Category Archives: Natural Law

UPDATE IV: Bullied ‘Jail Bus’ Lady: Fearful Fatty, Not a Hero (I Am ‘Old’)

Education, Family, Feminism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Natural Law, Pop-Culture, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Reason, The Zeitgeist

HERE are excerpts from “Bullied ‘Jail Bus’ Lady: Fearful Fatty, Not a Hero,” my weekly column, now on RT. It deconstructs the latest episode of infantilism in America:

The new ‘poster child’ for a bully victim in America is, wait for it, not a helpless small child, robbed of lunch money by the schoolyard ruffian, but an adult entrusted with supervising them.

The Internet watched 68-year-old Karen Klein, who was charged with ‘monitoring’ bused children in the town of Greece, N.Y., dissolve in tears to the taunts of her 13-year-old charges.

Klein’s failure to fend off the feral children was captured on YouTube by her tormentors, students at the Athena Middle School in suburban Rochester.

To the sight of a feeble adult, who occupies two seats on the vehicle she’s supposed to supervise; too fat to budge and too powerless to perform the task for which she is being paid—the Internet erupted in cheers.

Klein was quickly catapulted to fame for her, yes, courage. ‘God bless, you are my hero,’ effused a woman with the handle ‘Marykate,’ in an online post.

Charitably put, Klein has not advanced adulthood in infantile America. …

… In defense of the wolverines who preyed on Klein, how is an adult such as herself to command their respect? From whom are these fiends, out on a wilding spree, expected to learn a lesson? From Supervisor Klein, who was not adult enough to holler for help? Klein lacked the wherewithal to ask the bus driver to stop the bus and set the kids straight, then and there. …

… Or, perhaps the bus drive is another fearful fatty, who was unable to dislodge herself from her seat? Perhaps the two live in fear of potential law suits, lodged by the parents who sire these good-for-nothing seventh graders? …

… Natural order is not predicated on state-enacted laws. The natural order that has worked throughout the ages to tame young terrors is predicated on hierarchy; on the preservation of clear, never-to-be-blurred boundaries between adults and kids. These boundaries were once upheld in-house—in the principal’s office, the home and the church. …

… Restore old-fashioned discipline to classrooms and school buses.

… Better still: Drain the septic tank that is our federalized education system, and with it the auxiliary personnel that infest the schools and feed off a dwindling tax base. There is now one non-teaching adult for every 8 or 9 children. …

The complete column, now on RT, is “Bullied ‘Jail Bus’ Lady: Fearful Fatty, Not a Hero.”

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

Support this writer’s work by clicking to “Recommend,” “Tweet” and “Share” “Return To Reason” on WND, and the “Paleolibertarian Column” on RT.

The paperback edition (softcover) of “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” is available on Amazon. It features bonus material, including an Afterword by Burkean philosopher, Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.

UPDATE I: If you must have the visual:

UPDATE II: A Facebook Friend writes on my Wall:

Sean Sheedy:

I’m appalled by these Lord-of-the-Flies adolescents. But I also recall my Irish grandmother, who would have stuffed their words back down their throats ’til they choked, and then settled back for a nip of her favorite whiskey.
The U.S. these days is sadly lacking in cranky old folks.

I reply:

SS: I love your comment. Exactly my sentiment. I grew up around wiry little old Israeli ladies, who were so tough and scary that we kids used to imagine they were witches who would eat us up if we got close enough. (There were no Idiot Pads in those days; we’d think up scary stuff for fun.) Anyone taunting these former pioneers of the Holy land, who had drained swamps in their youth, would run for his/her life. We respected our elders.

UPDATE III: Guys start fighting on my Wall over abortion. I write: “AMM: There is not a thing you can do when people go off about fetuses (which I, of course, love). As I once wrote: “Would that Republicans fussed as much over the many fully formed human-beings dying daily in Iraq, as they do over fetuses.” Fuss all you like, but not on this Wall, fetuses (which I love) are not the subject here. But, I have a very low regard for your average Republican’s “culture of life.”

UPDATE IV: A comment at WND:

Ilana Mercer, one day you will be old, and fat, and powerless, and someone will heap on the last straw…and you will break, and sob, and understand what this woman went through. Until then, you’ll be a soulless fraud.

How does the fool writing this know I am not “old”? Because of the way I look? American slobs make me sick. You know nothing about real suffering, but you think a cruel word qualifies. (Read Into the Cannibal’s Pot to get a perspective on just how disgustingly self-indulgent and full of self-pity you are.)

Americans are blind to anything and anyone that isn’t like them; you can identify with Klein because she looks like you. You cannot identify with those who do not mirror indulgence and sloth (“old” though they may be).

From the fact that someone looks OK, you deduce that they are young, have it easy, haven’t suffered like the Klein woman has (she doesn’t know what real suffering is)?

