Does “Fiscal” conservatism need “social” conservatism? What is the >real< diffference?

Ron Paul at the 2007 National Right to Life Convention, held at Crown Center Hyatt Regency in Kansas City, MO; June 15, 2007, (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have a comment on this article, “Fiscal Conservatism Needs ‘Social’ Conservatism”. I’m sending this commentary to his email as well as posting it on my blog:
http://jewishworldreview.com/0113/prager012213.php3#.UlFduCTMos4

Dennis Prager deserves attention from those who disagree with him, because he makes his arguments, as he says it, from the head and not from the heart.

FIRST CLARIFICATION

I am one of many Christian libertarians, but strongly Christian. There are more of these than you think, who very much believe in practicing our Christianity in private and in public, and for us there is no separation of economic and social values. Economic values are only a part of the social values, and every so-called “conservative” who makes that difference, especially for the sake of pragmatism, is a victim (or perpetrator) of the mistake of lifting up the love for things over the love of his fellow-man.

I do marvel at the fact that applying the principle of freedom to economic issues, though, is the absolutely best thing that can happen to the poor in any society, as a general principle. Stealing is a moral issue, in fact, and taxation is a form of theft, because it is the forcible expropriation of goods or services without even the formality of requesting it.

There is an overlap there. But Dennis, note that Israel in the time of the book of Judges, before the kings, they had no formal taxation. There was no taxation to support an army, or police force. Armies were raised from volunteers as an answer to prayer for deliverance from enemies.

In fact according to the jew it was actually a moment of moral weakness that drove the Israelites to demand a government. In their case, it was a king. God warned them through Samuel against what they were asking for: the king would require their sons to send them off to war, and he would require burdensome taxes, and their sons and daughters in future generations would be sorry.

I don’t think rabbis or pastors pay too much attention to this, and its implications.

SOCIAL CONSERVATISM AND LIBERTARIANISM

I absolutely agree that all principles are a package, and that the divide is a false one. I believe it is mostly engendered with the use of propaganda in the Establishment Media, and politicians who put position and power over principle.

I also would agree that it is wrong to deprecate the value of American history from even before 1776 as being an incubator of respect for the time-proven moral principles that have a substantial near-equivalence with what is known today as “conservatism”.

Where we differ is a result of the misunderstanding about libertarian morals, that unfortunately, I believe many libertarians also do not understand about the real world.

I’m not talking here about the small minority of libertarians that just want what they see as “benefits”. Many of the members of the namesake Libertarian Party are like that, but not all of them either.

RON PAUL VS. GARY JOHNSON

The difference between Ron Paul and Gary Johnson are significant in this respect. Gary Johnson points to the benefits of marijuana, whereas Ron Paul points to the moral difference between you deciding what is good for you, and some self-appointed smarter-than-thou committees so deciding. Ron Paul is the one who also points out that at least for Prohibition they realized they could not ban alcohol on a federal level without a constitutional amendment.

In the same way that it is immoral to arrest an Amish farmer for providing raw milk to his neighbors, in principle, the same principle has to be applied, as you say, to the extreme cases.

Another couple of examples would be what we call the “natural right” of atheists to speak as they will, and the right of the “gay gang” to say what they will. And we support this in spite of the enormous damage that the advocacy of both of them wreak upon the general society.

In other words, the moral imperative of allowing the free exchange of goods and services as the parties that engage in such activity may voluntarily do so, this is a moral principle that also applies to other moral and ethical contexts.

Take so-called “same-sex marriage”, for example. The only reason the propagandists have been able to make this an issue they can impose upon the rest of us is that the Christian and Jewish and other religious persuasions have allowed the state to usurp this cultural and social institution.

Before the Mormons appeared, historically, for example, monogamy was a universally accepted norm in the states where they originated and grew. But monogamy laws were passed specifically because many Mormons practiced polygamy. So they migrated to other states and the process repeated until they finally got to the Utah area, where the federal government passed their law and threatened to blow up their city. (A Mormon once told me their people were scattered across the countryside at that time).

