Category Archives: Private Property

Death-Spiral States

Debt, Economy, Government, Political Economy, Private Property, Socialism, Taxation, The State

A death spiral state is one in which the parasites outnumber the hosts. In these states, the taker-(public sector workers)-to-maker (private sector workers) ratio is unsustainable.

William Baldwin of Forbes magazine defines a death-spiral state as one that has “more takers than makers,” where “a taker is someone who draws money from the government, as an employee, pensioner or welfare recipient. A maker is someone gainfully employed in the private sector.”

Charitably, Forbes counts only “11 death spiral states, rang[ing] from New Mexico, with 1.53 takers for every maker, down to Ohio, with a 1-to-1 ratio.”

Consider (or don’t):

Let’s say you are a software entrepreneur with 100 on your payroll. If you stay in San Francisco, your crew will support 139 takers. In Texas, they would support only 82. Austin looks very attractive.

Private Property Day

History, Private Property, Propaganda

As convention has it, Thanksgiving is the day Americans give thanks that Native Americans taught them to plant corn.

The Native Americans felt compassion and sympathy for the Pilgrims, sharing their technology. With numerous settlers having died in the winter of 1620, none of the Pilgrims would have likely survived without the Wampanoag teaching them local customs of planting, gathering and preserving foods.

This is nothing but palliative history, a bit of myth-making.

The real story Behind Thanksgiving is the “celebration of the triumph of private property and individual initiative.” Writes Paul Schmidt at Freedomkeys.com:

William Bradford was the governor of the original Pilgrim colony, founded at Plymouth in 1621. The colony was first organized on a communal basis, as their financiers required. Land was owned in common. The Pilgrims farmed communally, too, following the “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” precept.
The results were disastrous. Communism didn’t work any better 400 years ago than it does today. By 1623, the colony had suffered serious losses. Starvation was imminent.
Bradford realized that the communal system encouraged and rewarded waste and laziness and inefficiency, and destroyed individual initiative. Desperate, he abolished it. He distributed private plots of land among the surviving Pilgrims, encouraging them to plant early and farm as individuals, not collectively.
The results: a bountiful early harvest that saved the colonies. After the harvest, the Pilgrims celebrated with a day of Thanksgiving — on August 9th.
Unfortunately, William Bradford’s diaries — in which he recorded the failure of the collectivist system and the triumph of private enterprise — were lost for many years. When Thanksgiving was later made a national holiday, the present November date was chosen. And the lesson the Pilgrims so painfully learned was, alas, not made a part of the holiday.
Happily, Bradford’s diaries were later rediscovered. They’re available today in paperback. They tell the real story of Thanksgiving — how private property and individual initiative saved the Pilgrims.
This Thanksgiving season, one of the many things I’m thankful for is our free market system (imperfectly realized as it is). And I’m also grateful that there are increasing numbers of Americans who are learning the importance of free markets, and who are working to replace government coercion with marketplace cooperation here in America and around the world.

Juxtapose the truth with the official historical version of the Thanksgiving celebration.

It might pique your curiosity to know that Thanksgiving was proclaimed by Diablo himself, in 1863. Read more about “The Most Cynical and Hypocritical Speech Ever Delivered” on that holiday.

UPDATED: Secession: Trust Texas To Reject Untrammeled Federal Tyranny (The GOP Beast)

Political Philosophy, Private Property, Racism, Republicans, States' Rights, The State

The pathology of an overreaching federal government is fueling the fever of freedom, and all hail to that. And to the Lone Star State.

Glenn Beck has been scathing about the fact that, as the Daily Caller has it, “By 6:00 a.m. EST Wednesday, more than 675,000 digital signatures appeared on 69 separate secession petitions covering all 50 states, according to [an] … analysis of requests lodged with the White House’s ‘We the People’ online petition system.”

Sean Hannity is more patient. He interviewed “the president of the Texas Nationalist Movement, Daniel Miller, who [brilliantly] explained their cause — and just why they feel Texas needs [its] independence”:

“The fact of the matter is, that there cannot be a union between those that esteem the principles of Karl Marx over the principles of Thomas Jefferson. Here in Texas, we esteem those principles of Thomas Jefferson — that all political power’s inherent in the people. What we have seen given on Tuesday was that a majority of the people in the United States, and the states in which they reside, esteem the principles of Karl Marx over those principles.”

You’d think that as the party that professes freedom, Republicans would have embraced the peaceful political divorce that is secession as the quintessentially American response to untrammeled tyranny.

But no. The truth is that Republicans are vested in Abe Lincoln’s legacy of brute, centralized power. Falling back on the Party of Lincoln bona fides (and on the “glory” of Reconstruction) serves as a political buffer against the racism libel.

That’s the mundane, garden-variety argument advanced in Ann Coulter’s new book, to counter the perennial Democrat accusations of racism. After all, what other argument can one muster if you consider Barry Goldwater’s defense of private property an extreme libertarian aberration, as Ms. Coulter does?

UPDATE: Wonderful analysis of the nature of the GOP beast by Dr. Clyde Wilson (via Facebook Friend and pal Jerry Lynn Ward): “The American Revolution was a revolt of the country against the court. Jeffersonians understood that every political system divides between the great mass of unorganized folks who mind their own business — that, is, the country party — and the minority who hang around the court to manipulate the government finances and engineer government favours. It is much easier and quicker to get rich by finding a way into the treasury than by hard work. That is mostly what politics is about. Of course, schemes to plunder society through the government must never be seen as such. They must be powdered and perfumed to look like a public good.”

MORE.

UPDATED: Ann Coulter Disses Barry Goldwater’s Devotion To Private Property

Affirmative Action, Ann Coulter, Individual Rights, libertarianism, Private Property

In her latest column, “DON’T BLAME ROMNEY,” Ms. Coulter suggests that,

…purist libertarian Barry Goldwater … — as you will read in [her] book, ‘Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama’ — nearly destroyed the Republican Party with his pointless pursuit of libertarian perfection in his vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Well, that immutably just position on private-property rights, taken by “purist libertarian Barry Goldwater,” is the position adopted in Into the Cannibal’s Pot, where I write the following:

In a free society—one not silhouetted by the State—honored is the right of the individual to associate and disassociate, invest and disinvest, speak and misspeak at will. Contrary to the civil servant, the private person’s “refusal to deal” ought to be sacrosanct. … In the encroaching American State, the right of free association has been circumscribed by crippling codes of hiring, firing, renting, and money lending. The culprit is the Civil Rights Act of 1964…

(Pages 119-120)

Cited in Into the Cannibal’s Pot is another “purist” who feels no compunction about defending a sacred individual right: the fine libertarian legal theorist Richard Epstein, author of Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws.

(“The Cannibal’s” predictive value seems to dovetail with its respectable Amazon rank below, today:
#3 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
#23 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Civil Rights & Liberties
#29 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Public Affairs & Policy > Social Policy)

UPDATE: In response to the Facebook thread: Ms. Coulter is very bright. Brilliant in many ways. But she’s not a deep thinker. I think she’s a solid writer and has a quick mind. I’ve always liked her b/c of those qualities, so rare among the the teletwats (sorry, could not help that).