Category Archives: libertarianism

Updated: Octuplets One Can Get Behind: Apu & Manjula Nahasapeemapetilon's

libertarianism, Media, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

I’ve been able to avoid commenting on the curious case of Rod Blagojevich, the creepy politician who’s been singled out for special attention by an equally creepy media and Blagojevich’s crooked peers.

I see I’ll not be spared the scourge of single mother, Nadya Suleman—the interest in the woman who gave birth to octuplets in California last week is simply too great. Suleman, 33, “already had six children before giving birth on Monday,” and now has 14 kids below the age of eight.

The public might not be too enamored of Suleman, or support her plans to hawk these poor mites on Oprah, reports the Times of London, since,

“Many have asked how an unemployed single mother can raise 14 children, as her first six have already strained the family budget.”

And:

“Experts believe that the unnamed fertility specialists who gave her in vitro fertilisation (IVF) should not have implanted so many embryos.”

Does the Times mean to imply that if the insane sow Suleman had been implanted with, say, four embryos only the dilemma would be no longer?

Talk about asking the wrong questions.

The question a moral society would ask is this:

How does an unmarried, unemployed ho, with iffy finances, and no partner, get fertilized again and again with potential children?

Under libertarian law, such transactions, of course, would not be banned. Since a welfare society would cease to exist, the incentives to manufacture these mites would diminish. One can trust accredited, professional, medical societies to police themselves.

And, of course, neither the government nor the market can eliminate a freak head case like Suleman and the odd quack who’d gratify her craven, selfish needs.

The first problem we have is an extant and growing welfare society that encourages and subsidized degrees of depravity (although Suleman is pretty far gone).

The second problem is immorality: A culture in which the consensus keepers refuse to condemn—or allow a condemnation of—laziness, self-indulgence, and lax morality. Look, Angelina Jolie has an unhealthy fetish she indulges: having or acquiring kids. She clearly gets a kick out of popping them out or adopting them. Once they grow into spoilt, insufferable, stupid brats, she’ll be less enamored of them, although still more than able to provide for her brood.

The thing is, Jolie can afford her fetishes; Suleman can’t.

The risky medical procedure, notwithstanding, my favorite octuplets were Anoop, Uma, Nabendu, Poonam, Pria, Sandeep, Sashi, and Gheet. They were born to a celebrity, married couple: Apu and Manjula Nahasapeemapetilon of The Simpsons. Those were octuplets one could get behind.

Update (Feb 2): “Octuplets mom gets TV, book offers” (via Roger).

Updated: Memo To Ditto Heads: Obama Didn’t Do It

Barack Obama, Bush, Conservatism, Economy, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Inflation, libertarianism

Just in case ditto heads are still blaming Obama for the economic depression we’re in, here’s a reality check, and an excerpt from the CNN documentary, “I.O.U.S.A.”:

January 1, 2000, Federal Debt: $5.6 Trillion Dollars.

George W. Bush is declared the winner of the 2000 election.

One of his first priorities is pushing a large tax cut.

September 11, the attacks put the U.S. on war footing.

Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost hundreds of billions.

May 1, 2003, Federal debt: $6.5 trillion.

Through Bush’s first term, the Fed cuts interest rates 12 times. [Creating the glut of malinvestment and spending]

The dollar begins a long, steep decline against other currencies.

Cheap credit floods the housing market.

Many home buyers grab risky, non-fixed mortgages. [Helped along by existing federal laws, to which Bush added,mandating loans to risky minorities]

The war drags on.

Bush signs into law Medicare-D, an expensive drug benefit program.

Bush wins re-election on November 3, 2004.

Federal debt: About $10.7 trillion and 75 percent of GDP.

Federal deficit: $455 billion … and now we’re talking trillions for several years going forward.

[Snip]

As we’ve pointed, the totality of US government liabilities exceeds the worth of its citizens.

Also pointed out in this space, years back, is that with an extremely high debt-to-GDP ratio, the US would not be admitted to the company of socialists: the EU. The US’s debt is about 75 percent of its GDP.

I’m often asked what is to be expected under these dire circumstances.

Assets will continue to devalue. Saving will be difficult; retirement near impossible, because, with the continuing devaluation of the dollar, savings depreciate. Hyperinflation is a very real threat, as the amount of goods in the economy decreases, and the supply of worthless paper increases.

Now Obama’s thinking is wrongheaded: he is as clueless as Republicans about the economy and will only prolong the agony. Nevertheless, “I didn’t do it” (Bart Simpson’s famous phrase) is an appropriate defense of Barack.

Update: In response to comments. I do hope the Addiction to that Rush is not on display.

So it’s Obama’s deficit as it is Bush’s??? ‘Cmon; don’t be a ditto head. As bad as he is, Obama is probably one of the least influential politicians to date, given his short tenure in office. (He is destined to change that, of course.) Didn’t ditto heads make that very point in arguing against his candidacy?