Before that, marriage was more common-law, I would think, with some formal recognition in the respective religious institutions of each different religious faith.

But the de facto situation today is, that the state controls it. The USA has completed its evolution into a nation that thinks it has to tolerate a ruling regime that is actively hostile to all religious faith except the faith of materialism, with special hostility toward Christianity. Statist-power politicians regard Jews as little problem for secularization of the populace in the interest of a docile subject populace, because most Jews have adopted secularist-state views in the States.

(As a parenthesis, in my opinion, there are two reasons for this. One, many Jews have this big bugaboo about a Christian majority population, fed in the background by thousands of Hollywood productions that keep bringing back images of the Holocaust. One judge I heard about on a talk show once actually allowed certain prayers in some official activity, but banned the use of the name of “Jesus”.)

There are a great number of libertarians who are also Jews, of every “kind” of Jew there is, of course, and that includes even some Jewish settlers in “Samaria”.

At the core of libertarian thinking is the non-aggression principle. That principle is based in the very moral principle of non-aggression. This principle is a sort of dumbed-down version of the second greatest commandment: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”.

That commandment from the laws of Moses is akin to the Christian’s “Golden Rule”, which in a way restated it in terms of its application, its practice. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, is also a paraphrase of what Jesus said, but is an abbreviation of the same thing.

That of course includes avoiding aggression against your neighbor, meaning avoiding the use of force or threat of force or aggression by fraud to get something from that neighbor or to force him to do something.

There was no command to force the world to come to the morality embodied in the Ten Commandments, no divine order to go forth and convert the entire pagan world by force, and there is no way to interpret it as such, much as some less ethical atheists try to do. It’s easier to do that with the Koran, maybe, but even in the most brutal version possible you can extract from the laws of Moses it doesn’t work. At least not without some hilarity (if it were not so serious a subject).

So there is credible content to a moral and even religious objection to the imposition of moral law upon others by any individual or any group. The laws of Moses are full of admonitions to respect the stranger among you, the travelers that journey through the land round about, and so on.

And even Dennis Prager would have to admit that even though the USA may be a good nation and exemplary in morals, that it has no “right” or obligation to conquer North and South America to impose those ideals, even if it could somehow be made to work in some weird way.

GAY MARRIAGE

It is true also that many libertarians in the USA and elsewhere believe that state-sanctioned same-sex marriage is a matter of equal treatment or somehow an issue of more freedom somehow, whereas it is no such thing at all. One propagandist says there are 10,000 specific benefits from marriage that same-sex couples do not get because of the bans on same-sex marriage.

In my opinion, this is the only reason that any visible number of homosexuals support the idea. A tiny minority gets marriage licenses where it’s legalized, the rest don’t care for it but might vaguely support the activist stand on it. Another tiny minority of currently practicing homosexuals have called talk shows to express strong objections to the idea, I’ve heard them, one of them citing the same reasons Dennis Prager does.

WRAPPING UP

Mr. Prager asks some questions that

Do you really want to live in an America that is godless, where liberty derives from the state and where moral values derive from each individual’s heart? In an America that ignores genocides abroad? In an America that so radically redefines marriage — the union of anyone who loves anyone — that it no longer has a moral justification to prohibit polygamy or incest? In an America that has no moral opinion on abortion, even if performed solely, let us say, for reasons of the fetus’s gender? In an America that embraces multiculturalism rather than the melting pot ideal?

So libertarians do NOT want liberty to derive from the state. Moral values can never derive from an enforced monopoly on the use of force. But you have no right to decide moral values for anyone else, by the force of violence or the threat of violence (that’s exactly what laws are), whether you’re an imam, rabbi, or minister, or guru, or priest, except for the ban on aggression.

