Category Archives: Paleolibertarianism

Updated: The Oink Sector Is Always Seen (‘A Decrease In the Spending Increase’)

Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, Government, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Economy, The State, War, Welfare

“The art of economics,” wrote Henry Hazlitt, “consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.” Hazlitt was encapsulating Bastiat’s What-Is-Seen-and-What-Is-Not-Seen principle.

“Flanked by emergency medical personnel,” write the editors at the WSJ, “Mr. Obama made his usual threat of Armageddon if automatic spending cuts go forward on March 1. Americans can expect more such melodrama in the coming days, so as a public service we thought we’d break down the President’s three biggest political tricks.”

Members of the “oink sector” were front and center in Obama’s show. What you didn’t see were the many private-sector suckers who work to fund the wealth consuming sponger sector, members of which were on show. What you didn’t see were the unemployed in the private sector, who are displaced because of the growth of government.

Think zero-sum, or parasite vs. host. The first (the parasite) is sucking the lifeblood of the second (the host). The larger the parasite gets, the weaker the host will grow.

UPDATED (2/22): “What a bunch of Keynesians,” writes the Fox News column “Power Play” about … the Republicans. Now that’s progress. (Fox News is usually a megaphone for the GOP.)

So here sit Republicans, teeth clenched, gripping their desks, waiting for the “devastating” cuts to explode the economy and just hoping that Obama will get some of the blame for having invented the thing. They are assuming that $85 billion less spent by the government will cause devastation in an economy of some $16 trillion.

The sequester, as everyone knows, “was …the brainchild of Team Obama.” It is nothing more than a “decrease in the increase in spending,” another good way to describe the “crippling reductions [Obama] says will result from the government spending only $15 billion more this year than last year.”

Self-Segregation Trumps Imposed Multiculturalism

Ilana Mercer, Liberty, Multiculturalism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Correctness, The West

“Originality is rare in punditry these days,” writes Joseph F. Cotto, who is “a scholar and columnist from central Florida.” “Every time a new narrative-of-the-day arrives, we take refuge in groupthink rather than thinking for ourselves. Not Mercer … [who] is one of America’s leading paleolibertarian voices, [with] “a prominent column on WorldNetDaily.”

Mr. Cotto recently interviewed this writer for the Washington Times’ community pages. You can read the interview, “Self-Segregation Trumps Imposed Multiculturalism,” at WND. Here are excerpts:

JOSEPH F. COTTO: This seems like one of the most polarized eras in American politics. Why do you think that our country’s political atmosphere has become so divisive?

ILANA MERCER: I think you are correct in your assessment regarding the unparalleled polarization of American society. Have you noticed how commentators on both sides of received political wisdom attempt to diminish the fact you articulate by referring to America’s fractious history? Nevertheless, this is a complex issue that is hard to answer briefly. I’ll try. In the introduction to F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” economist Milton Friedman underscores this important point: “The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.”
Underway today in the USA is a monumental clash between individualism and collectivism; between the forces of reason and reality, against force and coercion. The “philosophical” differences between the Republikeynesians, on the one hand, and the Democrats, on the other, are insignificant. The first believe individual rights should be carefully calibrated by central planners; the latter believe these natural rights can be overridden.
There is also a cultural dimension to these irreparable divisions. We are today, thanks to social engineering, a deracinated and divided society. We are no longer what John Jay termed “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and custom.” There can be no unity without community. The glue of togetherness is gone, replaced by a flimsy, fluid, and thoroughly fake unity peddled by politicians. “Ideas” they call it. On the one day, it’s a crusade for democracy; on the next, it’s a war against racism.

COTTO: Multiculturalism is spreading rapidly across the Western world. This has led not only to cultural barriers, but tremendous religious and ethnic conflicts. What are your views on the subject?

MERCER: Multiculturalism as practiced in the West amounts to top-down, centrally enforced and managed integration. Show me a historical precedent where forced integration has worked. As it works across the Anglo-American and European spheres, one group (the founding, historical majority) is forced by self-anointed and elected elites—no contradiction there—on pain of public and professional ostracism, to submerge its history, heroes, customs, culture, language, and pander to militant minorities, who’ve been acculturated by the same elites in identity-politics warfare. …
… An interesting new book, reviewed by one Barnaby Rogerson, makes the point that the Levant of the 18th century was peaceful and prosperous (and surprisingly libertine), because it was made up of “a grid of self-governing communities.” Integration between disparate communities was not enforced. And surprise, surprise: communities freely chose to live in complete segregation. This freedom fostered “remarkable tolerance” among diverse communities across the cities of the Levant of that time. “Deals before Ideals, City before State, Trade before Politics,” as the reviewer puts it. This freedom of association was the source of strength. These autonomous ethnic communities were free of the top-down, punitive, forced integration that has become the hallmark of the 19th-century nation-state that usurped their authority. …

This interview, “Self-Segregation Trumps Imposed Multiculturalism,” continues at WND.

