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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TLS Q&A: What is Austrian Economics?

(Austrian) Economics, Education, History, The Basics, TLS Q&A
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Reader Ryan reminded us that not everyone who happens upon The Libertarian Standard will know what Austrian Economics is. Since an understanding of sound economics is so important to understanding the case for liberty, and Austrian Economics just is sound economics, we decided to make this the first question-and-answer for our Q&A series and the first addition to our Libertarian FAQ. Remember, you too can submit questions to us that you would like us to answer, if not for yourself then for the benefit of others. Inspire us!

What is Austrian Economics?

Austrian Economics is paradigm, a way of analyzing economic and social phenomena that is sometimes completely at odds with the “mainstream” of Economics both in academe and among the ruling elites. AE is centered in the acting human being and thus follows a strict causal-realist that -claim its enthusiasts- render a far deeper and truer comprehension of what goes on in human societies.

This tradition or school of thought is the culmination of centuries and perhaps even millenia of (European) continental subjectivist notions that can be traced back to the ancient Greeks and all the way through Roman thinkers, Medievalists, Renaissance and finally modern authors. What makes it distinctive is the focus on human action rather than in objective (materialistic), aggregated additions and substractions of actors and goods (viewing the forest but losing sight of the trees or ignoring them altogether) as well as idealized mathematical and geometrical models (in a supposed desired to seem “more scientific” that otherwise).

The Austrian School’s founder, Carl Menger, wrote his “Principles of Political Economy” as a structured marginalist1 answer to the Methodenstreit (a debate on method) that he was having with the German historicists, who claimed that there are no economic (reality) laws but rather recipes that may or not work depending of time and place. His successor, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, used the same marginalist approach to explain capital, savings, investment, interest and time preference. His contenders of the time were the Marxists but also the clearly stuck “Classical” economists of the British islands who were making mistakes as grave as to have engendered -at least partially- the bases for Marxism and Keynesianism. Böhm-Bawerk’s most brilliant student was Ludwig von Mises, considered by many as the best economist ever. Mises predicted as early as in 1921 that socialism was an untenable ideas because it kills the possibility of economic calculation (the final products being more than the intermediate goods and other things spent used to make them) and thus renders the whole of society (qua division of labor) a chaotic and inharmonious cluster of errors.

Mises also demonstrated that economic booms and busts are caused by an easy credit (no previous savings backing it up) policy mainly coming from States. Finally Mises demonstrated the universal character of economic laws as features of human action thus recouperating Economics from the relativistic pitfalls of empirism and historicism once again popular in his time. Mises’ most famous student, Friedrich A. von Hayek was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 in big part due to this work with Mises on the direct threat that Intervencionism and Inflationism pose for free societies. The Austrian School found a Misesian revival after Hayek abandoned Economics to pursue other intellectual interests under the influence of Karl Popper and others, when Murray N. Rothbard wrote his treatise “Man, Economy and State”. Rothbard went beyond his teacher not only on strict Economics matters such as monopoly or Interventionism but mainly he set a foundation of Ethics that would resist any utilitarian attempt to seek anything but freedom because of special considerations of any kind. Other students of Mises that need mention are Hans Sennholz, a prolific writer on the subjects of money and inflation; Henry Hazlitt -the NYTimes Economics editor- who although wasn’t a student of Mises personally, was tremendously influenced by him; Israel Kirzner from NYU, with a clear Hayekian strand of analysis of entrepreneurship and coordination, Ralph Raico a revisionist historian of prime qualities and George Reisman, whose attempts at an Austrian + Classical synthesis are controversial but very interesting nonetheless.

Currently the hotbead of Austrian Economics is Auburn, Alabama where Llewellyn Rockwell Jr. setup the “Ludwig von Mises” Institute to help spread the Misesian-Rothbardian strand of AE. Scholars close to or directly working with the LVMI are prof. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a radical and pathbreaking thinker, prof. Jörg Guido-Hülsmann who has made original contributions to several subjects including the Ethics of money production, profs. Joseph Salerno, Peter Klein, Walter Block and Thomas Dilorenzo. Today www.mises.org is a world famous source of economic education in the causal-realist paradigm and is in no small part responsible for the revival of AE and its arrival to countries such as Ecuador, Brazil, Spain, Sweden and Chzech Republic among dozens others that are seeing the formation of Misesian centers for thought and education in the tradition of the Austrian School.

  1. Analyzing the whole from the relevant unit added to it instead of analyzing wholes/aggregates ↩

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L. Neil Smith on Anti-IP “Thieves”

IP Law
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As a followup to various posts (The L. Neil Smith – FreeTalkLive Copyright Dispute; Russell Madden’s “The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism”; Replies to Neil Schulman and Neil Smith re IP), I see Smith has posted another article, “The Medium and the Message,” that touches on IP.

In this piece, he again states that IP is valid but without offering any justification. He explicitly compares IP abolitionists to those who want to tax and regulate and censor the Internet: after describing these nefarious types, he turns to IP opponents, describing us as an “equally deadly threat to freedom of expression”. Yes, he literally said that. We are simply envy-filled socialists: “Like the socialists they are, most of them appear to envy and hate the creators of intellectual property, and relish a future they imagine in which it’s impossible to earn a living by writing.”  We are not libertarians; we are thieves: “Opponents of intellectual property rights are nothing more than thieves, and, no matter what they may claim, neither are they libertarians.”

But he provides no argument at all for the proposition that IP is a legitimate type of property. He just calls it theft. And he says, “There can be, of course, no moral distinction between physical and intellectual property …..” The “of course” apparently is supposed to do all the work here.

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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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