To say the contrary is to say whoever has the guns decides the morality. That has not worked out well for Jews, nor Christians, nor Muslims, or anybody else really. That’s why atheist-driven and secularist-driven bans on the free expression of religion by majorities is so hypocritical, and the censorship on the Creation science point of view in government schools. Or the censorship of any point of view in them.

Related articles

• Walter Block on Discrimination and Bigotry (economicpolicyjournal.com)
• The Cornerstones Of Conservatism (redmillennial.com)
• What is libertarianism? (jeremylagunas.wordpress.com)
• The Libertarian Renaissance: It’s Happening! (dailypaul.com)
• New Poll Shows GOP Shifting in Fascinating New Direction (theblaze.com)
• The GOP Forgot. Ronald Reagan: If you analyze it, I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. Ted Cruz Didn’t (aconservativeedge.wordpress.com)

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Freedom is not “feelings”

A quote: ” When you feel freedom, it’s because the laws that are present make you feel good”.

 

“True” freedom has nothing to do with feelings. And if you are bound by a law, how in the world can anybody think that makes anybody more free?!

Much of the “freedom” Americans “feel” so far this year has a LOT less to do with what laws are present, but a LOT MORE to do with what laws are NOT present, and what arbitrary dictates are not present.

But to the extent Americans “feel” free so far this year, much of that is illusion anyway. Unconstitutional executive orders multiply, grand theft inflation continues robbing value from the monopoly currency along with interest rate price-fixing, regulations multiply, and now we have this 1,500-page Godzilla eating the livelihood of everyday common Americans.

Another quote:  When you feel liberty, its because your fellow citizens permit you to be free.

A. Forget the “feel”, please. In reality, people “are” more “free”, by both your definition and mine, by the way, to the extent that citizens respect the principle of non-aggression. No citizen has ANY ethical or moral right, at least no “natural” right, to aggress and natural law demands that they respect it.

When they don’t, then the principle of self-defense kicks in with a role. Ted Cruz, for example, is absolutely doing the right thing. I don’t care how many people voted for Obama or how they forced this oppressive and freedom-killing law down our throats, it’s going to make Americans sicker than ever along with the EPA‘s rules and the FDA‘s and the FCC‘s rules.

In both cases, they are management processes. Some are societal, laws; others are individual or group management processes that respect the laws in place and in some case self-restraining processes.

And that, my friend, to be brutally honest, is a semantical tap dance to avoid the non-agression principle, and recognizing that central planning and collectivism and involuntary anything is an aggression against freedom, against the individual.

Related articles

• Freedom, Liberty, the Principle of Non-Aggression, what they mean in the context of groups (trutherator.wordpress.com)
• What’s Wrong With Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” (trutherator.wordpress.com)
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• Zero Aggression Project – The Zero Aggression Principle (libertarianhippie.com)
• Freedom Matters (bakerju89.wordpress.com)
• Why Open Source will dominate the future and is spreading freedom. (trutherator.wordpress.com)

 

What’s Wrong With Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”

Freedom and liberty are over-used words in 2013 English. But what matters in the concepts they cover, what is worth applying in the real world of interaction between humans, is contained in the non-aggression principle.

I like that phrase for that reason. And that’s the one I’m sticking to.

You might call it the idea that “freedom from aggression” is the freedom worth striving toward. But there are two people involved in the non-spiritual aspects of freedom. Freedom for one person requires respect for that freedom from others.

Self-defense is the enforcement mechanism for it, the best, in fact. As a matter of even more fact, any other mechanism for enforcing respect for the other person’s freedoms is a violation of freedom. (Contracting with security professionals counts as self-protection. Having the proper equipment for self-defense also counts).

The words “freedom” and “liberty” are so abused and twisted by Orwellian state propaganda shills that I prefer the N.A.P. Use that as the best non-ambiguous definition of freedom I can work with.

