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.

Modern, Standing Armies Commandeered by Cowards

Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Just War, Palestinian Authority, Terrorism, War

Although Hillary Clinton would like the world to think of her as indispensable in negotiating an Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire, she arrived in the region well after rumors had spread that an agreement was being brokered by Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy.

If regional players know they will ultimately have to face one another, only, they are more likely to reconcile.

Hamas is a rib of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ribcage. Let Morsy assume a lead in the negotiations between Hamas and Israel.

CNN: “Hamas listens to Mohamed Morsy,” Gerges said. “Hamas looks up to Egypt now, at this particular stage, and that is why Egypt has emerged as the most important state vis-a-vis Hamas and Gaza.”

Yes, let Morsy man up.

If I understand the events of the last few days, Hamas aggressed from Gaza, which it now controls. Israel responded with disproportionate force. The result: Gazan civilians are dying in disproportionate numbers. These people have no siren systems to warn them of an impending attack, no bomb shelters, no nothing. They just die. Or their meager homes are destroyed.

The abiding problem for the libertarian is justifying killing of innocents. One cannot.

Yes, Hamas started the fight. Hamas hides among unwitting civilians. But this does not give Israel the right to kill these innocent non-combatants, not even unintentionally.

Where are Israel’s precision pac men? What’s wrong with their Special Operations capabilities?

After the Lebanon fiasco, I proposed that “the state of Israel should consider stationing on the borders the best of its special-operations units such as the ‘Sayeret.’ It’s trained in surgical strikes, including modern urban counterterrorism operations.”

“Sayeret” soldiers can go door-to-door to trace the source of the attacks on Israeli civilians and take them out.

But no, modern, standing armies are commandeered by cowards. It used to be that generals led their men into battle. Now they issue orders to bomb innocents from above. And the soldiers sit in armored cars and fire away indiscriminately.

Fiscal Cliff Farce

Debt, Economy

“So what exactly is this looming menace, and why is it so dangerous?,” asks Peter Schiff. It is nothing of the sort, replies the financier. The fiscal cliff song-and-dance is aimed at undoing a previous, meager legislative commitment (Budget Control Act of 2011) to reduce some spending increases. “[G]oing over the fiscal cliff is not the problem, it is part of the solution. Our leaders should construct a cliff that is actually large enough to restore fiscal balance before a real disaster occurs. That disaster will take the form of a dollar and/or sovereign debt crisis that will make this fiscal cliff look like an ant hill”:

“Stripped of its rhetorically charged language the fiscal cliff is simply a legal trigger that will trim the deficit in 2013 by automatically implementing spending cuts and tax increases. In other words, the government will spend less, and more of what it does spend will be paid for with taxes rather than debt. Isn’t this exactly what both parties, and the public, more or less want?

The fiscal cliff means that the federal budget deficit will be immediately cut in half, shrinking to approximately $641 billion in 2013 from the approximately $1.1 trillion in 2012. What is so terrible about that? I would argue that there is a greater danger in avoiding the cliff than driving over it.

If you recall, the cliff was created by a deal last year when Congress couldn’t find ways to trim the deficit in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. When they failed to reach an agreement, Congress knew they had to raise the debt ceiling anyway. The resulting Budget Control Act of 2011, signed in August of that year, offered the pretense that they were dealing with our long-term fiscal crisis and not simply raising the debt ceiling with no strings attached. This was done not only to appease some House Republicans, who had threatened to vote against a debt ceiling increase, but to satisfy the bond rating agencies that had threatened (I would choose a different word or provide a source to back this up)a down-grade if Congress failed to act.

Now the focus turns to how Congress will dismantle the structure it created just 16 months ago. There can be little doubt that they will as economists are assuring politicians that driving over the fiscal cliff will immediately bring on a recession. The expiration of the Bush era tax cuts for all taxpayers will cost Americans an estimated $423 billion in 2013 alone. Hundreds of billions of across the board spending cuts, including the military, have been delineated. No politician would allow that to happen.”

MORE.

On the Atrocity Scale, Bush’s Badness Dwarfed Benghazi-gate

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Just War, Pseudo-history, Republicans, War

As bad as it is, Benghazi-gate is nothing as compared to the cost in blood and treasure, courtesy of George W. Bush, of the immoral, fraudulent invasion of Iraq.

Nothing.

Follow the hyperlinks above if you have doubts. (You shouldn’t, if you have a moral compass and a cerebral cortex.)

It would be an entirely different matter if Republicans had the intellectual moxie to examine the human toll, for decades to come, of Obama’s “murder by multilateralism” in Libya. For that was what the invasion of Libya amounted to.

But they don’t. To the Republicans, Benghazi-gate amounts to no more that a “procedural mishap.” Namely, finding out “what happened? How did it happen? Who covered it up? And, above all, how do we return to doing what we did before IT happened. ‘IT’ being the Sept. 11 attack on the embassy in Libya that left Ambassador Chris Stevens and ‘three other,’ mostly faceless Americans dead.”

And if, in the process of discovery, Republicans can implicate the president—all the better.

By the way, here’s a big surprise. As was to be expected, the horrible David Petraeus “lied to Congress” last week. Oops. Reports RT:

Retired US Army General David Petraeus testified before Congress this week about the storming of a US consulate building in Benghazi, contradicting previous statements made by the since-resigned CIA chief.
Friday morning’s closed-door session was void of the normal media presence as lawmakers on Capitol Hill grilled Gen. Petraeus for further information about the assault in Libya two months ago that left four Americans dead, including the country’s ambassador.
Since the attack on Sept. 12, little has been explained to either the public or politicians in Washington about what really happened before, during and after the consulate was raided in Benghazi. In the immediate aftermath, the White House, State Department and reportedly even Petraeus himself suggested that the assault was likely a spontaneous response to an anti-Islamic film produced in America that had been circulating on the Web. Hours earlier a similar demonstration erupted outside a US embassy in Cairo, Egypt, and the events shortly after in Benghazi were considered to be a copycat protest. In the weeks and months since the attack, however, government agencies have slowly but surely retired that explanation to instead blame the assault on anti-American insurgents, perhaps with al-Qaeda affiliation, waging what is now considered a terrorist attack.
Gen. Petraeus testified to that claim on Friday, sources in attendance say, despite previously suggesting the Benghazi incident was spurred by the “Innocence of Muslims” movie.