Two red flags about this community...

Economics Political Theory
21

Sure, them too. I cite the property owners specifically, because the harm to them is a priori: they’ve been threatened with violence directly, regardless whether there even are any interested buyers out there. If there are none, then arguably nobody has been harmed other than the property owners. That’s a minor nit, of course.

The other reason I didn’t mention the buyers in this case is to dodge the obvious jingoist rebuttal: the buyers in question are evil godless slant-eyed yellow nip devils, so harming them would be seen as a plus. I’m focusing on the fact that good, honest, hard-working red-blooded Americans are being harmed by the embargo, in order to maximize the impact of my point.

–Len.

22

Here’s a good rule of thumb: libertarians want to abolish the state, and socialists want to make it omnipotent.

Some of us are indeed (cringingly) supporting Obama, because relative to McLunatic and Madame he is the only peace candidate (though there are still huge problems with his foreign policy) who remains viable. For genuine libertarians a candidate’s being pro-peace or pro-war is usually the deciding issue.

Seeing that the US government kills or is responsible for the killing of its own subjects/citizens every day (not to mention the millions killed in aggressive wars), I see 9/11 as little more than a single hurricane in a season of invariable rainy weather. On the other hand I suppose there’s really no “hard” evidence that it did anything at all to the effect of destroying its own buildings (or at least none that the courts wouldn’t dsimiss as frivolous), unless you count total non-response as doing something. However, considering that…

  • there have been hundreds of cases of major skyscraper fires, some of them lasting for days with raging infernos, but only three have collapsed; two with very localized fires, and the other with an invisible one, and all on the same day;

  • airplane fuel does not burn hot enough to melt steel;

  • there were reports of explosions being heard from both buildings as they fell;

  • in the week preceding the event there had been power downs and evacuation drills which had never been done before;

  • and for the previous eight months Bush had been itching for a reason to attack Iraq (by Paul O’Neill’s testimony);

calling the truthers hateful and irrational loonies with no case is only indicative of one’s thoughtless kowtowing to all the state’s edicts.

Tell me, when you read or hear an idea you’re unfamiliar with are you even cognizant of the information it contains or does your brain just reinterpret it into something entirely different? Government is DEFINED AS a monopoly of use of force. Hence it is an economically and morally reprehensible institution.

The state of the economy is essentially a function of how much wealth it contains. Thus the only thing that is “bad” for the economy is the destruction of wealth. War of course is just a colossal act of destruction so naturally, no matter what a few vociferous and Keynesians may say, it does great economic damage. Imperialism (even if it’s relatively peaceful), aside from inevitably leading to war, and even having a standing military are similar though not as devastating, in that they necessitate wasting (i.e. destruction of) the same resources (time, food, weapons, human capital, etc.; everything other than civillian property). All of this is lost and the only thing gained is that a few soldiers got to goose-step for a few hours, have their staff sergeants yell at them, and perhaps look slightly more imposing to the people whose land they’re invading.

23

" - there have been hundreds of cases of major skyscraper fires, some of them lasting for days with raging infernos, but only three have collapsed; two with very localized fires, and the other with an invisible one, and all on the same day;"

The problem with this is that no two building fires are alike, since every building uses different materials, support structures, etcetera. Most fires are also fought these days, something which was not able to be done on 9/11. One of the skyscraper fires that has been cited, for instance, has a concrete support structure in addition to a steel structure, so it wouldn’t have collapsed even if the steel had been considerably weakened, which it was. This “and all on the same day” thing plays to the wrong kind of incredulity, because there is a very clear causal link between them.

"- airplane fuel does not burn hot enough to melt steel; "

Steel doesn’t need to be melted for a steel structure to collapse; at half its melting point, steel is weakened considerably. Plus, there was lots of fuel in the form of paper, wood, and oxygen in the towers, so the temperature of the fires wouldn’t be affected solely by how hot jet fuel burns.

“- there were reports of explosions being heard from both buildings as they fell;”

Eyewitness reports are not only notoriously unreliable, even accurate reports can be misinterpreted. Plus, I’ve never heard a gigantic steel building falling three blocks away from me, but I would be that it would sound just a little bit like something had exploded.

