Category Archives: libertarianism

Updated: Absolut Anti-Americanism Vs. Patriotism

America, Colonialism, Economy, IMMIGRATION, Israel, libertarianism, Socialism

Speaking of a hatred of America (see previous post): Let me say this: I’ve observed that the usual libertarian offenders sided with the Reconquista ad campaign of Swedish vodka maker Absolut.

They have my absolute contempt.

Such people are intent on never showing that they stick up for flesh-and-blood human beings—but can love only deracinated abstractions. Ideas and issues before individuals.

The invasion of the Southwest—or “Reconquista” in the parlance of La Raza libertarians’ —is wreaking havoc on a part of the world that was built-up beautifully by Americans, not Mexicans.

To shelter me and protect me, I’d trust a “red state fascist” any time over a libertarian Absolutist.

Speaking of patriots, I’ve just finished Pat Buchanan’s latest book. It goes without saying that I take issue with economic protectionisms. But about Pat there can be no quibble: he is an absolute patriot.

The other good news to emerge from Day of Reckoning is that Pat is rather complimentary about Israel. In fact, it’s as though he read my “Nature of the Jewish State” column about Israeli nationhood. These ideas are reiterated toward the end of Pat’s book. It was indeed a bonus for me to see a sea change in his appreciation of Israel’s existential challenges.

Update (April 16): For an evisceration of the welfare-state “argumentation” La Raza libertarians put forth see “The Work Open Borden Libertarians Won’t Do,” and other essays in the Immigration Archive.

As to our reader’s contention that “self-sufficient people don’t choose socialism”: Really? If people can get back from the taxpayer more than they earn, they do indeed choose socialism. John C. Calhoun, in “A Disquisition on Government,” warned of this eventuality quite some time back too.

Updated: In Defense Of The Fence

Constitution, Crime, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Private Property

Here’s an excerpt from my new WorldNetDaily column for Friday, April 4:

“[T]he Department of Homeland Security [has] proceeded to waive certain environmental laws for various project areas in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, so as to begin completing, this time apparently in earnest, the 700 miles of fencing mandated by the ‘Secure Fence Act.’”

“The Act was forced on the ruling class in 2006 by a passionately non-partisan American public, sick and tired of the farce on the southwest front. Naturally, after the primping and preening that accompanies the signing of a bill into law just prior to midterm elections, the politicians promptly side-stepped the popular will…”

“That the government has used its discretionary waiver authority to temporarily suspend a few of its countless ‘land management’ laws, never vetted by voters, is no tragedy. In fact, government should waive more superfluous regulations if this means fulfilling its one constitutionally mandated function: defending the nation’s borders…”

Read “In Defense of The Fence” here (or on WND, where we lead the Commentary Page).

Update: In reply to some of the hysterical yelps of “tear down this wall”:

“If you really want to see an immigration liberationist rise on his hind legs, mention a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. … Irrational minds have transformed a defensive wall à la the Emperor Hadrian’s, intended to keep the ‘barbarians’ out, into the Iron Curtain or the Berlin Wall, constructed to keep people in.”

A fence is the quintessential non-aggressive method of defense. You don’t attack, arrest, or otherwise molest undesirables, you keep them at bay, away. This is why it’s so dishonest of libertarians to protest the fence. Other than utopian solutions that’ll never come to pass, there is no other option. Libertarians are not that stupid. They know this, which makes their position all the more callous. Even sicker do such people make me when they protest Israel’s security fence. It has cut by over 80 percent the number of Israelis maimed and murdered by suicide bombers.

“Other barriers that fail to move the ‘tear-down-this-wall’ humanitarians to do their St. Vitus Dance are those separating India and Pakistan, Botswana and Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyztan, Thailand and Malaysia, and Turkey and Syria (this one is mined).” And, as Joseph Farah points out in his latest column, Egypt is erecting a fence to keep the bad-tempered Gazans from hurting Egyptians.

I suspect that the kind of person screaming bloody murder about a barrier would change his tune if his property was being traipsed by trespassers day-in-and-out. Here’s the left-liberal Time magazine on the ordeal:

“When the crowds cross the ranches along and near the border, they discard backpacks, empty Gatorade and water bottles and soiled clothes. They turn the land into a vast latrine, leaving behind revolting mounds of personal refuse and enough discarded plastic bags to stock a Wal-Mart. Night after night, they cut fences intended to hold in cattle and horses. Cows that eat the bags must often be killed because the plastic becomes lodged between the first and second stomachs. The immigrants steal vehicles and saddles. They poison dogs to quiet them. The illegal traffic is so heavy that some ranchers, because of the disruptions and noise, get very little sleep at night.”

