American racism has contracted in practice (largely because of the revolt against government-imposed segregation) but exploded in Leftist theory. The "rape culture" has also become a "racist society." It's gone from bigotry being the province of an Archie Bunker to this being a nation of Archie Bunkers -- and worse. Contemporary America is routinely described by such figures as Julianne Malveaux ("two hundred million white racists"), Joe Faegin ("every major aspect of life [here] is shaped ... by racist realities"), and Maulana Karenga ("increasing racism and continuing commitment to white supremacy") in terms honestly applicable to only apartheid or Nazism. But it's a progression not without its own logic: The greater the evil of the social masses, the greater the good of the socialist elite.

Antiwar.com Original Articles : Pro-Business vs. Pro-Market: What's the Difference?

Wed, 7 Dec 2011 15:58:02 +0000

FROM What’s Really Reactionary: The situation was paralleled across the Great Pond, where a nation virtually born of a revolution against mercantilism began to sire its own mercantilist enterprise. Mythologized as the "Progressive Era," when the Little Man and his (self-anointed) champions rose up to bridle the "economic power" of Big Business, this was actually -- in the phraseology of Gabriel Kolko -- a "triumph of conservatism," wherein the established "business and financial interests" sought to fend off upstart competitors by resorting to reactionary means: government intervention in the economy.

The "departure from orthodox laissez faire" is by and large the only part of the myth that was true. Instead of a handful of cephalopod monopolies using their "economic power" to constrict competition, the "dominant tendency in the American economy at the beginning of [the twentieth] century was toward growing competition," which the older corporations could not stop -- without political favoritism, that is. So "it was not the existence of [free-market] monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it." The new state regulatory bodies and their decisions were "invariably controlled by leaders of the regulated industry, and directed toward ends they deemed acceptable or desirable ... [mostly] because the regulatory movements were usually initiated by the dominant businesses to be regulated," e.g., the Interstate Commerce Commission and the railroad industry (and over the decades many others, such as the Food and Drug Administration and the pharmaceutical industry, the Securities Exchange Commission and the securities industry, the Federal Communications Commission and the various communication fields, the Civil Aeronautics Board and the airline industry, etc.). In addition, there were the huge subsidies, e.g., money and land to the railroads -- as well as the high protectionist tariffs, since, as the New York Times soon grasped,

so-called Anti-Trust law was passed to deceive the people and to clear the way for the enactment of this ... law relating to the tariff. It was projected in order that the party organs might say to the opponents of tariff extortion and protected combinations, "Behold! We have attacked the Trusts. The Republican party is the enemy of all such rings."

And the Progressive Era's patrimony to the present age? We can assign a contemporary "progressive" -- Ralph Nader -- the task of "restatement of the obvious":

The arms-length relationship which must characterize any democratic government in its dealings with special interest groups has been replaced, and not just by ad hoc wheeling and dealing, which has been observed for generations. What is new is the institutionalized fusion of corporate desires with public bureaucracy -- where the national security is synonymous with the state of Lockheed and Litton, where career roles are interchangeable along the industry-to-government-to-industry shuttle, where corporate risks and losses become taxpayer obligations. For the most part, the large unions do not object to this situation, having become modest co-partners, seeking derivative benefits from the governmental patrons of industry.

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Third Systems, Intervention and Government Functions - Ludwig von Mises - Mises Daily

Mon, 5 Dec 2011 17:01:03 +0000

It is necessary to point out this fact in order to prevent a confusion of socialism and interventionism.

Well, there ARE similarities:

Recall how he spoke of an ideology that "resembles that of communism." Indeed: a crafted mythology as official history; government growth as a declared inevitability; administration of the masses economically (professedly to benefit the lower classes, really to establish a political elite); the use of the term socialization to denote usurpation by the State of the institutions of society; the invocation of "wrecker" saboteurs ("reactionaries" and "conservatives") to prove that statism never fails, but is only failed; militarism in the service of "pacification." Corporate socialism and Communist socialism are of course not twin totalitarianisms, but they are kindred Orwellianisms: Fantasy is Reality -- reality, fantasy.

Frontpage Magazine : A Refreshing Weekend of Real Conservatism

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:13:19 +0000

Affirmative Action, Negative Justice

Antiwar.com Original Articles : Guam Shows the Way

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:00:45 +0000

Justin appeared yesterday in a Rothbard re-print on Mises.org.

Frontpage Magazine : In the Debt Crisis, Moral Equivalence Is Moral Evasion

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:51:14 +0000

Congress can't delegate fiscal policy, but it can balance the budget without raising taxes.

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Economic Law and the Occupy Wall Street Movement - Eric Phillips - Mises Daily

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 17:54:33 +0000

@ ClassicalLiberalism Great link! Thanks

Frontpage Magazine : Gay Slurs, Al Sharpton and Double Standards

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:19:41 +0000

Al Sharpton: Helped incite anti-Jewish riots in Crown Heights, New York in 1991. Convicted of libel for his role in the racially charged Tawana Brawley hoax. Incited black anti-Semites against a Jewish business establishment in Harlem in 1995.

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Depoliticize Everything - Stephen Mauzy - Mises Daily

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:50:57 +0000

Separation of Church and State and separation of SCHOOL and State — for the exact same reasons.