"- in the week preceding the event there had been power downs and evacuation drills which had never been done before;

  • and for the previous eight months Bush had been itching for a reason to attack Iraq (by Paul O’Neill’s testimony);"

Red herrings, really.

“calling the truthers hateful and irrational loonies with no case is only indicative of one’s thoughtless kowtowing to all the state’s edicts.”

I’m as anti-state as the next anarcho-libertarian, but I do think that 9/11 truthers must either fall into the categories of misinformed, irrational, or dishonest, given that so many straw men and even bald lies are pulled out by them. I know this isn’t a 9/11 thread, but I felt these things were important to address.

24

RE: Solomon

Thanks man. These were the sort of responses I was interested in.

RE what is a ‘real’ libertarian… it now makes total sense to me that if their most important issue was war, they could easily bounce from someone like Paul to someone like Obama.

RE 9/11 truth movement… I don’t want to get into a huge debate about what brought down the towers (although I can say that steel doesn’t have to completely melt for the buildings to collapse). To me, it’s about the company you keep. I find the people behind that movement to be so ‘out there’ that I would question anyone else who would align themselves with such a movement.

RE monopoly of use of force… So how is a society going to survive against a more powerful aggressor who for their own survival must constantly be preparing for or executing war?

RE war and economy… But if our assets are not protected from other statist nations, we end up with nothing if attacked.

I don’t really understand this anarco-capitalism concept. How come Mises or Rand or any of those types never advocate(d) this system? Hasn’t it only been others who claim that their philosophies can only lead to a society absent of government? Why did those two (for example) never come to that conclusion?

I titled this post using the term ‘red flags’ because I think my ideals follow kinda closely to Rand minus a couple things. She brought up Mises frequently in her Capitalism book. I took that Mises test and scored an 88… the only other answers were from the Chicago school… none were Socialist or Keynesian. I then found this site hoping that it could become a home base for me to learn more.

Lastly, this is to address someone else who said I was confusing the terms “non-interventionist” and “isolationism.” They seem one in the same.. for example, when OUR oil rigs and refineries were nationalized by the regimes in the middle-east, I can’t see any libertarian non-interventionist or isolationist (whatever you want to call it) advocating forcefully retrieving what is rightfully ours from those governments. To me, that is the first thing that should have happened… which is also why I believe that so long as there are other countries in the world, we should attempt to maintain a monopoly of the use of force. They took our property by force, we have the right to take it back by force… no?

25

If by isolationism, you mean not having alliances, then no, history does not support your position. During WWII, we were allies with Japan’s enemies, and we were actively supporting them with military aid. So no, Pearl Harbor was not an unprovoked attack.

9/11 was not an unprovoked attack either. The U.S. has been giving tons of military aid to the ME (Middle East), had troops stationed in the ME, was actively starving people in Iraq, had assisted in the Iran/Iraq war, and had helped make a regime change in Iran.

26

RE: Nasikabatrachus,

I figured a few people would claim that the US propping up Israel is a major reason why we are constantly attacked by Islamic radicals.

I’ve come to understand that those radicals don’t really exist without the support of their governments, which should have all been taken out when they seized our property over there (oil).

But also, when the Ottoman Empire was broken up, wasn’t it England that was given rule over Israel and then they ‘gave’ it to the Jews after WWII? So that means the Palestinians don’t have any right to claim something that was not theirs in the first place. For me, I only see Israel as a recruiting tool for these rouge Mideast governments, when I think it can be demonstrated that if those governments weren’t allowed to exist in the first place, terror wouldn’t have gained the traction to be able to mount an attack like 9/11.

Next, what is to be feared by a single world government if it basically adopted a constitution like our own?