Or if his beloved fell pray to a member of a group so well-represented among the criminal class:

“Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens.” In 2000 nearly 30 percent of federal prisoners were foreign-born. In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants are for illegal aliens. In 1995, already 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California was illegal. In the Mecklenburg County, where the sheriff recently broke with the country and began to enforce immigration law, “1,200 foreign-born people have been arrested since April, on charges ranging from traffic violations and trespassing to sex crimes, and nearly 600 have been found to be here illegally.”

Updated: Judenräte Turns on Geert Wilders

Free Speech, Islam, Judaism & Jews, libertarianism, The West

In “Nitwork Solutions Suspends Wilders Site,” you read about a heroic Dutchman by the name of Geert Wilders who is fighting Islam’s suffocating strictures. In a country of dhimmis, this Dutchman is a rare breed (so is Ayaan Hirsi Ali); he is trying to reclaim his country.

When the self-anointed Jewish leadership is not reaching out to libertines and left-liberals, it is siding with Jew haters. Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League is still mum about the dangers to the American Jewish community of Muslim immigration.

On the other hand, Foxman had a fit over Mel Gibson, a man who has never hurt a Jew (unless hurt feelings count—and they don’t; sticks and stones and all that). But when a Seattle Jihadist murdered a Jewish woman and critically injured five other women at the downtown Jewish Federation building, our defender issued only the tersest of statements, making no mention of the dead, the injured, and the Muslim.

By the ADL’s telling, this was a random killing.

Now the Dutch Judenräte has turned its back on a friend of the Jews, Geert Wilders:

“In a statement following the film’s online release, the board said that Wilders – the leader of the Party for Freedom – was guilty of serious generalizations. ‘Wilders presented demographics on the increase of Muslims in Europe with pictures from scenes of terrorist attacks, suggesting all Muslims are potential terrorists,’ head of the Hague-based Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, Dr. Ronny Naftaniel, Saturday told Haaretz.”

Dr. Ronny Naftaniel’s incorrect deduction aside, Jews who side with him and his ilk ought not to complain when increased Muslim immigration coincides with more hate crimes against them. Nor should they be surprised when the many Dutch who secretly consider Wilders a patriot think of Jewish representatives as unpatriotic, and worse.

By the way, the response of the Muslim world and its representatives to “Fitna,” the Wilders film, proves irrefutably that Wilders is right about Islam. To deny that he is correct about the dangerous, dampening effects of Islam on a free society is to deny reality.

Wilders would have been shown to be wrong had the Muslim world and its proxies refused to bring pressure to bear on organizations that screened “Fitna,” and adopted a western live-and-let-live stance toward this form of speech.

Had Wilders not been subjected to death threats for his speech; and had the Dutch government not been pressured by Muslim leaders to denounce Wilders—I’d have been the first to concede that the Muslim Ummah is indeed benign, peaceful, and presents no threat to the West.

Speaking of the Ummah; where is my libertarian community on this? Have those few errant folks repented yet?

Update (April 1): “LiveLeak restores Fitna. Score one for freedom,” reports the intrepid Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch. LiveLeak had previously removed the piece.

Update 3: Nitwork Solutions Suspends Wilders Site

Free Speech, Islam, libertarianism, Media, Morality, The West

A hosting service has suspended the site erected by the heroic Geert Wilders to popularize his film about the Quran. Wilders is the only politician I know of, aside Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to speak truth to power about Islam.

We all recall the tragic fate another brave Dutch film maker met. Vincent van Gogh’s great-great-grandson—more authentically Dutch you cannot get—was “stuck like a pig” on an Amsterdam street by a Muslim immigrant.

So who has curtailed Wilders in his heroic efforts? An American company, of course:

“Network Solutions has received a number of complaints regarding this site that are under investigation … The company could not immediately be reached for comment. Its terms of service contain a sweeping prohibition against ‘objectionable material of any kind or nature.’”

(I’ve just asked the designer of our new fabulous website under construction to check up that the server to which we will be migrating tolerates speech. American companies are becoming oppressive.)

The Herald Tribune has characterized Wilders as heading “a reactionary party with 9 seats in the 150-member Dutch Parliament, which was elected on an anti-immigration platform. He lives under police protection because of death threats.”

If by reactionary the Tribune means that Wilders would dearly like to prevent Sharia from becoming the law of the land in his beloved homeland, and that he doesn’t rah-rah for Muslim rioters, then yes, I guess he could be called a “reactionary.”

The fact that a man who voices unpopular opinion is required to “live under police protection” in a western, liberal society—this, the Herald Tribune doesn’t find the least bit “reactionary.”

