Thrifty, Principled Republican Plans to Defund NPR

Taxation, The Right, Vulgar Politics
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In a bold move that promises to prove the Republicans’ dedication to preserving the First Amendment and fixing up the federal budget, Senator Jim DeMint has introduced a bill to eliminate federal funding for NPR. This is following the great controversy over NPR’s decision to fire Juan Williams, who made some commentary on Muslims and air travel that his bosses at NPR didn’t quite like.

DeMint, I’m sure, of course has a heroic record of free speech advocacy. I assume, though I have not found evidence at the time of writing this, that he introduced bills and fought vigorously for an end to this ridiculous idea of “free speech zones” which were used during the Bush Administration to stifle free speech. Because, surely, Jim DeMint is all about free speech, and this latest move was not simply motivated by his approval of Williams’ commentary, but rather from a deep philosophical opposition to government restriction of speech.

Some might also think that the $420 million that defunding NPR (and PBS) would save is a bit on the paltry side as far as budget cuts go, given that federal spending for FY2010 was officially about $3.5 trillion, or, to use like-terms, $3,500,000 million. But hey, that’s something, right? And, after all, if you exclude Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt, all the other “mandatory” spending, and everything to do with the military, is there really that much else to cut?

So good on you, Jim DeMint. Keep up the good work.

Not labeled: The 0.00012% of the budget that NPR represents

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Road Socialism Leads to Broadband Socialism

Nanny Statism, Technology, The Basics, The Left, The Right
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In a previous post I pointed out the slippery slope in accepting government-backed licensing of “crucial” professions. The problem with slippery slope arguments is that they tend not to be rhetorically-compelling to those without a sufficiently cynical, I should say realistic, conception of the state. They are simply not convinced that allowing certain “reasonable” policies now will set a precedent that will lead to unreasonable policies down the road. Our worries are discounted as merely hypothetical possibilities. They are quite content to put off discussion of crossing that bridge when we come to it…if we come to it, as they see things. And, in any case, something needs to be done about the current problem now, dammit! The trouble is, by the time we reach that bridge of unreasonableness (wherever it happens to be for our interlocutor), we have already gathered so much momentum from sliding down the slope that it is difficult, if not impossible, to halt, much less reverse, the slide. Along the way, with each new government intervention, people grow increasingly used to turning to government solutions for every little problem — they lose the ability to even imagine the possibility of private, market solutions — and what was once thought unreasonable no longer seems so.

We libertarians have more than merely consequentialist, slippery slope arguments against government policies, of course, but I still think it is useful to point out dangerous precedents, particularly when our worries are not just theoretical as we are already well on our way down the slide. The acceptance of professional licensing of “crucial” professions has over time been expanded into ever more areas, even to the licensing of florists in my home state of Louisiana and now to calls for the licensing of parents.

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Grading the Pledge to America

Corporatism, Democracy, Health Care, Imperialism, The Right, Vulgar Politics, War
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So….the Republicans have put out their Pledge to America. Is it any good?

Jeffrey Tucker sums it up pithily by juxtaposing short quotes from it and the Declaration of Independence:

Declaration of Independence (1776): “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…”

A Pledge to America (GOP, 2010): “Whenever the agenda of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to institute a new governing agenda and set a different course.”

If this goes on, related fellow TLS blogger Daniel Coleman to me, in another 100 years it will be “Whenever a subpoint of policy within a government agenda becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to organize a committee to change those subpoints of policy and replace them with better subpoints.”

Liberty Central, the Establishment’s attempt to co-opt the Tea Party, has a poll asking us to grade the Pledge. Head on over there and tell them what you think of it. Fellow TLS blogger Jacob Huebert has a couple of good posts on LewRockwell.com about Liberty Central, the Tea Party, the Pledge, and Glenn Beck.

The Liberty Central poll only lets you grade the Pledge as a whole. Here is a quick graded breakdown of important aspects of the Pledge, with short reactions by me in parentheses:

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Gingrich the Compulsive Mosque-Baiter: Reveling in Weakness

Democracy, Imperialism, The Right, Vulgar Politics, War
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Newt Gingrich, a serial adulterer and disciple of New Age futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, makes a singularly unlikely Crusader. Yet apparently at some point in the past year or so Gingrich looked in a mirror and saw Don John of Austria looking back at him.

An epiphany of that kind would explain Gingrich’s perverse determination to depict the contrived controversy over the “Ground Zero Mosque” as a contemporary Battle of Lepanto. A more reasonable explanation would be that Gingrich, one of the most penetrably insincere figures in American politics, is trying to distill irrational populist resentment into a propellant for a presidential campaign.

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Is the Federalist Society Evil?

History, Legal System, The Right, Vulgar Politics
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I love this article by Paul Craig Roberts on the “true cost” of the Iraq war and think everyone should read it.

But there’s one sentence in this otherwise-outstanding piece to which I take exception.  Roberts writes: “The fascist Republican Federalist Society has put enough federal judges in the judiciary to rule that the president is above the law.”

This is nonsense.

First, let’s tackle the claim that the Federalist Society is “fascist” and “Republican.”

The Federalist Society was formed by law students who were frustrated by the left’s dominance at law schools.  They created the organization to provide a forum for alternative voices: namely, those of conservatives and libertarians.

Here’s how the Federalist Society functions.  There’s a national headquarters in Washington (a red flag, I’ll grant you), there are student chapters in almost every law school, and there are lawyers’ chapters in various cities.

The student and lawyers’ chapters generally do one thing: host lectures and debates.  These events feature speakers ranging all the way from people Roberts would probably call “fascist” to anarcho-capitalist libertarians such as Randy Barnett and Walter Block.   One frequent Federalist speaker is Roberts’s fellow columnist at Antiwar.com, Doug Bandow, whose lecture topics include the American Empire.

Who decides who will speak at these events?  Each chapter’s members.  If the members tend to be more conservative, they may bring in more conservative speakers.  If the members tend to be more libertarian, they may bring in more libertarian speakers.

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