Category Archives: The State

Guess Who’s Pooh-Poohing Tea Parties & Touting The Political Process?

Elections 2008, libertarianism, Liberty, Media, Politics, Taxation, The State

Mr. Neal Boortz is a big fan of the political process, which is why serious libertarians consider him a serious statist par excellence.

Boortz admonished irate Americans to:

“Use your tea bags to make tea and do something meaningful. Go around your workplace or neighborhood and register voters who actually produce and contribute to our society. Trust me, there are enough people out there registering the parasites, find the producers who don’t vote – convince them that their vote is needed and would count – and sign them up. Then take a copy of their voter registration, put it with the other copies you’ve already collected, and send them to your congressman.”

The palsied haters of the liberal press are not covering the Tea Party movement. When they do, it is with the toffee-nosed contempt they reserved for Sarah Palin, the Moose hunting mama.

Newsweek’s latest cover, “The Thinking Man’s Guide To Populist Outrage,” could just as well have read “Those hick rubes are at it again.”

I’ve protested the diffuse, directionless nature of the rage animating the masses. The eruption of civil society, however, is a good thing; far better than registering people to partake in a rigged charade. (Presumably, Boortz wants society’s producers to vote for a Republican.) But, right now, with the exception of a few pockets, the populist uprising is a bit of a headless chicken.

In any event, like the liberals, Boortz seems to need to show that he’s wiser than the yokels.

Guess Who’s Pooh-Poohing Tea Parties & Touting The Political Process?

Elections 2008, libertarianism, Liberty, Media, Politics, Taxation, The State

Mr. Neal Boortz is a big fan of the political process, which is why serious libertarians consider him a serious statist par excellence.

Boortz admonished irate Americans to:

“Use your tea bags to make tea and do something meaningful. Go around your workplace or neighborhood and register voters who actually produce and contribute to our society. Trust me, there are enough people out there registering the parasites, find the producers who don’t vote – convince them that their vote is needed and would count – and sign them up. Then take a copy of their voter registration, put it with the other copies you’ve already collected, and send them to your congressman.”

The palsied haters of the liberal press are not covering the Tea Party movement. When they do, it is with the toffee-nosed contempt they reserved for Sarah Palin, the Moose hunting mama.

Newsweek’s latest cover, “The Thinking Man’s Guide To Populist Outrage,” could just as well have read “Those hick rubes are at it again.”

I’ve protested the diffuse, directionless nature of the rage animating the masses. The eruption of civil society, however, is a good thing; far better than registering people to partake in a rigged charade. (Presumably, Boortz wants society’s producers to vote for a Republican.) But, right now, with the exception of a few pockets, the populist uprising is a bit of a headless chicken.

In any event, like the liberals, Boortz seems to need to show that he’s wiser than the yokels.

Updated: Barack’s Bitches

Barack Obama, Business, Capitalism, Economy, Fascism, Law, The State

Michelle Malkin makes an important, if limited, point when she writes the following about the ponces in Congress. They indeed have some nerve pointing fingers at other parasitical incompetents:

“How nauseating to hear the growing chorus of lawmakers on Capitol Hill inveighing about the AIG bonuses and the rewarding of incompetence. This, after the Senate refused to give up automatic pay increases for themselves and Nancy Pelosi refused to give the measure a hearing. Congress sez: Incompetence bonuses for me, but not for AIG. Spare me.”

Of course, “Congress played major role in AIG mess,” as it has in our credit woes.

But the larger issue here is interventionism. You may be surprised to learn that I am completely indifferent to anything that our Kenyan kleptocrat inflicts on business leaders and their bonuses if they have been bailed out.

Take what you get; you’re Barack’s bitches now.

Economist Ludwig von Mises warned that the road to socializing the means of production is paved with interventionism. Middle of the road interventionism leads directly to socialism.

AIG has made common cause with the State. Now that the State owns a good chunk of the company, it gets to regulate and terrorize its corporate lackeys; take over operations completely, and sink the whole sorry ship with all on board.

