Category Archives: Paleoconservatism

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.

UPDATE IV: A National Reviewnik Thinks He’s "Contrarian"

Debt, Inflation, Journalism, Media, Neoconservatism, Paleoconservatism, Pseudo-intellectualism, Republicans

He’s trillions of dollars and a decade too late, but Kevin D. Williamson of National Review can assure himself he’s “contrarian” for advocating an about face in the Federal Reserve Bank’s fiddling.

Williamson may be reading Austrian economics. By that I mean the reality based thinking of Ludwig von Mises (taught at the Mises Institute); preached by Ron Paul (whom the neoconery mocked during the Bush years), practiced by financier Peter Schiff, written about by Tom Woods in Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse; as well as by Vox Day, and in this writer’s columns and blogs over the past decade.

Being of the establishment, however, Williamson can just put his hands over his ears and tell himself over and over again “I’m contrarian,” and this will be so.

“So here’s a contrarian take,” Williamson assures himself: “The Fed should stop trying to drive down interest rates. It should instead work to raise them. Why? Our economy needs savings and investment. …”

As I said, trillions of dollars and a decades too later … (“PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES!”)

Your host, writing in “Those Invisible Jobs,” did not anoint herself a “contrarian” for advocating that Fed supremo Ben Bernanke raise interest rates.” Not then, and not in 2000 (“The Central Bank’s Game is the Same, Whoever’s the Name”), and on all those occasions in-between.

Why? Because in the Austrian community, represented by some very prominent people, this is common wisdom.

Bloody annoying…

UPDATE I: I’ll be honest: it’s hard to know from Mr. Williamson’s wishy-washy articles exactly where he stands on matters of political philosophy (or if he is a neoconservative or not). However, this post’s point was pretty clear. It expressed annoyance that someone can call himself contrarian for proposing less quantitative easing. Granted, it’s a prickly post, but Mr. Williamson can understand, surely, why writers like myself get a tad testy? We’ve been marginalized for being right on foreign policy and fiscal matters our entire careers, such as they are. Then, when the rest catch up with us, a decade down the line, they pretend that truth began with them.

If I’ve learned anything about the American Mind it is this: Truth doesn’t exist until someone in the establishment pronounces it, usually a decade or so after it has been in circulation. I guess, better late than never, but why not acknowledge those who went before?

I saw Mr. Williamson go up against one or the other left-liberals on TV, and I remember thinking: much better than Rich. Still, I do not believe there is a sufficient amount of information to conclude that “better than Rich” is a meaningful statement.

Mr. Williamson is young (and presentable). He has plenty of time to correct any mistaken impressions I might have formed, not least of which is his sharing that horrible habit common among the Republican establishment of never admitting to being Johnny-come-latelies on Iraq, Bush, economy, QE, etc.

UPDATE II: Mr. Glisson, first, why don’t you provide hyperlinks and particular quotes in substantiation of your position that Mr. Williamson is never a neoconservative? Second, why misconstrue the point of this writer’s post, encapsulated again in the last two sentences of “UPDATE I”? Moreover, from a parenthetic statement about the neoconservatives’ attitude toward Ron Paul, Mr. Williamson concluded that I had called him a neoconservative. You do the same, for some reason.

Again, Mr. Williamson is better than Rich; way better. I am still unsure as to what kind of badge of honor this really is; or if Mr. Williamson is or is not a neoconservative. Isn’t that a condition of employment at National Review? John Derbyshire is NRO’s only paleoconservative (sort of). I’d love to see John thrust into the spotlight, but they keep him in the basement, so to speak.

UPDATE III (Oct. 17): We thank Kevin D. Williamson for responding to the intrigue he has generated on Barely A Blog. He remains a man of mystery, and that is not half bad. In the age of too much information (and letting it all hang loose), mystery is a good thing. We agree that Mr. Williamson ain’t Rich. Has Rich employed a non-neoconservative in the hope of generating some oscillation in the static National Review? Or because the readership has little patience with that old guard? Who knows? We also understand that a man has to make a living. To do so, he must often walk an ideological tightrope.

Nevertheless, those who went before—and remain permanently frozen out of mainstream—deserve mention. It gets terribly cold out here. Mr. Glisson seems to think I’m some kind of intellectual missionary, spreading the good word, pleased to turn the other cheek just so long as the new guard can adopt the gospel, even if they falsely pretend to be pioneers.

Rubbish. Nonsense on stilts. I’m all about justice. Intellectual justice included.

UPDATE IV (3/5/2016):

“NRO Writer’s ‘UnFollow’ Leads To Musing About The Manners-Morals Connection.”

Bibi’s Paleo Position

IMMIGRATION, Israel, Labor, Nationhood, Paleoconservatism

“We have created a Jewish and democratic nation, and we cannot let it turn into a nation of foreign workers,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a conference of the Israel Manufacturers Association in January. … Although the Israeli government issued a record 120,000 foreign work permits in 2009, the country’s political leaders say they want to phase out migrant labor. .. [that it] threatens the nation’s Jewish character” …

The New York Times has awoken to the story about “Netanyahu Wanting To Retain Israel’s National Character,” discussed on BAB in March.

