Category Archives: Liberty

UPDATE II: ‘Un-American Revolutions’ (Un-American America)

America, Democracy, Founding Fathers, History, Islam, Liberty, Middle East, Nationhood, Political Philosophy

Having grown up in the Middle East, and lived through a war or two, I’m not optimistic about the outcomes of a democratic revolution in the region. I said as much in “Media’s Sickening Sentimentality On Egypt” (HERE). That’s why I mocked (in 2005) the continual comparisons Bush and his gang used to make between “the carnage in Iraq and the constitutional cramps of early America; between the feuding Mohammedans and the followers of John Locke and Baron de Montesquieu.”

Niall Ferguson, writing in Newsweek, also thinks that the slobbering will soon give way to an uneasy silence:

“Time and again, Americans have hailed revolutions, only to fall strangely silent as those same revolutions proceeded to devour not only their own children but many other people’s too. In each case the body count was in the millions.

So as you watch revolution sweeping through the Arab world (and potentially beyond), remember these three things about non-American revolutions:

* They take years to unfold. It may have seemed like glad confident morning in 1789, 1917, and 1949. Four years later it was darkness at noon.

* They begin by challenging an existing political order, but the more violence is needed to achieve that end, the more the initiative passes to men of violence—Robespierre, Stalin, and the supremely callous Mao himself.

* Because neighboring countries feel challenged by the revolution, internal violence is soon followed by external violence, either because the revolution is genuinely threatened by foreigners (as in the French and Russian cases) or because it suits the revolutionaries to blame an external threat for domestic problems (as when China intervened in the Korean War).

To which an American might reply: yes, but was all this not true of our revolution too? …”

Read “Un-American Revolutions.”

UPDATE I (Mar. 6): Regular readers should know better than to attribute my quoting of Ferguson to an ideological affinity for his neoconservatism. Hell, Myron, as a man with a particularly critical and curious mind, don’t you get sick of tinny ideologues who mouth-off opinion without reference to the facts of history? I like deductions that cleave to facts. Ferguson is a good source of information. The article is cited for its juxtaposition of the American and The Other Revolutions. These contrasts demand Derb-worthy pessimism, not silly, happy faces. A lot of people refuse to ever cast aspersions on Thomas Jefferson’s blind spot: France. As much as I revere him, Jefferson was somewhat enamored of the “Revolution in France,” Edmund Burke’s precise, and derisive, characterization.

UPDATE II (Mar. 7): UN-AMERICAN AMERICA. Right you are Nebojsa. Vox writes: “Americans themselves do not even enjoy the democratic freedoms which their leaders are claiming to support elsewhere.” Which is exactly the point I belabored in “Frankly, My Dear Egyptians, I Don’t Give a Damn,” over a month ago:

“The ‘planners’ society’ I inhabit is ‘dominated by a bureaucratic elite.’ This unnatural elite, ‘manages its people’s principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances. … Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent.'”

“What remains of the rights to property and self-ownership in the soft tyranny that is the USA is regulated and taxed to the hilt. When they travel, Americans are routinely patted down, and irradiated with photons like meat in a packaging plant. In contravention of their naturally licit rights, many thousands of my compatriots languish in prisons for ingesting unapproved substances, or for violating information socialism laws (so-called insider trading infractions). Others are hounded by democratically elected despots for daring to form militia (as many Egyptians have recently done) in order to repel the trespassers who traipse across their homesteads on our country’s Southern border, killing their cattle and imperiling their kin.”

BESIDES:

“More often than not, Americans who yearn for the freedoms their forbears bequeathed to them are labeled demented and dangerous. I’ve yet to hear liberty deprived peoples the world over stand-up for the tea-party patriots. When they do — I’ll gladly galvanize on their behalf.”

BASICALLY, when Egyptians and Libyans stand up for my tea-party rights, I’ll love them and their freedoms back.

Obama’s Hate-Your-Boss Hotline

Barack Obama, Business, Economy, Individual Rights, Liberty, Regulation

“Get in the game,” the president instructed U.S. business leaders, in an address to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce today. As Bloomberg.com reported, this audacious president urged business to “support their country by moving cash from the sidelines into the economy,” “hiring more American workers,” and, generally “investing in this nation.” This, as Obama carves greater and greater sections out of the hide of American businesses for the assorted, unproductive oink sectors.

Just the other day, this deeply silly man “launched a new program at the Department of Labor which will refer workers who have complaints about their bosses to a toll free number at the American Bar Association, where they can get a lawyer to work on their case on a contingency fee basis.” (Via Elizabeth MacDonald of Fox Business) Yes, litigation always reduces the costs of doing business, doesn’t it?! What’s not to like in a collaboration between “the federal government and private bar” to promote “worker rights,” already covered by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and other legislation. This is how Obama is “doing his part to improve the business climate” in this country.

The meek reply to BHO’s demands from Johanna Schneider, “who directs external relations for the Business Roundtable,” will not do. “Jobs will follow demand,” she said. “Unless you see sustained demand for your product or your service, you cannot from a fiduciary standpoint invest in more employees.”

