Five reasons not to support Newt Gingrich for President

Vulgar Politics
By / / 1 minute of reading
Share
  1. He’s for invading foreign countries to fight “radical Islamists,” except when he’s not.
  2. He suggested instituting the death penalty for drug trafficking in the 1990s.
  3. He supports ethanol subsidies as part of a “low-cost energy program”, which may include a cap-and-trade system, or maybe not.
  4. He’s strongly opposed gay marriage as a threat to traditional American values, which no doubt played a vital role in his three marriages (and extramarital affairs).
  5. In 1994 Gingrich claimed “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.”  He’s right, you know: he probably would be a guard at the front gate.

Five reasons not to support Newt Gingrich for President Read Post »

The Chamber Says: No Unauthorized Progress!

Business, Corporatism
By / / 1 Comment / 2 minutes of reading
Share

Auburn, Alabama, experienced some tornado damage the other day, and the place was just a mess. Trees were down. Houses had collapse. Fences were in tatters. Yards were trash heaps. The damage was not major by any standard but there was plenty to do in the wake of this one.

As happens, enterprise was there to make a buck fixing things up. Contractors came from all states in all directions. The unemployed suddenly had work. Skills that had been dormant were suddenly needed. This isn’t the Broken Window fallacy; it is just a reality that new kinds of work needs to be done and enterprise jumps at the chance. Good for enterprise and good for those who need help repairing the damage.

So get this. The following note appeared in my inbox this morning, from the Chamber of Commerce:

The chamber would also like to remind those of you who have damage to your personal property to ask for proof of a license to do business in Auburn as you are negotiating with contractors and other businesses for cleanup, roof repair and other services. Additionally, we as a chamber encourage you to use your local chamber members first. For your convenience we have provided you with a list of chamber members who could offer their service to you.

What’s the priority? Getting the job done or preserving the cartel of favored businesses? We know where the Chamber stands.

The Chamber Says: No Unauthorized Progress! Read Post »

Real tax dollars, imaginary threat

Corporatism, Vulgar Politics
By / / 2 minutes of reading
Share

That Barack Obama has handsomely rewarded supporters who bankrolled his presidential campaign is no secret; he’s just the most recent in a very long line of Leaders of the Free World who indulge in political patronage.  It’s a tradition in Washington, like spring cherry blossoms and Congressional sex scandals.

But perhaps having run out of political appointments and “green” energy companies to throw money at, now the Obama administration appears to be just making up opportunities for its supporters, according to a detailed story in the Los Angeles Times:

Over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work.

Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world’s richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor.

Smallpox was wiped out in the late 1970s, and no evidence has surfaced that any “rogue nations” or terrorist groups have obtained the virus, which is reportedly held only by the U. S. government and a Russian research institute.  Even if smallpox should surface again, the Feds have stockpiled a billion dollars’ worth of the vaccine, which has a shelf life of decades – quite unlike the drug being developed by Siga, which barely lasts three years.

And it’s uncertain whether it would even be effective, since testing it would require that someone becomes infected with, you know, smallpox.

None of these concerns seemed to deter Health and Human Services officials from securing the funding for Siga, to the point that they essentially created a no-bid opportunity for the pharmaceutical company:

But the federal contract [for developing the antiviral drug] required that the winning bidder be a small business, with no more than 500 employees. Chimerix Inc., a North Carolina company that had competed for the contract, protested, saying Siga was too big.

Officials at the Small Business Administration investigated and quickly agreed, finding that Siga’s affiliation with MacAndrews & Forbes disqualified it.

The Obama administration could have awarded the contract to Chimerix as the only eligible small-business applicant. Or it could have reopened the competition to companies of any size.

Instead, the administration moved to block all companies — except Siga — from bidding on a second offering of the contract.

Read much more here.

Real tax dollars, imaginary threat Read Post »

A great new libertarian resource: Libertarianism.org

Anti-Statism, Education, Libertarian Theory, The Basics
By / / 1 minute of reading
Share

The new Libertarianism.org, a project of the Cato Institute, is a gorgeous website containing a well-organized set of information about libertarian ideas, history, and people. I am just exploring it but am amazed at how smooth and elegant the site design and organization of material is. It contains introductory material for newcomers and current and more advanced material as well, and it highlights the work of a host of people influential on libertarian ideas. Check it out.

For a good overview of the site’s aims and contents, see the welcoming post from Nov. 3, 2011, by Aaron Ross Powell. (My fellow TLS blogger Wirkman Virkkala blogged about it previously at New Libertarian Website Launched.)

A great new libertarian resource: Libertarianism.org Read Post »

On Sweatshops, Liberty, and Social Justice

(Austrian) Economics, Business, Libertarian Theory, Nanny Statism, The Left
By / / 11 Comments / 5 minutes of reading
Share

Over at the Center for a Stateless Society, Michael Kleen asks whether compassionate libertarians can agree to oppose sweatshops as a matter of social justice. Ah, but what does he mean by “oppose” and “social justice”?

Libertarianism is not about people just getting by; it is about maximizing human liberty. Liberty cannot be achieved as long as eking out a living in dangerous conditions for 12 to 14 hours a day is an individual’s most attractive option.

So there could not have been liberty prior to modern times?

Either this line of argument was not thought out or Kleen subscribes to a Marxist-style determinist-materialist conception of history. I hope for the former, as these lines strike me as a propagandistic rhetorical flourish.

Incidentally, the conception of liberty used by Kleen here equivocates between the libertarian conception (i.e., not being subject to the threat or use of initiatory physical force) and a more left-liberal/socialist conception of liberty as positive economic freedoms. I’m afraid compassionate libertarians cannot get on board with such a conflation. To treat both as a matter of political justice is to try to wed contradictions, because “promoting” positive economic freedoms in this way will necessarily require the violation of rights (liberty). This is the mistake made by statist socialists and left-liberals.

Although Kleen uses the term “social justice,” he actually conflates political justice and social justice here and elsewhere in his post. If one insists on using the term “justice” in reference to positive economic freedoms, it is important to distinguish social justice (more a matter of personal morality and unenforceable in a libertarian legal system) from political justice (liberty/rights, which are enforceable in a libertarian legal system).

Kleen also seems to conflate pointing out that people often choose to work in a sweatshop because they see it as better than the alternatives with endorsing sweatshops as ideal work environments. I can’t speak for everyone who doesn’t see sweatshops as unjust and an indictment of capitalism, but I think that most do not think of sweatshops as ideal or unequivocally good. We just do not think that capitalism, as amazing as it is, can magically allow a poor, agricultural society to just skip over the terrible working conditions of the Industrial Revolution in its transition to an industrial or post-industrial economy.

Sweatshops are simply often better than the alternatives available and opposing them via statist means will only be counterproductive, harming the very poor such policies are meant to help. This does not mean we “favor” sweatshops in the abstract or propose them as an ideal business model. It does not mean we do not sympathize with the plight of the poor working in such conditions. Having to point this out makes me feel like I do when libertarians oppose the state performing some function and statists of all parties assume that means we don’t want that function performed at all — e.g., we oppose social-welfare policies so that must mean we hate the poor and want them out on the streets, starving to death, dying of disease. Hardly.

Kleen’s post contains a few other nits in need of picking:

…

On Sweatshops, Liberty, and Social JusticeRead More »

On Sweatshops, Liberty, and Social Justice Read Post »

Scroll to Top