Monthly Archives: June 2010

UPDATED (7/31/020): Beck Bad-mouths Byrd, RIP

Democrats, Glenn Beck, Race, Racism, Republicans, States' Rights, The South, War

It looks like Glenn Beck is positioning himself as a right-wing racial policeman to rival the Sharpton and Jackson reign of terror. Today, Beck badmouthed the late Robert Byrd, one of the last principled, old-style Democrats, making sure that his listeners were aware of the old Byrd’s clan membership way back in the 1940s or 1950s.

Byrd was an old Southern gentleman after whom Republicans have always chased for his past peccadilloes. Intellectually honest souls that they are, Republicans would attack Byrd’s present policy positions by citing his distant-past indiscretions. Pretty much how Beck played it today.

Most recently, Byrd (D-W.Va.), “a stern constitutional scholar who has always stood up for the legislative branch in its role in checking the power of the White House,” warned about Obama’s executive-branch power grab.

According to Politico, “Byrd complained about Obama’s decision to create White House offices on health reform, urban affairs policy, and energy and climate change. Byrd said such positions ‘can threaten the Constitutional system of checks and balances. At the worst, White House staff have taken direction and control of programmatic areas that are the statutory responsibility of Senate-confirmed officials.'”

Last year, Sen. Byrd issued this warning regarding the procedural shenanigans the Democrats tried to deploy to pass the healthscare bill:

“I oppose using the budget reconciliation process to pass health care reform and climate change legislation…. As one of the authors of the reconciliation process, I can tell you that the ironclad parliamentary procedures it authorizes were never intended for this purpose.”

The frail senator had taken to the floor of the United States Senate on October 14, 2009, “to discuss the situation in Afghanistan and voice his concerns over the possibility of a major increase in U.S. forces into Afghanistan”:

“General McChrystal, our current military commander in Afghanistan, has requested 30,000-40,000 additional American troops to bolster the more than 65,000 American troops already there. I am not clear as to his reasons and I have many, many questions. What does General McChrystal actually aim to achieve?” “So I am compelled to ask: does it really, really take 100,000 U.S. troops to find Osama bin Laden?”

Perhaps if Republicans adopted Byrd’s skepticism of war for the sake of war, and rediscovered authentic Taft Republicanism—they might even deserve to win the next election.

Here Sen. Byrd is at his finest:

RIP Robert Byrd, you were sui generis.

As for Beck: as if the nation does not already feed on fiction, Beck, aided by one David Barton, has been busily breathing life into—and developing—a fanciful idea: America had black Founding Fathers. A racist society and its schooling have stopped this truth from percolating down to your kids. Glenn to the rescue.

UPDATE: The footage is not yet online (or I haven’t been able to find it), but Beck also singled out Byrd for opposing the Civil Rights Act, the same tack Democrats took with Rand Paul recently.

I would not have expected anything less from Byrd. As I wrote when Rand was being lynched, “It has never occurred to me that for the reasoning advanced in these posts, I could be construed as a racist. Respectable scholars advance the same arguments: Richard A. Epstein, Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England, 1995), and Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom: The Story of How Through The Centuries Private Ownership has Promoted Liberty and the Rule of Law (New York, 2000).

Beck’s litmus test for racism is as rigorous as Shaka Zulu’s sniff test for witches.

UPDATED (7/31/020): Anti-war all the way.

Life, Liberty and Property Stronger (State Rights, Not So Much)

Constitution, Federalism, GUNS, Individual Rights, Natural Law, States' Rights

As someone who doesn’t believe the Constitution gave the government the right to enforce the Bill of Rights in the states, the Supreme Court’s latest gun-rights decision presents with the usual dilemma. The SCOTUS has decided that “the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms applies to every jurisdiction in the country – throwing doubt on a Chicago law that bans handguns in the home.”

Still, and overall, the ruling will revive the eroded, immutable right to defend life, liberty and property. (The title of John Lott’s op-ed encapsulates exactly that: “Court’s Gun Decision An Important Win for Americans Who Want to Defend Themselves.”) This is a war. Progressives have left little of the original Constitutional scheme. A victory for natural rights in the rights-violating society we inhabit is a good thing. The good guys won. A toast to the patriots who fought the good fight: a besieged black man from Chicago and his lawyer.

Johnny-Come-Krugman Diagnoses Depression

Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation, Media, Political Economy

Austrians like myself have long been calling this “recession” a depression. My WND colleague Vox Day wrote a book explaining why this economic downturn is a depression—the worst we’ve seen so far because of unprecedented levels of household and government debt. Now Paul Krugman, whose Keynesian voodoo I discussed in “Obama To G-20: Print More Money, Don’t Make It,” has, finally, diagnosed a depression.

