Consider Bastiat’s comments on Rome and how–if you substitute for slavery the drug war and tax slavery–they apply to the modern US:
What is to be said of Roman morality? And I am not speaking here of the relations of father and son, of husband and wife, of patron and client, of master and servant, of man and God—relations that slavery, by itself alone, could not fail to transform into a whole network of depravity; I wish to dwell only on what is called the admirable side of the Republic, i.e., patriotism. What was this patriotism? Hatred of foreigners, the destruction of all civilization, the stifling of all progress, the scourging of the world with fire and sword, the chaining of women, children, and old men to triumphal chariots—this was glory, this was virtue. It was to these atrocities that the marble of the sculptors and the songs of the poets were dedicated. How many times have our young hearts not palpitated with admiration, alas, and with emulation at this spectacle!
From Bastiat, Selected Essays in Political Economy, quoted in Geoffrey Allan Plauché, “Roman Virtue, Liberty, and Imperialism: The Murder-Suicide of Classical Civilization.” America is riddled with patriotism, with American flags senselessly displayed all over, and people mindlessly responding to criticism of the Fatherland with the retort, “You show me another country that’s better!” Its wars, the welfare state, its taxes and manipulation of money, its jails full of non-criminals have indeed debased morals. We have scourged the world with fire and sword, and statues of our modern warlord gods, such as Lincoln, adorn our capital city. As for the last line, about the youth swooning over our military might and conquest, one is reminded of the not completely tongue-in-check skit Wayne’s World during Gulf War I, when Wayne and Garth had fun watching the videos of US missiles destroying Iraqi targets.
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.
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Will there come a time when firefighters have to consider saving an endangered species over someone’s home? One wonders:
Lost in the images of aircraft dropping giant red plumes of retardant on a Colorado wildfire this week is the fact that the practice may not be legal under federal environmental laws.
A federal judge in July declared that the government’s current plan for dropping retardant on fires is illegal, and he gave the U.S. Forest Service until the end of next year to find a more environmentally friendly alternative.
The issue appears to hinge more on how the retardant is used than on the retardant itself, but when human lives and property are on the line, should it matter at all if some fish and plants are put at risk? Plants grow back and waterways recover, even from the worst disasters. People’s lives and homes aren’t so easy to reassemble.
Then we have the Federal government’s futile attempts to spark the “green economy”, which has succeeded primarily in shipping jobs overseas (h/t Jeffrey Tucker):
The last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison’s innovations in the 1870s….
What made the plant here vulnerable is, in part, a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014. The law will force millions of American households to switch to more efficient bulbs.
The resulting savings in energy and greenhouse-gas emissions are expected to be immense. But the move also had unintended consequences.
Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China.
Bastiat weeps! Of course the unintended consequences are never considered by policy makers when The Future of Civilization is at stake (or at least when cheap political points can be scored). A few hundred people’s livelihoods, consumers’ freedom of choice: small sacrifices on the environmentalists’ altar. Maybe Mother Earth will thank us in a few million years.
