Monday, December 5, 2011

Living a Life of Excellence and Liberty

by on December 5, 2011 @ 12:33 pm · 0 comments

in Anti-Statism, Education, The Basics

My fellow TLS blogger Norman Horn’s recent speech, What you can do to promote liberty, called to mind some things I’ve blogged about before. In Nock and Leonard Read on “One Improved Unit” and the Power of Attraction, blogged previously here, I discussed the idea advocated by Albert Jay Nock and Leonard Read, that your primary task is to improve yourself–to strive for excellence in yourself. Then you become a bright light that attracts people; they see you are good, and successful, and worth emlating or listening to–so you win people over by the power of attraction. They come to you, and then you have more success spreading the ideas of liberty than if you go around being a boor. More detail, including excerpts from Nock and Read, are in that post.

The other post, previousyl blogged elsewhere, is reproduced in full here:

 Career Advice by North

Gary North delivered a wonderful lecture last month during Mises University 2009 (the same day I gave my own speech), “Calling and Career as an Austrian School Scholar” (a shorter version of this was in the LRC podcast 127. Gary North: Making a Difference, Making a Living, which is also excellent).  North talks calling and occupation. Calling is “the most important thing you can do with your life in which you are most difficult to replace.” Occupation is “how you put food on the table.” Occasionally they are the same, but often not; but there is no reason not to arrange your life so as to have both. He talks about how to combine them or at least have both in your life, and centers his talk around some examples, notably Burt Blumert and William Volker.

Also see Paul Graham’s “What You’ll Wish You’d Known (“I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.”)

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Sean Gabb on Libertarianism: Left or Right?

by on December 5, 2011 @ 11:59 am · 2 comments

in Anti-Statism, Libertarian Theory, The Basics, The Left, The Right

English libertarian Sean Gabb recently gave an excellent speech, “Libertarianism: Left or Right?”, to the Manchester Liberty League; his blogpost is reproduced below. The the audio file is here, and also streaming below.

Libertarianism: Left or Right? 2nd December 2011, Sean Gabb

Sean Gabb, speaking to the Manchester Liberty League on the 2nd December 2011.

Points made:

In early 19th century England, radical liberals – who may be regarded as libertarians on account of their views - were often in sharp opposition to conservatives. As such, always allowing for the overall lack of meaning to the term, these people were on the “left.”

By the end of the 19th century, people holding the same views had often closely associated themselves with the conservatives.

The reason was that the growth of municipal socialism and the increasing volume of collectivist legislation – usually brought in by Liberals. The Liberty and Propery Defence League was set up by conservatives and classical liberals to resist this growth of statism; and our libertarian ancestors became identified, and identified themselves, as on the “right.”

This identification was completed by the state socialist revolution in Russia. Between 1920 and 1990, politics became a tug of war. You could choose your ideological views. Once this was chosen, however, you gave up all control over which end of the rope you would be pulling. You also gave up any choice of allies.

This has changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The tug of war is over. We are free at last to have a good look at our allies; and big business is not particularly libertarian. Actually existing capitalism is largely the economic wing of an exploitative ruling class. It benefits from limited liability laws, infrastructure subsidies, and tax and regulatory systems that favour large scale business.

Now that we no longer risk becoming useful idiots for the Communist Party, we should be reaching out to ordinary working people and explaining how big business and big government stand in their way.

So far as left and right have any real meaning, libertarians should align themselves on the left as well as on the right.

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Hoppe’s Phoenix and the Coming One-World Currency

by on December 5, 2011 @ 11:49 am · 4 comments

in (Austrian) Economics, Anti-Statism, Statism

I noted previously, in The Prophetic Dr. Hoppe on the Rise of the Phoenix, Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s prediction years ago of the inexorable move to a single, worldwide fiat currency. It’s coming. As reported here back in 2009, “The dollar dropped after China’s central bank reiterated a call for a worldwide currency.”

In this connection, see Hoppe’s fascinating discussion of money starting about 1:05:17 of Lecture 3 of his riveting 10-part Economy, Society, and History lectures delivered in 2004, where he talks about the tendency on a free market of multiple “monies” to converge to one–by the nature of money, it’s more valuable the more widespread it is, etc. Hoppe notes that there is a similar tendency now, with fiat currencies, only this time, it’s bad, not good. He points out that the world had alreayd achieved free market unified money (gold); this was destroyed with the outgrowth of dozens of country-based paper monies, leading to a world in a state of quasi-barter; and now when the major currencies like the dollar, yen, euro, talk about monetary unification, they are moving back towards what we already had with gold, except without the relatively fixed supply and other salutary aspects of a commodity-based money.

Part of this process is cementing the position of the Euro as one of the world’s major currencies. And this is happening too. As reported in the NYTimes, Germany and France are now pushing for changes to the European treaties to extend and prop up the euro–with “automatic penalties for countries that exceed European deficit limits as well as the creation of a monetary fund for Europe. … European leaders will begin to change the fundamental structure of the union, creating a form of centralized oversight of national budgets.”

As I noted earlier, in Greece, the Euro, and Secession, in a 2004 LRC post, How Stupid are Europeans?, I observed that unless an explicit right to secede or exit from the then-proposed European Constitution were added, any countries joining would likely be prevented by force from leaving later. Happily, the EU Constitution was never finally ratified, due to the heroic stubbornness of French and Dutch citizens.

But as noted in Greece Considers Exit from Euro Zone,

It remains unclear whether it would even be legally possible for Greece to depart from the euro zone. Legal experts believe it would also be necessary for the country to split from the European Union entirely in order to abandon the common currency. At the same time, it is questionable whether other members of the currency union would actually refuse to accept a unilateral exit from the euro zone by the government in Athens.

Never join a political union. Never centralize. It could be a one-way ratchet, as the CSA was forced to realize. Decentralization—and the Catholic idea of subsidiarity—down to the individual level, is the anarcho-libertarian goal.

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