Category Archives: The State

A Budget Cut In D.C. Doublespeak (I.E., Bowel-Speak)

Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, Government, Taxation, The State

Tom DiLorenzo (he’s a friend) on D.C. bowel-speak:

In Washingtonese, if one proposes a $100 billion spending increase, and actual spending increases by “only” $90 billion, they call it a $10 billion budget cut.

And on the Washington Monument Syndrome game, via LRC.com:

The game is this: Whenever a politician is “threatened” with a minor slowdown in spending, the first thing to do is to eliminate police, firefighters, ambulance services, school buses, etc. — everything that inflicts the maximum discomfort on the victims of the government monopoly (a.k.a., taxpayers). The booboisie then wake up from their American Idol stupor for a moment to raise a fuss, and the proposals to slow down spending growth disappear. (It’s called the “Washington Monument Syndrome” because the head of the National Park Service shut down the Washington Monument in the ’60s in response to Congress’s temporary refusal to fund his complete spending wish list. Tourists from every state complained to their congressmen, and the Park Service wish list was fully funded).

Rand Paul: Political Performance Artist, Or Action Hero?

Economy, Government, libertarianism, Liberty, Paleolibertarianism, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Ron Paul, The State

The purist in me recoils at Sen. Rand Paul’s latest political performance art. As Glenn Beck reports, the senator from Kentucky “took the $500,000 in savings he had from running a frugal, cost-efficient office and returned it to the treasury.”

“Hey, Senator Paul, wait a minute. You know better,” I want to shout. “That money you’ve returned to Treasury in a grand gesture doesn’t belong there, it belongs to taxpayers. Why stuff stolen goods down the maw of the federal beast, into which scarce resources only ever disappear without trace, and where everything is fungible? Rand’s $500,000 could be directed into the domestic drone program. See what I’m saying? The principles absolutist in me rejects many of Rand’s gestures. On the other hand, what American doesn’t like an action hero?! I like Rand Paul’s energy.

The question: Is this Randian energy or Brownian Motion?

Rand Paul is front-and-center in media, showing what some people like to call “leadership,” a contemptible phrase, I know. The libertarian Paul is a pragmatist, whereas his father, Ron Paul, is an idealist.

So far, I’ve been critical of Rand’s compromises, but perhaps he deserves more support? After all, have I not condemned the sin of abstraction we libertarians tend to commit, writing against the libertarian “specimen that has nothing to say about policy and politics for fear of compromising precious libertarian purity”?

Suspended as he is in the arid arena of pure thought, this species of libertarian will settle for nothing other than the immediate and absolute application and acceptance of the non-aggression axiomatic ideal. And since utopia will never be upon us, he opts to live in perpetual sin: THE SIN OF ABSTRACTION.

Ambition no doubt has a lot to do with Rand Paul’s positions, but, boy, is he a doer. The question is, is he doing the right things?

Here’s Paul putting in a good performance over the sequester nonsense:

PAUL …for goodness sakes, it was [Obama’s] proposal. He proposed the sequester. It was his idea. He signed it into law, and now he’s going to tell us that, oh, it’s all our fault?
I voted against the sequester because I didn’t think it was enough. The sequester cuts the rate of growth of the spending, but the sequester doesn’t even really begin to cut spending, which we have to do or we are going to get a credit downgrade, another credit downgrade.
BLITZER: So you don’t think that the $85 billion this year, that would be the forced cuts this year, from your perspective, that’s not enough?
PAUL: It’s a pittance. I mean, it’s a slowdown in the rate of growth. There are no real cuts happening over 10 years.
Over 10 years, the budget will still grow $7 trillion to $8 trillion. He added $6 trillion to the debt in his first term. He’s on course to add another $4 trillion to $6 trillion in his second term. So, really, this is just really nibbling at the edges, and he’s saying, oh, it’s some dramatic thing where all of a sudden it’s still the rich’s fault.
Didn’t he already raise taxes on the rich? I’m having trouble even understanding what he’s talking about because he sets up this rhetoric and this sort of game of let’s go get the rich again that really is divorced from any reality. It’s his sequester we’re talking about, his bill.

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.”

A Not-So Soft Fascism

Crime, Fascism, Government, The State

Dominating this week’s news headlines were two events: The hunt for Christopher Jordan Dorner and Barack Obama’s fourth State of the Union (SOTU) extravaganza. Both events involved forceful displays by what Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises called the Total State.

(Only the first event is the topic of this blog post. BHO’s SOTUs have been chronicled in “Man With The Reverse-Midas Touch” (2010), “Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State” (2012), and in many blog posts. The president’s 2013 SOTU doesn’t rate a mention.)

Von Mises coined the term in his treatment of “totalitarian collectivist systems” exemplified by Nazism and fascism. The arc of totalitarianism, however, led Mises and others to the post-modern totalitarian state, which is characterized by a “soft fascism,” as Perry de Havilland of the British Samizdata blog calls the modern Managerial State.

But there was nothing soft about the way Local, state and federal assassins went in for the kill in the countrywide manhunt for Christopher Dorner. Dorner, who is presumed dead, was a former LAPD officer with a grudge against the Los Angeles Police Department.

According to the Wikipedia timeline, the Navy veteran blew his stack and went on the lam after a killing spree in Southern California. He is alleged to have shot three police officers, one fatally, in Riverside, and committed a double homicide on Sunday, in Irvine, murdering the daughter of a former Los Angeles Police Department captain (Randal Quan), also the lawyer who represented Dorner during his dispute with the LAPD. Ms. Quan’s fiance was also murdered.

I am not here saying that Christopher Dorner did not need killing. I’m asking you to jump a level of abstraction and look at the meta picture. The one killer syndicate (the state’s agents) converged on another lone assassin (Dorner), as the first group concentrated almost all the resources provided (at the point of a gun) by a third party (taxpayers), to eliminate the lone assassin with whom a personal score had to be settled.

The police force went in for the kill, Waco style. Dorner’s cabin did not combust, or “catch fire,” as media put it, but was incinerated with smoke devices and demolished wall by wall.

In the course of this demonstration of might, innocent bystanders were shot at, their vehicles rammed, and businesses entered and shuttered.

Does this sound like law enforcement, or like the actions of a private army run for the benefit of sectional interests?