Category Archives: Liberty

Updated: Mitt’s Sincere Sermon

America, Christianity, Elections 2008, Judaism & Jews, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Liberty, Objectivism, Religion, The West, The Zeitgeist

I don’t think a commentator can credibly understand or expatiate upon America, in particular—and the West, in general—without reference to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Heck, one can’t appreciate the greatest composer of all times—Bach—without acknowledging the contribution of his muse—Christianity—to the glory of his music. Ditto for many other great artists.
This is why there’s a sterility and a lack of believability to the religious-hating aspects of Objectivism. As to Christopher Hitchens, he’s an ex-Trotskyite. Why would he understand America?
I say all this even though I am irreligious (although very Jewish in my thinking). America is undeniably and deeply religious.
Having no dog in the fight over Mitt’s Mormonism, I have to say, moreover, that listening to his speech about his faith was moving. Admittedly, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may have some odd ideas. Not so the Mormons I know; they are very fine people. And quite magnificent is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; it’s in fact the finest in the world.
As you can see, it’s impossible to untangle religion in the West and the glorious cultural contribution it has inspired in the faithful.
Particularly loathsome in their mocking commentary about Mitt’s sincere sermon were Keith Olbermann and his Washington-Post henchman—they compared Mitt to their idol, J. F. Kennedy, and found him lacking, to put it mildly. The two did, however, drive home how loathsome the liberal left can be.

Update: Jerri (listen to her great interviews) will enjoy this excerpt from the Hebrew Bible in the First Book Of Samuel. It’s one of the oldest, greatest, most forceful injunctions against the wickedness of centralized power. (Let me tell you, it’s so much better in the original Hebrew). How can one grasp the ancient quest for liberty without proper reverence to this tradition and its revelational component? Note that the king, warns G-d, will take a tenth of the people’s wealth. If only! Send us such a king who will enslave us to the tune of a tenth only!
1 Samuel 8

Israel Asks for a King
1 When Samuel grew old, he appointed his sons as judges for Israel. 2 The name of his firstborn was Joel and the name of his second was Abijah, and they served at Beersheba. 3 But his sons did not walk in his ways. They turned aside after dishonest gain and accepted bribes and perverted justice.
4 So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah. 5 They said to him, “You are old, and your sons do not walk in your ways; now appoint a king to lead [a] us, such as all the other nations have.”
6 But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the LORD. 7 And the LORD told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. 8 As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. 9 Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will do.”
10 Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking him for a king. 11 He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. 12 Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. 15 He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. 16 Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle [b] and donkeys he will take for his own use. 17 He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. 18 When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day.”

On Idiot Ideologues Who Pan Paul

Elections 2008, Ilana Mercer, Individual Rights, Liberty, Private Property

A word about the tinny ideologues who pan Paul because he isn’t perfect: They hate freedom, plain and simple. They don’t know what it is to live without it. They are mollycoddled milksops. Here’s why:

I don’t agree with Paul about everything—I voiced my reservations about his understanding of Islam and the Muslim world in “Some Advice for Ron Paul.”

Without going into it, I don’t much care for his position on abortion. However, unlike Paul’s detractors, I happen to know what living without freedom is like. Paul is as close to The Good Life we could hope to come. Only idiots encased in an armor of worthless ideology—worthless because it exists in the arid arena of their minds, not on earth—would turn their noses up at the prospect of Paul.

Let me share with you a little something: I left South Africa with the proceeds from the sale of my apartment stashed in the soles of my shoes. Had I been apprehended smuggling my property out of that country, I’d have gone to jail with my husband. We both stood taller on that trip. As I am in the habit of sending funds to family, I’ve seen firsthand the same creeping oppression sneak-up on Americans. We’ve already seen the South-African model of detention-without-trial slowly become part of the American legal landscape.

I love life and liberty. Almost more than anything I want to keep what is mine—not to pay the mafia shakedown fee levied on my home (property tax), which means I can never really own my abode, and that ownership is merely nominal. When such prospects loom, I seize them. Being an individualist who loves life and liberty means seizing the day; it means that when one encounters a man whose understanding of freedom and individual rights approximates—if not parallels—your own, you seize the moment.

This is not to say one ought to become a mindless “Paulbearer.” Some have; I have not. (More criticism of Paul’s position on immigration is in “Ron Paul’s Electability.”) Nor does it mean that one turns into an asinine detractor, while deluding oneself that rejecting imperfection is tantamount to a show of principle. What the love of liberty means is seizing the best opportunity at a revolution one has. Those who stand on the sidelines are pussies, and worse, slaves to abstractions.

