LibertyBob's last two posts

are about the Spring Holiday Season. Of course, he chose different ones than I usually emphasize (link one, link two).

I like to draw attention to The Ides of March on the 15th, and St. Urho's Day on the 16th.

invadesoda has a link to a brilliant list of

Libertarian quotes, but I'm gonna make you go through him to find them.

Here are a few:

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Benjamin Franklin

One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation. – Thomas B. Reed (1886)

If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all. – Jacob Hornberger (1995)

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. – P.J. O'Rourke

The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates. – Tacitus

No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session. – Mark Twain (1866)

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him. – Robert Heinlein

The true danger is when Liberty is nibbled away, for expedients. – Edmund Burke (1899)

Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none. – Thomas Jefferson

The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society. – Mark Skousen

A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. – Thomas Jefferson (1801)

When the government's boot is on your throat, whether it is a left boot or a right boot is of no consequence. – Gary Lloyd

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. – H.L. Mencken

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. – H.L. Mencken

Makes me want to watch "V for Vendetta" again.

Tim Pawlenty just did an hour on Northern Alliance Radio

That's our Governor, btw. He's also chairing John McCain's presidential campaign.

Now, I'm one of those people who's irritated as hell about all the compromisers, but I gotta tell ya, Tim Pawlenty is the most knowledgable, friendly leader the world has ever seen. People asked him tough questions and he answered them honestly and completely.

I gotta find that for ya.

Hmm. How's that damn website work? Am I in the right place? It looks just like Townhall.com, but it's all screwed up.

Agh! I give up!

What?!

The Republican Party of Minnesota informs me that I've been elected a Precinct Leader. Funny, I don't remember raising my hand for that one. The precinct chair is that young gal I was sitting next to when I had the twitches.

Oh, yeah, I am a vice chair. I guess that qualifies me as a leader. I was afraid they'd ousted my gal H___ (I don't know if she qualifies as a public figure yet), or otherwise made some awful mistake.

Their going to have training sessions in a couple weeks. Guess I have to go find out what I got myself into.

I read a story back in junior high about a kid who suddenly had to go on the lam; while his mother was packing him some food for his trek into the mountains, one of the other kids asked, "When does a boy become a man, Mama?"

She answered, "When a man is needed."

Think a man's needed here?

Sorry, I had a bunch of things going on for the past week.

Family, work, computer issues.

The family's fine, and nothing exciting was going on, just a lot of it. Work stuff, I don't talk about here. Kills a lot of possible posts, but it saves my job, probably.

Looks like the old Compaq's on her last legs. We're looking into getting a new one, and the wife saw a way to get one better than this one for a quarter the price. Something else I can't talk about is getting in the way of that, though.

Not all of life sucks, but some parts of it definitely do sometimes.

That's my apology, now check out what Alex Epstein has to say about the mortgage crisis:

Too Big to Bail
By Alex Epstein

Every few days we hear that another leading financial institution has written down billions more on subprime investments gone bad. Nearly every major financial institution, it turns out, had a hand in loans to low-credit borrowers--borrowers whose ability to pay often hinged on endlessly low interest rates or a strong housing market. How could this happen? How could nearly all the leading lights of the financial industry--the experts in assessing and managing risk--expose themselves to such massive losses? Or, as a Fortune cover crudely put it: "What were they smoking?"

A major part of the answer is: government bailout crack.

Just another variation of the old ABCT, seems to me. [You'll have to assume that Crusoe has some big berries to accept Mahoney's illustration.]

Update: Oh, I guess that's what this guy is saying. When you're done with that, check out Setting the Stage for American History: Liberty vs Power in Europe and England, by Murray N. Rothbard.

BTW, if you want to check out other Business Cycle theories, you can't do better than start at Wikipedia. I'd start with this one and follow their links to other articles.

Toward a good conspiracy theory

Murray Rothbard said:

The bad conspiracy analyst tends to make two kinds of mistakes, which indeed leave him open to the Establishment charge of "paranoia." First, he stops with the cui bono; if measure A benefits X and Y, he simply concludes that therefore X and Y were responsible. He fails to realize that this is just a hypothesis, and must be verified by finding out whether or not X and Y really did so. (Perhaps the wackiest example of this was the British journalist Douglas Reed who, seeing that the result of Hitler's policies was the destruction of Germany, concluded, without further evidence, that therefore Hitler was a conscious agent of external forces who deliberately set out to ruin Germany.) Secondly, the bad conspiracy analyst seems to have a compulsion to wrap up all the conspiracies, all the bad guy power blocs, into one giant conspiracy. Instead of seeing that there are several power blocs trying to gain control of government, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in alliance, he has to assume — again without evidence — that a small group of men controls them all, and only seems to send them into conflict.