This is not about giving anyone a pass. However, spreading irresponsibility is just what ditto heads and democrats like. This allows their respective point men and women to continue to commit legalized crimes, because responsibility in government is always socialized. “Don’t play the blame game” is the political parasite’s favored term.

No, Obama was a relatively obscure politician until now. Bush and Cheney—they ought to have been impeached. Blame for the depression belongs to their administration and to its foreign, fiscal and monetary policy.

To collectivize responsibility and spread it around equally is to oblige the political operatives, and reward them for their crimes. That’s precisely what they want. You’ve fallen into their trap. I’m afraid responsibility must be assigned with laser-like precision.

While on the issue of history, not revisionism, one more thing: The only commentators deserving credit for warning of the financial crisis are my fractious political tribe—not all, but certain libertarians and assorted paleos. And Ron Paul always. Of course, because, other than Paul, we are relatively unknown, the likes of Stephen Moore, who wrote odes to Bush’s “ownership society,” can remake themselves into all-knowing gurus, without crediting their betters.

No one in the age of the idiot will be the wiser.

Updated: Older Liberals Like Me

Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, EU, Ilana Mercer, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism

James Burnham on classical liberals of the nineteenth century:

“Older liberals tended to be patriotic and nationalistic. They believed in the self-government, independence and sovereignty of their own country, and also in the right of other nations and peoples to be independent and self-governing. They were ready to fight, and did fight… There was little trace of pacifism in nineteenth century liberalism; rather more imperialism than pacifism.”

“As rationalists they believed that … other things being equal, peace among nations is better than war. But Peace had a modest priority; there were a number of other things, Liberty prominent among them, more important than Peace.” (Suicide of the West, 1964, p. 172)

In some respects, modern-day libertarians are closer to left-liberals than classical liberals—in preaching pacifism, and in their disregard for notion of the nation and its place among nations.

Update I (Jan. 3): Speaking of nineteenth-century liberals like myself, “Eurosceptic Czech President Vaclav Klaus” is a good example. Klaus opposes the European Union for its sovereignty sundering supranational regulation, and “stubbornly refuses to fly the EU flag.”

It’s a great shame that his people, who once cheered this free-thinking, free marketeer, are turning against him—and their better instincts—and toward the prevailing, pitiful PC around them. Resisting propaganda is never easy.

Patriot Goes Up Against Treason Lobbyist

BAB's A List, Crime, Ethics, Ilana Mercer, IMMIGRATION, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, libertarianism

Patriot Peter Brimelow, founder of VDARE.COM, debated Treason Lobbyist Jacob Hornberger on immigration.

I await footage of the debate, but I expect “Bumper Hornberger” was intellectually disemboweled.

He ought to be used to it, although the bitch-slap he received from Robert Bidinotto occurred some time ago, so “Bumper” may need a reminder. See “Shame on Bumper Hornberger,” reproduced hereunder.

I have no wish to revisit the manner in which he (and his ever-righteous ifeminist handmaiden, or hyena, rather) swarmed me. I’ll say only this: Hornberger and his backers seldom fail to bend over backwards to avoid imputing evil intent to bad elements or evil characters (as Bidinotto elaborates hereunder). Yet me Bumper and his gang accused of malicious intent in the absence of any. In other words, they implied I was a liar; impugning my person rather than my positions.

Again, notwithstanding the intellectual differences we hold on the issues; what makes these people–who’re forever posing as paragons of justice–so despicable is that they convicted me of malicious intent when there was none.

In the universe of these twisted individuals, some are more equal than others.

In any event, in “Shame on Bumper Hornberger,” Robert Bidinotto explains why “Bumper Hornberger” is a lousy exegete, not fit to defend truth. This is why I am quite confident Peter Brimelow, a class act, will have tossed and gored Hornberger “real good.”

The BIDINOTTO BLOG
Shame on Bumper Hornberger
posted 08/26/03

Bumper who?

Okay, apologies. This impromptu post refers to a matter more arcane than you’ll normally find here, and I beg your patience for a brief setup.

A feisty columnist for WorldNetDaily.com, Ilana Mercer, recently took on some fellow libertarians for their one-sided view of Middle East politics: the view that Israel is the root of all evil, and that the poor, downtrodden Palestinians are merely responding defensively and justly against the Zionist oppressor.

Ilana (she’s a friend, so I’ll call her that) has a perfectly good point. There’s a curious moral asymmetry among some self-styled lovers of Liberty and Justice, who rage against Israel for targeting the likes of Hamas terrorists in self-defense, yet who simultaneously exude boundless sympathy toward those who encourage their kids to strap on explosives and blow themselves up, along with scores of innocent noncombatants in buses, restaurants, and nightclubs. For most Americans, this is an easy moral call; but then again, most Americans aren’t libertarian anarchists.

Anyway, it so happens that one of Ilana’s targets was a writer and editor, Sheldon Richman. Not one to mince words, she wrote: “I understand that libertarians like Sheldon Richman (and the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review) believe, mistakenly, that all ‘the land’ belongs to the Arabs.”

