Category Archives: Political Philosophy

Theatre of the Absurd

Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections, History, Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Political Philosophy, Private Property, Republicans, The State

A couple of hours ago I filed this week’s WND column with my editor (I file on Wednesdays). I have just heard Judge Napolitano deliver his editorial on Freedom Watch. Uncanny. The theme of my new column tracks with the Judge’s editorial. I had titled my column “Who’s It To Be? Teddy # 1 Or Teddy # 2?” (My good editor will often find better, more pithy titles.) In any event, I wrote this:

“What are the odds that a Democratic commander-in-chief and his chief Republican rival declare their philosophical fidelity to the Progressive Theodore Roosevelt on the same day? And I replied, “The dice were loaded in Teddy’s favor. The sitting Democratic president (Obama) and the Republican odds-on favorite for president (Gingrich) are in TR’s corner…”

Our heroic Judge, in his December 7 segment (not yet posted), asks and answers similar questions.

Hopefully, many more people beyond the libertarian orbit will come to experience the same gut reaction at this theatre of the absurd.

One Nation Under Inflation

Debt, EU, Europe, Fascism, Federal Reserve Bank, Federalism, Political Philosophy, Regulation, Socialism, States' Rights

“When it grows up, the EU wants to be just like the US. That was Jose Manuel Barroso’s message to his host at the US Public Broadcasting Service.” The excerpt is is from “One Nation Under Inflation,” now on WND.COM:

“The EU Commission president, a chap called Jose Manuel Barroso, told PBS’s Jeffrey Brown, on November 28, that the European suprastate is not quite up to American statist standards.

Barroso lamented that the EU lacks America’s level of ‘convergence’: ‘We have a common currency, but not, for instance, a common treasury,’ said this slick operator. Fiscal discipline (one wonders what our commissar means by that) can only come about with more ‘pooling of sovereignty.’

The Commission’s president certainly sees the US as a model ‘fiscal union,’ with a high degree of ‘fiscal policy’ ‘integration’ throughout; and is almost envious of the fact that the US federal government possesses ‘the instruments’ that have allowed it to accumulate enormous liabilities: Evidently, America’s debt-to-GDP ratio is larger than the European Union’s.

In a nutshell: Barroso longs for Brussels to be able to do the necessary tinkering to keep the PIIGS of the Eurozone —Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain—living at the expense of their more industrious, austere neighbors to the north. (Presiding European bureaucrats like himself live-it-up no matter where they reside.) The EU, complained its Capo di tutti capi, needs to create those “instruments.”

When it comes to Newspeak, Barroso still beats Obama.

In any event, when it grows up, the EU wants to be just like the US. That was Jose Manuel Barroso’s message to his host at the US Public Broadcasting Service. So successfully has the Unites States government submerged the sovereignty of its states that a top European technocrat longs to be like us. We must be in worse shape than we imagined. …”

The complete column, The excerpt is is from “One Nation Under Inflation,” now on WND.COM. Read it.

My book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon. (Don’t forget those reviews; they help.)

A Kindle copy is also on sale.

Barnes and Noble is always well-stocked and ships within 24 hours.

Still better, shipping is free and prompt if you purchase Into the Cannibal’s Pot from The Publisher. Inquire about an Xmas special on bulk buys.

Pipes on Private Property (Courtesy of JIMS)

Individual Rights, Israel, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Private Property, Pseudo-history, Russia

Sponsored by the Jerusalem Institute for market Studies, the “Property and Freedom” lecture below was given by Prof. Richard Pipes, author of the book Property and Freedom. Here’s a shocker: historians of the West have paid scant attention to the role of private property in the annals of America and Europe. “If you look for the word ‘property’ in the index of American books dealing with evolution of American [and European] attitudes you tend to find nothing there,” says Pipes.

(Property and Freedom is cited in Into the Cannibal’s Pot.)

You already know what this writer thinks. It should be, life, property, liberty. In that order. Property trumps liberty, for liberty can be variously defined. Our government insists we are free so long as we can vote. We know this to be untrue. Property, moreover, is harder to redefine by the state. If our rights to property were fully upheld—the same state that tells us to consider ourselves free (and be grateful) would be unable to control huge areas of our lives—bedroom, boardroom, deathbed, you name them.

PART I:

PART II:

PART III:

UPDATE II: Alternative Right Reviews ‘Into The Cannibal’s Pot’ (A Lemming’s Lunacy)

Ilana Mercer, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Paleoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Private Property, Race, South-Africa, The West

Writing for Alternative Right.com, “an online magazine of radical traditionalism,” the illustrious Derek Turner, editor of the UK-based Quarterly Review, has reviewed Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa. “Unusually amongst” paleoconservatives, plain conservatives, and left-libertarians, Derek has engaged with the material in the detail and depth his fans have come to expect from him, starting with the distillation of this writer’s paleolibertarianism:

“Ilana Mercer is a well-known controversialist on the American right, who writes a deservedly popular WorldNetDaily column and somehow finds time to maintain both a website and blog.

