Category Archives: libertarianism

Costs of War Predicted By Prescient Libertarians

Iraq, libertarianism, War

On April 30, 2003 I wrote the following:

According to figures provided by Yale professor William Nordhaus and the Council of Foreign Relations, the eventual costs of the war on Iraq will be roughly $1.2 trillion.

Very many libertarians debated—and were familiar with—this estimate.

On March 17, 2006, MSNBC’s Martin Wolk finally awoke and wrote:

One estimate puts the total economic impact [of the war] at up to $2 trillion.

On May 28, 2004, I noted in amazement that the neoconservative talking twits [have] been wrong all along about the invasion of Iraq. Their utter ignorance of geopolitical realities had them insisting our soldiers would be greeted with blooms and bonbons and that an Iraqi democracy would rise from the torrid sands of Mesopotamia. They’ve consistently dished out dollops of ahistoric, unintuitive, and reckless verbiage.

They were wrong all along, yet they’ve retained their status as philosopher-kings.

On the other hand—and unfortunately for America—there hasn’t been a horror in Iraq that certain libertarian prescients did not foretell well in advance.

And I asked: “So why are insightful commentators, whose observations have predictive power, generally barred from the national discourse, while false neoconservative prophets are called back for encores?”

The answer I gave in 2004 applies today:

Elites—media included—can rule only if they represent ideologies that are widely embraced, as the invasion of Iraq was. Today’s news is not what it used to be because a dumbed-down population, well represented in newsrooms, cannot distinguish evidence from assertion and fact from feel-good fiction. News is now nothing but a slick, demand-driven product designed to please—not inform—the populace. Having their worldview affirmed—even affirmed in a parallel universe—is worth a lot to news consumers, who are keener to avoid the pains of cognitive dissonance than to get the real deal.

Those Cartoons: A Reply To Walter Block

Free Speech, Ilana Mercer, libertarianism

…Dr. Block has denounced the rather mild Danish cartoons as not nice, not moral, not appropriate and not considerate…
Whereas Dr. Block and I both agree the cartoons are perfectly licit in libertarian law and that the cartoonists and their publishers deserve to be safe from death or threats thereof, Dr. Block has asserted, under the rubric of a libertarian analysis, that libertarians would view the cartoons as immoral and that “from the libertarian perspective, both sets of acts—”drawing pictures of Muhammad” and offending “western sensibilities”—are “improper”…
What is Dr. Block’s premise for asserting these things are immoral? Other than that they offend Muslims, I see none. And to give offence is not always immoral. It is certainly not immoral to lampoon the connection between Muhammad, author of Islam, and the savagery and atavism that grip the Muslim world today…
… if a radical proponent of freedom such as Dr. Block can dub mild satire immoral, inadvertently tainting innocent, non-aggressive satirists, then it’s imperative to address the substance of the speech being debated, lest innocent polemicists and illustrators be maligned.

The complete essay, “Those Cartoons: A Reply To Walter Block,” is on the Free-Market News Network. Responses are welcome.

Behold A “Real” Peace Movement!

libertarianism, War

As I’ve mentioned, there isn’t a respectable antiwar movement libertarians can get behind. That some antiwar libertarians endorse the A.N.S.W.E.R coalition is not to their credit. At its core, A.N.S.W.E.R comprises American haters from the “Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, Filipino, Haitian, and Latin American communities.” One of their objectives is to undermine everything Israeli. For example, they continue to propagate the Jenin massacre canard, which was even renounced by Kadoura Moussa, the Fatah director for the northern West Bank.
Mr. “the-Jews-are-monkeys-and-swine,” aka Sami Al-Arian, is not merely someone they defend, but a star among them. The hard-Left Rabbi, Michael Lerner, is always poised to remind Israelis, whenever their civilians are blown to smithereens by suicide bombers, to take the blame and turn the other cheek. Even he is too pro-Israel for A.N.S.W.E.R. So they banished him from one of their ragtag rallies.
And A.N.S.W.E.R opposes capitalism (that their agitators are mostly unemployed may have something to do with that).
So it is with great joy that I announce a genuine peace coalition: The Perdana Global Peace Forum, headed by Dr. Mahathir Bin Mohamad. This is the same Mahathir who once arrested his political rival, Anwar Ibrahim, for his support of “open markets and international investments“; the same Mahathir who has distinguished himsel for Jew baiting, to quote:

The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.”

