Category Archives: libertarianism

Reactions To The Idea That Businessman Trump’s Trying To Cut Loss … Of Life

Business, Economy, Homeland Security, Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, IMMIGRATION, Islam, libertarianism, Terrorism

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“Businessman Trump trying to cut loss … of life” is this week’s column.

VW, a WND reader (a lady), reacts via email:

Dear Ms. Mercer,

Absolutely brilliant take on the situation! Congrats on your spot-on insight …
God bless you and keep up the good work!

From workforlivn @ The Unz Review:

“Perfect prose Ilana. First lesson in a business: Watch the pennies and the dollars will care for themselves. The contrast to Washington is dropping million dollar JDAMs on 2 dollar tents.”

This from Craig Smith on Facebook:

A very valuable post. As much as I’ve been reading, I still haven’t come across anything quite as incisive as this. I’ve shared it, and added a long caption.

Read Craig’s “longer caption.”

My reply:

Thank you, Craig Smith. That you’ve said these kind words so often over the years doesn’t diminish their value. “No Wonder The Pols Think Businessman Trump’s Crazy; He Understands Scarcity” is the weekly column, no mere post. It appears on WND, of course — has done since 2001, on The Unz Review (America’s smartest webzine) since last year, on PRAAG – Die Pro-Afrikaanse Aksiegroep, belonging to Dan Roodt who fears no one; on the gifted Sean Gabb’s UK-based Libertarian Alliance and on Quarterly Review, a now small, still august, historic, British publication edited by Dr. Leslie Jones. Please support and popularize the handful of publications—only a handful—that carry and have carried the Return to Reason column since its inception. Yeah, the rest are a disgrace.

Our English readers are ever erudite.
Says John Warren, on 13 December, 2015 at 7:12 am:

Brilliant. I couldn’t agree more. In my ever so humble opinion, Ilana Mercer is spot on with all that she writes here.

A good, clear thinker who brilliantly sets out on paper that which she considers important enough to write about. Her paragraphs arrive randomly sprinkled with wit, wisdom and tragedy. She seldom repeats herself or attempts to impress the reader by churning out a shedload of boring facts – which we can all, in any event, find out for ourselves should we feel the need to.

Other people will not agree I know, but for me, I better enjoy reading articles when the writer tells me how they feel about issues and not how much they know about them. If they know everything about anything they shouldn’t need to talk about whatever to anyone.

Ilana not only owns the sort of retentive ability that bestows her with great confidence, she also demonstrates a fertile and often delightfully wicked imagination. I’ve found a diamond.

UPDATED: Libertarians Should Look Inward For Reasons Funding Drying Up*

Ilana Mercer, Intellectualism, libertarianism, Liberty, Political Philosophy

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Jim Ostrowski has posted to Facebook a column by EPJ’s Robert Wenzel titled “LewRockwell.com in Financial Trouble?” Jim, who has never enjoyed a feature column on the “libertarian sites” he slavishly touts (sorry pal; just standing up for what you deserve), and has been called by Murray Rothbard “one of the finest people in the libertarian movement” (damn straight), should contemplate the following:

If these iconic, but waning, sites had not diligently and systematically expunged or marginalized their best and brightest, presumably because we do not conform strictly to party-lines; they’d have long since harnessed the energies, intellectual and other, of individuals who, after working in the trenches like dogs for little to nothing, and without ANY libertarian support—are in a position, finally, to boost atrophying sites and help increase their audiences.

Robert Wenzel is right. The problem of dwindling funding (usually associated with reduced readership) is not all the doing of the neocons or the libertarians who don’t like cookies or pop-ups. (The love of cookies inspired the title of a chapter in my next book, not that you’ll hear about any of my books, all good for liberty, from the libertarian sites you know.)

Non-establishment libertarian sites operate in as cultish a manner as do beltway libertarians. In the liberty-oriented community, people tend to huddle in atrophying intellectual attics, and quibble about detecting and expelling contrarians. Dare to dissent, and keepers of the flame will take it upon themselves to read you out of the movement (check).

This, naturally, makes for tribalism, not individualism. The bad, moreover, have a nasty habit of crowding out the good. Or, as one Objectivist wag once wrote, “Quality is never the result of intellectual purges: the most creative and independent thinkers are the first to go.” That makes perfect psychological sense: those who remain feel more secure, group cohesion having trounced intellectual vitality.

