Category Archives: Political Philosophy

Cooperation, Not Communism

Capitalism, Communism, Free Markets, Intellectual Property Rights, Liberty, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Socialism, Technology

On my mind is another of Glenn Beck’s frequently made errors. Whenever Beck sends out a free copy of his newsletter, he declares “provocatively” that “Glenn has succumbed to socialism.” Avail yourself of the product of Glenn’s momentary insanity, he will exhort (referring to himself in the third person), and sign up for this free, socialistic service. This is a good opportunity to clarify what socialism really is, for unless you understand that there can be no socialism without state coercion, why, then, you comprehend very little about the dread socialism—as little as conservatives and Republicans do.

Indeed too many people conflate the voluntary provision of a free service with socialism. Voluntary cooperation, even absent remuneration, is never socialism. Glenn Beck seems to think that anything free is socialism. Not so. A Kibbutz—Israeli communal living—is a voluntary socialistic arrangement, which, if you prize freedom, is as good as any arrangement people want to enter that is coercion free. Kibbutzim are often economically viable arrangements. Perhaps this is because people are there by choice and by belief.

Thus, an open source software project, worked on voluntarily by scores of developers across the globe, is not socialism. Although volumes have been written on the pros and cons of open source versus proprietary software, the proof is in the pudding: Although free, open source is often as good as software that costs serious money.

I do not want to veer into the copyright debate. However, I still stand by my writing on the topic. “KAZAA,” for example, was engaged in voluntary exchange; “THE COPYRIGHT CARTEL” was the fascistic attempt to infringe on this voluntary exchange—and on tangible property not its own. But let’s leave this debate right now.

Update II: The French Revolution Revived

Conservatism, Debt, Economy, Europe, Federal Reserve Bank, Founding Fathers, Inflation, Liberty, Political Philosophy

“Everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit,” is how the Brilliant Edmund Burke, supporter of the American colonists, described the illiberal, irreligious, intolerant French Revolution. In return, the punk Thomas Paine spat worthless venom at Burke for his devastating critique of that blood-drenched Revolution. Like contemporary Americans, Paine’s fealty was to the Jacobins, who, for his troubles, almost had him guillotined. The Rights of Man, in particular, is intended as a refutation of Edmund Burke’s critique. Naturally, it does nothing of the sort.

There is no affinity between the French and American founding ideas. And Paine’s proto-socialism—he advocated welfare financed by taxes—is quintessentially unAmerican. Yet Paine is beloved of Americans; of Burke I seldom hear. I intend to change that here on BAB.

Let me begin with an excerpt from Reflections on the Revolution in France, where Burke speaks about the proliferation of fiat money (“fictitious representation”). He does so a great deal in this magnificent tract. Burke hammering on about “current circulating credit,” “defiance of economical principles,” and “bankruptcy” could not be more germane in fin de siècle America:

“At present the state of their treasury sinks every day more and more in cash, and swells more and more in fictitious representation. When so little within or without is now found but paper, the representative not of opulence but of want, the creature not of credit but of power, they imagine that our flourishing state in England is owing to that bank-paper, and not the bank-paper to the flourishing condition of our commerce, to the solidity of our credit, and to the total exclusion of all idea of power from any part of the transaction. They forget that, in England, not one shilling of paper money of any description is received but of choice; that the whole has had its origin in cash actually deposited; and that it is convertible at pleasure, in an instant and without the smallest loss, into cash again. Our paper is of value in commerce, because in law it is of none. It is powerful on ‘Change, because in Westminster Hall it is impotent. In payment of a debt of twenty shillings, a creditor may refuse all the paper of the Bank of England. Nor is there amongst us a single public security, of any quality or nature whatsoever, that is enforced by authority. In fact, it might be easily shown that our paper wealth, instead of lessening the real coin, has a tendency to increase it; instead of being a substitute for money, it only facilitates its entry, its exit, and its circulation; that it is the symbol of prosperity, and not the badge of distress. Never was a scarcity of cash and an exuberance of paper a subject of complaint in this nation.”

[SNIP]

Readers: search the online volume, posted on Bartleby.com, and post comments excerpting your favorite tracts.

Update I (August 26): Prof. Dennis O’keeffe is the author of Burke, due out in October of this year.

Update II: Russell Kirk on Burke:

“Written at white heat, the “Reflections” burns with all the wrath and anguish of a prophet who saw the traditions of Christendom and the fabric of civil society dissolving before his eyes. Yet his words are suffused with a keenness of observation, the mark of a practical statesman. This book is polemic at its most magnificent, and one of the most influential political treatises in the history of the world.” (The Essential Russel Kirk, 2007, p. 144)

Paglia’s Statist Prattle

Barack Obama, Democrats, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Political Philosophy, Politics, Pop-Culture, Pseudo-intellectualism, The State

Camille Paglia is the scrappy Democrat adored by conservatives. On politics, she conceals heavy-duty statism behind the fig leaf of libertarianism. In the realm of art and culture, she substitutes symbolism for substantive assessment. Remember her clapped out claptrap about the significance of drag-queen iconography? What she knows about music is positively dangerous; she has conceptualized of Madonna—who is unable to sing or compose a warble worth hearing—as “an authentic, creative artist”? The Paglia prattle about the mismanaged sexuality of well-worn, ugly monsters like Britney Spears, here, was as worn and uninteresting as anything Gloria Steinem has ever mustered.

