Sticks and Stones and All That

Vulgar Politics
By / / 1 Comment / 5 minutes of reading
Share

You can always count on The Huffington Post for ridiculous ideological one-upmanship. Latest case in point? A short piece on Tim Kaine:

DNC Chairman Tim Kaine took to the National Press Club on Wednesday to gloat about the showing of Democrats in primary contests the night before. In the process he offered the usual platitudes: the party was rewarded for offering solutions to the economic malaise; enthusiasm is up as evidence of turnout in the Kentucky Democratic primary; Republicans find themselves in an ideological civil war, with Tea Party candidates knocking out establishment candidates, and so on.

The most interesting (least spun) tidbit of wisdom, however, came when Kaine was asked to address the common conservative complaint that the Obama administration represents socialism in disguise. Had the label hurt the party or the president, a questioner wanted to know.

“People love to throw label around and I think for most thinking Americans, throwing that label around actually doesn’t hurt us,” Kaine replied. “It suggests an extremism and an ideological rigidity that isn’t where most Americans are. We are problem solvers.”

Most Americans are problem solvers, or are just the Democrats?

“A party that just relies on throwing labels around and refusing to cooperate, they might get a headline but they won’t get support of people,” he added. “We are going to promote smart solutions to these problems and If the other guys want to rely on labels rather than roll up their sleeves and actually help us govern a nation at a time when governance is needed — it is an abdication of responsibility but they are not going to help their case by doing that.”

Really? I mean, really? Is any of this credible?

Sure, “socialism” is an over-used taunt. The “we’re all in this together” intent of socialist doctrine is missing from the ultra-big-government “smart” solutions that Democrats push. It is more like what Democrats have long accused the Republicans, of supporting “free markets for the poor, but socialism for the rich” (a not-very accurate description of the services available for the poor, or the habits of many of the rich), only turned on its head: The socialism of the Democrats is a “socialism of the well-connected and the ‘too big to fail,’” leaving the rest of us with a hobbled market.

But, hey, I am on record as deprecating “socialism” in most modern cases for “dirigisme,” or what Mises called “interventionism.”

So I agree with Kaine, right?

Wrong.

…

Sticks and Stones and All ThatRead More »

Sticks and Stones and All That Read Post »

Live and Let Die

(Austrian) Economics, Health Care, The Right, Vulgar Politics
By / / 6 minutes of reading
Share

A schoolmate of mine, a Christian conservative, once insisted that the reason our public school teachers informed us about Eskimos leaving their aged on the ice to die was to prepare the way for doing something similar to our oldsters.

That seemed like quite large dose of paranoia, to me. After all, also in public school we learned that Aztecs cut the hearts out of those they sacrificed to their gods. The pyramid steps of Teotihuacan ran red with blood. We were told this, I thought, because it was true. Could there have been an organ harvesting agenda behind the history lesson?

Seemed unlikely.

Before asserting a major conspiracy, it strikes me as worth addressing, openly, all aspects of the problem that might give birth to such concerns. Was euthanasia of the elderly in the future? Probably only when I get old, I thought, darkly. But seriously, why would it be considered?

Because of the expense, of course.

But whose expense?

This is lightly touched on in Thomas Sowell’s recent column, “A ‘Duty to Die’?”

…

Live and Let DieRead More »

Live and Let Die Read Post »

Dishonorable

The Right, Vulgar Politics, War
By / / 2 minutes of reading
Share

The new website, “Honor Freedom,” is an example of conservatism at its most witless. It is an attempt to organize Americans to rehabilitate the reputation of George W. Bush.

The site’s author makes much of this “war president” and his alleged contributions towards our “freedom,” but what I remember about Bush is this: Prior to 9/11/01, Bush hardly uttered the word “freedom.”

His campaign chant may have been “A new freedom,” but it was just as duplicitous as Woodrow Wilson’s so-called “New Freedom.” That is, it had little to do with freedom. Wilson defended “free enterprise” when running for office, but defined this mainly by being a trust-buster. (Dubious honor in that.) Bush was for “free enterprise” mainly by pushing for decreased tax rates, but once in office he increased regulations, subsidies and encouraged the spendthrifts in Congress. (His veto power lied dormant, for the most part; federal spending ballooned.)

It’s mere pretense to suppose that increasing foreign military involvement abroad increases our “freedom.” But Bush wrapped himself up in the word, after 9/11, pretending that terrorists could take away our freedoms easier than could the government that he himself headed. The 9/11 attack, remember, took away lives, not freedoms as such. It was the government response — his response — that managed to take away freedoms.

And thus Bush played into Osama bin Laden’s game plan. Osama had extrapolated from his work in undermining the Soviet Union that, by organizing attacks upon America, the U.S. federal government would so overreact as to jeopardize its own position, transforming imperial America into imperious America, making it truly loathsome and thus easier to raise recruits among opponents, converting them to terrorism.

George W. Bush thus served as Osama bin Laden’s Useful Idiot. His reputation deserves not rehabilitation but a more thorough and generally acknowledged destruction.

Death to tyrants. Ignominy to fools.

Dishonorable Read Post »

Better Than the Golden Rule?

The Basics
By / / 7 minutes of reading
Share

Attempts to summarize all morality into a simple principle are ancient. Long before Kant’s categorical imperative we were blessed with the Silver and Golden Rules. Indeed, there is a sort of progress in the development of these rules:

Silver: Do not do unto others that which you do not want done to yourself.

Golden: Do unto others that which you want done unto you.

Cat. Imp.: Act only in such a manner that you can at the same time will that your act should become a universal law.

But the progress may be illusory. …

Better Than the Golden Rule?Read More »

Better Than the Golden Rule? Read Post »

A capital ism?

The Basics
By / / 6 minutes of reading
Share

The debate over whether “capitalism” should be used by libertarians and other supporters of free markets waxes rather than wanes. Last week, Sheldon Richman published “Is Capitalism Something Good?” on Freeman Online. And I can see why Stephan Kinsella calls this an “extremely frustrating” debate. We never get very far.

My favorite of Richman’s points is lexical:

At the semantic level, capitalism is an unfortunate word when applied to the free market. It suggests a privileged status for capital over other factors of production, which is not the case in a free market. A capitalist is not a believer in capitalism but rather an owner of capital. One can be a socialist capitalist, that is, one who owns capital while favoring a system called socialism.

In my younger days of argumentation, people would sometimes accuse me of being a capitalist. Well, in those younger days I was broke. I had no savings. I had nothing to invest, and invested in nothing but my own mind. So I would correct them: “Hey, I’m near the poverty line. No capitalists down here! Besides, I support laissez-faire because it regulates businesses: It enforces a rule of law that disallows businesses from demanding I pay for their goods if I don’t want their goods, or pay more than I would under competition, which laissez faire also enforces. I am not a capitalist, because I insist that we keep capitalists in their place.” …

A capital ism?Read More »

A capital ism? Read Post »

Scroll to Top