Bibi’s is quite an extraordinary a position; it’s a paleoconservative position.

NYT: “Since the first intifada of the early 1990s, more than a million migrants from the developing world have come to Israel to replace the Palestinians, who were the country’s original source of cheap labor.”

Bibi thinks that unemployed, minimally skilled Israelis and Palestinians (provided they don’t smuggle bombs under their clothes) should do the jobs foreigners want so badly to do in Israel. Just as the same segment of American society should have dibs on those jobs in the US. While no one owns a job, and one cannot tell employers who to hire—people who care about the fabric of the society in which they live will want to see low-skilled locals making a living.

Israel is fortunate to have a better class of foreign laborers; these poor Chinese workers—some treated atrociously—do not march demanding political rights and calling their employers racists; they sue for the wages they’ve earned.

UPDATED: In Defense Of Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Free Markets, Free Speech, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Paleoconservatism, Political Correctness, Political Philosophy

Tom Piatak’s article, “Nazis and Other Delusions: A Response to Hoppe,” is generating a lot of heat at Chronicles Magazine, edited by the peerless Dr. Fleming. Hans Hoppe, whom I know and like, is said to have referred to some prominent paleoconservatives, Pat Buchanan and the late Sam Francis, as national socialists.

Writes Piatak, “All the paleoconservatives present at the 1996 meeting with whom I spoke confirmed my recollection of this, and I can attest that Sam Francis understood Hoppe to be calling him a Nazi as well.”

Hard-hitting, for sure, I have always understood Hoppe’s “national socialism” comments to be a condemnation of the economic thinking of his philosophical foes. Besides being an unbelievably hackneyed and meaningless label, libeling someone a Nazi usually refers to their alleged anti-Semitism or racism. Hoppe’s libertarianism is the kind that doesn’t give a hoot if someone harbors such sentiments, just as long as the so-called Nazi keeps his mitts to himself.

That’s my position as a paleolibertarian. I don’t care if you hate me for being Jewish, just stay out of my face. In fact, I will go so far as to say that I despise sanctimonious neocons (like the stupid E. Hasslebeck on “The View”) who go out of their way to hunt down and humiliate anyone who shows “prejudice.” (I want to start a “Protect the Prejudiced” movement.) I think Hoppe is pretty much like that.

More important: Hoppe has been hounded by the PC police and accused of racism, homophobia—you name it. He is pretty uncompromising on race, culture—is a defender of the natural aristocracy and the West they way it ought to be. Mr. Piatak himself quotes the uncompromising Hoppe using designations such as “human trash” and “inferior people” quite comfortably. This doesn’t sound like a person who would turn around and, self-righteously, call another a Nazi.

Why would someone with Hans’ views,then, use the “national socialism” pejorative in the way he is accused of doing against his interlocutors? It’s just not Hoppe’s style. Coming from Hoppe, I am inclined to see any use of the national socialism label as descriptive of their economics. Economics is his field, after all.

“What have Hoppe’s fellow libertarians done on immigration since 1996?” asks Piatak. Unless he has backpedalled on immigration, Hans was one of the few libertarians to oppose the mass immigration immolation.

See “TRADE GOODS, NOT PLACES.” I’ve always taken Hans to be both anarchist and immigration restrictionist, which is, some would argue, inconsistent. “TRADE GOODS, NOT PLACES” does not paper over the inconsistencies:

Matters would be simple if all libertarians agreed that a constitutional government has an obligation to repel foreign invaders. They don’t, not if they are anarchists. Both open-border and closed-border libertarian anarcho-capitalists posit that an ideal society is one where there is no entity—government—to monopolize defense and justice functions. In a society based on anarcho-capitalism, where every bit of property is privately owned, the reasoning goes, private property owners cannot object if X invites Y onto his property, so long as he keeps him there, or so long as Y obtains permission to venture onto other spaces. Despite their shared anarchism, limited-immigration anarcho-libertarians and free-immigration anarcho-libertarians arrive respectively at different conclusions when they make the transition from utopia to real life.

The latter believe the state must refrain from interfering with the free movement of people despite the danger they may pose to nationals. The former arrive at the exact opposite conclusion: So long as the modern American Welfare State stands, and so long as it owns large swaths of property, it’s permissible to expect the state to carry out its traditional defensive functions. This includes repelling incomers who may endanger the lives and livelihoods of locals. [UPDATE (June 27): This, in my understanding, is Hoppe’s position.]

The open-border libertarian will claim that his is the less porous position. He will accuse the limited-immigration libertarian of being guilty of, on the one hand, wanting the state to take action to counter immigration, but, on the other hand, because of his anarchism, being at pains to find a basis for the interventions he favors. Not being an anarchist, and hence not having to justify the limited use by government of force against invaders, I hope I have escaped these contradictions.

This essay is in my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society. Get it.

By the by, Hans, whom many people vilify as haughty, can be a lot of fun.