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

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‘Slavery Is The Price I Paid For Civilization’

Intellectualism, Old Right, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Correctness, Race, Racism

The words in this post’s title were spoken by “famed black writer” Zora Neale Hurston. She was “what today we are inclined to call a ‘paleoconservative’ or ‘paleolibertarian,’” who was “born in the early 1890s in the lower South.”

Thanks to Jack Kerwick’s profile of Zora Neale Hurston, timed for Black History Month, we know something about this brilliant (black) member of the Old Right.

Hurston resented the efforts made by black and white intellectual alike to make of black Americans a new proletariat, a victim class perpetually in need of an all-encompassing national government to ease the “lowdown dirty deal” that “nature has somehow given them.” Hurston was adamant that she was “not tragically colored.” She insisted that “no great sorrow” lies “damned up in my soul, lurking behind my eyes,” and she placed a world of distance between herself and “the sobbing school of negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are hurt about it.”
For what contemporary black commentator Larry Elder refers to as the “victicrats” among us, Hurston had zero use. “Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves,” she remarked. Much to their chagrin, though, “it fails to register depression with me.” Furthermore, she stated bluntly that “slavery is the price I paid for civilization.”
Our increasingly joyless generation is oblivious to another of Hurston’s insights: A sense of humor can bear most, if not all, painful things. Regarding racial discrimination, she noted that while she “sometimes” feels “discriminated against,” she does not get “angry” about it. Rather, the experience “merely astonishes me,” for how, Hurston asks, “can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”

… Pearls before swine.

MORE.

UPDATED: Football Frenzy (The Ravens And 49ers)

Aesthetics, America, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, Pop-Culture, Sport, The Zeitgeist

Piers Morgan, who is warring against a quintessential and meaningful American tradition—self-defense—has declared his affinity for another: the Superbowl.

MORGAN: “Listen, I know what this game means to America. It’s going to be a hell of a day on Sunday. I shall be glued to it, as always. I love the whole entertainment. I love the commercials. I love the football. I love the fact that it’s such a huge part of American culture. And may the best team win.”

The truth is that we foreigners do not get it—and will never get it. Also true: One can never really be an American unless one talks the talk about the game and the scene.

Oh well. Not belonging to the cool kids’ fraternity has never bothered me terribly. And at least one great American agrees about the obscenity of the whole scene.

“I don’t pay much attention to it, replied Ron Paul to a Piers Morgan question, in February of last year, during the 2012 campaign.

My sentiments exactly.

… the American football scene is obscene, starting with its incestuous fraternities, the rock-star status surrounding handlers and players, their pompom-waving, knickers-baring groupies, and the tantrum-prone fans who experience bare-fanged fury when their heroes let them down.

The ads are always a big point of contention. Thus, in 2012 too, Freedom Watch’s “J-Nap” (a coinage by Jack Kerwick for Judge Andrew Napolitano) struck a blow for “liberty” by calling on a middle-aged Madonna to challenge The Censor and repeat the feat of another peer, Janet Jackson. (Yes, “Libertarianism Lite” carries the day.)

The apparition the Judge wished upon us was described, in 2004 (“JANET’S SACK OF SILICONE & OTHER SYMBOLISM”), as a “sack of silicone-filled skin, awkwardly positioned on Janet Jackson’s chest. Few will forget how pop singer Justin Timberlake released The Thing from Jackson’s bustier during the Super Bowl halftime show.”

Add the effects of age and gravity to a surgically over-stuffed breast, and you end up with a veiny mass, mounted inorganically on the breastbone. Take my word: This is not something you’d want to wave about. It looks like a stretched-to-the-limits Bota Bag (also known as a wine skin), only not nearly as inviting. The photograph also captures the gaze on Justin Tinkerbelle’s girlie features. The reviewers, mostly groovy hip-hop heads, described the sequence as “a sex-charged duet.” Justin, Jackson’s partner in the “stunt,” looks as turned on as a surgeon removing a suture. The “sensuality” was, er, a bust.

Contra “J-Nap,” I was comforted to learn that a quaint Old-World, quintessentially American gentleman like Ron Paul was baffled by America’s annual football frenzy. (And is guaranteed to find the commercials as off-putting as the frenzy.)

UPDATE: I’m one of you. Hear me talk Ravens And 49ers.

The two coaches are brothers. One quarterback has been a starter for barely half a season. The sport itself is under a microscope for its violence, and the setting, New Orleans, is where the home team found itself recently caught up in a so-called bounty scandal — bounty — excuse me — scandal.
The spectacle and the game, Super Bowl XLVII, between the Ravens and 49ers, it’s all set for Sunday, with an expected worldwide audience of more than 160 million.

MORE at PBS.org. I won’t be reading this. It’s for you.