Also, this argument bothers me a little bit:

“volunteer” in quotes because the half-children who make up most of the military cannot possibly understand the purpose or the moral nature of what they do

…it bothers me because it’s the same line of reasoning that many leftists use. People voluntarily smoke tobacco because they think it’s cool (I am one of those… when I smoke, especially in a social setting, I feel like Miles Davis)… they’ve bought into the ad campaigns but are also totally aware of it’s dangers. In the 90s, millions of dollars were awarded to smokers who claimed to be misled by advertising and because of addictive ingredients. Personal responsibility, or in legal terms, assumption of risk, was completely thrown out the door. Regardless of ingredients or advertising, they still voluntarily smoked. It was bull crap that the smokers won that litigation. My point is that everyone is perfectly capable of making decisions for themselves… their reasoning behind their decisions doesn’t make them any more or less volunteer.

Your thoughts?

27

snliii:

Which do you believe is likely to be true:

a. Osama can easily find suicide warriors, because he doesn’t have to invent the 9/11 type of event. All he needs is to point at the occupied territories (bases). We, on the other hand, do need 9/11 to send our warriors to die.

b. We can easily find warriors to die in arab lands, all we need is to show them 9/11. Osama, on the other hand, needs to be the “US Base Truther” and only by lying about supposedly existing us bases on arab lands, can he find his suicide pilots.

This is what “truthers” believe: a. The rest believes in b. If you are the one who believes both causes are real, then we either need to take away our bases or let arabs have their 9/11 here at will. Anything less than that, and you’d have to argue that the people of Saudi Arabia had invited our bases. This is, by the way, what russians were told by the government of USSR in regards to the war with Afghanistan.

Remove the bases and Osama would have to do his own local 9/11, or a fake “US Base” stunt to recruit. Remove 9/11, and we would still need one.

I have no doubts that this logic will not turn you into a truther. And that is fair enough. It would be an awfull world if we all though the same. However, you must admit, if you are honest, that there must be a reason that GVT would not release ALL tapes and photos pertaining to 9/11, would not permit the investigation of certain authorities, and would not allow themselves to explain how it came to be that we keep remains of every aircrash in werehouses, but could not find a square mile of nevada desert to keep 9/11 ruins even for a year. This, more than anything else, keeps people rightfully suspicious.

If you count yourself as a real American, how can you blindly trust the gvt on any matter, without full investigation? Remember, in God we trust, - this was said for a reason, and it has nothing to do with religion.

28

RE: Spideynw,

Well if that’s the case, then an attack on our trading partners is still an attack on us. If China is buying weapons and supplies from us and Japan attacks them, that still makes them the aggressor against us. Japan, 100% of the time, was the aggressor from like, 1920 until the end of WWII… I’m pretty sure of this.

I’ve always understood that Japan saw that the US would for sure enter into WWII, so their action against Pearl Harbor was a necessary preemptive strike.

My whole point about that though is I find it a blunder on the part of the USA for not being more interventionist. When dealing with threats, the earlier you can identify them and defeat them, the less there is at risk once they become powerful… that goes back to me finding (as Nasikabatrachus points out) that “interesting contradiction” in the minarchist-misesian argument regarding the monopoly on use of force.

29

RE: Thorgold2,

The problem is that AQ only exists because they are sanctioned/funded by a statist regime… I pointed this out in a different post I think. Remove the regimes and you are effectively removing funding and sanctuary to those groups. At that point, the only terrorism you’ll deal with is the random Tim McVeigh that will pop up every so often.

I am not blindly trusting the government on 9/11… I’m trusting what I saw. There is no information out there that proves that our government is guilty of an attack on itself.

30

RE: Byzantine

Monopolizing the use of force in a global sense… well, I was just pointing out a contradiction. (see my other posts)

But what’s the problem with a single world government so long as it’s capitalist, allows it’s citizens to be armed, and does not abrogate rights to life, liberty, and property without due process? (I’m being general but you get my point I hope…)

31

RE gplauche:

You gave me a lot of reading… but from what I gathered in only skimming some chapters of the Myth piece, it does not address the defense of our assests not located within our borders but within another country. Also, how can a militia defend against an ICBM? I’m going to read it all though.

…and I think I covered the other stuff in other posts.

