Category Archives: libertarianism

Republicans Already Teed Off With Tea Party

Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation, libertarianism, Political Economy, Republicans, Ron Paul

Well of course the Republicans will back Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) for the post of GOP conference chair, “the fourth-highest House leadership position,” in the new Congress, over “Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), a ‘Tea Party heroine.'”

If the Daily Beast, run by airhead Tina Brown—“the author of a gossipy, somewhat obese book about the anorexic dolt, Diana Spencer”—and the life-style libertarians at Reason Magazine (which calls the former outfit an “indefatigable friend”), both favor an establishment Republican over Michelle Bachmann—take it to the bank that Bachmann is the better bet.

Jacob Sallum, a master at sweating the smaller, safer stuff, has concluded that Bachmann, one of the few people in Congress who understands and protests monetary policy, is a philosophical spender because of the “agricultural subsidies her family farm has [allegedly] received.”

Sallum’s case is not worth a straw. I am sure one can find occasions when Ron Paul has fallen short on such minor (albeit important) matters. But when it comes to the big issues—monetary policy (around which the girls at Reason cannot wrap their heads)—he more than makes up for it. Ditto Michelle Bachmann, who joined Ron Paul to do battle against Ben Bernanke.

Of course, the “High Priests Of Pomposity” at Reason panned Ron Paul too.

Reason is famous for its “35 Heroes of Freedom,” which established their criteria for “cool and cosmopolitan”: William Burroughs, a drug addled, Beat-Generation wife killer, whose “work is mostly gibberish and his literary influence baleful,” was included, as well as Larry Flynt, Madonna, Martina Navratilova and Dennis Rodman.

Madonna Reason has exalted for, as they put it, leading “MTV’s glorious parade of freaks, gender-benders, and weirdos who helped broaden the palette of acceptable cultural identities and destroy whatever vestiges of repressive mainstream sensibilities still remained.” This sounds like the unscrambled, strange dialect spoken by a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies.”

I mean “Womyn’s Studies.”

If you lost the post’s thread, here’s the gist: Bachmann understands monetary policy and grasps its importance. Republican leaders, who don’t, are choosing to back their boy over Bachmann for the position of GOP conference chair. Beltway libertarians are backing the boy and his masters.

Thomas Paine: 18th Century Che Guevara

Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Founding Fathers, History, Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Liberty, Political Philosophy

My Friday column for October 22 will probably be titled “Thomas Paine: 18th Century Che Guevara.” The column following it, to be published on Friday October the 29th, is “The ‘Moronizing’ Of Modern Culture.”

You’ll have to read the first to appreciate the second, as they are part of a conversation with Dennis O’Keeffe, Professor of Sociology at the University of Buckingham, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, “the UK’s original free-market think-tank, founded in 1955.”

Under discussion is the subject of Professor O’Keeffe’s latest book, “Edmund Burke.”

One of the questions I asked Dennis was “Why is it that one rarely hears Edmund Burke mentioned in American public discourse, yet my countrymen know and love Thomas Paine, who sympathized with the Jacobins and spat venom at Burke (‘the greatest Irishman who ever lived’) for his devastating critique of the blood-drenched, illiberal, irreligious ‘Revolution in France’?”

Indeed, although neglected, Edmund Burke’s thinking is central to American—and any other—ordered liberty.

Be sure to read the two columns, which you can follow from Barely a Blog to WND.COM.

I am away at the 3rd annual meeting of the HL Mencken Club. Please join me if you are in the vicinity. The details are HERE.

UPDATE IV: Forclosure Fracas (Still About Deadbeats)

Business, Debt, Federal Reserve Bank, Law, libertarianism, Private Property, Reason

Vox Day, friend and fellow (libertarian) rebel on WND.COM, has objected to my comments about his bank foreclosure comments in the BAB post titled “Financial Paperwork Crisis (No Conspiracy Thinking, Please).” Vox and I have been exchanging emails on the topic. Vox traces the arguments back-and-forth in his post “A dialogue with Ilana (UPDATED).”

Consider: You’re a homeowners. You have a mortgage with the bank. The title deed is yours; you have a legal right or title to the property. However, this obtains just as long as you honor your mortgage payments. The bank has a lien on the property until you pay-up the mortgage. If you pay your monthly mortgage installments, and the bank has cashed these payments, your bank account will reflect that. If you’ve met these conditions, and the bank, nevertheless, proceeds to foreclose on you—this is an error, and a legal and statistical anomaly; an outlier case.