Update: Barely a Blog friend Steven Browne has continued the thread here. Lest I be identified with the treason faction of the liberty movement—the rank pinkos who promote open borders to the detriment of liberty and property in the US—let me add that Dr. Paul is not sufficiently restrictionist on immigration. As I’ve written, “When government orchestrates an unfettered movement of people into an interventionist state, in which the rights to property, free association, and self defense are already heavily circumscribed by the state—it is guilty of unadulterated social engineering, central planning, and worse.” Aiding and abetting this is philosophical treason.
Our Immigration Archive, in which I’ve demolished most of the feeble arguments advanced by those who are laissez faire on immigration. Admittedly, if one is an anarchist, a meaningless position, then the open-borders stance is the only principled one. But since I’m not a kook (anarchist), but belong to the respectable classical liberal tradition, my position is perfectly congruent philosophically.

Paul was wrong to imply, reductively, that Islamic terrorism in general and September 11 in particular are the sole consequences of American foreign policy. Libertarians cannot persist in such unidirectional formulations. As I’ve said previously, our adventurous foreign policy is a necessary precondition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one, given that Muslims today are at the center of practically every conflict across the world. The received leftist wisdom that the Arabs were (and remain) hapless and helpless victims of the West is false and patronizing. As scholars such as Efraim and Inari Karsh have shown, “Middle Eastern history is essentially the culmination of long-standing indigenous trends, passions and patterns of behavior rather than an externally imposed dictate.”

Ultimately, a rational suspicion of power, upon which libertarians pride themselves, must be predicated on distrusting all power, not only American power.

Groovy Over Gravitas: The Unbearable Liteness of Being Reason

Classical Liberalism, libertarianism, Liberty, Political Philosophy, Pop-Culture, Pseudo-intellectualism, Reason

The reason I prefer to describe myself as a “classical liberal” is in order to avoid being equated with libertarians who equate liberty with grooviness. Exemplars are Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch of Reason magazine, who see the Ron Paul surge, in part, as a yearning for the “freewheeling fun of libertarianism.”

The breathy, unsubstantial nature of Reason libertarians was best encapsulated in the essay “Burke vs. Reason,” reproduced hereunder. Although I don’t agree with the writer about everything—his discounting of Ayn Rand, for example—Grace captures the essence of this libertarianism: Groovy over gravitas.

More material, “Reason’s list [of ’35 heroes of freedom’] is based on a false premise.” America is not freer than ever, as Reason’s groovy gush claims. If these libertines are not hip to that reality, then their feel for freedom—never mind their reasoning—is not very good.

What’s left but to groove on?

