Article: What Libertarians Should Learn From Radical Socialists

Anti-Statism, Articles, History
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Ross Kenyon analyzes the radical socialist movement of the Progressive Era in an attempt to discern why they failed and how libertarians can learn from their failures in order to create the ideal libertarian society today.

Ross Kenyon is a news analyst with the Center for a Stateless Society and a senior at Arizona State University, where he is majoring in American History and is a member of the ASU Students For Liberty leadership team.

Read the Full Article by Ross Kenyon

Afterwards, discuss it below.

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Another U.S.-Inflicted “Ground Zero” in Pakistan

Anti-Statism, Imperialism, Racism, The Right, War
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If opinion polls are reliable at all, most Americans are too enthralled by the manufactured outrage over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque to notice that the government claiming to represent them just massacred, via remote-controlled drone, at least twenty innocent people in Pakistan.

Several of those killed in the attack were children whose lives were violently ended by a missile fired at the hideout of “suspected militants.” It was their fatal misfortune to be living next to an address chosen for a “targeted execution” — that is, an assassination conducted pursuant to presidential order.

This is just one of literally hundreds of “ground zeros” the U.S. government has inflicted on Pakistan since Barack the Blessed escalated the drone war early in his presidency. That fact is lost on the  spittle-flecked militarists who profess to be inconsolably offended by the presence of Muslims within a few blocks Ground Zero’s incomparably sacred soil in Lower Manhattan.

People intoxicated with a sense of vicarious victimhood aren’t likely to understand, or care about, the anger and frustration of Muslims whose homes and families have been destroyed, on a whim, by the rulers of a distant and unassailably powerful regime.

The more deranged among the neo-Know Nothings (the “No Mosques in America!” crowd) insist it is a species of sedition even to suggest that there is a connection between the criminal violence committed by Washington abroad, and the retaliatory terrorism we occasionally experience here at home.

This dogmatic indifference to the value of non-American lives was displayed by Hillary Clinton during an October 2009 foreign excursion in which she inflicted herself on the inhabitants of Pakistan.  During a meeting with Clinton, several well-spoken but forceful Pakistanis condemned the strikes as “executions without trial” and acts of state terrorism. Clinton breezily dismissed the complaints: “There is a war going on.”

That statement is a distant echo of Madeleine Albright’s notorious comments in a 1996 60 Minutes interview, in which she blithely said that it was “worth it” for the U.S. to suffocate Iraq with sanctions that were killing tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians each year.

Albright’s words, which were re-played incessantly in the Muslim world, resulted in a huge windfall for terrorist recruiters (who really should have given her a commission for each suicide bomber who enlisted in their ranks).

Clinton’s arrogant, dismissive comments weren’t as widely reported, but the policy she defended is cultivating the seeds from which future terrorist attacks will spring. And the bovine residue being spread about the “Ground Zero Mosque” by the War Party’s cynical hate peddlers is helping fertilize that threat.

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Rachel Maddow the Accidental Libertarian

Anti-Statism, Democracy, The Basics
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I just recently watched The Daily Show‘s interview of Rachel Maddow from last April (embedded below) and couldn’t help but comment. She proposed two rules for public discourse: 1. “Don’t lie” and 2. “Don’t threaten to shoot people or encourage the shooting of people.” I was surprised – Maddow and I rarely end up in agreement, yet I couldn’t agree more that the world would be a much better place if everyone stuck to these two rules when speaking in public forums. I knew, of course, that Maddow could not possibly be serious or had not thought too hard about her second proposal. The implications of that rule, though perhaps not immediately obvious, are staggering.

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Who are the worst Americans?

Anti-Statism, The Left, The Right
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From Stephen Bainbridge via Tyler Cowen comes a list of the worst Americans:

John Hawkins asked a bunch of right of center bloggers to list the “20 Worst Americans of all time,” from which he compiled the following list. The comments are mine. Personally, I find the collated list pretty much of a joke. It reflects the partisan passions of the moment, not anything resembling a serious verdict of history.

It goes on to list the usual suspects from the modern political right’s perspective: the Clintons, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, various spies and assassins, FDR, Ted Kennedy and so on.  I agree with Bainbridge that several selections are historically dubious; leftist loudmouths such as Moore and Al Sharpton seem inconsequential next to true monsters like FDR and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

I doubt Bainbridge would agree with a libertarian’s list, however, although some overlap would exist.  But we libertarians enjoy the benefit of an anti-state, pro-liberty perspective, which neither the right nor left will entertain.  Thus while Bainbridge puts John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of “our greatest President”, at # 3 of his own list, Booth’s target would top mine.  Yes, Abraham Lincoln: the worst American ever.

And certainly no other assassin or spy or anyone else who has undermined the state would go on my list of worst Americans.  The worst Americans are the ones who have used the state to murder, rob and terrorize innocent people.  Lincoln prosecuted a war to prevent secession and caused the deaths of 600,000 Americans and virtually unmeasurable economic destruction.  Timothy McVeigh isn’t our worst domestic terrorist: the United States government is.

