2017) Political Pimps Feathering Their Nest On The Public Dime

Democrats, Ethics, Politics, Republicans, Ron Paul

UPDATE (6/7/017):

The Post below is from 2015, but the problem is ongoing and undetected. Politicians arrive in DC and right away begin feathering the nest and flogging products, on the taxpayer’s dime. Conservatives detect nothing unethical. Sen Mike Lee is selling a book. AGAIN.

What's so important about FEDERALISM?@LevinTV & @SenMikeLee discuss a core principle of the American Republichttps://t.co/iuL9Iq2rfZ pic.twitter.com/TEqYIAqyt0

— CRTV (@CRTV) June 6, 2017

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What do you know? Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee were on Fox New today to flog their books, among other things. The problematic Patriot Act and its impending renewal seemed incidental to the job of promoting their products on our dime. So lax are the ethical standards that bind these politicians that they can move seamlessly between their roles as politicians, authors and all-round eternal self-promoters.

It sticks in one’s craw that we pay them to feather their nests. Ron Paul also used his celebrity to sell stuff (although I forgave him because of his outstanding service to liberty). To be honest, I’ve never read a book of his. He’s not a particularly good writer. I am sure the former congressman did not improve on Murray Rothbard when it comes to thinking about the Federal Reserve’s workings. I’ll stick with Rothbard. I have his books.

What #RandPaul Gives With One Hand, He Takes Away With The Other

Homeland Security, Intelligence, libertarianism, Regulation, Ron Paul, Terrorism, The State

Sen. Rand Paul went astray. His rousing remarks against the renewal of the PATRIOT Act were softened by a call for “the hiring of a 1,000 more FBI agents.” “We need more FBI analysts analyzing data,” said Paul.

Moreover, and as reported at Target Liberty, it is the legal opinion of Judge Andrew Napolitano “that the US government is lying to the American people with the claim that the mass surveillance would be suspended upon the expiration of the PATRIOT Act provision used to justify the mass surveillance program.”

Essentially, the Patriot Act will be revamped, only to reemerge as the USA FREEDOM Act.

Napolitano states:There are two other provisions in the law that the NSA relies on which will cause it to continue to spy on Americans even if section 215 of the PATRIOT Act does expire. One of those is a section of the FISA law called section 702, and one of them is a still-existing executive order signed by President George W. Bush in the fall or 2001, which has not been tinkered with, interfered with, or rescinded.

By Robert Wenzel’s telling, the “best analysis of the Patriot Act renewal and the USA Freedom Act” comes courtesy of “Glenn Greenwald in discussion with Jameel Jaffer, the Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU,” at The Intercept.

The question of whether “the sunset of Section 215 will be a meaningful step towards reform” is especially informative:

GREENWALD: That’s what I was going to ask next, actually.

JAFFER: That’s a good question. The problem –

GREENWALD: Let me just interject there: the argument that people make, and I’m sympathetic to it, which isn’t the same thing as saying I agree with it, is how significant would it really be?

The NSA has all of these other authorities. They can cite executive orders and other things, on top of which they’ve done a really good job of co-opting laws in the past. We had this FISA law that said you can’t eavesdrop on Americans’ communications without a warrant, and they did it anyway.

They invented this incredibly radical interpretation of the Patriot Act – of 215 – that says “This lets us collect everything we want,” and that was the interpretation the Second Circuit, ten years later, rejected, finally, just a couple of weeks ago.

So given how adept they are at kind of co-opting the process to do what they want – the other authorities – and their propensity to circumvent the law or even break it to do what they want, how significant would it really be?

… MORE.

Degrees Do Not An Educated Person Make (#RenaissanceMan, RIP)

Education, Human Accomplishment, Technology

Think you’re educated? Think Again. I have.

For a long time, the “Aristotelian ideal of the educated person” was the aim of a Liberal Education. The ideal and idea of the Renaissance Man, however, has been completely lost:

… The Aristotelian ideal of the educated person, “critical” in all or almost all branches of knowledge, survived for centuries as the aim of liberal education. Originally, the student would be taught seven arts or skills, consisting of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). The names are antique, but the seven “subjects” were comparable to a modern liberal curriculum of languages, philosophy, mathematics, history, and science. The arts or skills were “liberal” because they were liberating. That is, they freed their possessor from the ignorance that bound the uneducated. … The original belief that an educated person should be “critical” in more fields than his own no longer exists …

(Excerpted from Charles Van Doren’s A history of Knowledge: Past, present, and future, 1991, New York: Ballantine Books, on Dr. Alexander A. Petrov’s blog).

In his discussion of a “humanistic education” (as Sean Gabb terms the liberal arts education of yesteryear), Dr. Gabb mentions our mutual, late, dear friend, Dennis O’Keeffe, who was “famous for his denunciations of what he calls socialist education—this being a denial that there is any value in the traditional curriculum. Such an education means”:

a training in habits of thought and the exercise of general intellectual ability. It may require the acquisition of specific skills—for example, learning at least one of the classical languages and few modern languages, and learning some of the technical aspects of music and the visual arts. It may also require an understanding of mathematics and of the natural sciences. It certainly requires a long study of literature and history and philosophy and law and political economy. But none of this may be useful in any direct financial sense. …

Dr. Gabb does, however, underestimate the mental prowess (albeit maybe not intellect) that goes into completion of advanced degrees of what he calls “technical or professional training.” Most of us are unable to manipulate the laws of nature (physics/mathematics) to create the workable technology that makes life so good.

I often watch “Food Factory.” I’m in awe of the mechanical engineers who design these magnificent robotic assembly lines, even though they may not be witty and entertaining dinner guests (which Sean Gabb most certainly is, as I learned when I attended a Liberty Fund colloquium in the UK).

Designing an assembly line that makes my chocolate slabs materialize is a pretty noble calling.

The #RossUlbricht Outrage

Drug War, Law, Natural Law

Not content with stealing a young man’s life and property, and subjecting him to a Stalinist show trial, during which due process was denied—the federal government has sentenced Ross Ulbricht, innocent in natural law, to life in prison. The operator of Silk Road had been in the business of facilitating voluntary, victimless trade in drugs, online. Via The New York Times:

… Mr. Ulbricht’s novel high-tech drug bazaar operated in a hidden part of the Internet sometimes known as the dark web, which allowed deals to be made anonymously and out of the reach of law enforcement. In Silk Road’s nearly three years of operation, over 1.5 million transactions were carried out involving several thousand seller accounts and more than 100,000 buyer accounts, the authorities have said. Transactions were made using the virtual currency Bitcoin …

Note that the sentencing judge, Federal District Court Katherine B. Forrest, saw fit to deliver a sermon at sentencing: “What you did in connection with Silk Road was terribly destructive to our social fabric.”