Category Archives: Political Theory

Lew Rockwell On Radio Free Market – Saturday, April 10, 1 PM CT

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TUNE IN TO THE WEB’S MOST POPULAR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: LEW ROCKWELL

Saturday, April 10th, 2010 at 1PM CT

** LEW ROCKWELL ** – An Exclusive Interview and Wide Ranging Conversation. Lew is the Founder and Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute (www.mises.org) and Editor of LewRockwell.com – two websites having among the highest Internet Traffic in the entire world. We will the Disastrous Effects of Government Intervention on Jobs, Businesses and How to Quickly Cure Unemployment.

LEW, THE THINKER-ACTIVIST

Lew was, in the 1960’s, an editor for the books of Ludwig von Mises and he was Ron Paul’s Chief of Staff in the 1970’s.

We will talk about The Future of Liberty in America and The Practical Steps Each Person Can Take To End the Spread of Tyranny. We are very honored to have Lew on our show and know that everyone will find him an extraordinary teacher from whom to learn.

Hosted by Michael McKay along with Special Commentator, Ms. Zoe Russell.

Propaganda Nation: Libertarian Labels

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Robert Wenzel at EconomicPolicyJournal.com:

Tyler Cowen has listed from “his gut” the 10 books that have influenced him the most. Human Action by Ludwig von Mises is not on the list. None of Mises’s books are on the list. Keynes makes the list. Of Keynes, he writes:

John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.  Keynes is one of the greatest thinkers of economics and there are new ideas on virtually every page.

Which raises the question for me, “Why does Cowen even care what Austrian economists call themselves?” If he can’t put a Mises book on a list of ten books that influenced him,when Human Action is the greatest economic text ever written, yet finds room for Keynes and “his new ideas,” I have to classify him a Keynesian, pure and simple.”

Why does Cowen care? It’s all about subversion of language…

“Libertarianism” thus defined (or, more accurately, labeled) comes to mean something not very removed from “liberalism”….

…which today has moved so much to the left that in many areas it’s indistinguishable from communism.

Which means you get to call yourself a libertarian but still push for the same programs and policies that the left-liberals push for.

Which keeps you within the range of “respectability.”

And keeps you out of SPLC lists that have you rubbing shoulders with the Pentagon shooter and anyone else who decides to get physical with the state apparatus.

Mind you, at our little blog, we have no quarrel with communism or communists. We don’t think they’re evil. We just don’t want them turning us into guinea pigs for their experiments. When they feel an urge to test the limits of human malleability, we suggest that they try it out first on their spouses and off-spring. See how that turns out after a generation, and then give us a call and we’ll talk….

India Begins First Biometric Census

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India launches the first biometric census today, reports the BBC.

“India is launching a new census in which every person aged over 15 will be photographed and fingerprinted to create a biometric national database. The government will then use the information to issue identity cards.

Officials will spend a year classifying India’s population of around 1.2 billion people according to gender, religion, occupation and education. The exercise, conducted every 10 years, faces big challenges, not least India’s vast area and diversity of cultures.

Census officials must also contend with high levels of illiteracy and millions of homeless people – as well as insurgencies by Maoists and other rebels which have left large parts of the country unsafe.
President Pratibha Patil was the first person to be listed, and appealed to fellow Indians to follow her example “for the good of the nation”. “Everyone must participate and make it successful,” she said in Delhi.

‘Unstoppable’
This is India’s 15th census and the first time a biometric element has been included.”

If only it were an April Fool’s prank. Unfortunately, it’s the real thing.

The master mind behind it is Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder of IT outsourcing giant Infosys, hero of the Gideon’s Bible of globalization, Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” (a book I confess I’ve given a small thrashing to), and the man who coined the irritating meme in the first place.

As this Times article points out, less than 7% of the Indian population of over a billion (that is, around 75 million) pays income taxes. There’s also rampant corruption, a thriving black market, endless bureaucracy, and documentation requirements that make cross-state travel a time-consuming burden.

The ID is supposed to end all that. What it will begin, we can only guess.

As we blogged a while back, even the UK, the Anglophone world’s police-state petri dish, crammed to the gills with CCTV and traffic cameras, managed to squash this frightening initiative when it was introduced there.

Unfortunately, Europe has taken to it, with Germany, France, Belgium, Greece, Luxembourg, Portugal, and Spain among the 100 countries that use compulsory national identity cards.

But India, it need hardly be said, is not Europe. Besides the civil liberties dangers, the costs are heavy. In the UK, they were estimated to have been between 10-20 billion pounds. In India, they are said to be around 3 billion pounds (other figures I’ve seen are $6.6 billion and 300 billion rupees), an enormous burden on the public treasury. And the number is only an estimate, which, like all government estimates of future costs, is almost 100% certain to be over optimistic.