Her views are probably best described as paleo-libertarian. The book’s provocative title, which probably cost her potential readers, is borrowed from Ayn Rand, but the author tempers capitalist principles with respect for national identities and cultural traditions. Unusually amongst conservatives, she combines Israelophilia and dislike of Islam with trenchant opposition to American military adventurism. Unusually amongst libertarians, she is an outspoken critic of current US immigration policy as subversive of social order as well as fiscal responsibility. She has now turned her sights on her former homeland of South Africa – both for its own sake and because she feels its tenebrous present contains urgent indicators for America.”

Read the complete review, “RSA-USA—Beloved, Benighted Countries,” on AltRight.com.

In it, Derek zeroes in on the book’s salient statistics—the murder, rape, unemployment, food production (or lack thereof), emigration, ratio of taxpayers to tax consumers, etc—that characterize “the nouvelle regime.” Mr. Turner, a most sensitive writer—has also picked up on the things that vex and pain this author: the pathos and paradoxes inherent in Afrikaner—and, by extension, western—identity, “the fraught final days of apartheid,” and “the unresolved tension,” the consequence of “fleeing from a once-beloved country, and leaving behind … fine people, black as well as white, who had not the Mercers’ good fortune of possessing a second passport and remittable funds.”

[The author’s inner-conflict and sense of privacy have, obviously, resulted in some confusion. To clarify: My (WASP) husband, the consummate individualist, was the force of nature that yanked me away from South Africa. I had wanted to remain in that country; my husband could not wait to get out. He was right. He suffers no survivor’s guilt; his wife does, which is what our perceptive reviewer has picked-up.]

Mr. Turner also knows how to make a South African smile by throwing in a fitting Afrikaans bon mot: “the most verkrampte variety of bigot.”

Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa is available from Amazon.

UPDATE I: “She does not offer any SA solutions,” writes Derek. I believe there are no quick-fix “solutions,” as we in the West like them served. But in the final chapter, “Conclusion: Saving South Africans S.O.S.,” the propositions of emigration and secession are explored. (“Look Inside” the book.) And, in particular, emigration under the refugee program is spelled out, with reference to the value of an influx of Afrikaner farmers to the US, in the context of the economic depression: To go by Austrian analysis, farming is one of the nascent industries that is expected to thrive.

“South Africa’s commercial farmers are among the best in the world, if not the best. They have to contend with a plethora of problems—the vagaries of the weather, constant drought, rising taxes on everything from the rain on their trees to municipal levies (for which they receive nothing), and excessively high toll road costs. South Africa’s land tenure laws make it difficult to dismiss workers, let alone remove these workers from their properties, and they are besieged by land invasions and squatters. They are the victims of crop and stock theft, more murders per capita of their group than any other community on earth. They are burnt out, their fences are destroyed, and they are intimidated to the point where many have abandoned their farms.12
Despite a life of graft and grief, most persist and persevere. These are just the kind of men and women whom America, once a frontier nation, needs on its road to ‘financial sobriety.'”

[Page 249.]

Immigration will probably fail to “save South Africans S.O.S.,” not because I have not offered up such a solution—I have—but because of the ill-will and malevolence infesting Western powers, including the American government, whichever the party.

Granted, my exploration of secession is theoretical, rather than a pragmatic. This is because, as I state somewhere in that chapter, it is not for those of us who are safely ensconced in the West to draw up the boundaries of a viable (not landlocked) Anglo-Afrikaner state in that part of the world. The reader should note, moreover, that the kind of solution that would comport with a respect for individual liberties, and the sanctity of life and property are unlikely because of the lemming’s lunacy evinced by left-liberals, both in that country and without it. These are the suicidal sorts who infest the institutions of state and civil society—they are unwilling to entertain the manifest evils of democracy, especially in societies riven by race. This reality is spelled out in the book.

UPDATE II (Nov. 29): Here is an example of the liberal lemming’s lunacy of which I wrote above. Read EUSEBIUS MCKAISER’s “When the Walls Come Down,” published (approvingly) in the New York Times. A South African liberal, MCKAISER’s bit of whimsy offers no analysis, only lamentation over the reality dictated by crime in South Africa.

What can one do when left-liberals, who believe in crying and turning the other cheek, are at the helm? I speak to these philosophical problems in the book. More about this repulsive mindset, pervasive across the West, in “Sacrificing Kids To PC Pietism.”