On the other hand:

Were all the Trilateralists and Rockefeller Foundation and Coca-Cola people chosen by [President] Carter simply because he felt that they were the ablest possible people for the job? If so, it's a coincidence that boggles the mind. Or are there more sinister political-economic interests involved? I submit that the naïfs who stubbornly refuse to examine the interplay of political and economic interest in government are tossing away an essential tool for analyzing the world in which we live.

Hmm, says I.

I don't suppose any of those people are active today?

BTW, this post is largely the result of perusing the Mises.org daily articles archive in pursuit of the source of my previous post. I had to check out this article, because I didn't think my boy Murray Rothbard could be led astray by anything as crude as the crap I've heard from the John Birchers or the LaRouchies. Amusingly enough, he lends some support to both groups. That does not mean that he, nor I, desired to support the goals of either group.

Original Sin! Now there's scientific proof of it!

I learned first about the University of Nottingham (isn't that appropriate) research from the Mises Institute, and now Kevin Hogan has beaten me to the punch on a follow up article. I should have know he'd be on it like a chicken on a june bug.

Kevin does a pretty good job expressing himself, but I've got to warn you, he hasn't read Eats, Shoots and Leaves. But I'll by-pass that issue and quote what he quotes:

"Anti-social punishment was rare in the most democratic societies and very common otherwise.

"Using the World Democracy Audit evaluation of countries' performance in political rights, civil liberties, press freedom and corruption, the top six performers among the countries studied were also in the lowest seven for anti-social punishment. These were the USA, UK, Germany, Denmark, Australia and Switzerland."

He adds: "Their results suggest that the success of democratic market societies may depend critically upon moral virtues as well as material interests, so the depiction of civil society as the sphere of 'naked self-interest' is radically incorrect."

Adapted from materials provided by University of Nottingham, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

University of Nottingham (2008, March 6). Cooperation, Punishment And Revenge In Economics And Society. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 7, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/03/080306183134.htm

The latter items in italics are Kevin's sources.

To see what I mean by "original sin," read how Kevin introduces the study. But, actually, I was keyed to my own analysis by the Mises Institute article Does Neuroscience Support Austrian Theory?

Oh! Crap! That's not the one that mentions the Nottingham Study. It is, however, very much the one that stimulated my thoughts as a matter important to my project of synthesizing the theories of Lutheranism, Objectivism and Libertarianism. I mentally filed (but, unfortunately, didn't physically file) the Nottingham study as evidence for my contention that Original Sin is, basically, the tendency to blame someone else for our own failings.

What did Eve do after she ate the fruit of The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? She blame the serpent. What did Adam do when he was caught? He blamed Eve. Did Cain shoulder the responibility for murdering Abel? He certainly shouldered the consequences, but I never read that he apologized.

Blaming somebody else and then stealing what they had a right to; that's the whole story of the Old Testament. The New Testament is saying, "Stop that crap! Right here! Right now!"

That's why I'm unwilling to let go of Christianity. It may be that we're carrying the "forgive and forget" message too far - or we think we should, and our history proves that we haven't carried it far enough - but it's a message that the world is literally dying to hear! And it's done wonders for Western Civilization.

I suppose I should say something about Brett Favre retiring.

The People have been clamoring so for a proclamation.

I heard Laura Ingraham asking the question, did Favre embarass himself by crying at his farewell press conference? I'm not a "real men don't cry" guy at all, there are damn good reasons to cry, most of 'em involving death, and retiring from a storied football career is one of those.

But, I'm not sure why the guy's retiring. Nobody in the history of the world was more in a position to say, "Just kidding!" and have everyone respond, "Well! You really had me going there for a minute!" And then go on as if the word 'retire' had never been mentioned.

I hear Favre's got a massive ego. Let me stroke it a bit: he's the greatest thing that ever happened to the Packers in my lifetime. Well, okay, I was alive for half of the Lombardi Era, but I don't remember any of it.

Except for brief glimmerings, the Packers have sucked most of my life.

What's next season going to look like?

The Old Whig Marketing Award

goes the LDS "talk to your kids" ads. I love listening to those when they come on. They haven't convinced me to become a Mormon, but they definitely make points that parents need to learn about listening to their kids, and they do convince me that the Mormons know how to raise happy, successful children.

And to root for them to raise more of them.

Keep it up, Mormons! You're doing good things for humanity.

