Libertarian Feminists Make A Move On Von Mises

Gender, History, libertarianism, Private Property, Reason, Socialism

“Libertarian Feminists Make A Move On Von Mises” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“As I paged through the dog’s breakfast of an essay titled “The Feminism of Ludwig von Mises,” I found myself wondering:

What does midwifery have to do with Mises? Both find their way into the stream-of-consciousness non sequiturs that is the article. I suppose midwifery is an occupation dominated by women. Mises was an old-fashioned, European economist whose legacy women are attempting to occupy. That must be it!

Incidentally, naming the solipsistic feminists (a redundancy, I know) who’ve made a move on the Austrian-School economist is unnecessary. “Avoid naming names when dealing with marginal characters,” I was once instructed by a veteran journalist, who was responding to a devastating critique I had penned in reply to some self-important, insignificant sorts. Joseph Farah e-mailed one of his lacerating missives: “Good job. But who the hell are these people? Their arguments are of a piece with Yasser Arafat’s. Next time, tackle the Arafat argument instead,” he admonished.

Alas, “The Feminism of Ludwig von Mises” is devoid of argument to tackle. From the fact that Mises taught and mentored capable lady scholars, the FEE.org* feminists have concluded that the Austrian-School economist “actively promoted the interests of women in academia” and “saw women intellectuals in Vienna as an undervalued human resource.” …

… Indeed, it takes a degree of provincialism unique to our country’s feminists to claim that a European gentleman, born in Austria-Hungary in the late 1800s, was one of them—a rib from the feminist fraternity’s ribcage. This writer grew up in Israel at a time when quite a few elderly, highly educated Austrian gentlemen were still around. Grandfather, a master chess player, hung out with these men in Tel-Aviv chess clubs and cafés. Having actually encountered this creature in his natural habitat, I put this to you, gentle reader:

The proposition that Ludwig von Mises was a feminist is an apodictic impossibility. …

… Read on. The complete column is “Libertarian Feminists Make A Move On Von Mises” now on WND.

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Killer Government

Government, Private Property, The State

The stories of government reckless indifference are unchanging. We saw it during super-storms Katrina and Sandy, to name two natural disasters.

Simply knowing the incentives at work in government makes predictions about the inaction of officials foolproof. Thus, borne out is my “premature” contention that local officials had procrastinated after the Snohomish County hillside landslide, in which “[a]t least 25 people are believed dead in the massive mudslide above the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River, although only 16 bodies have been identified. Dozens have been reported missing.”

Via The Seattle Times:

The commander of the Washington National Guard said Wednesday that he offered his help to county emergency-management officials last Saturday and Sunday but was rebuffed until midday Monday. A spokeswoman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) said its help was requested around noon on Monday.
The National Guard has a 50-person search-and-extraction team with experience and specialized equipment. FEMA has a nationally recognized 65-person urban search-and-rescue team.
Both teams arrived to help Tuesday, long after any sign of survivors was reported in the debris. …

Where have we heard this before? The answer is during every other rescue mounted by government.

Via Salon.com comes a belated report—it’s too late for the victims of the landslide in Snohomish County—that the officials failed to forewarn residents who built homes on the hill of a foreseeable lethal landslide.

One likely reason for the tragedy in our state is the failure of the state’s Department of Natural Resources to properly monitor clear-cutting nine years ago.

A Seattle Times analysis of government geographical data and maps suggests that logging company Grandy Lake Forest cut as much as 350 feet past a state boundary that was created because of landslide risks.
The state Department of Natural Resources is supposed to verify a timber company’s proposed cut on the ground and then reinspect the site after the harvest has been taken.
State Forester Aaron Everett reviewed records on the issue Wednesday afternoon and said it appears that a portion of the clear-cut’s footprint extended into the sensitive zone. He said his agency was trying to locate records to show whether it inspected the site after it was logged.
“I was surprised,” Everett said. He will investigate further before concluding whether Grandy Lake went beyond the borders.
Grandy Lake officials have not returned calls seeking comment.

Had the resource been privately owned, the owners would be legally liable and would have had all the incentives in the world to manage the land responsible. But I repeat myself.