FDR, who ushered in the modern welfare state and deliberately goaded the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, thus providing an excuse to push the U. S. into WWII, surely is in the top five.  As is his successor, Harry Truman, for slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians with atomic weapons.

Then there’s Alexander Hamilton, a strong centralist whose ideas of protectionism and fiat currency plague American economic policy to this day.

Here are some of my choices, not in a meaningful order after the top five or so:

  1. Abraham Lincoln
  2. Woodrow Wilson (World War I tyrant, established the Fed and the first progressive income tax, allowed segregationist government policies)
  3. FDR
  4. Harry Truman
  5. Alexander Hamilton
  6. LBJ (expanded involvement in Vietnam, biggest spender on social programs since FDR)
  7. George W. Bush (two wars, unprecedented expansion of Federal government)
  8. Ted Kennedy (worst recent example of our ruling political class)
  9. Alan Greenspan (architect of the Fed’s disastrous monetary expansion)
  10. Paul Krugman (apologist for neo-Keynesian economic policy)
  11. John Marshall (4th Chief Justice of SCOTUS who greatly expanded Federal power)
  12. Janet Reno (murderess of 76 Branch Davidians in Waco)
  13. J. Edgar Hoover (the FBI’s first and still most evil dictator director)

I’m sure readers can think of many others, but this is a good start.

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Pundits: Play Whack-A-Mole with WikiLeaks. Oh wait…

Anti-Statism, Imperialism, Police Statism, Technology, War
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In How to Mirror a Censored WordPress Blog, I discussed how the Mises Institute open-sourcing all of Mises.org and putting its entire literature and media library online as a set of torrents will help ensure the continued existence of this treasure trove of liberty in the event of a natural disaster or a future crackdown by the US government.

Here’s a practical example taking place before us. Some technologically and strategically-incompetent pundits are clamoring for the United States federal government to use its cyber capabilities to take out WikiLeaks before the organization puts online the remaining 15,000 documents of the leaked Afghan war logs.

Kevin Poulsen of Wired.com explains how a previous attempt to take down wikileaks.org has already failed in the past and how future attempts to take out WikiLeaks will fail as well.

In 2008, federal judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco ordered the WikiLeaks.org domain name seized as part of a lawsuit filed by Julius Baer Bank and Trust, a Swiss bank that suffered a leak of some of its internal documents. Two weeks later the judge admitted he’d acted hastily, and he had the site restored. “There are serious questions of prior restraint, possible violations of the First Amendment,” he said.

Even while the order was in effect, WikiLeaks lived on: supporters and free speech advocates distributed the internet IP address of the site, so it could be reached directly. Mirrors of the site were unaffected by the court order, and a copy of the entire WikiLeaks archive of leaked documents circulated freely on the Pirate Bay.

The U.S. government has other, less legal, options, of course — the “cyber” capabilities Thiessen alludes to. The Pentagon probably has the ability to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against WikiLeaks’ public-facing servers. If it doesn’t, the Army could rent a formidable botnet from Russian hackers for less than the cost of a Humvee.

But that wouldn’t do much good either. WikiLeaks wrote its own insurance policy two weeks ago, when it posted a 1.4 GB file called insurance.aes256.

The file’s contents are encrypted, so there’s no way to know what’s in it. But, as we’ve previously reported, it’s more than 19 times the size of the Afghan war log — large enough to contain the entire Afghan database, as well as the other, larger classified databases said to be in WikiLeaks’ possession. Accused Army leaker Bradley Manning claimed to have provided WikiLeaks with a log of events in the Iraq war containing 500,000 entries from 2004 through 2009, as well as a database of 260,000 State Department cables to and from diplomatic posts around the globe.

Whatever the insurance file contains, Assange — appearing via Skype on a panel at the Frontline Club — reminded everyone Thursday that he could make it public at any time. “All we have to do is release the password to that material and it’s instantly available,” he said.

WikiLeaks is encouraging supporters to download the insurance file through the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay. “Keep it safe,” reads a message greeting visitors to the WikiLeaks chat room. After two weeks, the insurance file is doubtless in the hands of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of netizens already.

We dipped into the torrent Friday to get a sense of WikiLeaks’ support in that effort. In a few minutes of downloading, we pulled bits and piece of insurance.aes256 from 61 seeders around the world. We ran the IP addresses through a geolocation service and turned it into a KML file to produce the Google Map at the top of this page [go to the Wired.com article or view it on Google Maps — GAP]. The seeders are everywhere, from the U.S., to Iceland, Australia, Canada and Europe. They had all already grabbed the entire file, and are now just donating bandwidth to help WikiLeaks survive.

Cross-posted at Is-Ought GAP.

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