Category Archives: libertarianism

Donald Trump’s ‘He Started It’ Argument Is Libertarian

Conservatism, Donald Trump, Feminism, Free Speech, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Logic, Reason

Donald Trump’s ‘He started it’ argument, whinged CNN’s Anderson Cooper, is a five-year-old’s argument. Maybe. But it’s also the skeleton of the libertarian, non-aggression axiom: aggression against aggressors only.

First, context via Gawker:

During last night’s CNN-hosted Republican town hall in Milwaukee there was a funny, and perhaps even cathartic, exchange between Anderson Cooper and Donald Trump over Trump’s hounding of Ted Cruz’s wife, which culminated with Cooper telling Trump he was acting like a child while Trump insisted that he wasn’t acting like a child. …

MORE.

It’s not enough to malign something as childish. You have to show that the maligned childish thought or act is wrong. Children can be right, on rare occasions. Besides, the liberal left worships The Children (as do their partners among new, feminized, Michelle-Fields conservatives). Adults are the dolts in every Hollywood film. In liberal lore, those founts of knowledge and wisdom spring from the effing kids, mostly.

In this case, The Donald aka The libertarians aka The Kids are correct. Aggression against aggressors is justifiable.

Of course, verbal aggression is not the aggression libertarians are referring to when we apply libertarian law. Speech is not aggression.

Donald Delivers Economic Expertise @ Free-Market Speed

Debt, Donald Trump, Economy, Free Markets, libertarianism, Trade

No sooner had I penned “Trump And Trade,” questioning the slavish devotion of my own philosophical tribe, libertarians, to trade deficits, without considering that America’s trade imbalances occur in the context of debt—personal, corporate, state—than the magnificent Maria Bartiromo introduced, on Sunday Futures, the equally impressive Stephen Miller to speak to these matters.

Miller is a Trump Campaign senior policy adviser.

To comport with his earlier contention that, “We can’t have a service only economy,” Miller stated today (3/20):

It’s the donors vs. the voters. “The choice we have is between the national interests vs. the special interests.”

Mr. Trump’s has killed off the Cult of Megyn Kelly. Next on his to-do list: Replace crappy journo Kelly with pro Ms. Bartiromo.

Related:

“The Me Myself And I Megyn Kelly Production.”

“Trump And Trade.”

3/21/016:

UPDATED: TRUMP AND TRADE

Donald Trump, Free Markets, libertarianism, Regulation, Trade

“TRUMP AND TRADE” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

Mitt gives Mormons (whom I love) a bad name. I thought Mormons weren’t meant to bad-mouth others. Yet Mitt had nothing but bad things to say about Donald Trump, who is political tabula rasa and has never passed a law in his life.

Neither has Trump ever caused the death of a single Iraqi kid. But the religiously devout Romney called him evil for defiling the precious memory of someone who had caused many thousands of such deaths: Bush II.

The meme about Mitt Romney is that had he attacked Barack Obama with the vim and vigor he reserved for Trump, he might have made it to president.

(Likewise, if only Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League went after Muslims who lob bombs at Jews with the passion he reserves for gentiles who raise their right hand in a pledge of support for Trump. Poor Abe is seeing Nazi faces in the clouds again.)

Romney also claimed Trump would “propose 35 percent tariff-like penalties” and “would instigate a trade war that would raise prices for consumers, kill export jobs, and lead entrepreneurs and businesses to flee America.”

I don’t know that Trump favors protective tariffs, import quotas or export subsidies.

I do know that we don’t have free trade.

What goes for “free trade,” rather, is trade managed by powerful bureaucracies – national and international – central planners concerned with regulating, not freeing, trade; whose goal it is to harmonize labor, health and environmental laws throughout the developed world. The undeveloped and developing worlds do as they please.

My understanding is that Trump simply wants to make these agreements and organs work for the American people.

I know, too, who did support “labeling China a currency manipulator,” so that he could “put in place, if necessary, tariffs where … they are taking unfair advantage of our manufacturers.”

Mitt Romney in 2012.

When it comes to the glories of an aggregate, negative balance of trade, libertarian post-graduate cleverness deserves to be questioned. …

… READ the rest. “TRUMP AND TRADE” is the current column, now on WND.

UPDATED (3/15):

The Russell Kirk We love Is …

Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, libertarianism, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, War

… the Russel Kirk who, “Toward the end of his life, … returned to his anti-war beginnings. He went so far as to say that ‘not a single American war … had been absolutely necessary.’ He denounced the neoconservatives as warmongers; and he had no use for National Review. ‘Kirk came to believe that Buckley had sold out to the neocons, claiming in a private letter to [Peter] Stanlis, ‘As Patrick Buchanan remarks, National Review is now the New York office of the New World Order.’”

David Gordon is always streaks ahead of the rest of us mortals. Read David’s review of Russell Kirk: American Conservative, by Bradley J. Birzer (University Press of Kentucky).

I will say that I knew, from my edition of The Conservative Mind, “that Kirk in the 1940s was himself a libertarian, or close to it.” And that: “… he strongly opposed America’s war policy, in particular the use of atomic weapons and the internment of Japanese Americans.”

I didn’t, however, know that Kirk “corresponded with both Albert Jay Nock and Isabel Paterson, both renowned libertarians. Indeed, he favorably discussed them in the first edition of The Conservative Mind.”

Best tidbit from David’s review:

Buckley was a former CIA agent, and the principal point of the [NR] magazine was to reorient the American Right from a noninterventionist foreign policy toward a militant pursuit of the Cold War against Russia and to purge those who dissented from militarism and war. Four of the editors, Willmoore Kendall, James Burnham, Frank S. Meyer, and Willi Schlamm, favored preventive war against Russia. Kendall and Burnham were also former CIA agents; and the late great George Resch told me that Henry Regnery, Kirk’s publisher, called National Review a CIA operation.

READ “The Real Russell Kirk” by David Gordon.