Clearly anti-Semitism and peace activism are not mutually exclusive pursuits. (By the way, a more Halaal-kind of anti-Semitism is called “I-am-only-criticizing-the-Jewish-State’s-‘criminal’-policies, relentlessly, day-and-night, with-no-balance, with-the-aim-of-bringing-about-the-destruction-of-that-‘despotic’-gulag, which-so-threatens-its-‘peaceful’-neighbors.)
At least two of the papers at the Perdana Peace conference were devoted to the threat Israel poses to Iran. Peace activism can be a little unintuitive—go against the grain, you know. But Mahathir and panelists—a Counterpunch scribe, Robert G. Mugabe,
Zimbabwe’s Genocidal Dictator For Life, the “Attorney of Record for the Chechen Republic, an Imam or two, the Chairman of the UK-based Planetary Movement, and some UN lackeys—mean well, no doubt. Mahathir especially does a lot to make vivid the horrors of war and the effects of explosives. His speech is replete with descriptions of guts spilling out and limbs hanging by a strand of muscle. And Israel is in the thick of it. Mahathir’s latest libel—also in his keynote speech—is that Israel uses depleted uranium bullets and missiles on the Palestinians. I gather the Perdana peaceniks won’t be condemning suicide bombers who smear Jews on pavements any time soon.

Behold A Real Peace Movement!

libertarianism, War

As I’ve mentioned, there isn’t a respectable antiwar movement libertarians can get behind. That some antiwar libertarians endorse the A.N.S.W.E.R coalition is not to their credit. At its core, A.N.S.W.E.R comprises American haters from the “Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, Filipino, Haitian, and Latin American communities.”

One of their objectives is to undermine everything Israeli. For example, they continue to propagate the Jenin massacre canard, which was even renounced by Kadoura Moussa, the Fatah director for the northern West Bank.
Mr. “the-Jews-are-monkeys-and-swine,” aka Sami Al-Arian, is not merely someone they defend, but a star among them. The hard-Left Rabbi, Michael Lerner, is always poised to remind Israelis, whenever their civilians are blown to smithereens by suicide bombers, to take the blame and turn the other cheek. Even he is too pro-Israel for A.N.S.W.E.R. So they banished him from one of their ragtag rallies.
And A.N.S.W.E.R opposes capitalism (that their agitators are mostly unemployed may have something to do with that).
So it is with great joy that I announce a genuine peace coalition: The Perdana Global Peace Forum, headed by Dr. Mahathir Bin Mohamad. This is the same Mahathir who once arrested his political rival, Anwar Ibrahim, for his support of “open markets and international investments“; the same Mahathir who has distinguished himself

for Jew baiting, to quote:

The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.”

Clearly anti-Semitism and peace activism are not mutually exclusive pursuits. (By the way, a more Halaal-kind of anti-Semitism is called “I-am-only-criticizing-the-Jewish-State’s-‘criminal’-policies, relentlessly, day-and-night, with-no-balance, with-the-aim-of-bringing-about-the-destruction-of-that-‘despotic’-gulag, which-so-threatens-its-‘peaceful’-neighbors.)
At least two of the papers at the Perdana Peace conference were devoted to the threat Israel poses to Iran. Peace activism can be a little unintuitive—go against the grain, you know. But Mahathir and panelists—a Counterpunch scribe, Robert G. Mugabe,

Zimbabwe’s Genocidal Dictator For Life, the “Attorney of Record for the Chechen Republic, an Imam or two, the Chairman of the UK-based Planetary Movement, and some UN lackeys—mean well, no doubt. Mahathir especially does a lot to make vivid the horrors of war and the effects of explosives. His speech is replete with descriptions of guts spilling out and limbs hanging by a strand of muscle. And Israel is in the thick of it. Mahathir’s latest libel—also in his keynote speech—is that Israel uses depleted uranium bullets and missiles on the Palestinians. I gather the Perdana peaceniks won’t be condemning suicide bombers who smear Jews on pavements any time soon.