Category Archives: libertarianism

A Free Lunch, Or The Last Supper?

Business, Europe, Labor, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Private Property, Regulation, Welfare

Permanently tethered to the welfare state, Europeans are unwilling to make the connections between the regulatory state and steep prices, high unemployment, and a declining standard of living. It would seem obvious that the greater the cost of doing business, the less business will be done. But not to the individual who is motivated to keep the gravy train chugging along.

He wants to get that free lunch, even if it is his Last Supper.

Via John Stossel:

In Europe …workers … get “vacation do-overs”- if they are sick on vacation, they get additional paid time off to make up for it. In Spain, employers must give 24 months of severance pay after they fire someone. No wonder companies don’t hire. [Unemployment among youth there is 50 percent.]
America doesn’t have mandatory vacation time, but we still have 170,000 pages of rules.

Want to expand your business? The costs to a proprietor of adding new workers will be prohibitive, often in excess of the workers’ productivity.

In Italy, it is near impossible to fire an employee once he has been hired. If he steals and worse; the onus is on the business owner to prove his case before he can fire the offender. Bad work habits and low productivity don’t constitute cause for dismissal.

In all, a European business is better off staying small. Don’t reach for the sky. Limp along below the regulator’s radar.


MORE.

UPDATED: Ann Coulter Disses Barry Goldwater’s Devotion To Private Property

Affirmative Action, Ann Coulter, Individual Rights, libertarianism, Private Property

In her latest column, “DON’T BLAME ROMNEY,” Ms. Coulter suggests that,

…purist libertarian Barry Goldwater … — as you will read in [her] book, ‘Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama’ — nearly destroyed the Republican Party with his pointless pursuit of libertarian perfection in his vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Well, that immutably just position on private-property rights, taken by “purist libertarian Barry Goldwater,” is the position adopted in Into the Cannibal’s Pot, where I write the following:

In a free society—one not silhouetted by the State—honored is the right of the individual to associate and disassociate, invest and disinvest, speak and misspeak at will. Contrary to the civil servant, the private person’s “refusal to deal” ought to be sacrosanct. … In the encroaching American State, the right of free association has been circumscribed by crippling codes of hiring, firing, renting, and money lending. The culprit is the Civil Rights Act of 1964…

(Pages 119-120)

Cited in Into the Cannibal’s Pot is another “purist” who feels no compunction about defending a sacred individual right: the fine libertarian legal theorist Richard Epstein, author of Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws.

(“The Cannibal’s” predictive value seems to dovetail with its respectable Amazon rank below, today:
#3 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
#23 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Civil Rights & Liberties
#29 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Public Affairs & Policy > Social Policy)

UPDATE: In response to the Facebook thread: Ms. Coulter is very bright. Brilliant in many ways. But she’s not a deep thinker. I think she’s a solid writer and has a quick mind. I’ve always liked her b/c of those qualities, so rare among the the teletwats (sorry, could not help that).

UPDATED: Libertarians And The Vote

Canada, Democracy, Elections, Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, The State

New American columnist Jack Kerwick is blasting non-voting libertarians. (I have an excuse: I have chosen to decline citizenship of Police State USA. I’m a permanent resident, but not a US citizen. I am, however, an American patriot. I don’t need Uncle Sam’s imprimatur or papers to be a patriot.)

I think Jack is making an argument that is similar to the one made in “LIBERTARIAN WRANGLING”:

From the fact that many libertarians believe that the state has no legitimacy, …they arrive at the position that anything the state does is illegitimate. This is a logical confusion. Consider the murderer who, while fleeing the law, happens on a scene of a rape, saves the woman, and pounds the rapist. Is this good deed illegitimate because a murderer has performed it?

Writes Jack:

“Romney, along with his fellow partisans, has pledged to repeal ObamaCare. “Would that be evil? [NO] He also wants to make America more energy independent. [Note: Libertarians want energy production, not necessarily energy independence, for the latter would imply a rejection of the logic of trade. It’s “drill AND trade, baby, trade.”] Would this be evil? A Romney administration would engender an environment dramatically more business-friendly than any that we could ever expect from an Obama administration. Would this be evil?”

The answer is no.

Basically, Jack Kerwick wants to shatter the pretense of ideological purity that allows libertarians (like myself) to stand outside of politics.

It’s a good debate. We should have it. (If I were cleared to vote, I doubt I would vote for the loopy Gary Johnson.)

UPDATE: Joseph Farah feels the same urgency that Jack Kerwick does: “It’s a matter of self-defense and self-preservation,” he says. MORE.

To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi: That’s The Question

Democracy, Democrats, Government, libertarianism, Media, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Republicans, Terrorism, The State, War, Welfare

“To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi; That’s The Question,” and that’s the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

The gist of a cable received by the Office of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on August 16 this year, summarized an emergency meeting convened a day before at the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, Libya.

The post could not be defended in the case of a coordinated attack. Such an attack was in the air, as Benghazi was home to “approximately ten Islamist militias” raring to go. The compound was small and understaffed. It lacked “the manpower, security measures, and weapons capabilities” to repel an all-out assault.

The cable laid out before Mrs. Clinton’s Emergency Action Committee what Fox News’ Catherine Herridge described, on Oct. 31, as “specific warnings” and “detailed intelligence.”

Fox News has been covering the Benghazi story wall-to-wall; the other cable news stations not at all. However, one specific snippet buried in the telegram was too fraught for the folks at Fox to probe.

In “liberated” Libya, the American outpost was also up against limited “host nation support.”

This was a coordinated attack on a despised presence, timed for the 9/11 anniversary. Living under de facto American occupation had enraged the occupied. Anathema to “free” Americans, this generic creature had evinced similar rage when he lived under Genghis Bush, in Iraq.

At first, the eminence grise of American opinion makers—left and right, Republican and Democrat—got behind the central conceit floated by the Obama Administration. The Arab world had once again erupted because of those of us who dared to insult Mohammad, Jihad’s muse. As the other set of despots used to intimate during its tenure in D.C., the perennial Muslim rioter resented the freedoms of our pole dancers, potty-mouthed entertainers, and loud, loutish politicians.

From the stuff that makes us “free,” these proxies for American power always exclude the IRS (Internal Revenue Service), authorized to hound us till end of the world, the alphabet soup of regulation agencies that prosecutes and regiments our best and brightest to the gills, the War on Drugs that assumes dominion over the most precious piece of real estate we own—our bodies—a welfare state that has been likened “not [to] a principality, but [to] a vast empire bigger than the entire budgets of almost every other country in the world,” and a warfare complex that gobbles up so much wealth and so many men, ours and others around the world.

As soon as it was discovered that these things—the accoutrements of a “wonderfully” messy democracy—could not be blamed for the attack on the Benghazi Mission, most media fell silent. …

The complete column is“To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi; That’s The Question.” Read it on WND now.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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