Two more recent images (taken in Oct. 2012) have been added to ilanamercer.com’s Gallery.
The more cheerful image is also the image now appended to Return To Reason, WND’s longest standing, exclusive, paleolibertarian column. The previous image was, well, dated.
My editor has informed me, diplomatically, that, for WND’s purposes, “glam” photos are better than the do-it-yourself kind. I know. I’ll get to it. But right now, professional images, like the one on RT’s “Paleolibertarian Column,” are expensive.
Besides, as you get older, you get more comfortable with a non-finessed look.
I listened to a young (24), fiercely individualistic, libertarian friend speak about casting his vote for Mitt Romney. My pal may not be finely tuned to every philosophical nuisance, but he lives and breathes individualism. His backbreaking work as a proprietor of a small business means, moreover, that local politics are vital to his bottom-line. My friend explained to me why he would be voting to keep the toxic Dems out of office in our state, and why he supported Romney.
Although wedded to reality, columnist Jack Kerwickis “finely tuned to philosophical nuisance.” As mentioned in “On Living In Sin: The Sin of Abstraction,” Jack and I parted company over his decision to vote Romney. However, I admire Jack for “mixing it up”—for his commitment to arguing the issues and making pragmatic decisions in the rigorous and vigorous Rothbardian tradition.
His individual achievements outside politics show that Mr. Romney is nothing like “Bronco Bamma,” who has always been at full throttle for the distributive state.
“The issue that needs to be raised [and won’t],” says Giuliani, who knows a thing or two about the New York locality, is, “we don’t have the modern energy infrastructure that we should have. We’re operating at the brink. Every day during hot days I’d worry about the possibility of a blackout. I built 10 new generators in NY City to try and address the problem. but had I tried to build a big generator, the environmentalists would have blocked it. We don’t build nuclear power-plants, we don’t expand transmission lines, we don’t put in modern generators. Anytime you try, it’s a 10-15 year process of litigation. We have to modernize our infrastructure, otherwise, we’re living on the brink. Something goes wrong and it’s 10, 5, 4 days to come back.”
“The opposition to [modernizing] projects, especially in the northeast, is systemic. You have to undergo 10-15 years of litigation to put in a new pipeline”
[SNIP]
Washington State is outside the orbits of power, so you hear nothing much about our annual battles with nature and regulation. But as “Dispatch from Third-World Washington State” detailed, early this year, we endure devastating power failures almost annually. The main problem in our state are regulations that prevent the maintenance of a tree-free grid and power lines.
Mayor GIULIANI repeated these important points on the Kudlow Report, implicating Obama’s policies of,
“absolutely just say[in] no to any form of expansion of energy, which is the reason why we’re having such a tough time recovering. … this aging infrastructure that we have. Well, we haven’t rebuilt it, not because we don’t have the money to do it, we haven’t rebuilt it because all these groups oppose every single thing you want to do. If you want to build a new generator, they oppose that. If you want to build new transmission lines, they oppose that. God forbid you should build a new nuclear power plant. Oh, my God, oh.”
KUDLOW: But that’s what Bloomy is saying. I don’t mean to cut. That’s what Bloomy is saying. When he goes down this road of global warming and he also mentioned, Rudy, cap and trade. He is saying we’re going to put limits on the volume of energy, all energy, including, you know, the new fracking energy for natural gas. This is an era of limits. It’s anti-growth. And New York City doesn’t need anti-growth policies and neither does the rest of the country.
Mayor GIULIANI: Well, the reason for the difficulty in recovering right now is that we are always at the breaking point on energy. … I knew this when I was the mayor. I built 10 new generators as a result of that. I really pushed to do it by the New York Power Authority. Where–and this is not just true of New York, it’s true of all throughout America. We operate at the limit. Now some of that is economics because it costs money to buy that excess energy, but some of it is also that excess energy doesn’t exist because we haven’t built a new nuclear power plant in 30 years. … We haven’t expanded transmission lines, we haven’t modernized. And a lot of that is because–I would call them not the environmentalists, the extreme environmentalists who oppose it and just block it completely. …”
Rights-based arguments are seldom made by members of the media and their guests. In explaining what a (semantic) aberration the term gouging is John Stossel opted to privilege the utilitarian angle. So did his guests.
Like any voluntary exchange of goods, “gouging” amounts to free people exchanging property to which they hold title. Each relinquishes something he values less (money/goods/labor) for something he values more (money/goods/labor).
John Stossel and guests prefer to stick to purely utilitarian economics. That’s the mindset that prevails.
I’d like to hear our side argue for freedom by saying that, whether free markets work or not is secondary to the unalienable, immutable, rights of men. It so happens that—surprise!—upholding the absolute rights of the individual to life, liberty and property works very well. Wealth redounds to all.
Bless Stossel for his efforts to promote economic literacy, over decades. However, I listened to Steve Horowitz last night, and then “muted” when Stossel made the perennial decision that guides the dueling perspectives political panel.
Rather than let Steve enlighten, Stossel allowed the reality denier to hog the stage with a perversion, not a version, of the truth.
In a free market, the institute of private property ensures that we have prices. “Prices are like a compass: pegged to supply and demand they ensure the correct allocation of resources. Without market prices, supply and demand cannot be brought into balance and, by extension, consumer needs cannot be satisfied. Conversely, in socialized systems there are no prices because there is no private property. Absent such knowledge, misuse, misallocation and mismanagement of capital are inevitable.”
