More on Dorothy Day, Anarchist

Anti-Statism, The Left, The Right, War
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I mentioned Dorothy Day in passing in yesterday’s post. Specifically I named her as part of the Catholic pacifist-anarchist tradition. A couple of readers asked about whether or not Day was actually an anarchist, as they had always heard she was a socialist. I referred one reader to a short article on Day that noted her status as an anarchist, but I didn’t feel that was adequate.

By chance, my wife who is working on an unrelated research project about feminism, happened to pick up some books about Day at the library today. One of the books is The Moral Vision of Dorothy Day: A Feminist Perspective by June E. O’Connor. I thumbed through it and found the following passage, which I think provides a far more satisfying explanation of Day’s views:

Although she preferred the words libertarian, decentralist and personalist to anarchist, Day’s attraction to anarchism was an enduring one. With Peter Maurin and others, most notably Ammon Hennacy and Robert Ludlow, Dorothy Day sought fundamental changes in the structure of society by minimizing the presence and power of the state and by arguing on behalf of personal initiative and responsibility expressed in direct action.

Whether acting alongside of or in spite of Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day believed in the power of the person as the starting point for the good society. Day described anarchism as being “personalist before it’s communitarian: it begins with living a disciplined life, trying to be what you want the other fellow to be.” Day admitted that although one must assume responsibility oneself, the fact is that many others will not. When they do not, one must simply try to understand them, given their sufferings and their backgrounds, and accept them.

…Anarchists are not so much politicians or sociologists as they are moralists; their stand is not so much political and economic as it is spiritual and ethical.

[Well, anarchists aren’t politicians at all, but this is still a nice observation about anarchism.]

…

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Hunter S. Thompson’s Last Stand

Legal System, Non-Fiction Reviews, Private Crime
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Dear Dr. Thompson: Felony Murder, Hunter S. Thompson, and the Last Gonzo Campaign
Ghost Road Press, 2010

by Matthew L. Moseley

Reviewed by Ryan McMaken

Hunter S. Thompson was one of the 20th century’s greatest literary social critics, and one of the most anti-authoritarian. In the tradition of Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken, Thompson never flinched at exposing the hypocrisies and contradictions of American life and ideology, and his contempt for authority permeated not just his writing but his life as well.

Thompson killed himself in 2005, shortly before his remains were shot out of a giant cannon in Aspen, Colorado. Yet, right up to the end, Thompson made himself a gadfly and a nuisance and an enemy of the agents of the state who have so much power over the lives of the powerless.

In Dear Dr. Thompson, writer Matthew Moseley has provided an entertaining first person account of Hunter S. Thompson and his “Last Gonzo Campaign.” Through the book, which is both a true crime account and a study of Thompson the man, Moseley details Thompson’s involvement in the Lisl Auman case in which, Auman, then barely out of her teens, was kidnapped by a drug addled gangbanger who murdered a police officer. Later, prosecutors claimed Auman had assisted the murderer and, thanks to media hysteria and prosecutorial recklessness in the name of “sending a message” to cop killers, Auman was sentenced to life in prison without parole under the felony murder law in Colorado.

Then one day, while serving her life sentence in a Colorado prison, Auman wrote a letter to Hunter S. Thompson a few hours away in Aspen. Thompson’s assistant Deborah Fuller read the letter aloud to Thompson. The letter spawned the “Free Lisl!” campaign which would turn out to be Thompson’s last great campaign against injustice.

The Murder

Lisl Auman was handcuffed in the back of a police car in the parking lot of an apartment complex when skinhead Matthaeus Jaenig, whom Auman had met that morning, murdered a police officer.

Denver’s Westword newspaper provides a concise description of the scene: …

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Tea partiers will fall for anything

The Right
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Tom Tancredo today boasted a variety of endorsements he has received from local tea party organizers in his bid for the governorship in Colorado. I won’t bore you with the details, but Tancredo, a Republican member of Congress until 2009, launched a campaign as an independent demagogue after he decided the GOP nominee was not to his liking.

Now, I have no idea how representative these tea party organizers are of the rank-and-file tea partier, but I do know that Tancredo has spoken at local tea party events and has been cheered.

What’s interesting is that Tancredo was the only GOP member of the Colorado Congressional delegation that voted for the TARP Bailout. So, Tancredo, who voted for the greatest taxpayer ripoff in American history, goes to tea party events where he recites something about the virtues of small governments, and then receives thunderous applause.

Tancredo, who supported the legislation that stole almost a trillion dollars from the taxpayers and handed it over to Goldman Sachs and friends, now lectures the American people on the need for smaller government.Probably no other piece of legislation in recent memory galvanized and defined the party of liberty in America more than the TARP bailout and the opposition to it. It was the legislation that revved up the non-stop fleecing of the American public to about triple its normal speed. And with the support of Tom Tancredo.

The tea party types here are making excuses for him because Tancredo now says that voting for TARP was a mistake. How courageous. He voted for TARP because that required no courage, and now he’s disavowing his vote because that requires no courage. What a magnificent display of principle!

But, hey, tea partiers, I’m sure that, even though he voted for the biggest big government piece of legislation in decades, because Goldman Sachs told him to, that doesn’t mean he won’t be a staunch opponent of big government on everything else. Right? Keep dreaming, tea partiers.

Hey, remember when all those Republicans slashed the size of government after they got control of Congress back in 1994? Remember when George W. Bush didn’t double the size of amount of federal spending in 8 years? Wasn’t that great?

Oh wait, none of those things happened? Well, I’m sure your voting into office all the exact same people, like Tancredo, who gave us the bloated government and bailouts of the last decade will suddenly act in the exact opposite way now. It’s sure to happen.

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The long, slow flight from the US Dollar

(Austrian) Economics
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Fortune magazine has an interesting piece summing up some recent trends in the dollar. While there has not been a radical or frantic dumping of the dollar, central banks and private investors continue to distance themselves from the US Dollar. The piece notes that other dollars, namely the Australian and Canadian ones, are gaining in prestige:

A new report from Morgan Stanley analyst Emma Lawson confirms what many had suspected: the dollar is firmly on its way to losing its status as the reserve currency of the world. We already knew that central banks have preferred gold to dollars, and that they’re even selling their gold for cash; now, according to Lawson’s data, it seems that those central banks prefer almost anything to dollars.

The new competition over reserve currency is interesting for more than its economics since it is an important political issue. The nation that can build up its own currency as a reserve currency will expand its ability to inflate and incur debt with less fear of inflation.

The US has benefited from this situation for decades. As the Fed inflates to finance deficit spending and to “stimulate” consumer spending, dollars are eventually absorbed by foreign central banks, put in reserves and out of circulation. The United States has managed to stave off the effects of reckless money printing for decades thanks to the willingness of foreign investors and central banks to sit on dollars as a store of value.

Now the demand for the dollar is fading away slowly. This won’t mean sudden hyperinflation, however, since the economy is still in terrible shape, and even if a boatload of dollars were to return to our shores right now, the lack of lending and spending, as a consequence of deflating portfolios across the land, will keep prices relatively contained, at least in the short- and possibly medium-term.

The good news is that the fall of the dollar will mean that the United States will slowly have to come to the realization that it won’t be able to engage in endless deficit spending and monetization of debt without feeling the consequences of runaway inflation. The empire has been financed by a dollar that was the world’s reserve currency. Those days are coming to an end.

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