Update: Darn it! If you saw this before now, you had to notice that I that I said LSD, rather than LDS. I was thinking, don't say LSD as I was typing.

I've been listening to that country station,

my daughter keeps tuning it in, and - I forget what and whose the songs are, but there've been more than a couple about guys' Dads. And I was playing my Best of Bread CD earlier today which has the song "Everything I Own," about David Gates' Dad.

My Dad used to sing the song "That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine," which he probably took from Jim Reeves, though I see it was originally a Gene Autry song. I'd like to hear that (latter) version. I haven't heard either, really, I've only heard Dad sing it. I've mentioned that I think Dad was the best country singer I've ever heard, he had an extraordinary vocal range. I don't suppose I'll ever be able to make that case definitively. I'm obviously biased, and, as far as I know, there are no extant recordings to prove it.

Well, Dad sang this song here:

That Silver Haired Daddy Of Mine Lyrics
Artist:Jim Reeves

In a vine-covered shack in the mountains
Bravely fighting the battle of Time
There's a dear one who's weathered life's sorrow
It's that silver haired Daddy of mine

If I could recall all the heartaches
Dear old Daddy, I've caused you to bear
If I could erase those lines from your face
And bring back the gold to your hair

If God would but grant me the power
Just to turn back the pages of Time
I'd give all I own if I could but atone
To that silver haired Daddy of mine.

I know it's too late, dear old Daddy
To repay for the heartaches and care
But dear Mother is waiting in Heaven
Just to comfort and solace you there

If I could recall all the heartaches
Dear old Daddy, I've caused you to bear
If I could erase those lines from your face
And bring back the gold to your hair

If God would but grant me the power
Just to turn back the pages of Time
I'd give all I own if I could but atone
To that silver haired Daddy of mine

Now, Dad didn't go gray, really, much before he got lung cancer and ended up bald, so when he was singing it, I always imagined Grandpa as the subject of the song.

Grandpa outlived Dad by several years. Dad was the oldest of his seven children, and the third to pass. Is there a song that tells how Grandpa felt?

God wants me to be politically active tomorrow

Now I know where the expression "Oh, God!" comes from. It's not just profanity.

Anybody got some passion I can borrow?

My Fair Lady

My wife bought tickets, from the local PBS affiliate (so they were more expensive than they otherwise would have been, but they were well worth the price--we brought a spotting scope and a pair of binoculars, not knowing where we were going to end up, but they were absolutely unnecessary--we were in the eighth row), to that play.

I'm having a hard time writing right now without using the passive voice excessively. You see that I did manage to write a topical title without using "I," so I overcame that bugaboo.

The play was...how can I say this without sounding gay (another bugaboo)... Ah, screw it! The play was marvelous! I've loved "My Fair Lady" since I saw it on TV when I was about six. Henry Higgins is the man I want to be. But only if he gets Eliza Doolittle in the end.

Now long time readers (and there actually are a few) know where my passion for Audrey Hepburn comes from. Although, if you don't have a passion for Audrey Hepburn, I'll never understand what's wrong with you.

My wife and I are now contriving ways to get the kids to the play. We all watched the PBS special on the new production (twice) and the older girl really wanted to see it.

I'm going to write more on this on the other blog, but I have to go to the BPOU convention tomorrow. Hopefully I'll feel like it Sunday. I can't imagine losing enthusiasm for the subject, but I know how memories of dreams work.

In that light, I should say right now that although we had the understudy(?) playing Eliza, she was magnificent. What a marvelous voice that girl has! I'll have the playbill in front of me when I write my Bourgeois Philistine review so I can name names, but I had to put something out quickly about how much joy this has brought to my life. I felt terribly guilty about not putting something out about this before now. But my wife needed some attention.

William F. Buckley just died

He was a character, no doubt about that. Not being a "Crown and Altar" guy, I'm not feeling the loss. As a Rand and Rothbard libertarian it's tough to get worked up. The guy was the enemy.

Jason Lewis spent the hour I can't listen to on the subject. You're welcome to check out what he had to say. He's on to other things now.

See if you can guess who said this

before you check the answer:

It was long ago observed that the plain people, under democracy, never vote for anything, but always against something. The fact explains in large measure, the tendency of democratic states to pass over statesmen of genuine imagination and sound ability in favour of colorless mediocrities. The former are shining marks, and so it is easy for demagogues to bring them down; the latter are preferred because it is impossible to fear them.

It's a little more subtle than what you usually hear from the guy... I'll give you a hint: he means every word, and he's one of the greatest experts on the English language ever.

To play the game, open the comments, make your guess, and then post your reaction to the answer. You don't have to publish your comment between, just make a clear division.