A Supremely Ugly And Evil Oligarchy

Constitution, Gender, Healthcare, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Religion, The Courts

“Decent people are sick and tired of conservatives in their bedrooms and liberals in every other room.” This applies to the tyranny that is the U.S. SCOTUS (Supreme Court). It also covers the Court’s philosophical complexion, unless Justice Anthony Kennedy deigns to injects a tiny smidgen of libertarianism, if you can call it that, into this oligarchy’s debates. Via SCOTUSblog:

This morning, the [SCOTUS] heard a new and different challenge arising out of the Affordable Care Act: can a business be required to provide its female employees with health insurance that includes access to free birth control, even if doing so would violate the strong religious beliefs of the family that owns the business?

Said Ugly and Evil (behold. Or under “Recent Headlines and Pictures”):

“Those employers could choose not to give health insurance [to all their employees] and pay not that high a penalty – not that high a tax,” Sotomayor said. … “And in that case Hobby Lobby [plaintiff] would pay $2,000 per employee, which is less that Hobby Lobby probably pays to provide insurance to its employees,” Kagan said. “So there is a choice here. It’s not even a penalty by – in the language of the statute. It’s a payment or a tax. There’s a choice.”

Yes, push the poor male victims of Obamacare and all right-thinking women onto the Zerocare exchange, just because some females wish to screw themselves sillier on the public dime. These despicable women “have the right to purchase the stuff, but not to rope other Americans (including insurers) into supplying it.”

UPDATED: Putting Lipstick On The Pigs At NSA*

Constitution, Democrats, Homeland Security, Propaganda, Republicans, Technology, Terrorism

We’re doing the right thing; we’re not doing anything illegal,” said Four-Star General Keith Alexander to Fox News’ Bret Baier. An otherwise good reporter, Baier has been asking some poignant questions of the very clever, dissembling, outgoing director of the National Security Agency’s unconstitutional, naturally illicit and all-round reprehensible spying programs. However, Baier, another bright lad, seems to be merely going through the motion; making sure he does journalistic due diligence without any forceful follow-up. A less than obligatory follow-up would be: “I know that what you do is probably ‘legal,’ but is it ‘moral’?”

The occasion of the interview? Obama’s likely bogus “calls for an end to NSA’s bulk phone data collection.”

“What would you do to Edward Snowden if you were alone in a room with him” was more revealing of Baier’s sympathies. Alexander vaporized about the assorted entrapment operations to which hoovering up trillions of messages have led. (More about “The Dynamics of Entrapment.”)

BAIER: Former President Jimmy Carter saying he writes letters instead of sending e-mails because he’s worried that you’re listen — you’re reading his e-mails.

ALEXANDER: Well, we’re not. So he can now go back to writing e-mails. The reality is, we don’t do that. And if we did, it would be illegal and we’d be found, uh, I think accoun — held accountable and responsible. Look at all the folks that have looked at what we’re doing, from the president’s review group to Congress to the courts to the DNI, DOD, Justice. Everybody reviews what we do to see if anybody is doing anything illegal like you suggest. No one has found anything, zero, except for in 12 cases where people did that and we had already reported those.

* With apologies to pretty pigs.

UPDATE (3/26): The great Glenn Greenwald seems surprised that, much like Republicans, Democrats are opportunistic, lying, bottom-feeders. He notes that “what rational people do, by definition, is” this:

if a political official takes a position you agree with, then you support him, but when he does a 180-degree reversal and takes the exact position that you’ve been disagreeing with, then you oppose him. That’s just basic. Thus, those of us who originally defended Obama’s decision to release the photos turned into critics once he took the opposite position – the one we disagreed with all along – and announced that he would try to suppress the photos.
But that’s not what large numbers of Democrats did. Many of them first sided with Obama when his administration originally announced he’d release the photos. But then, with equal vigor, they also sided with Obama when – a mere two weeks later – he took the exact opposition position, the very anti-transparency view these Democrats had been attacking all along when voiced by Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney.
At least for me, back then, that was astonishing to watch. It’s one thing to strongly suspect that people are simply adopting whatever views their party’s leader takes. But this was like the perfect laboratory experiment to prove that: Obama literally took exact opposition positions in a heated debate within a three week period and many Democrats defended him when he was on one side of the debate and then again when he switched to the other side.

“The Leader is right when he does X, and he’s equally right when he does Not X. That’s the defining attribute of the mindset of a partisan hack, an authoritarian, and the standard MSNBC host. …”

MORE.