And don’t let anyone on the Left try to tell you that this is the culmination of the unfettered free-market. Lies. This is the outcome of fascism, corporate cronyism. Let those who partake in this system suffocate in its deadly embrace.

Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal, would have allowed unviable industries to fail. Under freedom, no one would survive at the expense of another.

Update (March 18): The corrective chaos that’ll come with state takeover is obvious: companies, CEOs especially, will see that it is better to go bankrupt, and look for other, honest employment, than become the state’s bitch. How can anyone suggest that the contracts of those who suck at the state’s teat ought to be sacrosanct? As far as I’m concerned, state employees ought to be denied the vote too. Contract law is a feature of the voluntary free market, not a prerogative of the plundering class.

Neocon Deluxe, David Frum, Damns Rush

Conservatism, libertarianism, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Republicans, The State, War

Neoconservative David Frum has really done it this time. Recall, for disavowing the war in Iraq, and being critical of the amorphous, ever-morphing War on Terror, he went after paleos, daring to call the likes of Pat Buchanan unpatriotic. (I responded on LewRockwell.com: “FRUM’S FLIMFLAM.”)

Now Frum is gunning for Rush Limbaugh in the most poisonous manner. As you know, I’m no ditto head. I’m beholden to nobody and nothing but the truth, as I call it (and I’ve called it quite well, I might add).

However, I’d defend Limbaugh over and above a neoconservative of the deepest dye such as Frum, who has likened Rush to Jesse Jackson:

“Rush is to the Republicanism of the 2000s what Jesse Jackson was to the Democratic party in the 1980s,” writes Frum, a former Bush speech writer who stabbed his own boss, George Bush, in the back.

The encomiums Frum offers to Obama have certainly landed him many a favorable interview in mainstream media—don’t those unwatchful dogs love centrists, even when the latter have been instrumental in agitating for unjust wars. (Ones where young people not their own fight and die.)

Here’s Frum juxtaposing Obama to Limbaugh (I’ll tell you now-now why this comparison is so singularly statist):

“On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of “responsibility,” and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.”

And Rush:

“And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence – exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word – we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.”

[SNIP]
What left-liberal pabulum. The focus on Rush’s exterior and the “self-indulgence” dismissal is repulsive. The free market, for the most, is how Limbaugh has earned the dough with which he feeds his alleged insatiable needs. I grant you that the man is excessively enmeshed with political power, but, overall, it’s fair to say that Limbaugh did not capture the market share of ditto heads he enjoys by political force.

Obama, on the other hand, has never earned an honest dime in his life. The president may be lean, fit and ascetic, but he has done so on the backs of taxpayers; he’s the very definition of a PARASITE of the political class.

For the most, and as much as I disdain his Bush alliance, Limbaugh has made his living via the economic means. The political class and its sycophants—senators, congressmen, presidents, their speechwriters, lawyers, and lobbyists—they utilize the political means to earn their keep. The first relies on voluntary associations and is free of coercion; the last is coercive and involuntary.

As libertarian economist Murray Rothbard reminded, these “are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth”—the economic means is honest and productive, the political means is dishonest and predatory…but oh so very effective.

The fact that Frum can’t tell the two apart tells us all we need to know about David. In this particular tiff, better to cheer Rush Limbaugh than slip between the sheets with Frum and his ilk. These effetes also campaigned against Sarah Palin because they look down on her. (And perhaps because their wives are such gossips.)

An excellent start for movement conservatives in reclaiming conservatism, the Republican Party, and exciting the base, would be to distance themselves from neoconservatives, starting with David Frum.

Let me preempt: Too many libertarians sit on the fence, holier than thou, refusing to engage the issues of the day, because oh-so superior. I disagree with such aloofness. Although I come from a different ideological solitude than Frum/Rush, I am convinced of the need to remain engaged, so as to keep proving that mine is the better perspective. This cannot be achieved without getting involved in the day’s rough-and-tumble.