Words to live by

My daughter got herself grounded from anything with a screen - TV, computer or anything else anyone can think of - for a month for leaving school and coming home during the day... Actually, it's a complicated situation due to arrangements with the local school district and the daycare lady that are all way off topic - complicated but not interesting.

Anyway, my daughter usually listens to Christian Rock and I enjoy that, but apparently she got bored with that tonight and she cranked up the local country station.

So I just heard the song "I'm Still a Guy" for the first time. Let me see if I can find that for ya.

Yup, right here:

When you see a deer you see Bambi
And I see antlers up on the wall
When you see a lake you think picnics
And I see a large mouth up under that log
You're probably thinking that you're gonna change me
In some ways well maybe you might
Scrub me down, dress me up aww but no matter what
Remember, I'm still a guy

When you see a priceless French painting
I see a drunk, naked girl
You think that ridin' a wild bull sounds crazy
And I'd like to give it a whirl
Well love makes a man do some things he ain't proud of
And in a weak moment I might walk your sissy dog, hold your purse at the mall
But remember, I'm still a guy

And I'll pour out my heart
Hold your hand in the car
Write a love song that makes you cry
Then turn right around knock some jerk to the ground
'Cause he copped a feel as you walked by

I can hear you now talkin' to your friends
Saying, "Yeah girls he's come a long way"
From draggin' his knuckles and carryin' a club
[I'm Still A Guy lyrics on http://www.metrolyrics.com]

And buildin' a fire in a cave
But when you say a backrub means only a backrub
Then you swat my hand when I try
Well now, what can I say at the end of the day
Honey, I'm still a guy

And I'll pour out my heart
Hold your hand in the car
Write a love song that makes you cry
Then turn right around knock some jerk to the ground
'Cause he copped a feel as you walked by

These days there's dudes gettin' facials
Manicured, waxed and botoxed
With deep spray-on tans and creamy lotiony hands
You can't grip a tacklebox

Yeah ith all of these men linin' up to get neutered
It's hip now to be feminized
I don't highlight my hair
I've still got a pair
Yeah honey, I'm still a guy

Oh my eyebrows ain't plucked
There's a gun in my truck
Oh thank God, I'm still a guy

Amen, bro!

I've never felt so close to another man.

I finally met somebody who's heard of Polo Hofer!

Of course it was a woman from Switzerland who's about my age. She told me she'd translate the Schwaitzer Deutsch for me. It's a different accent, or rather, dialect.

Most of the dude's German is incomprehensible to me, so I want to take her up on that. Actually, I suppose it's just one or two word per sentence, but their, like, the nouns and the verbs. The adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions are all obvious.

What?! Did I forget Valentine's Day?

No wonder the wife's been grumpy.

I've failed to mention thus far that David Strom has moved from the Taxpayers' League of Minnesota to the Minnesota Free Market Institute. He's the founder of both.

Other than that, I only have time [before the rolling-pin finds me] to mention these other two things I want to check out: Climate Change Forecasters on the Hot Seat and You Are What You Spend, by W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm.

I got both of those from NPCA, btw.

I got as far as this on the last article:

Income statistics, however, don’t tell the whole story of Americans’ living standards. Looking at a far more direct measure of American families’ economic status — household consumption — indicates that the gap between rich and poor is far less than most assume, and that the abstract, income-based way in which we measure the so-called poverty rate no longer applies to our society.

Oop! Hssst!

Gotta go!

I finally sat down and finished reading

The Betrayal of the American Right, by Murray Rothbard. That guy can sure write! This book should be made into a movie!

Let me give you the punch line, so to speak; though this excerpt is part of the summary (Ch. 13: The Early 1960s: From Right to Left, pp. 182-183 of the hard cover) and doesn't show the drama to be found in the rest of the book - the battles and final split of the paleocons and libertarians and the Buckleyite neocons:

Leonard Liggio then came up with the following profound analysis of the historical process, which I adopted.

First, and dominant in history, was the Old Order, the ancien regime, the regime of caste and frozen status, of exploitation by a war-making, feudal or despotic ruling class, using the church and the priesthood to dupe the masses into accepting its rule. This was pure statism; and this was the "right wing." Then, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western Europe, a liberal and radical opposition movement arose, our old heroes, who championed a popular revolutionary movement on behalf of rationalism, individual liberty, minimal government, free markets and free trade, international peace, and separation of Church and State--and in opposition to Throne and Altar, to monarchy, the ruling class, theocracy, and war. These--"our people"--were the Left, and the purer their libertarian vision the more "extreme" a Left they were.