Roosevelt spoke about his “four freedoms”: freedoms of speech and worship, and “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear“. It is a crime against intelligence and dumbing-down historical episode that the last two self-contradictory items in the list were not hooted down as invitations to tyranny. They are not natural rights at all.

The only “freedom from fear” you’re going to get is a Huxley one, chemically induced or psychotic. If he meant freedom from aggression that would be a right, but not at the cost of fiefdom, even if the figurative lords of the manor change every so often.

The “freedom from want” is the worst one. It is a the demand for a license to steal, to feed someone or to solve their “lack” by plundering the neighbors’ cattle, property, harvests, animals, and even wives. (After all, why should an ugly cripple “want” for sex?)

Related articles

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Freedom, Liberty, the Principle of Non-Aggression, what they mean in the context of groups

Now both the dictionary definitions for both the words, freedom and liberty, are similar, and in common parlance, are used interchangeably.

freedom:

noun 1.the state of being free or at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint: He won his freedom after a retrial.

2.exemption from external control, interference, regulation, etc.
3.the power to determine action without restraint.
4.political or national independence.
5.personal liberty, as opposed to bondage or slavery: a slave who bought his freedom.

liberty:

noun, plural lib·er·ties. 1.freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control.
2.freedom from external or foreign rule; independence.
3.freedom from control, interference, obligation, restriction, hampering conditions, etc.; power or right of doing, thinking, speaking, etc., according to choice.
4.freedom from captivity, confinement, or physical restraint: The prisoner soon regained his liberty.
5. permission granted to a sailor, especially in the navy, to go ashore.

There are two “manifestations” of freedom from my perspective.

One is described simply like the dictionary definition, and refers to a state where one is not enslaved, in which one can go about his business freely.

The other is more spiritual, more philosophical.

For the more “earthly” one, describing the external conditions under which one lives, it would be a state in which natural individual rights are respected. The best explanatory term for that I’ve seen is the “principle of non-aggression“.

The best description of that is found here. It is an ethical stance regarding a person’s dealings with other human beings:
http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Principle_of_non-aggression

The non-aggression principle (also called the non-aggression axiom, or the anti-coercion or zero aggression principle or non-initiation of force) is an ethical stance which asserts that “aggression” is inherently illegitimate. “Aggression” is defined as the “initiation” of physical force against persons or property, the threat of such, or fraud upon persons or their property. In contrast to pacifism, the non-aggression principle does not preclude violent self-defense. The principle is a deontological (or rule-based) ethical stance.

That web page also provides a more extensive examination of the principle, and answers the most common objections, and some that are not so common.

So the goal is a culture, or society, that adheres to this principle. It recognizes that any rule By which we guide ourselves involves aggression. Fraud is recognized as a kind of aggression.

Having five tons of gold more than your neighbor or five square miles of real estate more than your neighbor is NOT aggression, unless you STOLE it or got it with theft by FRAUD. (sorry for caps for emphasis)

Here’s another description of the principle, including a definition of aggression to help clarify.

A group with voluntary membership and based on what both parties (or more) agree by contract, however the parties regard such an arrangement as binding, these are “groups” that are perfectly compatible with the NAP (non-aggression principle).

However, when a “group” begins to enforce actions upon one or more members that was not of mutual prior agreement, this is aggression. A code enforcement officer comes to your house and tells you there’s a new law, and your house is painted a prohibited color, so you have to paint it. (This is an actual law in my municipality). If you don’t paint your house a different color, you get a fine. If you don’t pay the fine and don’t pay the house, you eventually lose your entire house. This is a taking. This is theft. This is aggression. Non-aggression is better.

But WHO IS any such “group” anyway? It’s a “collection” of individuals who think that theft of THEIR stuff by force is NOT okay but if they get together a great big gang and call it a “government”, then it’s okay because there is more of them than you.