Business leaders will have to learn to speak the language of individual/natural rights, and link the rights of property and freedom of association to prosperity and peace. Unless they sound morally indignant about the violation of their rights, parasitical collectivists such as BHO will continue to make light of and mock the “incredible pressure to cut costs and keep margins up,” as the Idiot-in-Chief put it.

UPDATED: Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed’ (More Gloom)

Barack Obama, Bush, Conservatism, Debt, Democrats, Fascism, Homeland Security, Liberty, Paleoconservatism, Political Economy, Republicans, The State

The following excerpt is from “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed,” my new WND.COM column:

“Last week, this column explained the divide between Americans and their ‘Overlords Who Art in D.C.’ I asked that you quit invoking words too weak to describe that divide. ‘Disconnect,’ ‘disrespect’: These are soft designations; they don’t begin to bridge the moat that separates you from your sovereigns.

Proper metaphors for the relationship between The Great Unwashed and the government that literally has them by the genitals is that of ruled and ruler, Rome and its provinces, Imperial China and its peasants.

If you’re a tax payer — at least 50 percent of Americans are tax consumers — you are the Beltway’s bitch.

So stop beseeching sinecured statists for ‘hope’ and ‘change.’ They will never know what it’s like to slum it in your neighborhoods. They’ll never experience the effects of inflation and rising prices as you will; they’ve voted themselves salaries twice as high as yours and pensions in perpetuity. You’re paying.

Think of yourself as a servant, your nose pressed against your master’s mansion windows. That’s how I felt as I drove through the suburbs of Northern Virginia, in October of this year. I saw what Peggy Noonan lushly described in her Wall Street Journal column, excerpted by John Derbyshire in his full and fair assessment of the tottering American experiment, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism …

The complete column is “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed,” now on WND.COM.

Avail yourself of my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society, on Kindle.

Merry Xmas to all,
ILANA

UPDATE (Dec. 25): “IT’S GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME” (as the Beatles lyrics go). The Powers that Be thought “Claire Hirschkind, 56, who says she is a rape victim” (and also happens to have “the equivalent of a pacemaker”), needed a reminder of her ordeal.

Hirschkind said because of the device in her body, she was led to a female TSA employee and three Austin police officers. She says she was told she was going to be patted down.
“I turned to the police officer and said, ‘I have given no due cause to give up my constitutional rights. You can wand me,'” and they said, ‘No, you have to do this,'” she said.
Hirschkind agreed to the pat down, but on one condition.
“I told them, ‘No, I’m not going to have my breasts felt,’ and she said, ‘Yes, you are,'” said Hirschkind.
When Hirschkind refused, she says that “the police actually pushed me to the floor, (and) handcuffed me. I was crying by then. They drug me 25 yards across the floor in front of the whole security.”
An ABIA spokesman says it is TSA policy that anyone activating a security alarm has two options. One is to opt out and not fly, and the other option is to subject themselves to an enhanced pat down. Hirschkind refused both and was arrested.

Hey, what do you know: A noisy, irate, flying public has changed the behavior of their sovereigns not a whit. Who would have thunk? (See “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed.”)

And what do memebers of the sheep herd say about a middle aged, ill American lady being mauled by rabid TSA dogs?

“I understand her side of it, and their side as well, but it is for our protection so I have no problems with it,” said Gwen Washington, who lives in Killeen.

It matters not a bit that “less than three percent of travelers get a pat-down.” This practice is a matter of policy, not happenstance. Theoretically, everyone could be molested, very many are. No freedom loving individual should be consoled by the repulsive, “rare-occurrence” excuse.

UPDATED: Tag The TSA Dogs (Make That Remorseless Dogs)

Constitution, Homeland Security, Liberty, Regulation, Terrorism, The State

Fliers who are frisked should write down the name of the TSA agent who pawed them, and then blog or YouTube the event by exposing the personal details of the perp. Footage abounds, but the agents—the stars in these horror films—remain nameless. Name the bastards! It’s one way to bring about some attrition. If you know an agent; be sure to dissociate from him or her. If I knew one of these vermin, I’d pin the perp’s poster to a tree or something.

The revolt against The Transportation and Security Administration has resulted in very little fundamental change, so far, other than exemptions for sectional interests. By fundamental change, I mean restoring the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

The TSA is just one department. All government departments are like the TSA: Bureaucrats write most of the laws under which we live, and which no elected official has approved. This is why some conservatives (the smart ones) use the term “Managerial State” for the Thing the Huckster and the Hannity call “our freedoms,” “our democracy.” We really have very of the first. And as bad as mobocracy is, we are, in truth, managed by unelected apparatchiks.

I am unable to fly to a destination of my choosing because I refuse to be fondled or zapped with photons.

“The Australian” carries a gallery of pictures of the American peon being pawed.

UPDATE (Nov. 29): MAKE THAT REMORSELESS DOGS. Finally, a lone agent has repented. Well, sort of. I guess he’s feeling the antipathy. Having discovered the Ten Commandments, this man laments that, “It goes back to, ‘Do upon others as you would wish others to do upon you.’ And I would not want that done to me, or my family, or my mother, or my grandmother.'”

Nothing about resigning.