What’s all the hoopla about? Well, you may recall that back in the 2008 presidential election CNN debuted a new ratings-capturing gimmick below the bloviating candidates: “A real-time graph depicting the averaged reactions of 32 supposedly undecided voters, who expressed favor or disfavor by turning handheld dials as they watched.”
A study by British scientists purports to show that a relative handful of indecisive common folk can “unduly” influence millions of their equally indecisive fellows around the country with this real-time feedback. Wait, we needed what was probably a tax-funded scientific study to tell us that?
Anyway … this, apparently, is BAD FOR DEMOCRACY™.
We can’t have WE THE PEOPLE™ influencing WE THE PEOPLE™ while a “debate” is going on! Oh noes! It’s the job of the elites — in the media, in politics, in government bureaucracies, in academia, and in think tanks — to influence the people before and after the “debates.” Now that’s democracy!
With all the hysteria in the mass-media in concern to the shutdown, your friendly Libertarian Standard blogger is here to deliver a public service announcement to allay any dissonance you may be needlessly experiencing.
You, dear citizen, will not be regaining any freedoms you might have had before; anything that otherwise might have been permitted to you before as a natural, human right will not necessarily be allowed again because of this unfortunate shutdown event.
THESE FOLLOWING ITEMS WILL BE UNAFFECTED BY US GOVERNMENT SERVICE CUTS:
The freedom to retain the full gain of property you’ve obtained through voluntary means. Our dedicated IRS agents will be working round-the-clock to ensure that you pay your full due (and then some). Sadly, due to current budgeting woes, money you’ve lent us interest-free (thanks again!) in advance will be held hostage due to despicable, greedy taxpayers shamelessly(!) refusing to fork over more of their property.
There will no freedom to enter or leave your invisible jail without permission papers from your ever-so-gracious wardens. You will have to defer your furlough plans until passport services are resumed.
You will not be free to trade with people living in other territories without paying our bridge trolls the proper custom. Any privacy you think you may have to be secure in either your person or property is out of the question once you are within the marked territories of the bridge trolls or their Uruk-hai siblings at the TSA.
The freedom to consume foodstuffs or chemicals for your pleasure and even health will be strictly prohibited without the specific permission of our Surgeon General. Any pleasurable activities that are as yet unknown are categorically forbidden by emergency measure. Yes, Granny may die because the FDA couldn’t approve her medicine in time, but so what, somebody might get high in the meanwhile, and we couldn’t have that, no sirree.
Always remember- a government shutdown affects YOU, not them.
With great solemnity, “Defense” Secretary Robert Gates imparted on West Point cadets this Friday a hard-earned pearl of newly discovered wisdom:
“In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it,” Mr. Gates told an assembly of Army cadets here.
In other words, “Never get involved in a land war in Asia.”
Sounds like good advi… Wait,what? Not everyone knows this already? Inconceivable!
Any culturally literate person has seen The Princess Bride at least once in the last 24 years1 and certainly knows about the most famous classic blunder:
Aside from his legacy as one of the giants of the Austrian school and modern anarcho-capitalism, Murray Rothbard was for a time a political activist, one of the founding members of the Libertarian Party, which got its start in the basement of David Nolan’s home some 40 years ago. Rothbard’s radicalism kept the LP honest for a time, but eventually it began to behave like most other third parties, softening its principles to make its platform more appealing. Eventually Rothbard, following a split with “low tax liberals” such as Ed Crane (founder of the Cato Institute) and David Koch (a Cato benefactor), left the LP, and took with him most of its radical heart.
No doubt Rothbard would be doing barrel rolls in his grave to see what’s become of the LP lately. The most recent candidates for the party’s Presidential nomination, Bob Barr and Wayne Allyn Root, both former Republicans, have been hard at work promoting not so much personal liberty but the kinder, gentler sides of former and current members of the U. S.’s stable of tinpot dictators.
Speaking to CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield, Barr did his best to defend his client’s tainted legacy, noting that, while Duvalier “is very well aware of the personal risk that he faced coming back to Haiti,” that “paled in comparison to the needs of his people.” Barr was tight-lipped about the details of Duvalier’s return and what he wanted to accomplish, other than to say that he wanted to “see funds made available to help the relief effort which, by any reasonable estimate here, has not progressed well.”
Then Whitfield hit Barr with a tough question on his integrity: after all the American government had done to clean up Duvalier’s mess, as a former Congressman, did he see any conflict of interest? Barr seemed to take offense, arguing that the American government had not helped much and, that, in fact, “the country is in worse shape now than it was at the time Mr. Duvalier was president.”
AP/file
Well, at least Barr isn’t representing the LP in his capacity as Baby Doc’s defender. I wish the same could be said of Root’s mash note for Egypt’s embattled president Hosni Mubarak, which was not only written by a sitting LP committee chair but was published on the party Web site:
I just got off the phone with a longtime friend- a successful Egyptian business leader. He believes that several hundred thousand people in the streets do not represent the 80 million citizens of Egypt. They represent anarchists, communists, and Islamic extremists- all with an agenda and axe to grind. He says if you polled the people of Egypt today, the majority would support Mubarak. He says that the backbone of Egypt- the business owners, small business community, and middle class still support Mubarak and the military. They are horrified by the mobs in the street and are shocked at Obama’s tepid response to the riots and the one-sided portrayal of the situation by the U.S. media.
It is shameful that the party of Nolan and Rothbard has become the party of apologists for dictators, but I can take comfort in knowing that as the Libertarian Party’s radical core has dwindled to nothing, so too has its relevancy to libertarianism in general.