That’s why groupthink is dangerous. You had Jim Crow in the Old South because there was more of “us” than “them”. But even so we had to make laws to make “some of us”

BUT even in areas where there was more of “them” than “us”, it was already the “law of the land”, the dictatorship of the majority became the dictatorship of the minority, and the ones that would “do the right thing” were prohibited by law from doing it. By the force of a gun and illegal activities protected by law.

Such is the end of all groupthink collectives.

Individuals are what count. Culture has influence, but individuals have changed culture over and over again in history.

In fact, it is through individuals that God has wrought spectacular advances throughout history. Guttenberg, Isaac Newton, Roger Bacon, Michael Faraday, and so on. Nicolas Tesla was a loner.

Eguene Mallove broke free from thinking what was best for his “collective” and quit so he could blast MIT for lying about the success they had seen with the low-cost high-energy processes like the ones announced by Fleishmann and Pons. So he founded the Infinite Energy Foundation and a Magazine to promote the new technology.

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Anarcho-capitalism vs. Government

English: This image is of economist Walter Block teaching economics in a Loyola University New Orleans classroom. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Let me help with understanding what I’m going to say here. First off, I had once gone from Marxist/Communist to syndicalist-anarchist (something like the “anarcho-communist” idea) precisely because I couldn’t trust people to govern themselves. My reasoning back then articulated like this: if you can’t trust people to govern themselves, you can’t trust them to govern other people. About that time I became a missionary, more concerned for the poor than ever, and all people that needed the truth.

So let’s see:

Q (Question or Comment): With no government than anyone (or group) who has more than others can buy more armed security to enforce their will on those who have less resources. There is nothing to stop bad guys from forming coalitions to gang up on smaller communities and take them over by force since there is no governmental power to stop them.

A: The Second Amendment debate should bring to clarity the principle that self-defense is much more effective than giving up your freedom –even some of it– in exchange for security. Give ’em an inch, they take a mile. Like Ron Paul said, the only legitimate purpose of any government is to protect its jurisdiction from violation of individual rights.

The problem is that you are trusting a band of strangers with protecting you from other bands of strangers. If it’s a “government”, however, you get protection the same way you get protection from a “Mafia”. If you pay, you get some protection –often not very good because who else can you call, so it is with monopolies– and you get to keep both your legs. Unless one of the rulers needs one.

Q If one does not want to use the term “mercenary” they can invent whatever euphemism they wish and call it a third party mechanism…

A-Euphemisms like “government”, except that’s involuntarily imposed force. And just like with the Army “volunteers”, many “mercenaries” are driven by other than monetary considerations. In self-defense, many of the “volunteers” will be just like the revolutionary militia, and today’s independent militias, people defending their lives, their families, their own children, like the independent militias that Mexicans are now forming to defend themselves against the gangs. Like some citizens of Detroit who have armed themselves for protection, because the police force are now useless. Precisely because under the “democratic-republican” Detroit government not everybody played fair. Especially the elected legislators and executives, and now even the judges are ordering the city to stiff the creditors that trusted them and pay the taxation without representation that previous city officials and unions colluded to burden them with. 

Q The fact is they fight for money and not principle and can be paid off by your enemies.

A [Ed-Like moles, or governments of corrupt sellouts like in Congress. The fact is, all of us have wrong reasons we do many right things. This
thought also ignores the fact that giving you good service for
your money is a principle worth more than money. Protecting
people is a good career. It is the first early motivation of
may policemen, in fact, who make a career of it, paid for
their services. Yet the very police is who we are talking
about. If they were more directly beholden to the people they
ahem, “serve”, we would have much less abuse and corruption in
their number.

A In a democratic republic you are free to hire your own self
defense so there is no denial of freedom.

A [Ed-Unless you have to defend
yourself against that government. Try buying raw milk in a
co-op and get arrested in the “Republic” of California.

Q One is free to dream that they can provide their own security on
either a personal or community basis against any threat but they
are assuming everyone else will play fair and continue to ignore
the myriad of scenarios that can develop in a world without
government.

