With all the hysteria in the mass-media in concern to the shutdown, your friendly Libertarian Standard blogger is here to deliver a public service announcement to allay any dissonance you may be needlessly experiencing.
You, dear citizen, will not be regaining any freedoms you might have had before; anything that otherwise might have been permitted to you before as a natural, human right will not necessarily be allowed again because of this unfortunate shutdown event.
THESE FOLLOWING ITEMS WILL BE UNAFFECTED BY US GOVERNMENT SERVICE CUTS:
- The freedom to retain the full gain of property you’ve obtained through voluntary means. Our dedicated IRS agents will be working round-the-clock to ensure that you pay your full due (and then some). Sadly, due to current budgeting woes, money you’ve lent us interest-free (thanks again!) in advance will be held hostage due to despicable, greedy taxpayers shamelessly(!) refusing to fork over more of their property.
- There will no freedom to enter or leave your invisible jail without permission papers from your ever-so-gracious wardens. You will have to defer your furlough plans until passport services are resumed.
- You will not be free to trade with people living in other territories without paying our bridge trolls the proper custom. Any privacy you think you may have to be secure in either your person or property is out of the question once you are within the marked territories of the bridge trolls or their Uruk-hai siblings at the TSA.
- The freedom to consume foodstuffs or chemicals for your pleasure and even health will be strictly prohibited without the specific permission of our Surgeon General. Any pleasurable activities that are as yet unknown are categorically forbidden by emergency measure. Yes, Granny may die because the FDA couldn’t approve her medicine in time, but so what, somebody might get high in the meanwhile, and we couldn’t have that, no sirree.
Always remember- a government shutdown affects YOU, not them.
All this recent talk of legislating and implementing an internet “kill switch” is being hyped by statists in the name of national security. Oh, just imagine the horrors if some if some malicious internet terrorists hax0r open the Hoover Dam floodgates, possibly killing thousands!
I readily agree with this FUD; but I disagree with the implementation. In order to protect the “national security interest,” the correct solution is to put not private, but all government, resources behind an internet kill switch! This way when some script kiddies start launching NORAD missiles, Obama can blister his thumb pressing the government kill switch that Murray Rothbard could only dream about.
Understanding basic economics is crucial for all libertarians. No other field offers as clear and irrefutable a case for liberty. Indeed, statism draws much of its support from the public’s flawed understanding of economics. Even libertarians are occasionally led astray by flawed economic reasoning. A friend recently brought a book designed to combat such flaws to my attention: Geoffrey E. Wood’s Fifty Economic Fallacies Exposed.
[Keep reading…]
In a previous post, Voting, Moral Hazard, and Like Buttons, I discussed the moral hazards of voting and why democracy does not legitimize the state or protect our liberty. I also discussed how statist democracy, particularly representative democracy, is manipulative and conducive to top-down central planning of society. (Statist) politics tends to reduce all basic social issues to problems requiring administrative manipulation. In this post, I’m going to delve into this issue further and draw upon insights by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition to illustrate how (statist) politics is inherently an attempt to run society as one massive organization, organism, or machine.
Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the differences between action (praxis) and work – and between politics, which involves action, and fabrication or making (poi?sis), which involves work – has negative implications for the central planning of society that is characteristic of modern representative-democratic states. In particular, I have in mind her criticism of Plato, and to a lesser extent Aristotle, regarding their tendency to view society as a sort of organization and politics as the running of society as such an organization – or, in their words, politics as akin to household management. This fits with the tendency in many cultures to refer to one’s country as “the Fatherland” or “the Motherland” and with socialists and communitarians (on the left and the right) essentially modeling their ideal society after the family.
[Keep reading…]