The other major mandate that Nilekani claims is that the new ID will help bring services and subsidies to the poor and prevent their theft or loss. This would be more reassuring if Nilekani didn’t count among former clients of Infosys such experts at combining doing good with doing well as Goldman Sachs.

The Times article describes the card thus:

“A computer chip in each card will contain personal data and proof of identity, such as fingerprint or iris scans. Criminal records and credit histories may also be included.

Mr Nilekani, who left Infosys, the outsourcing giant that he co-founded, to take up his new job, wants the cards to be linked to a “ubiquitous online database” accessible from anywhere.”

Nilekani is head of the newly-created Unique Identification Database Authority of India (IDAI) and he has received 19 bids for its first project from vendors including Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL, IBM, and his own company, Infosys.

For every rupee of IT spending on the project, industry experts estimate, around 60 per cent of this will go to hardware vendors (see Biometrics4You)

Update:

Biometrics4You lists other aspects of the initiative:

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI – the central bank of India) has announced plans to roll out new guidelines to help financial institutions use biometrics at ATMs in rural areas without access to banking. The Orwellian term for this is un-banked or under banked...as though there were some optimal level of banking every square foot of the earth should have.

Hayek and Bork On Intellectuals

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In an earlier blog, I expressed my disagreement with a common criticism in libertarian circles that socialism was motivated mostly by envy and spite. I made the point that most socialists I’ve known have had honorable motives, but, in my view, are superficial in their analysis of events. I cited Michael Oakeshott to that effect.

In this debate between noted legal scholar (and former corporate attorney) Robert Bork, Hayek makes the same point, only in relation to intellectuals: They confuse the intelligible with the rational.

Tocqueville On Morals Versus Laws

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“The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.”

—  Alexis de Tocqueville

Vatican Moves Away from Frankenfoods

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The head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Cardinal Peter Turkson, has moved away from his predecessor’s support for developing genetically modified food to alleviate hunger in poor countries. Instead, he argues that adoption of the “precautionary principle” is warranted:

“There are a lot of claims that are disputed (like) that GMOs never call for the use of pesticides or insecticides or anything because they are resistant,” he said. Such claims have been challenged, he said, and some say “at a certain point (these crops) require insecticides whose chemicals break up later in the soil and render the soil less fertile.”

Given the disputed claims and doubts, “I think that we should go easy and probably satisfy all of these objections to the full satisfaction of those who raise these objections,” he said.

Because of the companies’ control over the patented seeds, “what is meant to alleviate hunger and poverty may actually in the hands of some people become really weapons of infliction of poverty and hunger,” Cardinal Turkson said.

Previously, opponents of GM carried the burden of proving that some harm was being inflicted. Under the PP, companies that planned on introducing genetic changes into an organism would have to bear the burden of proving that it was safe.

While this might seem counter-libertarian, I would argue it is not.

1. Since changes in genetics are impossible to regulate post facto, they cannot be subject to the usual economic arguments available to libertarians. The potential devastation is so irreparable that the principle of liberty demands that the bar be raised ahead of the event.

2. Biotechnology as an industry is concentrated in so few and such large companies, that free market conditions do not prevail at all in other respects. The companies owe their position in the market to their influence on government regulations and laws, to begin with. That suggests that there will be little in the way of normal market forces to check their natural profit-seeking from turning into rent-seeking based on preferential treatment, captive markets/monopoly, and government enforcement.  PP is simply a thoughtful mechanism to prevent profit from careening into plunder.

Bottom line, PP prevents looting or theft.

That makes it libertarian.

Bastiat On The Virtues Of Misers

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In my view, the moral problem at the root of socialism is actually not envy, as many libertarians contend. I grew up among socialists, and they were, by far, motivated by honorable concerns: a sense of injustice, grief for the poor, compassion.

(I’m not talking here about political activists, some of whom do, in fact, have much baser motives).

The principal flaw in the socialist world view, as I see it, is a too great concern with appearances and an inability to see cause and effect in any complex way. It’s not the ‘materialism’ of dialectical materialism I object to. It’s the lack of ‘mind’ in the materialism. The reasoning is limited, superficial, and inaccurate. It lacks sufficient particularity, as Michael Oakeshott argued in “Rationalism in Politics” (1962).

And as Oakeshott argued there, that can be a problem in Hayek, as well.