Burke vs. Reason
By Kevin Michael Grace | Jan 18, 2004

“Reason” believes that the world has become “groovier” since 1968, the year of that magazine’s founding. Not merely “groovier,” mind you, but “groovier and groovier.” In celebration, it has nominated “35 heroes of freedom,” freedom apparently being synonymous with grooviness. This list, and the reasons given for the selection of the “heroes” therein is sufficient to persuade me that modern libertarianism, at least as exemplified by Reason magazine, is not a philosophy suitable for adults.
What sort of person says “groovy,” anyway? The last time I heard it used non-ironically was by a crooked lawyer in the movie To Live and Die in L.A. He was shot to death directly afterward and quite deservedly so. With its connotations of kaftans, flower power and “The Pope Smokes Dope,” its use today suggests superannuated hippies nostalgic for the Golden Dawn of the 1960s. But Nick Gillespie, Reason’s editor and presumed builder of the Pantheon of Groovy, is in his 40s and was thus barely toilet-trained during the Summer of Love. So the only nostalgia here is for a place that has never existed and never shall: Utopia.
To accuse someone or something of being “utopian” is normally considered an insult, for the reason that various attempts to mandate Heaven on Earth have resulted in the best approximations of Hell men can devise, but Reason thinks differently:
“For all of its many problems, the world we live in is dizzying in its variety, breathtaking in its riches, and wide-ranging in its options. Malcontents on the right and left who diagnose modernity as suffering from “affluenza” or “options anxiety” will admit this much: These days we’ve even got a greater choice of ways to be unhappy. Which may be as close to a definition of utopia as we’re likely to come.”
One would have thought it obvious that “a greater choice of ways to be unhappy” is a powerful argument against license. Certainly Edmund Burke thought so. Burke is considered the father of modern conservatism, but he was a Whig not a Tory, the champion of the American colonists and the people of India against the depredations of Warren Hastings. A classical liberal, in other words.
According to Burke,
“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites…in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
Certainly Thomas Szasz, one of Reason’s 35 heroes, would agree with Burke. But Margaret Thatcher, another hero, would not. “There is no such thing as society,” she famously declared. Reason evidently agrees, which explains the presence on its list of William Burroughs, Larry Flynt, Madonna, Martina Navratilova and Dennis Rodman, who are celebrated for their antinomianism and their intemperance.
William Burroughs is praised for “irrevocably loosen[ing] up Eisenhower’s America. Not only is his fiction (Junky, Naked Lunch, Nova Express) relentlessly anti-authoritarian, he proved that you can abuse your body in every way imaginable and still outlive the entire universe.” Like Rimbaud, Burroughs extolled the “derangement of all the senses”; unlike Rimbaud, his work is mostly gibberish and his literary influence baleful. Burroughs also killed his wife and got away with it, but misogyny is not incompatible with grooviness, it seems.
Which brings us to Larry Flynt.
“Where Hugh Hefner mainstreamed bohemian sexual mores, hard-core porn merchant Flynt brought tastelessness to new depths, inspiring an unthinkable but revealing coalition between social conservatives and puritanical feminists–and helping to strengthen First Amendment protections for free expression along the way.”
Never mind that the First Amendment protects not “free expression” but “freedom of speech.” What is the nature of Flynt’s expression? “Chester the molester,” the depiction of a woman being put through a meat grinder, the reduction of the erotic to the clinical detachment of the livestock buyer and the mortician.
Madonna is praised for 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.” In reality, Madonna’s career poses the question, How can you Ã?©pater le bourgeois after the burghers have embraced bohemianism? The answer is, You can’t. And so she has been reduced to publicly consuming her children, i.e., the likes of Britney Spears and Christian Aguilera.
Martina Navratilova is praised “as the first superstar athlete to admit she was gay and the first woman to play tennis like a man…she smashed stultifying stereotypes like so many poorly hit lobs.” But Navratilova has cheerfully admitted that even during her prime any one of the 100 top-ranked male players would have beaten her. As for stereotypes, she has firmly established in the public mind the conflation of female athletes with lesbianism. Which is not a good thing, is it?
Dennis Rodman is praised for “set[ting] an X-Men-level standard for cultural mutation. His flamboyant, frequently gay-ish antics place him in apostolic succession to a madcap handful of athletes such as Joe Namath, Rollie Fingers, and Muhammad Ali, all of whom challenged the lantern-jawed stiffness that had traditionally made sports stars such dull role models.” Rodman is a wreck of a man who wasted his talent, trashed his career and serves as a role model only for those that seek to emulate the insane, but what is that compared to the value of “gay-ish antics”?
It is worth noting that Reason’s list excludes cultural figures of eminence. (Unless you believe Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, Robert Heinlein and Willie Nelson count.) It is not as if America has not witnessed the flowering of great artists since 1968: Tom Wolfe in belles-lettres, Stanley Kubrick in film and Philip Glass in music are three that come to mind. But these men fail the grooviness test. Wolfe and Kubrick are rather gloomy about the human condition. And Glass is a Buddhist, a religion that teaches that desire is the root of human suffering, while Reason teaches the exact opposite.
To be fair, Reason’s list contains a number of worthies: Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, Jane Jacobs, Ron Paul, Szasz, Clarence Thomas. But would they celebrate the destruction of all norms and the reduction of people to the level of atoms seeking ceaselessly and exclusively to maximize their utility? I think not.
In any event, Reason’s list is based on a false premise. The world may be freer since 1968, but Reason’s editors do not live in the world, they live in the United States. And only a fool or liar would deny that America is much less free than it was 35 years ago. There is no sphere of human activity that American governments do not seek to regulate–except the sexual sphere. Laws proliferate at such a rate that everyone is a law-breaker. There is nowhere Americans can go when they simply want to be left alone. Just ask Randy Weaver and David Koresh. Meanwhile, the range of acceptable opinion becomes ever more narrow. Just ask Al Campanis, Jimmy the Greek, Trent Lott, Rush Limbaugh, Gregg Easterbrook, et al. The world we live in may be dizzying in its variety, but America becomes less “diverse” with each passing day.
A glance at any newspaper serves to demonstrate that Americans no longer believe in personal responsibility. They have become as children; their woes are always someone else’s fault. “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.” If Burke was right, then American liberty is in mortal danger. If the juvenile delinquents at Reason are right, that is as nothing compared to the constitutionally guaranteed right of the cabaret artiste to masturbate in public. To what will Americans listen and to whom? The counsels of the wise and good or the flattery of knaves? Burke or Reason? The future of the Republic rests on the answers to these questions.

Kevin Michael Grace is an unemployed journalist who maintains the website TheAmbler.com.

Rest in Peace ‘My President’

Federal Reserve Bank, libertarianism, Liberty

In the warm e-mail exchanges we had over the years, and until a few weeks ago, I’d always refer to Aaron Russo as “my president.” In 2004, Aaron vied to become the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate, but was unseated by ugly subterfuge, not uncommon in a party dominated by leftists.

Aaron passed away after a long battle with cancer. The column “Aaron Russo: A Choice, Not and Echo,” best encapsulates how I felt about this warm, captivating and larger than life personality. Aaron was never a tinny ideologue, whose ideas on liberty exist in the arid arena of pure thought. Rather, he was a flesh-and-blood warrior for freedom.

I was very fond of that lovely man.