Branded as Misesian

(Austrian) Economics, Vulgar Politics
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RECENT DEVELOPMENT: Friends to both my right and my left latch onto my admiration for Ludwig von Mises as a way to avoid using the word “libertarian.”

Today I was invited to help out on a political campaign, a run for office by a man thinking of using the “Tea Party” rubric. To get my support, he said that his campaign organizers were all “Misesians.” And a neighbor of mine, a famous rock musician, has repeatedly brought up Mises as an indicator of my political and social thought and orientation.

This interests me, in part, because it seems something new. “Mises” is becoming a brand, “Misesian” a respectable label.

It also interests me that the Hayek Brand appears to be receding in importance. Twenty years ago, I am sure Hayek would have been chosen as the hero corresponding with my ideology. Though “Hayek” still soars in academia, in America at large “Mises” has gained ground, and perhaps even surpassed “Hayek.”

Further, none of my friends and interlocutors really want to dredge up the one thinker with whom I most readily identify: Herbert Spencer. His brand is still in the proverbial toilet.

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Borders, boots and bearing arms

Immigration, Police Statism
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As Michael Barnett points out, government can’t do anything efficiently, at least not without spending enormous amounts of tax dollars and violating our rights.  The border wall is one example of a project the Federal government will never be able to complete to anyone’s satisfaction: for closed-border advocates, it won’t be effective in keeping out illegal immigrants; for open-border supporters, it will be a monument to government waste and tyranny.  The only way it might work at a reasonable price (reasonable for government, anyway) is to put a lot of armed guards along the wall.

Arizona is now seriously considering another application of the brute-force approach, in the form of a “papers, please” shakedown of anyone who doesn’t look, well, legal:

The Arizona House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a wide-ranging bill that, if signed by Gov. Jan Brewer, would cement the state’s reputation as the leader in tough and controversial immigration-control measures.

Senate Bill 1070 would, among other things, make it a state crime to be in the country illegally and bar what its proponents call “sanctuary city” policies.

Most disturbing among the bill’s provisions is granting cops the ability to arrest an immigrant without a warrant if they have “probable cause” to believe the person has committed an offense for which they can be deported.  And inviting an illegal immigrant over for dinner could land even legal residents in hot water, if they know their guest’s immigration status.

Just imagine how Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who holds illegal immigrants, criminals and civil liberties in equal disdain, might utilize these new powers.  Given that his uniformed thugs already routinely round up Mexicans in sweeps and were so abusive of their authority that ICE stripped the sheriff of some of his immigration enforcement powers, the Arizona legislature has effectively granted Arpaio a license to perform “enforcement” actions akin to ethnic cleansing.  The state will protect you from the brown menace!  And never mind the boot on your neck.

It’s all the more outrageous for the fact that it’s so unnecessary.  The same week the Arizona House was debating this evil bill, Governor Jan Brewer signed a far more laudable measure that will do more to improve her citizens’ safety than an entire file cabinet of anti-immigration statutes: allow residents to carry a concealed weapon without a license.  If Arizona residents are truly worried about violence from Mexico’s U.S.-backed drug war spilling over the borders, I can’t think of any better security measure than arming themselves.  And Brewer’s spokesman said that the governor did not believe that residents needed permission from the government to exercise their constitutional right to bear arms.  I’ll wholeheartedly agree with that!  Now if only she was as consistent on people being free to go about their daily business without being harassed by the cops for having a suspicious skin color.

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Clinton Compares Tea Party Members to Timothy McVeigh

Anti-Statism, Private Crime, The Right
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Bill Clinton has recently implied that modern Tea Party activists are all potential Timothy McVeighs:

Former President Bill Clinton on Friday said that “legitimate” comparisons can be drawn between today’s grass-roots anger and resentment toward the government and the right-wing extremism that bubbled up prior to the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City 15 years ago.

True, this probably isn’t as bad as the Bush administration’s claim that citizens who don’t support the Bush administration are “with the terrorists,” but it is fairly bold fearmongering. I doubt that Clinton mentioned the motivation for the OKC bombing. McVeigh, who was trained to kill and trained to make bombs by the United States Army, planned the bombing with his accomplices as retaliation for the Clinton Administration’s mass murder of women and children at Waco. The OKC bombing was carried out on the April 19 anniversary of Waco.

Clinton did say one true thing during his speech: “…be careful with what you say and do not advocate violence.” The state always considers itself exempt from this advice of course.

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The NOPD Is “Troubled”

Anti-Statism, Police Statism, Political Correctness, Vulgar Politics
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Federal assistant AG Thomas Perez is considering filing a “pattern or practice” lawsuit against the New Orleans Police Department as a result of all the killings and coverups perpetrated by that department since Katrina.  Due to niceties in federal law, such a suit, if won by the feds, would effectively allow the Justice Department to determine how the NOPD runs for a while.

What I find most interesting in the coverage of the story, though, is this:  Even though Perez wants to take over the NOPD because of a lengthy and recent record of police killings of innocent people and ensuing cover-ups, Perez still can’t bring himself to call the NOPD “corrupt,” “malignant,” “evil,” or even “dangerous.”  Perez and a New Orleans defense attorney (!) refer to the NOPD as “troubled,” which moniker the rest of us use to describe a rebellious and unhappy, but otherwise harmless, teenager.

I’m guessing that Perez and the defense attorney avoid stronger language partly instinctively in the avoidance of incurring personal liability (a habit lawyers learn quickly), and partly to avoid shaking our faith in government itself — political correctness at its most transparent.  But it makes me wonder:  If killing the people they’ve sworn “to protect and serve” earns a police department the label “troubled,” what must it take for these folks to refer to a department as “corrupt”?

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Capitalism, Socialism, and Libertarianism

Statism, The Basics
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There’s been a good deal of debate recently in libertarian circles about the word capitalism. Is it compatible with libertarianism? A synonym for it? Should we use it? For example:

As some of my posts linked above indicate, I find this debate extremely frustrating because the nature of the debate is rarely made clear. In that respect it is reminiscent of the interminable debates over gay marriage and thick v. thin libertarianism. On the gay marriage issue, it’s often the case that the arguments of gay marriage opponents boils down to opposition to the word marriage being used by the state in the caption in the statute, though they usually won’t come clean and admit it. In my view (not shared by all my co-bloggers at TLS), the thick-thin paradigm adds nothing of substance and is used to equivocate–engaging in non-rigorous argument about what “libertarianism” “is” semantically and then using this to argue for one’s particular substantive positions; it’s like trying to prove that marriage implies slavery or wife-ownership because the word “my” is used in “my wife.”

The libertarian opponents of “capitalism” often engage in equivocation, I believe. If challenged they say they are just opposed to the word, as if this is a semantic or maybe tactical/strategic issue. But because of confused leftist beliefs, many of them are actually opposed to aspects of the underlying social order that we anarcho-libertarians refer to as (non-corporatist) “capitalism”–the modern industrial free market. They oppose “absentee ownership” (see my post A Critique of Mutualist Occupancy), favor localism and self-sufficiency, are leery of the division and specialization of labor, buy into Marxian ideas about “alienation” and “labor”; they accuse standard libertarians of putting undue stress on “capital” while they do the same with “labor” and “the workers”; some flirt with crankish Georgist ideas, and so on. Some of the opponents of the word “capitalism” seem to have genuine strategical or even semantic concerns, such as Sheldon Richman, instead preferring the term “free market.” But some of them seem to oppose even this term–preferring instead the bizarre and annoying term “freed market,” or outright opposing the word “market” in the phrase “free market” (see Markets vs Free Markets). …

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