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Syndical Syndrome - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:45:20 +0000

FROM Who Would Be a Free Man? The Political Economy of Noam Chomsky:

It would be quite an understatement to say that Chomsky's actual position vis-à-vis anarchism and statism is somewhat "problematic." Can he really somehow be both a socialist and an anarchist -- or does logic force him off the fence? In Class Warfare (1996, pp.122-3), he declares, "[R]ight now I'd like to strengthen the federal government. The reason is, ... in this world there happen to be huge concentrations of private power which are as close to tyranny and as close to totalitarian as anything humans have devised [viz., business corporations,] ... [s]o you end up supporting centralized state power" to fight that "private power." This is a wholly unremarkable statement: socialism, the suppression of private enterprise, operatively requires "centralized state power." Who, from Lenin to Rothbard, would object? Even more along these lines, he (in a September 1999 interview with The Progressive) decries privatization as a crusade to destroy "every aspect of human life and attitudes and thought that involve social solidarity." What kind of libertarian, let alone anarchist, considers state coercion, not mutual consent, the foundation (indeed, the whole) of "social solidarity"? Worse yet, our New Left radical is parroting "corporate liberal" Robert Kuttner, who too uses "social solidarity" to label the meta-value supposedly evinced by welfare state programs (The Life of the Party: Democratic Prospects in 1988 and Beyond, 1987, pp.16-7). But compare all this with the fact that Chomsky regularly identifies himself as a "classical liberal" and earnestly bemoans how liberalism, a term that once stood for opposition to (or at least limitations on) state power, has been "perverted" to mean "a commitment to the use of state power for welfare purposes." He even fancies himself a kind of "[Old Right] conservative, like [Sen. Robert] Taft, [who] wants to cut back state power, cut back state intervention in the economy -- the same as someone like [Sen.] Mark Hatfield -- to preserve the Enlightenment ideals of freedom of expression, freedom from state violence, of law-abiding states, etc." (quoted in Milan Rai, Chomsky's Politics, 1995, p.188 n.24). Now compare that with his conviction that "New Deal liberalism ... [and] its achievements, which are the result of a lot of popular struggle, are worth defending and expanding" (The Common Good, 1998, p.5). If this is still not enough, I give you the lagniappe of a "socialist" who worries about the danger that corporations -- social bodies -- pose to individualism, since "[t]here's nothing individualistic about corporations" (Keeping the Rabble in Line, 1994, p.280). Though if that's true, then wouldn't these corporations be veritable fonts of "social solidarity" -- not "private power" -- which would consequently obviate the need for their suppression by "centralized state power"?

My "conclusion" is that Chomsky's political vocabulary, like Skinner's techno-cant, is a dialect of Newspeak that I'll "happily leave to others to decode."

Frontpage Magazine : Driving While White

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:51:25 +0000

This, from a 2003 essay, was meant as a joke:

The most interesting feature of this project (thus far) is its limitation to fields of achievement. This conflicts with the basic moral impulse of affirmative action: the egalitarian demand for "equality" irrespective of context. Logically, the campaign for diversity-of-pigment should be extended to fields of failure. If proportional reflection is an imperative for jobs, then isn't it equally an imperative for, say, jails? Shouldn't we make sure that the prison population "looks like America"? To achieve racial balance, all we would have to do is establish an arrest maximum for some ethnic groups and an arrest minimum for others. What possible objection could there be -- a concern for the actual behavior of individuals?

Frontpage Magazine : Meet the âOccupiersâ of a City Near You

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:25:00 +0000

OWS? Phony "radicals" — phony everything.

Frontpage Magazine : Driving While White

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:40:27 +0000

What IS "social justice"? http://www.abcdunlimited.com/ideas/social-justice...

Antiwar.com Original Articles : Why Oppose Interventionism?

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 13:55:57 +0000

"Astutely, Naomi Klein links the military side of empire to the economic theories of Milton Friedan, as applied in Chile." Actually, Klein herself has recognized:

"It's clear that Chile was never the laboratory of 'pure' free markets that its cheerleaders claimed. Instead, it was a country where a small elite leapt from wealthy to super-rich in extremely short order -- a highly profitable formula bankrolled by debt and heavily subsidized (then bailed out) with public funds. When the hype and salesmanship behind the miracle are stripped away, Chile under Pinochet and the Chicago Boys was not a capitalist state featuring a liberated market but a corporatist one .... a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war on the third power sector -- the workers -- thereby drastically increasing the alliance's share of the national wealth...."

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Occupy Wall Street: A Story Without Heroes - Anthony Gregory - Mises Daily

Tue, 4 Oct 2011 17:13:33 +0000

Good post, focusonpeace! AG's essay was linked at the Salon.com story comment section.

FBastiat's Comments

Frontpage Magazine : First, They Came for the Catholics

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Soak the Poor - Frank Chodorov - Mises Daily

Antiwar.com Original Articles : What War With Iran Might Look Like

Ludwig von Mises Institute : University Guildsmen and the Anticapitalistic Mentality - Morgan A. Brown - Mises Daily

Antiwar.com Original Articles : We Shall Overcome

Frontpage Magazine : The NAACP Sics the UN on Our Sovereign States

Antiwar.com Original Articles : Pro-Business vs. Pro-Market: What's the Difference?

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Third Systems, Intervention and Government Functions - Ludwig von Mises - Mises Daily

Frontpage Magazine : A Refreshing Weekend of Real Conservatism

Antiwar.com Original Articles : Guam Shows the Way

Frontpage Magazine : In the Debt Crisis, Moral Equivalence Is Moral Evasion

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Economic Law and the Occupy Wall Street Movement - Eric Phillips - Mises Daily

Frontpage Magazine : Gay Slurs, Al Sharpton and Double Standards

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Depoliticize Everything - Stephen Mauzy - Mises Daily

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Syndical Syndrome - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily

Frontpage Magazine : Driving While White

Frontpage Magazine : Meet the âOccupiersâ of a City Near You

Frontpage Magazine : Driving While White

Antiwar.com Original Articles : Why Oppose Interventionism?

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Occupy Wall Street: A Story Without Heroes - Anthony Gregory - Mises Daily

Frontpage Magazine : Meet the âOccupiersâ of a City Near You