Update (March 25): Posted over at Jihad Watch is an interview with “Nitworks Solutions.” That is if long pauses and pregnant silences from the company’s representative constitute an exchange.

My contact for all things webular tells me that “Network Solutions has a long history of screwing people. They were the first—and for a long time the only—people who registered domain names for the Internet in the early years.” They had a government granted franchise or monopoly [like Comcast in certain regions] and, consequently, charged very high fees. “Down the road, when people became savvier and other high-tech companies wanted the ability to sell domains as well, the latter had to go to court to get the ability but they won. Today Network Solutions still sells domain names and they are about a tenth of what they used to charge but they still cost more than most everywhere else. The markup is ridiculous.”

In any event, if Mr. Wilders contacts us, we’ll put him in touch with someone who’ll fix him up in no time with a reliable, willing host.

Libertarians who fail to protest such intimidation are a sad joke. Sure, a host is a private company and ought to be able to host or not host at will. However, this is an example of intimidation at the threat of death. (By the same token, neither did the ousting of Imus have anything to do with private property or market forces. Rather, mob forces shaped that event.)

In “Those Cartoons: A Reply To Walter Block,” I addressed the moral confusion that led some libertarians to shirk the responsibility to defend the great Danes in what I termed “one of the defining libertarian issues of our times,” and that is:

“Speaking and publishing under the threat of injury or death … what is becoming a matter of life and death for writers, filmmakers, comics, and caricaturists in the West.”

Update 2 (March 27): I am disappointed that some libertarians construed the protest on this post as a call for censorship. You really have to develop the ability to distinguish between a debate about libertarian law vs. one about morality and ethics. Or values, as an Objectivist would put it. Objectivists often complain that libertarians are incapable of bridging this void. I can see the merits of their complaint.

I believe I’ve done this exercise once before, but here goes again: It has to be manifestly clear that no one on this blog has called on the state to intervene with Nitwork Solutions, which, by the way, was operating by grant of a government privilege when it monopolized domain licensing; that’s another problem some correspondents clearly struggle with: telling the free from the fettered market.

In any event, the debate here is about this new phenomenon we in the West are subjected to, and that is publishing under the threat of death. What Nitwork did to the heroic Wilders is perfectly licit in libertarian law. Some libertarians, however, go so far and say it is moral; they even lend their imprimatur to Muslims in terrorizing writers for doing no more than “hoisting their epistolary pitchforks.” For this perspective, I have nothing but contempt.

That said, let’s move on to a letter from my mother, our correspondent in The Netherlands:

Wilders: A Principled Man

Holland has a hero. Geert Wilders represents many Dutch people who are anxious about the growing power of Islam in Holland. He is a member of the Dutch Parliament and has won 9 seats in the parliament.

The parliament members have done everything to stop Wilders legitimate objection to the growing power of Muslims in all spheres in this country. The government is terrified that the Arab states will object and will take measures to decrease monetary gains. This terrifies all Dutch parliamentarians and, as a result, they have done everything to stop Wilders from speaking out about this Islamization, have tried to stop him from releasing the film he has made about Islam; and have done all in their power to intimidate him into silence and threaten him to keep his mouth shut.

And this in the “Great democratic Holland,” where, supposedly, “Freedom of Speech” is a holy right of all. It is clear to all of us who support this brave man that freedom of speech in Holland is only allowed to those who agree with government policy—their fear of reprisal from Arabs, in the manner used against Denmark, is the only thing they can think about.

Wilders holds onto his principles, even though his life is threatened—he is indeed a man who is prepared to sacrifice himself for his principles—and for his country.

—Ann

Update 3 (March 29): ACCEPTING THE TERMS OF SURRENDER. As I’ve said, we’ve arrived at a stage in the West’s demise where we are publishing under duress—under the threat of death, to be precise. This state of affairs has arisen due to our welcoming into our midst a culture and faith that doesn’t comport with life and liberty. Philosophical disagreements will henceforth be settled by the kafia-clad hit squad, or their proxies, CAIR and their ilk.

LiveLeak.com has folded. Here you can find a statement of cowardice and capitulation from this outfit as to why they’ll not be honoring the courage of Geert Wilders, and posting his film, Fitna (Fatwa).

Those who threatened LiveLeak.com have rejected the way philosophical battles are fought by westerners (to distinguish from their governments). What they’re doing is laying down the law under Islam. Each capitulation brings us closer to a time when this space, and spaces as outspoken, will cease to exist.

What’s worse; westerners, with few exceptions, are accepting the terms of surrender.