Infrequently, on the occasion that this column is featured by one of the sites discussed, I will invariably get the odd letter or two to say: “Wow, never heard of you. Where have you been hiding? Why aren’t you a regular?”

Why am I persona non grata in libertarian circles after, oh, close to 20 years of quality writing? Take a guess?

The last of the letters I quote verbatim:

“Next to Rothbard, I believe you and Hoppe are the best libertarian writers I know of. I’ve read all your articles. I had been arguing with x and others about immigration for months. Some of the self-proclaimed dictatarians [sic] of libertarianism blocked me because I disagreed with them. You were the only person who challenged the libertarian establishment on immigration, and you were right.”

No, the Ron Paul Revolution is over and it is not the only act in town. If Ron-Paul-Only institutions are faltering, they need to look beyond the neocons and “the bizarre anti-ad perspective of many ‘libertarians,'” in the words of Wenzel, and do a little navel-gazing.

UPDATE (12/8): Jim Ostrowski knows I’m right, but won’t “Like,” because he’s being … lawyerly. He, like myself, deserves the prominence which would have PAID dividends to those who gave it. So, I’m sorry: You huddle in compliant ideological attics; you never tolerate the slightest dissent; you behave like mainstream; you’ll dry up.

*****

* For the same reason, The Independent Institute should stop hitting me up for money on Giving Tuesday or on any other day. (I’ll choose The World Parrot Trust and Project Perry any day. And I did.)

Donald Trump Says The Sentient, Simple Smart Thing: Keep Jihadis OUT

Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Terrorism

Said Donald Trump today at a rally: If you’re a Jihadi who’s traveled to train abroad—American, permanent resident or anything else—“you are never-ever coming back into the US.” Finally, a man smart enough to say the simplest, truest, most libertarian thing; what was said in “A Modest Libertarian Proposal: Keep Jihadis OUT, Not IN”:

Naturally, no individual should be arrested for harboring wicked thoughts or hanging with wicked people. But when he leaves the Occident with the intent to train to wage war on his neighbors—the Jihadi must be stopped from re-entering the good country.

Let the West’s homegrown Jihadis wander from the killing fields of one crap country to another, like the nomadic hired guns they are.

By nature, this modest proposal is defensive (not to mention decisive) and, thus, eminently libertarian.

There are well over 3,000 Western fighters that have traveled to assist ISIS and its offshoots in forging a caliphate. They return with murder on their minds. They must not be allowed back into Western countries.

Citizenship is nothing more than a political grant of government privilege; a positive, state-minted right. Citizenship is not a natural right. Yet these state-stamped licenses—citizenship and attendant travel documents—are honored, at the cost of innocent lives.


Be careful Donald Trump. Bringing down the system, as you are doing, is dangerous to the parasites that are attached to it like limpet mines.

Be careful. Get top notch private protection.

UPDATED: The Turks, The Turkmen & The American Turkeys Stateside

America, Foreign Policy, Government, Islam, Israel, libertarianism, Middle East

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The US government is too often on the side of the American People’s enemies. (Think closely about the implications of that statement.) I would venture that were a US pilot parachuting through disputed airspace, onto Turkey’s territory, the Turks—great NATO allies of Obama and Bush—would sic their Turkmen proxies on our pilot, and these ethnic Turkmen would have eliminated him, with blood-curdling cries to a vampiric god, as they did an ISIS-fighting Russian pilot. The Kurds—real allies to America and Israel but betrayed by both—our pals the Turks are always killing.

What is the term for a government that’s mostly on the side of its people’s enemies?

UPDATE: There is that tinny robotic libertarian edict to see no evil, hear no evil; some libertarians believe you should pretend to see no evil/ hear no evil, all under the guise of foreign policy neutrality. Not me. Noted here was the fact that there is a sympathetic people in the region. That only the 3, proverbial, see-no-evil hear-no-evil monkeys (and some libertarians) would deny. The post further asked not what we can do for the good Kurds, but why are this government’s interests (ditto Bush’s) the same as those of the bad actors. The paragraph is a rather modest one. So, where is its answer? What is the proper term for “a government that’s mostly on the side of its people’s enemies”? Where are those Founder quotes?