If someone looks OK in middle age, you think that comes easily and doesn’t involve hard work and disciple, and isn’t achieved despite a difficult life? You pity the slack and pile on hard-working disciplined folks, for what? Driving themselves hard (I do that)? Running 12 miles a week for the last 22 years? (I do that, come rain or shine). Not wallowing in pity (I don’t do that). Anything to excuse the way you eat and look, and the arrogance with which you treat others not like you.

How old does the writer think I am, what with a daughter who is 29-years old?

Misplaced compassion and envy; that’s what this country is increasingly about.

What I once said in an interview about reason and misplaced compassion obtains: “In well-functioning people, the intellect is not separated from the affect (i.e. the emotional). They are integrated. When people are rational, they observe reality as it is, and are more likely to be concerned with justice and avoid misplacing compassion.”

UPDATE II: On The Radio Show Of ‘Austrian’ Jay Taylor

Economy, Ilana On Radio & TV, libertarianism, Media, Natural Law, Political Economy, South-Africa

I will be a guest on The Jay Taylor Radio Show (“Turning Hard Times into Good Times”).

Date: Tuesday, June 26, at 3:30 EST.
Topic: Into the Cannibal’s Pot, as it applies to private property rights, gold in South Africa, and the backdrop to the establishment of Apartheid.

Jay Taylor is a New-York based investor and broadcaster, who invests and broadcasts in the intellectual tradition of Austrian economics. We met at the New York Junto gathering, where I was the month of May’s featured speaker.

I was delighted to hear that the topic of the talk—“Natural Rights in ‘Into the Cannibal’s Pot’: Abstractions or Facts of Life?”—resonated with Jay.

Jay is a treasure. Tune in to support his work. (And, it goes without saying, go easy on me.)

UPDATE I (June 26): You can listen to the show here.

UPDATE II (June 27): An MP3 of my segment is here.

Obama’s Parasite Economy

Economy, Government, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Natural Law, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Private Property, The State

The Free Dictionary teaches that a host is “an animal or plant on which or in which another organism lives.” This is precisely the nature of the relationship between the private, productive sector, and the public, unproductive sector. The last lives at the pleasure of the first; or lives off the first.

In the brouhaha over Barack Obama’s “The Private Sector is Doing Fine” comment, nobody is asking, Who’s property is it anyway? And why would a system (“The Economy”) do better when the number of parasites (people whose spending is financed as a result of coercive transfers of wealth from the private sector) it carries continues to grow (or to stagnate)?

The public sector consumes wealth—it doesn’t produce it.

Reason Magazine, representing as it does a variant of what I call “Libertarianism Lite,” focuses elsewhere.

Based on charts he generated at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ website, Reason’s Nick Gillespie notes that, “As it stands, the number of private-sector employees is about equal to what it was in 2005. And in 2000, which is really appalling. … The current number of government workers is about what it was in 2006.”

In the rest of the post, Gillespie does his utmost to clarify what BHO really meant when he said that,

The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government. Oftentimes cuts initiated by, you know, Governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don’t have the same kind of flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in.

UPDATED: IRS Survivors (Fleeing Police State USA)

Founding Fathers, Ilana Mercer, Law, Liberty, Natural Law, Taxation

Writer Christopher Sandford describes his interactions with the Internal Revenue Service as “dealing with a simultaneously incompetent and psychotically aggressive opponent.” “What is beyond a doubt is that our relentlessly progressive and humanely empathetic leader had done precious little for the rights of those of us who find ourselves caught in the spokes of his infernal government machinery. Indeed, he and his government myrmidons have frequently spoken of their intention to pursue the allegedly noncompliant taxpayer to the very brink of that unhappy individuals’ endurance and sanity. That most certainly is part of Obama’s record.” (Writing in the April issue of Chronicles Magazine.)

“Think the IRS can’t send you to prison?,” warns CBS’ Survivor winner Richard Hatch in a timely television commercial. “The IRS sends people to prison and they’re not celebrities. If you owe the IRS $10,000 or more, call for your free tax consultation NOW. Listen, I went to prison for over four years, and you don’t want to,” Hatch tells potential victims.

The US government exercises a brutal tax-enforcement regimen. As a police state, it regularly finds citizens guilty of crimes absent the intent to commit a crime—the legal imperative of mens rea.

The “taxpayer,” compliant or not, however, must accurately be described as an innocent, non-aggressive property owner, who has the natural right to keep what he has worked for, or what was voluntarily bequeathed to him.

In the case of the so-called “non-compliant” victim of this armed and dangerous syndicate—the state—his actions have been criminalized, even though his alleged crime, more often than not, was unintentional; he did not mean to “deprive” his masters of the spoils of his labor.

Going by Thomas Jefferson, we live under tyranny, for as this founder said, “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

UPDATED (April 17): Fleeing Police State USA. Special Report: Tax time pushes some Americans to take a hike.