A-No assumptions at all except that all central planning scenarios come with all those flaws built in.

Who really believes they can defend against a foreign invasion
with an army of locally hired of rent a cops thrown together by
few communities who decide they will participate?

A- The farmboy revolutionaries that defended the USA against British attacks are an excellent example. A rag-tag band of “backward” mountain men are
defeating the most powerful Army in the whole world as we speak. Bill Maher said once that the Second Amendment is moot because the government has tanks. Tell that to the Taliban. The militias in Iraq say Phooey too.

Otherwise, why would our own “democratic republic” government
of the USA have such a fanatical fixation on disarming the
entire civilian population?

Government can become oppressive. True. People with no government can also form groups and become oppressive. Also true. The fact that anyone can be corrupted is hardly a case for ” no more rules”. It seems better time would be spent working on small government within a republican ( small “r”) model following constitutional principles.

A – Who said “No more rules”. That’s a straw man argument. The rule that counts more than any other should be the “non-aggression principle“. See:http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Principle_of_non-aggression

Walter Block explains it well:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2003/02/walter-block/turning-their-coats-for-the-state/

Someone who does not believe in government of any kind has no reason to quote the Bill of Rights since without a government to enforce it, it is just a piece of paper.

A – I quote the Bill of Rights because they actually support the position, because if you read them properly, they are not grants of privilege by government, but they are declarations of what are universally held rights in the sense articulated in the Declaration of Independence as “unalienable”. It was a compromise demanded by patriots that did not want a strong federal government.But as we can see from events and history in the real world, if you disqualify my arguments on that basis, yours are disqualified by the proof in the real world that your very government is ruled by that Constitution as “the Supreme Law of the Land“, but that very same government has broken almost every one and in the most massive scale possible:

The First: “Free-speech zones“

Second: Gun control laws. Supreme Court legalized “reasonable” infringement legislation. In New Orleans the police went door-to-door confiscating arms without warrants or due process at all. The first gun control laws in the U.S. were Jim Crow-motivated laws meant to prevent even free blacks from owning them.

Third: To my knowledge, the military has not commandeered quarters in any house, even as “prescribed by law”.

Fourth: Recent revelations by Edward Snowden and the brave reporters of The Guardian have exposed the blatant and still now unrepentant violation of the right of the people “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects” in the unconstitutional seizure of the “effects” of EVERY ONE of the regime’s subjects in the United States. Having been exposed, they say “So what? It’s to keep you safe from bad guys”. The Fourth also says must have a warrant –from a genuine independent court, not a kangaroo court, and not a self-written– naming the person and things to be seized. And there’s nothing about allowing the right to a censorship on the target of such a warrant, as we now face with the Patriot Act. A librarian was charged with a felony for just showing one of these warrants to an assistant.

Fifth: They had this guy in Boston how many hours? As soon as he knew his rights he shut up. But the same Justice Department that was so worried the FBI might find out something from this violation of rights is the one that violates every American’s “Fourth Amendment” right all day every day.

Sixth: Speedy trail, confrontation of witnesses: Not just the rubber-stamp FISA courts (NSA director: You can’t lie to us anymore, we all know they’re kangaroo, else they would not approve the unconstitutional requests for blanket coverage, seizure of all those records). There is the case of the U Florida professor arrested (and convicted? deported?) based on what the government called secret evidence that they could not even show the judge in the case.

Seventh: The president, we now know, issues regular kill orders against anybody he wants to. Rand Paul forced the Attorney General to admit the government has no legal authority at least to kill Americans on American soil if there is no imminent danger, but the history of lies and conviction for Contempt of Congress shows we cannot trust their word. Not to mention executing acts of war (like drone attacks overseas) without the constitutionally required declaration of war by Congress.

Eighth (Cruel and Unusual Punishment): Now the president who as candidate opposed the interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo, now defends them as necessary. Nothing like a political campaign to bring out the liar in the worst characters. (Not to mention that the nests of rape, murder, assaults on prisoners convicted for non-violent offenses themselves, in my opinion, themselves constitute cruel and unusual punishment.)

