Category Archives: libertarianism

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.

Meet Lovely Amy Lindsay, Ted Cruz’s Missed Opportunity

Feminism, Gender, libertarianism, Republicans, Sex, Welfare

With Amy Lindsay, Ted Cruz, standing for president, had an opportunity to support a charming, gracious and smart lady, who had acted in one of his campaign ads (below), later to be pulled by the senator’s campaign because Ms. Lindsay had also starred in a naughty film or two.

The libertarian-leaning Ms. Lindsay is, by her own admission, extremely conservative fiscally, likes Ted Cruz—so she was doing his ad because it comported with her beliefs—and intends to vote Republican.

Here was Cruz’s opportunity to show his support for our kind of woman: doesn’t nag, doesn’t rely on welfare, doesn’t think she has the right to dictate to anyone how they use their resources and thus supports Cruz’s right to pull her ad. Can you image the fuss Sandra Fluke would make in her place?

Politically, here was Cruz’s chance to show Democrats what it means to dignify a woman’s right to make a living as she sees fit.

He blew it.

Donald Trump should employ Amy in his next ad against the three establishment Amigos: Jeb, Marco, John K.

Like The Left, Left-Libertarians Weaponize The ‘Nativist’ Pejorative

Constitution, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Race, South-Africa, Welfare

Et tu John Stossel? Austin Petersen? On the latest John Stossel Show (whose website seldom carries any contents-driven updates or transcripts, too unhip), the pejorative “nativist” is being bandied about to malign the concept of borders in a welfare state, where welfare is a magnet. Due to open-borders immigration central planning, America, as I’ve warned in Into the Cannibal’s Pot, is headed to dominant-party status like my native South Africa. But left-libertarians wish to do away with borders before private property has been reinstated as the governing principle in American society.

Anathema, too, to left-libertarians is the idea that liberty has a cultural and historical context—it is not a proposition or a mere idea easily assimilated by all. Hell, look at Bernie Sanders’ platform and its many American supporters! Do we need to import more Bernie voters?!

Check out my homeland South Africa, RIP, where the minority had imagined the black majority would be bound by the same political abstractions—that fellow black South Africans would relinquish race as an organizing principle, in favor of a constitutional design, because hey, that just how people are. It’s second nature.

Didn’t happen. Won’t happen.

In the left-libertarian universe, the perspective of someone like myself is discounted by fast-talking youngsters who’ve yet to be mugged by reality and human nature.


READ:

“Apartheid South Africa: Reality Vs. Libertarian Fantasy.”

“The Sequel to ‘Suicide of A Superpower.’”