...[B]ut what of socialism, that movement born in the ninetheenth century which we had always reviled as the "extreme left"? ...Liggio analyzed socialism as a confused middle-of-the-road movement, influenced historically by both the libertarian and individualist Left and by the conservative-statist Right. From the individualist Left the socialists took the goals of freedom: the withering away of the State, the replacement of the governing of men by the administration of things..., opposition to the ruling class and the search for its overthrow, the desire to establish international peace, an advanced industrial economy and a high standard of living for the mass of the people. From the conservative Right the socialists adopted the means to attempt to achieve these goals: collectivism, state planning, community control of the individual. But this put socialism in the middle of the ideological spectrum. It also meant that socialism was an unstable, self-contradictory doctine bound to fly apart rapidly in the inner contradiction between its means and its ends. And in this belief we were bolstered by the old demonstration of my mentor Ludwig von Mises that socialist central planning simply cannot operate an advanced industrial economy.

The rest of the book shows the consequences of adopting that analysis. The practical consequences. Rothbard was always trying to find a way to promulgate the message, which led to some bizarre alliances and associations.

This book disentangles the Gordian Knot of Twentieth Century American political history. It places all the movements where you can view them in the proper perspective.

Tom DeSabla is one of those guys

who "rages against the machine."

I just said I believe in politeness, but let's be more clear: politeness is not a metaphysical primary. It's a high value for civilization, but the fact is, sometimes you meet people who don't deserve it. I could probably do a dissertation on who deserves it and who doesn't. Basically, it's those who's ideas would destroy civilization who don't deserve it. What destroys civilization is the fundamental disagreement in politics, of course. That's what we're debating.

DeSabla, kind of a libertarian Michael Savage (both of whom I've managed to listen to this morning), weaves in some pretty strong points among the strong words of his anti-statist-media rant, some of which, to be sure, are about the incentives the media respond to, not all of which are about statism, a lot of their incentives are about their and their audience's short attention span. He's got an outline of the Feb. 6 show on his web page.

Too bad he blows out polite company right off the bat.

He rips this op-ed for not mentioning Ron Paul, but it's generally a pretty good article. Mickey Edwards should have mentioned Paul as the one guy who's saying more of what he's saying than the rest of the guys left in the campaign.

Speaking of who's left, Romney proved he's not a real conservative when he dropped out of the race the other day. If he had any real convictions, he would have campaigned through this weekend and tried to convince people that he really is the guy who stands for what we thought he stood for.

And here's what Dr. Paul says:

With Romney gone, the chances of a brokered convention are nearly zero. But that does not affect my determination to fight on, in every caucus and primary remaining, and at the convention for our ideas, with just as many delegates as I can get. But with so many primaries and caucuses now over, we do not now need so big a national campaign staff, and so I am making it leaner and tighter. Of course, I am committed to fighting for our ideas within the Republican party, so there will be no third party run. I do not denigrate third parties -- just the opposite, and I have long worked to remove the ballot-access restrictions on them. But I am a Republican, and I will remain a Republican.

I also have another priority. I have constituents in my home district that I must serve. I cannot and will not let them down. And I have another battle I must face here as well. If I were to lose the primary for my congressional seat, all our opponents would react with glee, and pretend it was a rejection of our ideas. I cannot and will not let that happen.

In the presidential race and the congressional race, I need your support, as always. And I have plans to continue fighting for our ideas in politics and education that I will share with you when I can, for I will need you at my side. In the meantime, onward and upward! The neocons, the warmongers, the socialists, the advocates of inflation will be hearing much from you and me.

What's that sound like to you?

An open letter to Ron Paul supporters

I just sent this to Jason Lewis, after a long on-air argument...well, I think you'll get it:

I'd like to say something about my fellow Ron Paul supporters, perhaps this
should be an open letter to them:

Conservatives are not impressed by the Victim Card. Don't call conservative
talk host and expect to be respected when you play it. There are two great
organisations who will teach you how to campaign well for our candidate (and
every call, letter or hand signal to someone with a wide audience is
campaigning): one can be found at http://www.RonPaul2008.com. The other is
The Advocates for Self-Government.

I'm hearing way too much discourtesy from libertarians and paleocons on my
side.

Ron Paul is NOT a victim! He's ahead of his time. His ideas are so old,
they're new. And they're not taught in our schools.

It's OUR job to spread them. It's not Jason's or any other media figure's
job to spread them.

It's MY job.

And the Victim Card ain't gonna get it done.

Thank you,

Al (the Old Whig) from Brooklyn Center