Mr. Richman, who is of Jewish descent, took great offense. He claimed that with this sentence Ilana had implied that he, too, was among those who denied the reality of the Holocaust. One notes, though, that in her sentence, Ilana had fastidiously segregated Mr. Richman from the Holocaust Deniers by means of a parenthetical barricade. I don’t think that any fair reading of the sentence (that is, a reading by someone not personally involved in the counterpunching) would construe it to mean that Mr. Richman was similar to the I. H. R. in denying the Holocaust–only in their shared beliefs about Arab claims to Israeli land.

Now Ilana Mercer is perfectly capable of defending herself, and she has. But a bit of piling on against her has begun, with one Jacob “Bumper” Hornberger–head of something called the Future of Freedom Foundation–now hyperventilating against the lady and her online publisher, WorldNetDaily.

Mr. Hornberger believes that Mr. Richman was grievously wounded by Ilana’s parenthetical bludgeon, and has publicly damned WorldNetDaily (“Shame on WorldNetDaily” is his screed’s title) for daring to defend their columnist, rather than muzzling or disowning her. Along the way, he accuses Ilana of a “false and despicable insinuation” and of a “smear”; and he further claims that she “knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally chose not to pursue the truth…”

I would have stayed out of this particular little spat except for two things.

First, I don’t much like it when men gang up on a lady–especially a lady whom I know to be honorable.

Second, it so happens that I’ve had a bit of first-hand experience with Mr. Hornberger concerning the matters that he says so concern him: false and despicable insinuations, smears, and deliberate misrepresentations of the truth.

This seems an opportune moment to revisit that episode.

The July 1990 issue of his Freedom Daily column, “The Forgotten Importance of Civil Liberties,” found Mr. Hornberger striking his favorite pose–that of a self-righteous moralizer–this time to attack me for what he described as “a tremendous intellectual assault on civil liberties.” My offense, he proclaimed to his readership (such as it is), was my three-part series, “Crime and Consequences,” which appeared during 1989 in The Freeman magazine.

While I am gratified that, to Mr. Hornberger, my series was both “tremendous” and “intellectual,” I certainly didn’t recognize any of my views in his characterization of them. According to him, here is what I said:

“Concerned with ever-increasing crime rates in America, Mr. Bidinotto argued that the solution, at least in part, turned on the curtailment of the safeguards enunciated in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Mr. Bidinotto suggested that if Americans just loosened some of the strictures in the Bill of Rights which enabled so many criminals to go free, the crime problem could be significantly alleviated. Not spared from Mr. Bidinotto’s attack were civil liberties lawyers as well as such rights as trial by jury, right to bail, right to counsel, protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, and protection from self-incrimination.”

Now had I written any of those things, I would have been first in line to condemn myself, sparing Mr. Hornberger the strain of further moral posturing. But the reader will first note a curious fact: nowhere in his bill of indictment does one find a single word in quotation marks. [A technique “Bumper” and his ifeminist friend further perfected on me.]

That isn’t surprising, since not a single claim is true.

What Mr. Hornberger declared to be attacks on the Bill of Rights were nothing more than my unapologetic assault on the Warren Court’s infamous misinterpretations and manipulations of the Bill of Rights: their shameless departures from a “strict constructionist” approach to constitutional interpretation, and their wholesale invention of a category of criminal “rights” never envisioned, intended, nor codified by the Framers.

For example, I criticized Supreme Court decisions such as Miranda v. Arizona (1966) and Mapp v. Ohio (1961) for manufacturing evidentiary “exclusionary rules” that one finds nowhere in the Constitution or Bill of Rights. Yet Mr. Hornberger equated my criticism of this constitutional vandalism with criticism of the Constitution itself. Perhaps this is understandable. Mr. Hornberger is an attorney, and having gone through a modern law school, he may no longer be capable of grasping subtle distinctions–such as the difference between James Madison and Earl Warren.

To take another example, what exactly did I say that he declared to be an “attack” on the “right to bail”? Only this: “Career criminals–and anyone with a history of escapes or failures to show in court–should never get bail consideration.” That is hardly a radical assault on a “right”: in fact, it’s the essence of the 1984 federal Bail Reform Act, which grants judges the authority to deny bail to defendants who pose a danger to individuals or the community. My position is totally consistent with the wording of the Eighth Amendment, which says that “Excessive bail shall not be required”–leaving it to judges to determine whether defendants are trustworthy to appear in court, whether bail ought to be granted, and in what amount. I said nothing inconsistent with this established principle, leaving me to wonder if Mr. Hornberger believes that the Constitution guarantees bail to every defendant, no matter what his character or trustworthiness.

I could go on, but the interested reader can decide the matter for himself. The three-part series is available online: Part I, Part II, and Part III. [Links defunct.]

Afterwards, the reader may also decide for himself if the accusations Mr. Hornberger slings at Ilana Mercer more appropriately describe the accusations he made against me: “false and despicable insinuation” and “smear” by someone who “knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally chose not to pursue the truth…”

If Mr. Richman needs a defender concerned with the truth, it should be someone other than Bumper Hornberger.