Ninth: Ha, the Congress over the last twenty years, with the happy cooperation of the worst of the bankers, has violated every other natural right that got in their corrupt way, including that of property, with the Fed, the New Deal, The Great Society, the right to free trade and free exchange of goods and services.

Tenth: Of course the Congress has used the carrot-stick approach and a blatantly unconstitutional perversion of the interstate commerce clause to entice and coerce the states to doing things that were not in the jurisdiction of the federal Congress to influence. Holder tried a pathetic attempt to stop the flood of states declaring it illegal for anyone to cooperate with federal officials in violations of the Second Amendment. Holder used the “supreme law of the land” argument, by which he meant that the federal government has a “right” under the “supreme law” clause to become a dictatorship whenever it feels like it.

So yes, in the real world, I believe using the Constitution is a good way to educate the people, and by golly, if we can agree to push at least for respect and obedience to the US Constitution, that would be better than the present condition by astronomical scales.

Related articles

• Types of government (trutherator.wordpress.com)
• A Concession from an Economic Purist (ankapistan.wordpress.com)
• Anarcho-Activist Adam Kokesh Held Without Bond for Filming Himself Performing an Utterly Harmless “Crime” (reason.com)
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Types of government

Ludwig von Mises (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

 

Find a good video here that explains different types of government:

 

http://jamesjpn.net/2009/06/15/type-of-government-explained/

 

Especially good is the demonstration that the best “political spectrum” goes from Total Government to No Government.

 

The usual “meme” they foist on our brains, the left-right “political spectrum”, is a blatantly false one if you inspect it thoughtfully. Just think about it: on the “extreme left” is totalitarian dictatorship by the state; on the “extreme right” is the totalitarian dictatorship by a corporate-state partnership.

 

So the “moderates” are caught without an ideological escape to freedom from tyranny.

 

The “powers that be” have indoctrinated generations of schoolchildren into this mind-set of non-thinking. With China and Russia introduced a few controlled, guarded, so-called “free-market reforms” into its production infrastructure, note that it didn’t fit easily this right-left diagram they use for the United States.

 

So they made a temporary exception to the usual definitions, and called the ones pushing for more freedoms as “liberal” and the ones pushing for more state control as “conservatives”, as if “conservatives” only want status quo and “liberals” want to change things for better.

 

That’s the way the powers that be report it in the West, especially the USA. The word “liberal”, however, when Ludwig von Mises wrote his books about real-world economics, the word “liberal” meant letting people do what they want, “laissez faire”.

 

There is another form of government not mentioned in this video. It is anarchism, but not of the sort portrayed in the clip. There are “anarchists” for sure who are better described as “nihilists”.

 

But if you go to the www lewrockwell dot com web site you’ll find definitions there for “anarcho-capitalism”. This is the idea that relations among people should be constrained by the “non-agression principle“, defined like this by Walter Block: “It states, simply, that it shall be legal for anyone to do anything he wants, provided only that he not initiate (or threaten) violence against the person or legitimately owned property of another.”

 

In an example of an “anarcho-capitalist” society, we have the Biblical time of the Judges. There was no government as such, no provision at all for a permanent police force, no standing army, and disputes were adjudicated by the priests or by judges who simply were judges because people looked to them for an arbitrator’s wisdom. When they were oppressed by invaders, individuals rose among them (God rose them up) to form volunteer armies to repel the oppressors. And then they disbanded.

 

I don’t want to bring back the laws of Moses like some Christians do, not just Orthodox Jews. But it’s just to show that where at least the dominant culture respects the principles, it can work. In fact, when they people of Israel demanded a king of Samuel because his children were bad boys and apparently there was no respected alternative, God told Samuel that they had not rejected Samuel but God himself!

 

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