32

Hmmm… Vietnam is indeed a powerful argument that ideas can be more powerful than bulletts… and Iraq seems another one… but what about Nazi Germany then? I don’t really think anything would have been better if America limits his war on Japan or anything like that… clearly, basic humanity demanded that genocide must be stopped, and it was, though a bit too late. So I think there isn’t a general rule to that… it really depends on the situation.

33

What assets do you mean? Government-owned assets overseas that shouldn’t be there in the first place? Or privately owned assets? Private individuals and companies do business overseas at their own risk.

And what is with all this “we” and “our” stuff? Coming from a quasi-Randian it sounds rather collectivist. I don’t have any assets overseas. To the extent that I have any connection to overseas trading partners, I don’t want the US government maintaining an empire overseas for their benefit. As for the US government’s government allies, I couldn’t care less about them.

In what chapter did you read that there would only be private, voluntary citizen militias in an anarcho-capitalist society?

There are a lot of other articles and books on free market security provision, by the way, besides The Myth of National Defense.

And who is likely to attack me with an ICBM?

Certainly not conclusively.

34

Uh, no, that makes them the aggressor against China. In a free world, U.S. citizens would be allowed to trade with whomever they like. Which means there would not be trading “partners”. Which means U.S. citizens could have traded with both Japan and China.

And I assume you attended “public” education as well. Here is the truth of the matter, from mises.org:

http://mises.org/daily/688

FDR had been trying to get the U.S. to enter the war for years before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He had done everything he could to get the U.S. to go to war. The only thing he had not been doing is sending troops to help out.

Japan may have thought that the U.S. was going to enter the war. But they had good reason to believe so. Again, we were giving their enemies everything except for troops.

But as for Pearl Harbor, you can blame our “great” president FDR for the massacre there.

From the same link above:

Pearl Harbor was just the excuse FDR needed to get us into the war.

And my whole point is, when we start trading with countries, for example China in the 1990’s and Vietnam in the 1970’s, we become friends, and they stop being a threat.

35

Exactly. We can’t lose sight of methodological individualism here. The “United States” is an abstraction, not a literal thing. People exist and have rights. Groups are subjectively defined entities that aren’t individuals, don’t literally exist, and don’t have rights. So a Japanese bombing in China is NOT an instance of “Japan attacking China,” and we can’t apply libertarian reasoning at that level. Similarly, the US can’t “defend itself.” People can band together to defend themselves or others, but all the action, and all the rights, are at the individual level.

–Len.

36

“Our”? Awfully collectivist for a Randian.

Perhaps it never even occured to Mises. He certainly never came across systematic presentations of it when he was writing his earlier works; he was too busy dealing with socialist fallacies. The sort of minarchist state he advocated, though, allowed secession down to the invididual level. As for Rand, it is argued that based on her own ethic she was inconsistent, and should’ve embraced market anarchism.

It will be, provided you have, as Rand would term it, an active mind.

No, those oil rigs &c. belong to private individuals who risked their assets by investing there. As I recall, Rand in fact argued such people gambled with their assets and had no right to demand that the US government intervene in their favour. So long as any war effort is coercively financed, it cannot be squared with the notion of individual rights. You act as though only the US has the right to exist.

BTW, what is the problem with a global government? One is that constitutions are mere words on paper. An omnipotent government of this sort has no incentive to actually be limited by this constitution. The US is not yet a global government, and yet it has constantly deviated from its constitution. I’d recommend you read Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis and Banking, Nation states and International Politics by Hoppe on why global governments cannot be capitalist.

Also, please use the quoting function and try limit yourself to fewer posts (if need be, respond to multiple posts in one.)

37

snliii,

Because such a government would be none of those things. Its costs would be so diffused among such a large tax base that no group anywhere could possibly muster effective resistance to government over-reaching. The US is an excellent illustration of this phenomenon. Most of what it does violates its charter, but the costs of those violations cost each of its citizens only a few dollars per year, so it’s uneconomic for them to fight it. This applies whether we are talking about direct transfer payments or national security regulations. It’s simply not economic for the average citizen to go down in a hail of bullets for not submitting to a degrading pat-down in an airport or some other indignity. And if one out of a thousand people actually stand up to the system, they can be swatted down like flies and the other 999 will calculate that they don’t have a dog in the fight.