This dangerous moron, however, believes depressions are caused by lack of spending—dips in demand must be compensated for by massive state spending, or else. That’s Keynesianism in a nut shell. Of course, be it on the macro or micro level, debt = decline + decay

HERE crazy Krug condemns the “resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy”:

“…this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.”

[SNIP]

Fans of Vox Day: write to our friend and urge him to write-up answers to the interview I sent him weeks back pursuant to reading the copy of “The Return of The Great Depression” he mailed me. Change the questions if you don’t like them, VD, respond to the Krug news; do what you like with my text, just get to it.

UPDATED: In Defense Of Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Free Markets, Free Speech, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Paleoconservatism, Political Correctness, Political Philosophy

Tom Piatak’s article, “Nazis and Other Delusions: A Response to Hoppe,” is generating a lot of heat at Chronicles Magazine, edited by the peerless Dr. Fleming. Hans Hoppe, whom I know and like, is said to have referred to some prominent paleoconservatives, Pat Buchanan and the late Sam Francis, as national socialists.

Writes Piatak, “All the paleoconservatives present at the 1996 meeting with whom I spoke confirmed my recollection of this, and I can attest that Sam Francis understood Hoppe to be calling him a Nazi as well.”

Hard-hitting, for sure, I have always understood Hoppe’s “national socialism” comments to be a condemnation of the economic thinking of his philosophical foes. Besides being an unbelievably hackneyed and meaningless label, libeling someone a Nazi usually refers to their alleged anti-Semitism or racism. Hoppe’s libertarianism is the kind that doesn’t give a hoot if someone harbors such sentiments, just as long as the so-called Nazi keeps his mitts to himself.

That’s my position as a paleolibertarian. I don’t care if you hate me for being Jewish, just stay out of my face. In fact, I will go so far as to say that I despise sanctimonious neocons (like the stupid E. Hasslebeck on “The View”) who go out of their way to hunt down and humiliate anyone who shows “prejudice.” (I want to start a “Protect the Prejudiced” movement.) I think Hoppe is pretty much like that.

More important: Hoppe has been hounded by the PC police and accused of racism, homophobia—you name it. He is pretty uncompromising on race, culture—is a defender of the natural aristocracy and the West they way it ought to be. Mr. Piatak himself quotes the uncompromising Hoppe using designations such as “human trash” and “inferior people” quite comfortably. This doesn’t sound like a person who would turn around and, self-righteously, call another a Nazi.

Why would someone with Hans’ views,then, use the “national socialism” pejorative in the way he is accused of doing against his interlocutors? It’s just not Hoppe’s style. Coming from Hoppe, I am inclined to see any use of the national socialism label as descriptive of their economics. Economics is his field, after all.

“What have Hoppe’s fellow libertarians done on immigration since 1996?” asks Piatak. Unless he has backpedalled on immigration, Hans was one of the few libertarians to oppose the mass immigration immolation.

See “TRADE GOODS, NOT PLACES.” I’ve always taken Hans to be both anarchist and immigration restrictionist, which is, some would argue, inconsistent. “TRADE GOODS, NOT PLACES” does not paper over the inconsistencies:

Matters would be simple if all libertarians agreed that a constitutional government has an obligation to repel foreign invaders. They don’t, not if they are anarchists. Both open-border and closed-border libertarian anarcho-capitalists posit that an ideal society is one where there is no entity—government—to monopolize defense and justice functions. In a society based on anarcho-capitalism, where every bit of property is privately owned, the reasoning goes, private property owners cannot object if X invites Y onto his property, so long as he keeps him there, or so long as Y obtains permission to venture onto other spaces. Despite their shared anarchism, limited-immigration anarcho-libertarians and free-immigration anarcho-libertarians arrive respectively at different conclusions when they make the transition from utopia to real life.

The latter believe the state must refrain from interfering with the free movement of people despite the danger they may pose to nationals. The former arrive at the exact opposite conclusion: So long as the modern American Welfare State stands, and so long as it owns large swaths of property, it’s permissible to expect the state to carry out its traditional defensive functions. This includes repelling incomers who may endanger the lives and livelihoods of locals. [UPDATE (June 27): This, in my understanding, is Hoppe’s position.]

The open-border libertarian will claim that his is the less porous position. He will accuse the limited-immigration libertarian of being guilty of, on the one hand, wanting the state to take action to counter immigration, but, on the other hand, because of his anarchism, being at pains to find a basis for the interventions he favors. Not being an anarchist, and hence not having to justify the limited use by government of force against invaders, I hope I have escaped these contradictions.

This essay is in my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society. Get it.

By the by, Hans, whom many people vilify as haughty, can be a lot of fun.