This month’s canned performance, “Obama’s healthcare horror,” can be followed from the conservative, Drudge newssite. (The “edgy” stuff about nude depictions is supposed to give this bit of banality a cutting-edge feel. Please! How original do you have to be to admit that Sharon Stone takes a good picture?)

Here’s a quick précis of the essay that instantiates Paglia’s hallmark statism and proclivity for the stylistic over the substantive:

• She voted for Obama so that he could repair the country’s IMAGE overseas. She’s pleased with that choice.
• She has complaints as far as his domestic policy, but they concern strategy rather than philosophy.
• A case in point: “healthcare reform,” which she thinks is the most important thing confronting dying America. It, of course, has been merely mishandled.
• The once beloved House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is no longer in Camille’s good books.
• Congress is “chaotic, rapacious, and solipsistic”; Obama is usually “sober and deliberative.”
• It is the State’s responsibility to see to it that an individual in “a major crisis,” or “earning at or below a median income,” has healthcare.
• More tired odes to the 1960s and the Democratic Party as a relic of that great era.
• Poor Camille is disillusioned. She never saw it coming: “I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic Party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.”
• Camille beats on breast because her “party is drifting toward a soulless collectivism.” Pray tell, Ms. Paglia, what would a soulful collectivism look like?
• Obamby failed to engender an “in-depth analysis, buttressed by documentary evidence, of waste, fraud and profiteering in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and insurance industries.” Another one of Ms. Paglia’s contradictory spasms; big pharma/business bad; big Obama good.
• On the Gates Case; she has nothing new to say that has not already been said by Pat Buchanan and this column.
• “The basic rule in comprehensive legislation should be: First, do no harm.” That was said by your host first.

(The same goes for Paglia’s eventual evaluation of the blogosphere; it came well after mine and only echoed what I had said in “The Importance of Boundaries.”)

THERE ARE A FEW paragraphs that are poignant. For instance: “The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.”

Overall, you’re better off watching the pictures linked, instead.

Update III: Socialist America Sinking

America, Founding Fathers, IMMIGRATION, Journalism, Liberty, Old Right, Political Philosophy, Socialism, Taxation

In “Socialist America Sinking,” Pat The Patriot pulls open and holds back a curtain to reveal what the blind and bombastic leadership and commentariat don’t see: an America in permanent decline, “far … off the course the Founding Fathers set for our republic”:

“In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson called George III a tyrant for having ‘erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.’

What did George III do with his Stamp Act, Townshend Acts or tea tax to compare with what is being done to this generation of Americans by their own government?

While the hardest-working and most productive are bled, a third of all wage-earners pay no U.S. income tax, and Obama plans to free almost half of all wage-earners of all income taxes. Yet, tens of millions get Medicaid, rent supplements, free education, food stamps, welfare and an annual check from Uncle Sam called an Earned Income Tax Credit, though they never paid a nickel in income taxes.

Coming to America to feast on this cornucopia of freebies is the world. One million to 2 million immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive every year. They come with fewer skills and less education than Americans, and consume more tax dollars than they contribute by three to one.

Wise Latina women have more babies north of the border than they do in Mexico and twice as many here as American women.

As almost all immigrants are now Third World people of color, they qualify for ethnic preferences in hiring and promotions and admissions to college over the children of Americans.

All of this would have astounded and appalled the Founding Fathers, who after all, created America – as they declared loud and clear in the Constitution – ‘for ourselves and our posterity.'”

[SNIP]

A must read, as is the case with most of Mr. Buchanan’s columns. He is assuredly one of the few patriots left among the government-fed news filters.

Update I July 20): Actually, there is no chance of “turning things around”—not so long as the US practices unfettered immigration, importing millions of people each year, into a country that no longer transmits or practices its founding values. The nature of immigration policies is such that it ensures most newcomers will end up consuming rather than paying taxes, and voting for more and more Statism. I wish people would realize that there will be no liberty when America is a Third World country. The reason Americans refuse to articulate this simple fact—that the American people are being dissolve and a new people elected—is, I suspect, because they are brainwashed about the wonders of diversity and multiculturalism, and have been taught that America is nothing without this tsunami of immigrants.

So no, Pat knows as I do that it’s all over. Pat is sad. Smart people will be sad.

Update II: Myron; you misunderstand Pat, who is 100% correct in his assertion about taxpayers vs. tax consumers. He is referring to those people–50% or so–who get back more from you and me than they pay in all taxes combined. I call them net tax consumers.

Update III: As I mentioned, people refuse to concede–are unable to due to a hippie, left-liberal state of mind—that not all immigrants come to this country to be rugged individualists. In fact, most are lured by a generous welfare state. Or, as I have pointed out a million times in immigration columns; one productive immigrant brings in a tribe (under the family reunification program), which falls to you and me to support.

The premise for our good reader’s optimism is precisely what has just been said: the goodness of the immigrants the law selects. So what if the economy is rapidly being socialized? There are still a few Atlases who carry the $13 trillion economy on their weakening backs. It takes a while to break the backs of the best. Decades hence, immigration will slow. Until then, the hordes will come to feed at the trough, which is still relatively full compared to other troughs.

But as I complain again and again, a liberal state of mind among Americans refuses to recognize that American immigration policy guarantees that socialism spread like kudzu. But since we have a mixed economy; not one in which all the means of production are nationalized, there are still a sufficient number of good people for the parasites—via the state—to feast upon for decades to come.