To put it another way, such a government would have no incentive to be self-limiting, so it wouldn’t be.

38

RE: gplauche,

Well, to continue with the Mideast oil example, I assume there was some sort of contract between our (and when I say “our” I’m not meaning in an sort of collectivist way, I just mean businesses owned and operated by Americans in America) folks and theirs. They broke their agreement and then STOLE the property of the American business owners… that doesn’t fall into any sort of assumption of risk. Since there is no “world court” that could settle the dispute, I think it is completely reasonable to do something (sanctions, bombs, whatever) that protects the assets of a business whose contract with a rouge state was violated. A business that operates under the US Constitution, pays US taxes for defense, etc deserves that kind of protection. I think the US started a drawn-out and weak retaliation by supporting Israel.

But the point is that meddling in the affairs of the Mideast was exactly what those sad people asked for.. because they’re theocratic. I think it’s clear that they’ve always been on the offensive against free societies.

I just don’t see why retaliating when double-crossed is immoral/interventionist when there is no arbiter (system of laws, court, contract, or whatever) to settle the dispute. They took our property by use of force, we have every right to take it back by use of force… and force will be needed because I doubt they will let us simply waltz in and begin to dismantle our rigs. It will be guns blazin’. That should be a statist’s risk for doing business with a capitalist. =)

39

I have certainly encountered many a faux-libertarian in my volunteer work with the Paul campaign (not only the uneducated statist attracted to any quixotic political figure, but the dutiful and well-heeled Keynesian corporatist as well). However, I must quibble a bit (if you’ll forgive my semantic deconstruction), with the use of the term “socialist”. Socialism, as it has come to be defined in the past 91 years, is commonly associated with extreme state action through the prism either of Marxist-Leninism, New Dealism or fascism. However, an older, more cerebral school of socialism, as exemplified by Beckman, Goldman, Debord, Derida, and (to an unfortunately lesser extent) Zinn and Chomsky, denounced all vestments of the state and believed in a collectively empowered society through labor organization at a local level, dissolution of private property and currency, and renunciation of religion and subjective morality. While this philosophy is largely at odds with the eventual goals of the Mises Institute, it does share a common means, which could result in the peaceful coexistence both of ancap and ancom societies. Libertarian socialism is not necessarily a contradiction in terms; it’s just not a commonly understood or openly espoused alternative. I am myself inclined to believe that organized checks on private wealth and excessive aggrandizement are ideal in a post-state society, but would much favor the ancap system to the corrupt bureaucratic nightmare that currently mollifies any vestige of individual dignity. That doesn’t make me any less libertarian, and it certainly doesn’t make me any less attuned to the modest, constitutional precepts posited by Dr. Paul during his campaign (and just to allay some perfunctory responses, I do believe in private property as the most important check on state hegemony, but am also concerned about the development of feudalism in its absence…I’m speaking more in terms of abstraction than political reality here). Just as Obama’s campaign has the marked rhetorical and ideological signs of fascism framed in a leftist venire, socialist libertarianism retains the same political aspirations as capitalist libertarianism with a different moral emphasis. Unfortunately, just like “Republitarians” (i.e. neocon libertarians), lib socialists tend to put ends before means and divorce themselves from the shared goals of state dissolution and localization with right libertarians.

-John

40

Collectivism snuck into your argument near the end. The businessmen owning the assets are indeed justified in acting against theft–but the “bombs” and “whatever” are not used nor paid for by the businessman. They’re used by soldiers with no stake in the business, and paid for by taxpayers with no stake in the business. To construe that as “self” defense, you have to pretend that the businessmen and the army are one entity. Namely, “America.” They’re not one entity.

More generally, “Americans” are no more united by a common interest than are “the rich” or “auto workers.” They have different, often conflicting, interests. Some Americans have common interests with foreigners, and conflicting interests with Americans. That’s why interjecting the country, and pronouns like “us” and “them”, is fraught with confusion.

–Len.