Libertarian theorist, Frederic Bastiat, makes much the same point in his acute analysis of the superiority of the miser over the spendthrift, an analysis that would be iconoclastic from the point of view of traditional religious morality, where the miser’s avarice would usually be condemned and the spendthrift’s generosity praised:

Continue reading →

Kurt Tucholsky On Love Of Country

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“We have just written “no” on 225 pages, “no” out of sympathy and “no” out of love, “no” out of hate and “no” out of passion – and now we would like to say “yes” for once. “Yes” – to the countryside and the country of  Germany America. The country where we were born and whose language we speak. (…)

And now I would like to tell you something: it is not true that all those who call themselves ‘national’ and who are nothing but gentrified militants have taken out a lease on this country and its language just for them. Germany America is not just a government representative in his tailcoat, nor is it a headmaster, nor is it the ladies and gentlemen of the steel helmets. We are here too. (…)

Germany America is a divided country. We are one part of it. And whatever the situation, we quietly love our country – unshakably, without a flag, or a street organ, no sentimentality and no drawn sword.”

(Kurt Tucholsky, Heimat, in Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, Berlin 1929, p. 226)

Roderick Long On Confucian Libertarianism

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Masterful libertarian scholar, Roderick Long, has a very long, fascinating paper, “Rituals of Freedom: Austro-Libertarian Themes In Early Confucianism,” at Mises.org. It traces libertarian ideas in Confucian thought, and makes a convincing argument that Confucianism is a better source of libertarian inspiration than the much more frequently cited Daoism.

I’m republishing a post on Long’s paper by Brian Caplan, at Marginal Revolution, because the pdf of Long’s paper isn’t very reader-friendly for a blog and Caplan has nice quotes from the piece.

“Unfortunately, Long points out, a much stronger theme in Taoist is primitivist hostility to modern civilization. Listen to Lao-tzu describe the Taoist utopia:

Lessen the population. Make sure that even though there are labor saving tools, they are never used. Make sure that the people look upon death as a weighty matter and never move to distant places. Even though they have ships and carts, they will have no use for them. … Make sure that the people return to the use of the knotted cord [in lieu of writing]. … Then even though neighboring states are within sight of each other, [and] can hear the sounds of each other’s dogs and chickens … people will grow old and die without ever having visited one another.

In contrast, Long finds much of value in the Confucians:

The early Confucians, by contrast, may not be as radical in their anti-statism as the Taoists, but in my estimation they make up for this flaw by firmly yoking their anti-statism to the cause of civilization, commerce, and the Great Society; their overall program thus looks a lot more like contemporary libertarianism than the Taoist program does. One Confucian text, while noting approvingly Laozi’s hostility to despotism, sharply criticizes Laozi for wanting to “drag the present age back to the conditions of primitive times and to stop up the eyes and ears of the people”; the best ruler instead “accepts the nature of the people,” which is to long for “beautiful sounds and forms,” “ease and comfort.”

The highlight of Long’s article is his discussion of the Sima Qian (c. 145-85 B.C.). Almost two thousand years before Adam Smith, Qian opined that “Wealth and currency should be allowed to flow as freely as water!” and had arguments to defend his position. And who said that Chinese intellectuals had no appreciation for the merchant class? Few Western thinkers match Sima’s appreciation of entrepreneurship:

These, then, are examples of outstanding and unusually wealthy men. None of them enjoyed any titles or fiefs, gifts, or salaries from the government, nor did they play tricks with the law or commit any crimes to acquire their fortunes. They simply guessed what course conditions were going to take and acted accordingly, kept a sharp eye out for the opportunities of the times, and so were able to capture a fat profit. … There was a special aptness in the way they adapted to the times …. All of these men got where they did because of their devotion and singleness of purpose. … [T]here is no fixed road to wealth, and money has no permanent master. It finds its way to the man of ability like the spokes of a wheel converging upon the hub, and from the hands of the worthless it falls like shattered tiles. … Rich men such as these deserve to be called the “untitled nobility” …

Murray Rothbard praised Sima in his history of economic thought, but Long notes that he neglected to mention that he was a Confucian!

It is hard to read this piece and not stand in awe of Long’s command of the Chinese literature. This is a body of thought comparable to Western philosophy in its intricacy and depth. Even if you couldn’t care less about Chinese proto-libertarians, this article exemplifies the true meaning of scholarship. And so the Sage says: check it out!” Continue reading →

John Paul II On The Moral Basis Of Capitalism

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Tom Woods cites Pope John Paul II on the moral basis of material prosperity:

“According to John Paul II, “The moral causes of prosperity . . . reside in a constellation of virtues: industriousness, competence, order, honesty, initiative, frugality, thrift, spirit of service, keeping one’s word, daring — in short, love for work well done. No system or social structure can resolve, as if by magic, the problem of poverty outside of these virtues.” These are precisely the virtues that the market economy fosters.

These ideas are not foreign to Catholic tradition: The Late Scholastics of the 16th and 17th centuries favored an economy very largely free of government controls, and John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus (1991) reflected an increasing appreciation for the moral and material benefits of non-coerced economic exchange.

The less heed we pay to slogans and propaganda, and the more we study the question on its merits, the more attractive does the market become.”