It is my understanding that Vox refutes the above; says the latter scenario may be the norm, or could easily become the norm due to endemic fraud.

Distilled, I contend that it is almost always true that a necessary condition for a foreclosure is for the homeowner to have failed to make his mortgage payments. It is my understanding that Vox disputes this.

I told Vox that the one article he referred me to “began with a one-case study as its proof. This is statistically worse than insignificant. The article graduated to assertion. Then added another one-case study.” Vox may well be right, “but the data in the column he provided do not prove his case.

I have since Googled some of the terms Vox deploys in his post. One search led me to the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. When Ezra does get something right it is only by accident. In any event, the Klein article does not support the Day case (as I understood it), namely that the foreclosed upon are being treated unjustly, even routinely robbed of their property.

Understand: I have no dog in the fracas other than the truth; am quite ready to find for Vox. So far, the hard evidence is missing.

Our debate might be delayed for a while, but it will continue. Stay tuned.

UPDATED I (Oct. 18): Difster’s comment hereunder is mostly waffle unless he is able to address what I wrote in the post: has the homeowner being foreclosed upon been paying his debt or not. He can’t. I really can’t abide argument that doesn’t cleave to reality and evidence. Bring me evidence of all the cases of paid-up homeowners who’ve been foreclosed upon. Present that here, please.

UPDATE II: Judging from this tale of woe, the lawyers for the defaulting borrower are themselves using what they consider irregularities of procedure to try and get their delinquent client’s debt forgiven. I am not saying that “MERS, the electronic mortgage tracking system,” and the banks that use it, are following the letter of the law, but what people seem to be skirting here, much to my horror, is that these borrowers owe money they borrowed. You don’t forgive someone’s debt because the debt-holder’s bureaucracy is bad, or even dubious. And you don’t accuse bankers as a group of robbing home owners of title to their homes, because of problems of paper trail. (As I pointed out here, to argue against the bankers, in this case, on the ground that they are, moreover, embroiled in the fractional reserve system is to make an error of logic, maybe even a categorical error. Along the lines of releasing murderers because justice system is corrupt, etc.)

Note too that nowhere do the delinquent borrowers deny that they have not paid their debts, only that they are struggling “to figure out who owns their loans, who can negotiate loan modifications with them, or even how to get a call returned.”

Also: Borrowers are deploying the very argument the bankers are using: it’s the bureaucracy.

What do you know, it seems that, as outlined in this BAB post, “the latest foreclosure crisis is indeed bureaucratic in nature.”

UPDATE III: The thing to take away from Vox’s WND column today is this line: “the law is very clear on the matter: ‘If the chain of title is broken, then the borrower’s loan is no longer secured by the property.'”

This is the positive law. The fact of the borrower’s debt is unchanged. A took from B in order to buy C. That’s another “chain” to keep in mind.

UPDATE IV (Oct. 19): STILL ABOUT DEADBEATS. From all the reports so far, FBN’s Gerri Willis’ being the latest, it is as I said. The defaulters owe boatloads of money. The bankers bungled the paper work in a manner that verges on the criminal. The reality, in as much as property rights go, comports with my distillation on this post and the one linked to it, “Financial Paperwork Crisis (No Conspiracy Thinking, Please).”

Educational (Racial) Thugocracy Wins; What’s New?

Education, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, libertarianism, Race, Racism

Yes, she had been reforming the educational gulag that is the D.C. public school system, instead of abolishing it (abolition should include educational vouchers and charter schools, a species of the publicly funded system). But I can’t judge Michelle Rhee by this libertarian’s ideal. Rhee, chancellor of perhaps the costliest and crappiest urban school system in the developed world, has been forced to step down because she set about purging the deadwood and detritus, and the structures that nourish them (tenure as opposed talent, for instance), from the DC educational enterprise.

WaPo: “Student test scores rose, decades of enrollment decline stopped and the teachers union accepted a contract that gave the chancellor, in tandem with a rigorous new evaluation system, sweeping new powers to fire low-performing educators.”

Pursuant to her purging, Rhee has been forced, presumably, to parrot publicly that, “We have agreed that the best way to keep the reforms going is for this reformer to step aside.”

That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

The powers that be have been reinstated in the person of Kaya Henderson.

SHE’S IN:

RHEE’S OUT:

Is this a case of out-with-the-Asian-outsider and in-with-the-African home girl? As with everything else in the US, the racial overtones are palpable.